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At the edges of Marblehead's parks — past the shade trees and the old shrubs cut back year after year to keep the sight lines clear — Kathy Bradford sees ground that could be doing more. A licensed landscape architect, she looks at those margins and imagines layers: native grasses, flowering perennials and shrubs that feed birds and insects, where the town now has little beyond what a maintenance crew can keep trimmed.
That idea goes on sale June 20. Friends of Marblehead Parks, a nonprofit that came together only months ago and recently received its 501(c)(3) status, will hold its first Native Plant Sale from 9 a.m. to noon at the Marblehead Community Center, 10 Humphrey St. Shoppers can buy native perennials, shrubs and pollinator plants the day before Father's Day, with a landscape designer, a horticulturist and master gardeners on hand to answer questions. Proceeds are meant to go back into the town's parks.
The sale is a fundraiser, but it is also an argument. The group's founders want to show that Marblehead's public spaces can be more beautiful, more resilient and more alive — without giving up the open ground that children, families and athletes already use.
From a conference to a new nonprofit
Larry Simpson traces the group to a conversation at a sustainable landscaping conference in New London, Connecticut, about three years ago, where he met Bradford, a fellow Marblehead resident. Simpson has lived in town 35 years and raised three children here; his youngest is a junior in high school. He studied botany, earned a degree in horticulture, took landscape design classes at Radcliffe and Harvard in the 1990s and taught plant classes at North Shore Community College from about 2000 through 2021.
He and Bradford found they had been thinking the same thing — that they wanted to give something back using what they knew. The group began meeting around December and January with six or seven residents who felt more could be done in the parks, Simpson said. It now has eight board members and a name its founders are careful to state plainly: Friends of Marblehead Parks, independent of any town department.
The mission, as Simpson describes it, is to bring thoughtful design and biodiversity to the parks. Too many landscapes, he said, grow by accumulation — a lilac planted one Mother's Day, a rose the next anniversary, each dropped wherever there is room. Such places end up designed "by randomness," he said, rather than with any sense of the space as a whole.
Biodiversity, in his telling, is a practical choice as much as an aesthetic one. A single ornamental tree might support three kinds of caterpillars; a native chosen for its ecological value, at the same cost, can support hundreds, feeding the birds that depend on them. A garden without that life can look like a picture but sit apart from nature, Simpson said, which should be "teeming with life."
Plants chosen to survive a dry summer
Bradford's piece of the work is the parks themselves. Right now, she said, many hold mostly trees and aging shrubs and need more layers — new native shrubs, perennials and grasses planted beneath and around what already stands. "The parks are crying out for another level of plants and native plants," she said.
"We're going to increase the layers of plant material," Bradford said, describing beds that step down from trees through shrubs to perennials and grasses. She brings a design background to the choices, along with master gardener Mary Krull and a landscape designer also named Mary; the group tests soil before planting to learn what each site needs.
Many of the plants are picked to survive on their own. Sustainability in a Marblehead park, Bradford said, means less water at a time when there is less to count on — last year's rainfall ran about 6 inches below normal, by her account, and the parks have no irrigation. The natives on her list — viburnums, black chokeberry, bayberry, summersweet, low-grow sumac, goldenrod, switchgrass, black-eyed Susan and little bluestem grass — are chosen partly because they can take a dry season.
Simpson points to others, like Joe Pye weed and cardinal flower, whose deep red blooms can draw hummingbirds. Some native wildflowers spread on their own over a few seasons, he said, turning a handful of plants into a stand — a slow return on a small investment.
The clearest test of the idea is Glabicky Field, where the group already has an early design for beds near the historic sign and hopes to plant by fall. When Friends of Marblehead Parks presented its plans to the Recreation and Parks Commission in April, Bradford said, it promised to stay on the edges, enhancing the borders while leaving the interiors open for sports, families and recreation. A year from now, she said, success would simply mean those beds are in the ground.
The group is not funded by the town and must raise money for every plant it brings in, which is part of what the sale is for. Bradford was careful not to fault the parks staff, who she said are stretched keeping the grounds usable; the deeper work of plant selection and design, she suggested, is more than a maintenance crew is set up to take on.
If the group has a harder task than fundraising, it may be changing how people see a native landscape at all. Many residents grew up on tidy azaleas and rhododendrons, Bradford said, and have to be shown that a looser, wilder planting belongs in a public park. Native plants, she said, "can be beautiful in their own way" — a case she hopes a single morning of sales, and a few beds at the edge of one field, can begin to make.
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