Mission expansion features beautiful landscaped park, thanks to friends

BY JIM WISE

Jwise@heraldsun.com; 419-6680

The Herald-Sun
Sunday, November 28, 2004
Final Edition
Inside Front Section
Page A2

Two years ago, the Durham Inn was a derelict motel at Avondale Drive and I-85, condemned as a public nuisance.

Now, the old hangout of junkies and hookers is cleaned up, painted up, fixed up and renamed the Good Samaritan Inn. It's a 300-room expansion of the Durham Rescue Mission -- with a professionally landscaped park courtesy of the community's good will.

"It's neat," said Rhonda Pollard. Pollard is president of the Durham Council of Garden Clubs, which spearheaded an effort to turn a weedy lawn into a restful park for mothers, children and families to relax, reflect, learn and play.

"We never thought about landscaping," said Gail Mills, the Rescue Mission's business administrator. "These people just came to us. It's such a blessing." In the summer of 2002, the Rescue Mission raised $400,000 for a down payment on the motel, which a judge had ordered demolished after neighbors' complaints over drug dealing and prostitution there.

Refitting the building to house homeless families was a huge challenge in itself. Where the grounds were concerned, Rescue Mission director Ernie Mills was just planning to mow the weeds.

Then Pollard heard him talk about the Good Samaritan Inn and thought she heard a calling for the garden council.

"I guess it was my brainstorm," she said, "or the Lord's." She talked up the idea of the council taking on the Good Samaritan's campus as a community service project.

"They liked the idea," she said, "and agreed we would try to get all the garden clubs to come together on this one single project."

For years, Durham garden clubs have undertaken community projects. But they had never banded together before in a single cause. This cause brought them all on board, along with several clubs not affiliated with the council.

With the idea endorsed, and Pollard having accepted a second year as president to see the job through, she contacted Pat Lindsey, a horticulture professor at N.C. State University to help come up with a plan.

"It started out as a design project for a class," said Lindsey. "We take on community projects as a way of giving kids experience in real life."

Meeting residents of the Durham Rescue Mission -- a 30-year-old Christian nonprofit that provides shelter, counseling and training for homeless, alcoholic and addicted individuals and families -- was educational in itself, Lindsey said.

"College students don't have a whole lot of contact with people outside their own socioeconomic status," she said. "It was the most amazing progression in their thinking."

Occupying a long rectangular space on the south side of the building, the park has a children's playground and storytelling grotto at one end, a broad lawn enclosed by an oval walkway, beds of flowers and shrubbery and patches of trees. Vega Metals of Durham donated an iron bench, its back in the shape of open butterfly wings.

"Butterflies are a symbol of hope," Pollard said, "and that's what we want this garden to be."

The Butterfly Bench faces a fountain, centerpiece of a Mothers Remembrance Garden. Driftwood, Forest Hills, Treyburn and the Orange County garden clubs' council, along with personal donations, paid for the statue, and the Garden Makers club provided two wooden benches.

Pollard is still looking for donations, in honor of mothers living or deceased, to buy a statue of mother and child.

Besides her students, Pat Lindsey brought her sister, Cathy, a professional landscaper, onto the project. Cathy Lindsey used her business contacts to get donations from garden-supply companies.

"It's such a great cause," said Pat Lindsey, "as soon as you explain what you're doing ... people were immediately willing to give."

A second phase of the project, yet to come, is a wall with planters along the side of the inn facing I-85. Its construction pending completing of the I-85 widening, that garden will provide a safety barrier and noise buffer between the highway and the Inn. It also will turn a former eyesore into a pleasantly floral vision at one of the main entry points to Durham.

The Daylily and Hope Valley garden clubs are on that project, and have raised $8,000 for it so far.

Individual garden clubs, said Pollard, vary in size from 15 to 50 and their members vary from young and active to older and not so. Each club got an assignment within its means.

Town and Country, Croasdaile and Four Seasons provided $15,000 worth of large shade trees. The Valley Run club produced a butterfly garden, Margaret Brawley and Heritage the storytelling area and a bird garden.

Television station WRAL provided shrubs for an azalea garden and an irrigation system for it all came as a gift in memory of a former Rescue Mission resident. Two Kiwanis Clubs and the Ronald McDonald Foundation chipped in for the playground.

On his third day on the job, new Rescue Mission staffer Rich Carr was delegated to get some pansies donated for the garden. One nursery offered six flats -- and ended up giving him 180. The Saturday before Thanksgiving, a crowd of volunteers was busy putting in plants to make a colorful show next spring.

"It's a pretty ambitious design for a very urban area. It is incredibly cold in winter, it is extremely hot in summer," Pat Lindsay said. "That wind that comes up off the highway can sear your hair in the summer."

Put all together, the Good Samaritan Inn has received $250,000 worth of landscape goods and service, and the Durham Rescue Mission hasn't had to spend a cent.

The park also is going to serve as a hands-on classroom to teach residents skills they can put to work as gardeners themselves -- on the job or for their own pleasure -- with help from the Durham County extension service.

"Things will happen; it's not finished," Lindsey said.

"We're just really proud of it," said Rhonda Pollard. "It's been just wonderful to see how the ladies and garden clubs have come together and taken ownership of this garden."

"There is power in volunteers," said Ernie Mills, "when people get together."