Gardens & Landscape
Cultivating sustainability and biodiversity, one garden bed at a time.
The Bread & Roses gardens and landscape cover nearly two acres of land surrounding the church. The area abounds with native and edible plants that have been carefully selected to provide food, shelter and habitat for native insects and pollinators (including bees and butterflies), as well as for birds, reptiles, mammals and humans. This approach helps maintain habitat biodiversity and enables the insects to pollinate the crops grown in the garden.
Growing Season
From April to October, the vegetable gardens are alive with activity. In these 20 raised beds our volunteers cultivate seasonal fruits and vegetables that we offer to families in need in our congregation and, through our partnership with Cultivate Charlottesville, to the wider community. At our monthly community workdays, volunteers plant and harvest, weed and prune, all while learning the fundamental skills of organic gardening.
Our focus on sustainability extends to waste management as well. We collect rainwater to use in the gardens. We use compost bins to convert organic garden waste into valuable soil amendments, reducing our need for synthetic fertilizers. The garden has a vermicomposting system, which uses earthworms to break down organic matter into “compost tea.” This nutrient-rich tea enhances the quality of our compost and improves the health of the soil.
The Trinity gardens are a demonstration site for sustainable agriculture in an urban setting. We showcase the possibilities of growing food in an environmentally responsible way, and we teach others to do the same. Throughout the year Trinity hosts classes in gardening basics—everything from sustainable practices to spring and fall planting—offered by Piedmont Master Gardeners.
Abundant Life
A visitor to Trinity will be sure to notice the abundance of flowering plants that adorn our landscape. Echinacea, mountain mint, milkweed, black-eyed Susans, vervain, salvia and hydrangea provide a feast for human eyes, and for our smallest visitors, another kind of feast altogether.
Native bees, butterflies and moths, grasshoppers, ants, earwigs, wasps and aphids all rely on our plants to thrive. We are all connected in God’s creation, and in the gardens, we can see our interconnection come to life.
Garden insects pollinate the vegetables we grow for our neighbors. Flowering plants such as the purple coneflower produce pollen and nectar that feed bees and butterflies. Birds feed on the insects and caterpillars. And during the winter, when the blooms have faded, gold finches feast on the seeds that remain on the dry flower stems.
God’s abundant gifts are ever-present and visible to us in the gardens.