Winter Stick Garden
Old South Church has a creative way to display their garden in the winter
As you walk along Boylston Street in the winter, you may notice a strange looking garden in front of the Old South Church. It's the famous Winter Stick Garden:
Four things I learned about the Winter Stick Garden
- Garden first appeared in the winter of 2010 and was created by Jim Hood and Diane Gaucher
- There are 600 sticks in the Winter Stick Garden.
- This was an inspiration for a similar display around the Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy Greenway Conservancy in 2012.
- The Red Osier Dogwood can be found around the Charles River and in the Back Bay's Emerald Necklace.
Sign in front of the Winter Stick Garden
Red Osier Drift
Spruce, solid casein stain, salt marsh hay
A winter garden of color for Old South Church's street front. This stick garden is a sculptural abstraction of a drift of Red Osier Dogwood (Cornus sericea) a native shrub found across the eastern United States, and appearing in our planters boxes near the front door.
The sticker was stained and installed by a team of members of Old South Church as a labor of love and gift to the city. Besides being a thing of beauty, the stick garden is also a proclamation of our faith: that beauty will spring from barrenness, form out of chaos, life out of death. Here in the coldest and darkest time of year, we make bold to proclaim that spring and life are on the way.