Flowers of Buffalo: Roses, Peonies, and Blooms
Flowers of Buffalo is a series exploring Buffalo, New York, from the grassroots to the flowers that bloom.
All photos courtesy of the author.
One April morning in 2021, I snapped a cell phone picture of a peony that was growing outside my mom’s house in Amherst, New York, a suburb of Buffalo. It was toward the end of the COVID pandemic. The term “new normal” was all the rage. I didn’t know it, then, but I was searching for love, and I had found it. This morning, the sun was beaming; the flowers were stretching for sunlight; and I was falling head over heels for the flowers of Buffalo.
Flower Bloom
When I showed my friend the picture I took at my mom’s house, I said to her, “Look at this rose.”
“Uh, that’s not a rose,” she said. “That’s a peony.”
Damn. Back then, like now, my knowledge of flowers requires remediation. It’s a good thing I love learning, and it’s even more serendipitous that the handheld device I carry takes wonderful photos. I can make visual and literary art while I learn about the natural world around me. At the intersection of personal growth and professional evolution, therefore, I have found flowers in bloom.
How else would a citizen journalist like me share the power of flowers to transform personal, professional, and civic life if not by weaving it into progressive discourses on political economy and community activism?
Flower Power
One of the community organizations I appreciate in Buffalo, NY, is Grassroots Gardens. The organization advocates for gardens as a multifaceted solution to social problems: “[A] garden has the power to transform a neighborhood. Community gardens deliver beauty and escape while many produce healthy food in unexpected places. A garden creates a shared sense of purpose that empowers a community, creates environmental awareness, and improves public health.” Countless flower species make their homes in urban gardens, and people cultivate gardens so that flowers don’t die hungry and homeless. Our institutions of governance should consult urban garden advocates on how to sustain human life in the city the way urban gardens enrich plant life.
Another partner organization with a rich history of producing life for Buffalo, NY, is the Massachusetts Avenue Project (MAP), which provides agricultural education and on-the-job training for city youth: “MAP employs youth year round and teaches them job readiness and leadership skills through farming, our Mobile Market, kitchen and nutrition education, as well as food policy and civic engagement.” In the city of Buffalo, urban agriculture remains an emergent labor market. One can stroll through the 5 Points neighborhood on Buffalo’s west side and find a job in the growing fields. If agriculture is not your thing, then you can get into horticulture. If you’re like me, you want a green thumb - MAP helps kids and adults in Buffalo get their hands dirty sustaining life.
Finally, there is the big, end-of-summer celebration: Garden Walk Buffalo. In 1993, an urban garden tour in Chicago inspired two Buffalo residents, Marvin Lunenfeld and Gail McCarthy, who brought the idea home to their block club in Buffalo, NY. With the help of their neighbors in the Norwood/West Utica Neighborhood Association, Lunenfeld and McCarthy developed plans for the first Garden Walk Buffalo, which took place in July 1995. 29 gardens participated in the urban garden tour, which was centered in the Bryant neighborhood between Summer Street on the south and West Ferry in the north and between Richmond Avenue on the west and Elmwood Avenue on the east. Lunenfeld and McCarthy’s home at 231 Norwood served as headquarters.
Now Garden Walk Buffalo is an economic engine in Buffalo, drawing tourists from around the world. spanning multiple neighborhoods, showcase hundreds of gardens across the city. Garden Walk Buffalo reports purports to make a $4.5 million annual impact on the city of Buffalo through tourism, beautification, and increased property values. Since 2015, there have been 400 or more gardens participating at the yearly event, and “tens of thousands” of flower enthusiasts visit Garden Walk Buffalo from the U.S. and other countries.
Flower Norm?
I suffer from male privilege so badly that I am self-consciously representing my love for flowers with heteronormative language. I know flowers have male and female parts, but I don’t care. That’s not how I know my flowers. For me, they are beautiful women begging for a little attention – and I get around like a bee. I’m sort of a pollinator.
But, before I go, I want you to know that I know we live in a gender-ambiguous world, and that masculinity like mine is not the norm but a sub-genre of gender with pronouns he, him, and his. Is it lost on you, or me, that I’m publishing “guy talk” about a “girlie topic”? I doubt it. Let me make it plain. Gender fluidity is my grape; sex equity is my jam. Let me share a few more of these flower centerfolds on Weave News.
