A Fruitful Partnership: A Strawberry Community Orchard at Woodford Mansion in East Fairmount Park

By Martha Moffat


In 2008, the Woodford Mansion, the Philadelphia Orchard Project (POP), and the East Park Revitalization Alliance (EPRA) began a collaborative project to plant the first fruit modern trees at Woodford Mansion in East Fairmount Park. The orchard is currently maintained by the East Park Revitalization Alliance (EPRA) and includes dozes of fruit and nut trees, a berry garden, a pollinator garden and an herb garden. These gardens serve the residents of the Strawberry Mansion neighborhood, providing fresh fruit and educational programming.

(Pictured at top right: an aerial view of Woodford Mansion)

History of Woodford

Woodford Mansion was built in 1756 as a summer home. It is a National Historic Landmark and has been operated by the Naomi Wood Trust as a House Museum since 1928. The Naomi Wood Collection of antiques is displayed at Woodford Mansion.

Historically, there had always been an orchard at Woodford, as mentioned in an advertisement from 1769 for the sale of the property (pictured below). It seemed only natural to bring that back to the area in 2008.

Challenge: How Can Woodford Mansion Help and Engage Our Neighboring Community?

When POP received a donation to plant a new orchard to benefit neighborhoods in Philadelphia, the Strawberry Mansion neighborhood and Woodford Mansion was the logical choice.

Strawberry Mansion is one of the most challenged neighborhoods in the City of Philadelphia. The area is a food desert with high poverty, a high crime rate, and many health issues.

(Pictured above is the plan for Phase 1 of the orchard and pollinator garden.)

Since the orchard was planted, POP, EPRA and Woodford Mansion co-host numerous community events there, including strawberry, apple and peach festivals. 2018 marked the 10th annual Apple Festival! (Pictured bottom right: members of the community pick strawberries in the orchard at Woodford Mansion.)

All members of the community are welcome to visit the orchard. Children from the Mander Recreation Center visit the site during all four seasons. During the winter season, children from the Mander Playground make ornaments for Woodford’s tree and pay a visit to hang them and get a special tour of the orchard.

Plans are also in the works for a Fair-amount Food Forest to be planted under the trees outside the fence for the Strawberry Mansion community. Stay tuned!

Martha Moffat is a Penn State Extension Philadelphia Master Gardener and the Site Manager at Woodford Mansion.

POP CORE with Philadelphia Orchard Project

TJ Hunt

On March 10, Master Gardeners joined volunteers and staff at Overbrook School for the Blind for an orchard pruning workshop led by the Philadelphia Orchard Project (POP). This class was offered as part of their POP CORE (Community Orchard Resilience Education) series—a four-part training series “intended to grow the knowledge, skillset, and self-reliance of [POP’s] community orchard partners and volunteers, resulting in happier, healthier, and more productive community orchards.”

POP's Phil Forsyth and Alkebu-Lan Marcus demonstrate the use of pole pruners on a peach tree in the OSB orchard.

After learning about the basics of ecological orchard care and pruning in a morning lecture session, participants received hands-on pruning instruction in the Overbrook School for the Blind orchard—one of POP’s partner sites.

Phil gives an overview of cane pruning. (Photo courtesy of Alyssa Schimmel.)

Other courses in the POP CORE series have covered pest and disease management, and common and creative uses for orchard fruits, herbs, and fungi. Part 4 of the series will take place this Thursday, March 29 at Bartram’s Garden and will provide an introduction to permaculture and Philadelphia’s food system (details and registration link here).

A Cornelian cherry tree in OSB's orchard. (Photo courtesy of Alyssa Schimmel.) 

For those interested in learning more about orchard care in general, POP’s website offers a wealth of informational resources, as well as opportunities to get involved with Philadelphia’s many community orchards. 

Philadelphia Orchard Project also partners with the Penn State Extension Master Gardeners of Philadelphia on the food forest orchard at the Fairmount Park Horticulture Center. Tours of the food forest and other MG demonstration gardens will be available at the 5^th Annual Garden Day and Plant Sale on April 22—for more details, see the flyer in our previous post!

Local Fruit (and more local than you think!)

Brian Olszak

Casually leafing through my copy of The Holistic Orchard by Michael Phillips on a Saturday night (because that’s what Master Gardeners do, of course!), in the section on pears I came upon a particularly interesting find. While European pears, naturally, have found their way to the States from Europe, some pears are found in the wilds of America and cultivated for larger distribution. One of which is the Tyson pear, which was discovered in 1794 in a hedgerow on Jonathan Tyson’s farm in Jenkintown, just north of Philadelphia! This is particularly thrilling for me, having grown up not too far away from this location, in Willow Grove.

A quote on Tyson pears from the preeminent source of American pear knowledge, The Pears of New York, written by Ulysses Prentiss Hendrick in 1921:

An illustration of the pear in question from The Pears of New York

The tree is the most nearly perfect of that of any pear grown in America…. The tree is certainly as hardy as that of any other variety, if not hardier, and resists better than that of any other sort the black scourge of blight. Add to these notable characters large size, great vigor, and fruitfulness, and it is seen that the trees are nearly flawless. (p. 223)

That “black scourge of blight” he’s talking about is none other than fire blight, a particularly destructive bacterial infection to which apples, pears, and even crab apples are quite susceptible to varying degrees, depending on the cultivar. Affected parts of the tree take on a blackened, “burned” look to them, which can spread quickly.

The rub, then, is finding this supposedly delectable pear. After about an hour online research, I could only find two orchard/nurseries that still carry or have recently been known to carry Tyson pears--these are Fedco Seeds and St. Lawrence Nurseries. A lauded and seemingly popular variety in the early 20th century, the economics of large-scale fruit and agricultural production has shifted Tyson pears and many other heirloom varieties into near obscurity, but specialty fruit breeders and nurserymen still carry on the tradition--it's just a matter of finding them! Sometimes it's knowing someone who knows someone else who knows an upstanding nurseryman, but Penn State has a good list of nursery sources for fruit trees, including nurseries that specialize in heirloom varieties, here.  The search goes continues, then.