The roots
Residents of Aquidneck Island may be familiar with the Maher Garden Center from their hand-made wreaths and Christmas trees. But the roots of the center run much deeper than the Christmas season.
“The Maher Center itself started 76 years ago as a resource for parents with special needs kids,” Lynn Maher, the executive director of the center, says. The original center wasn’t located on Aquidneck Avenue in Middletown, but in a living room in Newport. The move to a larger facility on Aquidneck Avenue started in the 1970s.
The idea to have a space dedicated to building a more inclusive world, to help and support people with intellectual and developmental disabilities, was a revolutionary idea at a time when many people were institutionalized for being different. Since the beginning, the non-profit agency has worked to foster independence for disabled adults, as well as promote dignity and opportunity for employment and self-sustainability.
The Maher Center at large has ten group homes spotted around Aquidneck Island and the East Bay. The garden center in Middletown resides on four acres of land, and the facilities there act as a training program for Maher clients to learn gardening and retail skills. With these skills, the Maher clients are better equipped for finding jobs in these areas. Currently, about 50 clients come to the garden center to work, to learn new skills and to refine others.
Proceeds from sales at the garden center flow back into the Maher Center programs. Christmas was a special time of year at the garden center with the festive showcase and sale of hand-decorated wreaths by Maher clients and volunteers. The non-profit aims to be self-sustainable and self-sufficient, a model of independence for its clients.
The growth
For various reasons, the Maher Garden Center closed in 2018, and for a few years, another horticultural business leased and operated out of that space. Then, about two years ago, the garden center reopened once more under the mission and name of the Maher Center.
Today, the garden center consists of a retail shop, a small retail greenhouse, a training program workspace, a compost area, and a vegetable garden, to name just some of the utilized spaces. Each area is designed to flow back into the Maher mission: the revenue from the shop keeps the garden center self-sustainable, the training workspace acts as an accessible area for clients to learn more about gardening, and produce from the vegetable garden is sent directly to the Maher Center culinary training program next door. Peppers, gourds, tomatoes, zucchini, and herbs all flourish in the garden behind the shop, and when ripe, the produce is quickly and skillfully turned into lunch.
There is also a room in the greenhouse complex that is specifically used for the organization and recycling of plastic plant containers. Customers can drop off empty plant boxes at the garden center to be recycled, and one client who loves organization ensures that every container is stacked by type and size to be used again for other plants.
The garden center has other rooms and greenhouse spaces available for further expansion. It is just a matter of determining use in a way that makes sense and works best for the Maher mission. The renewed center has only been open for about two years, so as the program finds its sweet spot and continues to grow, the organization can further fill into the space.
In bloom
The work the Maher Garden Center does goes beyond training programs and retail. The organization embraces the word “garden,” and has created a public pollinator garden on site with the help of URI Master Gardener volunteers. The title of “Master Gardener” seems fancy, but it “just means, like many retired Rhode Islanders, that I’ve taken the Master Gardener course at URI and volunteer at gardening projects around the state,” Casey Farley explains, one of the Master Gardeners that works in the Founder’s Garden. “We’re just a bunch of old lady volunteers,” she self-effaces, and explains that the pollinator garden is the newly transformed Founder’s Garden, which had previously fallen into disrepair and needed a lot of love.
Farley and other volunteers work weekly on Wednesday mornings to restore the garden. One of their first projects was to weed and re-brick the path to the Founder’s Garden. They’ve also been battling invasive plant species and hungry bunnies who doggedly chomp any freshly placed plant into tiny stems. It is a Sisyphean struggle, but that doesn’t stop the Master Gardeners from continuing their work. The Maher Garden Center donates native plants that didn’t sell to help in the process of restoring the garden.
Maher Garden Center has also adopted a garden spot near 40 Steps on the Cliff Walk. “Over one million people walk by it each year,” Maher says. But that space is a “wild garden,” compared to the manicured Founder’s Garden. Volunteers there are in a “battle with nature” from the salt air and the stray seeds that end up in the soil. For example, one year their seeds were outcompeted by surprise daffodils, Farley shared. Over two thousand daffodil blooms took over the space, and no one knew where they had come from.
Creating these spaces takes time and hard work, and more volunteers are needed to help in the Founder’s Garden and in the space by 40 Steps. Volunteers do not have to be Master Gardeners, and anyone interested in meeting new people, working in the dirt, and making Aquidneck Island beautiful should reach out to Troy Reininger, the manager at the Maher Garden Center.
