Adjacent to Moorestown’s First Baptist Church on Main Street is a place of tranquility, the church’s community garden.
Norma Wright serves as co-chair of the church’s garden committee. When she joined more than four years ago, the garden’s formation was still in the planning stages.
“It was basically a sandlot,” she explained. “It had been the playground of the church’s (former) preschool in years past … The church had the vision of turning it into a garden of some type.”
The committee fundraised for the garden after Wright’s close friend, a landscape architect, drew the layout. Wright said the garden committee hired the company her friend worked for to do the labor.
“It had to be sort of excavated and there was some concrete that had been probably a foundation of a former structure, so her people kind of got the bones of it started,” Wright noted.
There are benches, picnic tables, plantings and a labyrinth that visitors can trace with their steps. Wright noted that when plans for the garden were first established, the committee decided to include the labyrinth.
The Moorestown Improvement Association (MIA) recently donated a new legacy bench for the garden that joins two other donated benches.
“We have one memorial bench that a family in the congregation gave in memory of a loved gentleman in the church,” Wright said.
Wright is the only committee member who is a Moorestown resident.
“I just love maintaining it; I love gardening,” she said of the new area. “I’m the only one of our committee members who actually lives in Moorestown, so it’s more accessible to me to help maintain it.”
Wright wants residents to enjoy the garden’s greenery.
“It’s just a lovely, quiet place, too,” she said. “… It’s the only green space in town until Percheron Park is finally completed.”
