It was a steaming hot July day in 2005, and Cloverly Park was full of volunteers from the neighborhood, Drexel’s Pi Kappa Alpha fraternity, and Ace Insurance, along with staff from what was then Fairmount Park (now Parks & Recreation)—one of many such days during the yearlong park improvement effort supported by the Growing the Neighborhood initiative.
A battered red pick-up truck stopped on Wissahickon Avenue, and an older gentleman called out, “I have sedum. Do you want sedum?” Someone yelled, “Sure!” and one of the volunteers hopped into the truck with him. They returned some time later with some 25 mature plants. Ted organized a group of volunteers to plant them around a lonely dogwood tree.
It turns out that Ted was well known around the neighborhood for inveigling people to foster plants in their yards until he could find the right place for them. With that impromptu gift of a mass planting of sedum, Cloverly Park became one of the “right places.”
That day, planting the sedum, Ted looked at Cloverly’s two acres and saw a place where he could create something on a grand scale. We looked at Ted and saw a gardener with vision, knowledge, and energy—and a fierce independent streak that often ignored rules.
So we offered Ted a challenge: someone entering the park from the steps on School House Lane was greeted with an expanse of mud and packed dirt under the deep shade of massive trees, some old concrete benches, and a Y shape of sidewalk that led into the park from the shade to the sunlight. Could he do anything with it?
He could, indeed. The result was so miraculously beautiful and his generosity in providing both plant material and labor so remarkable that when the concrete benches were replaced with the metal ones now in “Ted’s corner,” we affixed a plaque on one to honor him.
Ted passed away on April 6, 2021, a time when the plantings in Cloverly are just coming to life, his gift of beauty coming into leaf and flower.
“Ted’s Corner” at Cloverly Park