On a bitter evening in 1994, we were staffing the evening primary care clinic at the Oxford Street Shelter in Portland. Gazing out the exam room window, instead of a vacant lot filled with rubble and weeds, we saw a summer garden of flowers, vegetables and healing herbs tended by shelter guests and volunteers. This momentary vision became a crusade that resulted in the Oxford Street Garden Project. The concept was to create an herbal and vegetable garden that homeless clients could maintain and develop. The project has been a tremendous success.
Volunteers lead classes in gardening techniques.
In addition to the many hours of donated time, generous donations have included cash, fencing, seeds, seedlings, apple trees, blueberry bushes, bulbs and manure. In the fall, the harvested crop becomes part of the resources of the Wayside Soup Kitchen. Herbal teas are dried and offered later to shelter guests who await evening bed assignments. The garden's dried flowers combined with an indigenous grapevine from the back of the shelter provide the basis for workshops on decorative uses of dried flowers. A new workshop focuses on creating healing tinctures and salves from garden herbs including echinacea, comfrey and calendula.