IN FULL BLOOM: Ira Lackey, right, is joined by fellow residents of Trenton’s Mill Hill neighborhood in the community garden they are tending outside the old Quaker meeting house occupied by Mercer Street Friends. Flowers planted by Lackey have passersby gawking and taking photos on their phones. (Photo by Jeffrey Tryon)

By Anne Levin

Along a stretch of Mercer Street in Trenton’s Mill Hill neighborhood, bright pink petunias and sweet potato vines cascade through a wrought iron fence, gently resting on a brick wall below. Above them, sunflowers, coleus, lariope, Dutch bulbs, ostrich fern, hostas, and numerous other varieties surround and intermingle with raised beds that are tended by a group of nine neighborhood residents.

This community garden, in a lot next to the nonprofit Mercer Street Friends, is especially vibrant this summer. Responsible for the flowers and the garden’s design is Ira Lackey, a Mill Hill resident and a realtor with Callaway Henderson Sotheby’s in Princeton. “He’s our fearless leader,” said Liesl Schubel, who grows vegetables and flowers in one of the beds.

The area was unkempt when Lackey first started participating in the community garden about four years ago. “I noticed that the paths were a bit overgrown,” he said. “Folks would tend their vegetables, but the common areas never really got a lot of attention. I suggested we rein them in, and got mulch to put in the aisles, to make it a cleaner-looking space.”

During the pandemic, Lackey wasn’t able to make his regular trips to his second home in North Carolina, where he has an extensive garden. “I was itching for all the gardening I did there, which was from sunup till sundown,” he said. “So I started doing the gardens in some of my [Mill Hill] neighbors’ houses, in the alleyways, and along the streets. Finally, it dawned on me that the largest area of land in Mill Hill was at Mercer Street Friends.”

Lackey approached the nonprofit’s leadership to ask if the raised bed area could be expanded to make them visible to passersby. They agreed. The following summer, he proposed planting perennial beds along the fence. “I thought it would be a much nicer thing for the entire neighborhood to have a garden that everyone enjoyed, whether they raised produce there or not,” he said.

Mercer Street Friends has funded the initiative, and Lackey has kept the costs low. “There were lots of sources for material, so I was able to make it very affordable,” he said. “I took tons of perennials from my own yard. One of my clients was selling her house, and had ostrich fern her in her yard. So I gathered that to create a garden of ostrich fern in the corner beneath the cedar trees, and along the front. I took all the hostas that were in a single bed and divided them, and it was enough to create borders along all the walkways.”

“He’s done a beautiful job,” said Dave Zboray, who was Mercer Street Friends’ director of facilities and human resources until retiring last week. “And he’s done it all as a volunteer. He took what was a blah lawn and turned it into a showpiece of the street.”

Lackey became part of the Rutgers Master Gardener Program during the pandemic. “I knew people were going to be asking me a lot of questions with the garden, and it would be good if I had some reason to feel I could advise them,” he said. “I learned Rutgers offered this course and I signed up.”

There is a steep incline to the topography of the garden, which didn’t make things easy. “There was a big bare spot, which I later learned was because a huge oak tree had existed there,” Lackey said. “And it is part of the logo for Mercer Street Friends. I decided we could plant something there that would become significant. I chose a lilac bush, but with the incline, there was no way to keep the dirt from washing away.”

In its place, Lackey hauled large stones from a neighbor’s parents’ home in Flemington, and arranged them in a circle, planting perennials inside. This year, there are coleus, dahlias, dusty miller, and painted lady fern in the tree’s former spot. Lisianthus will bloom later. “It is really paying homage to the original oak,” Lackey said.

Lackey moved to Mill Hill five years ago, and has sold several houses in the neighborhood. “I’ve always been interested in Mill Hill. I felt as a community, it desperately needed to recover from the 2008 economic downturn,” he said. “Most communities had recovered fully by 2012, but Mill Hill had not, even by 2018. So I started staging the houses I was showing, and paying a lot of attention to gardening at these properties. The highest sale in the area had not been over $300,000 at the time. We sold one for $400,000, which said there was value.”

Reactions to the garden on Mercer Street have been positive. “There are city and state workers who meander through at lunch time, and I find them taking photos of various plants,” Lackey said. “Neighbors do the same thing. It’s really nice to see.”