If you enter Highland Park along Stanton Avenue, one of the first things you’ll see is the community garden, riotous and fecund in season, with beefy fat tomatoes, peppers sweet or hot, an abundance of zucchini destined to be handed out at workplaces.
Continuing, you’ll soon encounter a planted area somewhat less vigorous. This plot has not yet thickened; just getting started, it’s mostly ground mulched and expectant, with some 20 twiggy trees alongside bushes and brambles still needing the protection of cages and support of stakes. In the future, though, this small space will become mighty with apples, cherries, peaches, plums, pears, figs, pawpaws, multiple berries and even the lesser known hican, a hickory-pecan hybrid. The chain-link fence before it bears the sign of things to come: a placard announcing the Highland Park Public Orchard.
The experiment is both horticultural and sociological.
“This is not the first orchard in a park in the city,” said Michael Kelley, the Pittsburgh Forestry Division’s utility coordination arborist. “But this is the first one that’s not going to be attached to any kind of external ownership.” Crucially, the fruits and vegetables brought forth from this partnership of Pittsburgh’s Forestry Division, local urban forest advocates Tree Pittsburgh and national nonprofit The Giving Grove, will be available to the public once ripe for the picking.
“With the community garden, people each have their own plot,” Kelley said. “The point of this is that nobody will have individual ownership.”
From lawn to forest
Highland Park, which cradles the neighborhood of the same name, was dedicated in 1889. It had been an attraction since 1879, when the installation of Reservoir No.1 formed a centerpiece for the surrounding green space. Its 377 acres now house the Pittsburgh Zoo & Aquarium, a swimming pool, trails for walking, hiking and biking, a children’s playground, volleyball and an off-leash dog park, in addition to its generous green spaces.
The orchard sits alongside the office of the Forestry Division, a squat little building that looks straight out of Jellystone Park. The charm of the exterior is met by that of the inside, but despite the whimsy this is a hotbed of community-serving activity. The 19-person Forestry Division is probably not the first entity to come to mind when considering local government, but once on radar their work is evident everywhere you look, especially if your eyes turn to the urban canopy shading (or not quite shading) our public spaces.
Immediately next to Forestry’s homebase was, until a few months ago, a regular lawn, plain old green grass, the kind that looks pretty and gets mowed and otherwise doesn’t really bring a lot to the party. “It wasn’t serving a purpose,” said Kelley. “Now we’re taking an acre of it and returning it to public access.”
‘We want an orchard’
Twenty trees, 18 bushes and 24 brambles were planted this year, with another four trees to come this fall. The seed was planted a few years ago when the Forestry Division had an opportunity to partner with The Giving Grove.
The Giving Grove is a Kansas City, Missouri nonprofit working across the United States helping individuals and organizations build orchards, with the belief that projects serving the community do best when community-led and community-driven. They supply the trees themselves, provide education and support, and have established around 850 sites so far.
In Allegheny County, their partner is Tree Pittsburgh. A few years back while the local nonprofit was fielding requests for orchards, The Giving Grove was looking to break new ground. For a city to qualify, a substantial amount of the population must be facing food insecurity. Pittsburgh fits the bill. In 2023, all the stars aligned and Tree Pittsburgh brought on Kimberly Bracken in the role of Giving Grove manager.
“People reach out and say, ‘We want an orchard,’ and we provide what they need to make that happen,” said Bracken. Most of the time this means planting on land owned by the government or nonprofit organizations, but private land is an option as long as it meets the requirements: eight hours of sun, water on site, safe thresholds of lead. Permission has to be granted for Tree Pittsburgh to plant and recipients must agree that they will never develop the site.
There’s also the stipulation that the public will be able to benefit, with ample room for interpretation. “We allow the steward a lot of freedom,” Bracken said. “But there has to be some component of being open to people who want to access it.” In some cases, that could be in exchange for participating in harvests, work days or some other kind of exchange. In Highland Park, it will mean visiting during designated daily hours in which visitors can explore at will.
That’s about all it takes. The process is simple, the application is streamlined and user-friendly. In the three years they’ve been working in Allegheny County, this goal has been met, the result being the planting of 55 orchards, so far.
Fences, but few barriers
At Highland Park, The Giving Grove is donating the majority of the plants with a few notable exceptions. The rhubarb, for example, will come from Kelley’s family’s plot in Butler, originally cultivated by his great-great-great (this is an estimate, there may be more) grandmother — a vegetable with a history deeper than the park itself, now in a 21st century plot.
Fencing, necessary to keep deer out, is recycled from other parks, with the Construction Division lending a hand with installation. “The nice thing about this is that it’s been extremely low cost for the city,” said Kelley, who estimates that so far the only direct expenses have been vinegar used to quell the grass and wire to cage the trees.
Kelley designed the tree layout along with Forest Equity Specialist Hana Kneiser. Spring ephemerals, bulb plants and ground cover, especially to create pollinator habitats, are on the list as well. In the works are non-botanical extras: signs bearing names and descriptions, tags in red or green to indicate if ready to pick or in need of a minute or two, maybe some QR codes leading to more information and resources.
The Forestry Division will be responsible for the maintenance of the space, at least at the onset. “We’ve had people come into the office and say, ‘I saw what you’re doing, can I get involved?’” Kelley said. Eventually opportunities will be available, not only in tending but in education and community outreach, possibly for organizations and groups.
Regardless of growth, though, the mission will persist.
“We will at some point be working with community groups to manage this space,” said Kelley, “But it will be managed with the expectation that it’s managed for the public.”
“I’m always glad to see another way for people to engage with the park,” says Stephanie Walsh, a longtime Highland Park Community Council board member.
Walsh is appreciative in particular of the street plantings leading to the park’s public pool, a multiyear effort that provides a path of uninterrupted shade to pedestrians traveling to it from East Liberty.
When the Forestry Division informed them of the orchard, they immediately started getting the word out. “It’s another opportunity to teach people about gardening,” said Walsh, a home gardener who is curious about pawpaws in particular, not yet having encountered one in person. “When you learn to grow, you grow yourself.”
What to do until the fruit comes
She won’t see one this year. Someday the dozens of planned trees will be expansive, hearty and prolific, and the orchard full. As of now, less than half of the planting has been completed; what exists is small and thin. Reaching peak productivity will take several years. The public opening won’t take quite as long but it’s likely to need a year or so.
In the meantime, The Giving Grove national website houses enough resources to spend the dormant months learning, and the Forestry Division has materials online as well. It will soon include an Engage PGH page, the city’s method of online community participation, with an interactive map inviting users to suggest fruits, vegetables and herbs they’d like to see, as well as elements like benches and gazebos.
For engagement IRL, on Oct. 17, Tree Pittsburgh will present a Giving Grove Tree Adoption Event, welcoming volunteers to help bring residents and trees together. Adoption events happen on the regular, and other varied volunteer opportunities always await.
As this season’s production winds down, the superstar turn was taken by an arch at center stage laden with legumes going like gangbusters. Kelley refers to this arbor as “Green Bean Grotto,” and one hopes that each section will eventually possess a pet name of its own. A pawpaw tree, which could someday stretch 30 shrubby feet toward the sky but now resembles Charlie Brown holiday decor, bore a single fruit. This was consumed, which was the intention, but by a raccoon, which was not. A blackberry bush produced a similar yield.
All of this is as expected. Bracken said that the trees planted are typically 3 to 6 years old, and while sometimes they produce in the nursery, it’s “very stressful to be planted from a pot to the ground,” so it could take a minute. Even once everything reaches its most fertile maturity, the harvest is meant to pique interest rather than sate appetites.
“The yield on this is never going to be high,” said Kelley. “The yield is going to be diverse so that people get a chance to experience fruits and vegetables that they don’t always get a chance to see growing naturally, or even to buy in a grocery store.”
Lissa Brennan is a Pittsburgh-based writer and theater artist and can be reached at lissabrennan.lb@gmail.com.
This story was fact-checked by Octavia Liku.
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