Crab apples and other memories of Hyde Park

A crab apple tree blooms on the Promontory Point by the lakefront in Hyde Park, May 2009.

Dropped by the old neighborhood last weekend and came across this crab apple tree, one of the last bloomers, against a background of the sparkling blue lake. The Promontory Point at 55th Street is the beating heart of the Hyde Park neighborhood, really, at least of the part of the neighborhood whose beating heart isn't the University of Chicago quadrangles. The Point is where Hyde Parkers walk, bicycle, meet, argue, protest, lie in the sun, argue, swim, barbecue, argue and gaze for hours at the far horizon of that blue lake.

Crab apple trees always make me think of Hyde Park. In the 1960s they started blooming all over the streets I walked on the way to school. They were being planted in an effort to replace all the grand old trees that had been torn down along with grand old houses in the urban renewal program. Crab apple trees are pretty tough and hardy; they grow fast; they make a big splash in the springtime; and they show the world that people in a community care enough to plant a tree.

My mother was one of a group of activist gardeners in the activist 1950s and and 1960s in Hyde Park. She and I were in Hyde park last weekend to drop the 50th anniversary version of the Hyde Park Garden Fair, since she was one of the original members of the Garden Fair Committee of the Hyde Park Kenwood Community Conference back in 1959.

Mom makes it clear she was not the leader of the effort--she gives that credit to Sophie Rudin and Molly Salmon, both gone--but she was one of the group that set out to make gardening easier and more accessible to citydwellers in a neighborhood where there wasn't a garden center for miles around. They commandeered the central mall of a newly built shopping center for a weekend in May, filled it with plants for which they had shopped at area nurseries and dispensed advice and help along with the annuals, perennials, shrubs and crab apple trees. Mom, like all the moms, volunteered her kids to schlep plants and run errands. I have very early garden fair memories.

The garden fair still takes place in that same spot and is a major fundraiser for the community conference, which has been a center of community activism (read: arguing) since the early 1950s. There's a mum and bulb sale in fall too. The garden fair is still an all-volunteer effort, and it still attracts children, university students, old Hyde Parkers, new Hyde Parkers, people who have been buying their geraniums at the fair for 50 years and people who didn't know they wanted a garden until they walked by all those plants on the way to the grocery store next door, and found a neighbor who was there to help them figure out how.

Got a garden question? I recommend you call or e-mail the Plant Clinic of The Morton Arboretum in Lisle, the Master Gardeners of the University of Illinois Extension or the Plant Information Service of the Chicago Botanic Garden in Glencoe.

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