America’s largest garden walk with over 300 gardens takes place every summer in Buffalo, New York, bringing in more than 60,000 visitors from all over the U.S., Canada, and beyond. Kim Halyak, co-chair of the Cooper-Young Garden Club, wants Memphis to be the Buffalo of the South. “I want people to say I’m tired to go to Buffalo,” she says. “I’m going to Memphis.”
And Halyak’s goal isn’t too ambitious, it seems. Already, this year’s Experience Memphis Gardens citywide garden walk, which Halyak helped organized, will be the largest garden walk in the South at some 270 green spaces in neighborhoods across the Mid-South. The walk, which kicks off on Saturday, May 18th, with the annual Cooper-Young Garden Walk, will span over six weeks through June 30th, on Thursdays, Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays.
“Nine years ago, we started [the Cooper-Young Garden Walk] with only 23 gardens,” explains Halyak. “At the time that we were only a one-day event, but we have really grown. And then last year we decided to go citywide, so we reached out to the city and said, ‘Hey, show us your gardens.’ And there were people from neighborhoods all over Memphis [who volunteered] — Colonial Acres, Berclair, Central Gardens, Frayser, Raleigh, High Point Terrace, I mean all over.”
The tour will showcase a wide range of spaces — beginner gardens, highly manicured lawns, farms, community gardens, nurseries, vegetable gardens, and so on. “We have a tour of Ounce of Hope’s aquaponic farm,” Halyak says. “We have a Master Gardener garden tour. We have gardens in Raleigh that we’ve never had [on our tour]. We have Cancer Survivors Park, and, I have to tell you, I’ve lived here 40-some years and I had never been there before. So what we really want to do is say to people: ‘You live in Memphis, go explore Memphis, go see what Memphis has to offer.’ … I really do want people to fall back in love with Memphis.”
The walk, in a way, is an incentive to beautify the city, Halyak adds. “Everybody gets aware of, hey, we have company coming. They just go crazy with excitement, and you cannot believe the community [that comes with that]. People have gotten to know their neighbors. … I don’t want to reinvent the wheel and I want us to make Memphis better. So this year, we’re giving away $10,000 to the neighborhoods that were on the walk last year. And when this walk is over, then I hope to give $20,000 away to the neighborhoods that were on the walk for beautification projects.”
Tickets for the Experience Memphis Gardens walk can be purchased at the Cooper-Young Gazebo on the day of the Cooper-Young Garden Walk sponsored by Urban Earth (May 18th-May 19th), at Urban Earth, at Ounce of Hope, at the Women’s Exchange, and online at experiencememphisgardens.org, where you can find a full schedule and more information.
Experience Memphis Gardens, Various Locations, May 18-June 30, $26.