At last night’s Decatur City Commission meeting, Commissioner Patti Garrett announced that she had just received word that Trees Atlanta will be planting 100 trees in Oakhurst to commemorate the neighborhood’s 100th birthday.

According to Ms. Garrett, Trees Atlanta will begin by planting 50 trees at the Oakhurst Birthday celebration on October 30th from 9a-12p.  Trees will be planted in memory of Oakhurst Community Garden founder Sally Wylde, so fittingly planting will begin at the corner of Oakview Road and 5th Avenue, where the first Oakhurst Community Garden plot was located.

Allison writes in with additional details about the Sally Wylde Memorial Service planned for September 11th at Oakhurst Baptist Church.

Flowers for Sally: From your Garden to the Celebration

Guests attending the celebration of the life of Sally Wylde planned for this Saturday, Sept. 11, at Oakhurst Baptist Church at 5:00 p.m. are invited to bring flowers from their own gardens along for the service. Volunteers from the church will be on hand to arrange the flowers in the church as folks bring them in. Please bring what you can from your home garden and help us decorate the church in a way that honors Sally’s unique spirit!

From Decatur City Commissioner Patti Garrett…

Memorial service planned for Oakhurst Garden co-founder Sally Wylde on September 11
A celebration of Sally’s life will take place on September 11, 2010, at 5 p.m. at the Oakhurst Baptist Church (222 East Lake Drive). If you live in the Oakhurst neighborhood, we encourage you to walk to the Church. The service will be followed by a Sally-inspired puppet parade. If you made a puppet with Sally for Earth Day a few years ago, please bring it out — or create a new one (you may store your puppet at the church during the service). The parade will process from the Oakhurst Baptist Church to the Oakhurst Community Garden Project along the East Lake Drive and Oakview Road route. You may join the parade anywhere along the route. A reception, to be held at the Oakhurst Community Garden Project (435 Oakview Road), will be a covered dish meal, Sally style! If you can bring a dish to share, dishes may be dropped off at the Oakhurst Garden between 3:30-4:30 p.m. In case of rain, the reception will take place at the Solarium (321 West Hill Street).

Gifts may be made in memory of Sally to the following organizations:
The Oakhurst Community Garden
The Community of Hospitality
The Global Village School

Last I checked, we don’t refer to our neighborhood gardens as “local gardens” or “animal rights gardens” or “foodie’s delight gardens” or “weight-loss gardens” or even “environmentally friendly gardens”.

When friends and neighbors come together for any number of reasons and start a communal garden – as the late Sally Wylde and her then husband did in Oakhurst back in 1994 – it is first and foremost referred to as a “community garden.”

While the central tenet of “community” may seem glaringly obvious when looked at it in this specific way, this component is one that is often ignored in many of the larger conversations about “local food”.  Big picture questions about what it means, who it should be helping, and who it ultimately reports to.

As the popularity of “local food” has evolved out of the “Back to the Land” movement of the 1970s and entered the mainstream, it has quickly been claimed by nearly every conceivable “cause” in the country.

To the ardent environmentalist, local food is a way to wean ourselves off cheap energies like oil.  To those with great concern for animals, it can be an alternative to becoming a strict vegetarian.  For those interested in worker’s rights, it’s a way to support a local farmer, who isn’t hiring for positions so grueling that only the most desperate among us will apply for them.  To the “foodie” (“gourmand” if you’re old-school) it’s all about taste.  To the nutritionist, it’s the commonsensical respite from a decade of powerful, mainstream diet fads.  And so on.

However, the vast promise in the simple act of “eating locally” has also, in some ways, become its own Achilles heel.

Read the rest of this entry »

The Decatur Minute’s Catherine Lee writes…

[Thursday] evening Sally Wylde, a Decatur resident, founder of the Oakhurst Community Garden Project and an inspiring community leader, passed away. She was an amazing woman and had a huge influence on the Decatur community. Sally moved to Oakhurst in 1993 where she and her neighbor, Louise Jackson, invited school children to become caretakers of a garden they had formerly cut through every day after school. Shortly after, Sally and her husband, Britt Dean, acquired a nearby undeveloped half-acre lot and established the Oakhurst Community Garden Project.

You can read Catherine’s full tribute to Sally HERE.