In 1959, the Martha’s Regional High School settled in Oak Bluffs, pulling students from across the Island to settle in a single place on the Edgartown–Vineyard Haven Road. Decades later, Island Elderly Housing joined the neighborhood across from the high school, putting up the first of the six buildings in what was to become the lush, garden-filled neighborhood of Woodside Village.
The first thing the high schoolers did to better the neighborhood was build a 10-foot-high metal enclosure to keep marauding deer out of what would become an awardwinning community garden in this woodland paradise. Today that once-ugly fence serves as a trellis for a lush collection of roses, blackberry bushes, and grapevines: things to eat, flowers to admire.
The garden started small — very small, according to garden historian Lynn Thorp, with just a few ground plots — and came about through the efforts of garden originator Doris Gaffney, a wiry little woman with great energy and determination. “She began by getting the high school interested in constructing the fence, the shed, and the toolbox inside the garden,” Thorp says. “It came about through the passion of Doris, who drove all over the Island, and found donations for the garden everywhere. People loved her passion toward building a community garden … and like a chorus, they gave and gave and gave everything she felt the garden needed.”
Next came the high school Leadership Class. “The high school students have been long-term good neighbors to Woodside Village for decades,” according to Marianne Sebastion, Island Elderly Housing property manager. It’s all part of learning to be good citizens, and in the process, learning what older generations have to teach them.
As part of Leadership Class, students give their time to help in the garden, cleaning up flowerbeds, raking, planting, and weeding. As part of their gardening duties, students from the French class learned a new word, and a bit about French plumbing, when they cleaned up this writer’s garden: the bidet and its usefulness. The French class was sent over to clean up my herb garden, badly overtaken by a single strawberry plant from Morning Glory Farm.
Once the widely spread strawberry plant and its errant offspring were carried into the woods, we turned to speaking French, such as we had: theirs from a charming French Canadian teacher, mine from weeks in Paris, as a result of answering an ad in the Paris edition of the New York Herald Tribune. Francis Ford Coppola, in his pre-“Godfather” days, was advertising for a gofer. I got the job as an assistant on “Is Paris Burning?” about the German invasion of Paris. I lived in a cheap hotel on the Rue Jacob in the West Bank: toilet down the hall, bidet in the room, I explained. Bidet? The kids asked. I explained.
The Minnesingers visit each year during the holiday season to give a mini-concert to Woodside residents.
Most recently, two students from the Leadership Class have been visiting Woodside once a week to spend an hour with residents for fun activities. These Fun Fridays are part of a Leadership project that revolves around intergenerational gatherings. The goal is to create a fun space for both generations to share, laugh, and learn from each other. From the first gathering, I could hear laughter coming from across the hall, as several residents played television trivia. The students learned about the old-time popular TV shows, and the residents clearly enjoyed reminiscing together. Each week they play a new game, and share fond memories.
The students are comfortable, and the conversation flows easily. So comfortable was one Woodside participant, a father of three, that he remarked, “They ask questions they’d never ask their own parents.”
The project will continue through January, helmed by high school teacher Erin Slossberg and students Charlotte Sebastian and Linden Maclead.
To see pictures of the high schoolers’ fence, check out mvtimes.com/2022/07/25/let-it-grow.
