Clock Garden
Corner of Central Avenue and Evergreen Place
This is one of the ways the city has begun to
use gardens. The large antique-look clock and antique-look street
lamps are between a triangluar garden of yellow day lillies and
low evergreen shrubs. This is a low maintenance perennial
garden that could easily be applied all along Central Avenue. I
hope they continue what they started. This photo was taken in
early summer of 2010 just after the clock began working.
I captured this photo from Google Maps as a
record of the way the median appeared early in 2010. The Clock
was added in the Spring and started telling time in the early
summer.
In early November, of 2010, I lost my car and
decided to give up driving. Since I could not make the long walk
over to the Senior Garden at City Hall Plaza any more, I looked
for a project closer to home that I could walk to each day. The
Clock Garden is an ideal project for me as I get older, since it
only needs a cleaning of city debris a couple of times a week. As
the picture shows, it survived the summer without needing daily
watering so I should be able to take on this project for a while.
The location is used by street vendors selling newspapers and
"stuff" to passing cars, so there are lots of cigarette
butts and plastic cigar holders, as well as a good collection of
liquor bottles hidden in the bushes, and lots of debris from
Dunkin' Donuts which is just down the street. The sad part is
that this corner is well covered with city trash bins, including
special bins for waste and for recycling, yet the sweet people of
East Orange prefer to drop their trash on the ground in front of
the bins, rather than into the bins. Those who want to turn our
city into a slum may get their wish one day, but this spot they
may not have as long as I am still able to fight the blight.