Greatest Person: Walter Kellar Led Creation Of Tanyard Creek Community Garden

Editor's note: "Greatest Person" is a new Decatur Patch feature in which we profile someone who has made the community a better place to live. If you have ideas for someone to profile, email ralph.ellis@patch.com.

Decatur residents with plots at the Tanyard Creek Community Garden are growing something besides lettuce, okra and tomatoes.

After one year of existence, the garden has developed into a neighborhood hub. Last weekend, neighbors strolled in and out, sometimes just stopping by to check their plots. Leonard Thibadeau and Stan Samuels tended their ground, pausing to chat now and then. Charlie Brown took a break to pluck his ukelele and sing.

Explained Walter Kellar, the acknowledged father of the garden, "People came together to garden and started meeting each other for the first time."

Kellar, 55, became interested in creating the garden while helping a student examine water quality in Tanyard Creek, which runs beside a weedy flood plain in their neighborhood. It's so named because a tannery operated nearby decades ago.

A trip to the courthouse revealed the land, located behind houses and bounded by Oakland Street and Northern Avenue, was owned bt the City of Decatur.

"That got us thinking about it," Kellar said.

Kellar had done some gardening but was hardly a country boy. He grew up in Atlanta and attended Druid Hills High. He taught English in Germany, lived in Canada and California and worked as a project manager, first for a telecommunications firm and now for a property management group.

When the garden idea came to mind, Kellar found support with the Great Lakes/Clairemont neighborhood groups. He also polled residents with homes backing up to the flood plain and found they liked the idea, too.

But getting the city to allow a community garden in that spot was, Kellar said, "incredibly bureaucratic."

The city staff had legitimate concerns about liability, since a non-city group would be using city land, and environmental impact because the garden would be in a flood plain. There was no precedent.

"They really didn't know what to do with us," he said. "They were concerned because it had never been done before."

Kellar attended a lot of meetings and filed a lot of papers. Eventually, the land use designation was changed and all approvals were granted, though with stipulations.

Gardeners, for example, must cover their plots with erosion control cloths, can't use pesticides and cannot plant within 25 feet of the stream bank.

Kellar organized the lottery for plots and created bylaws and an organization. The gardeners must cooperate among themselves, rotating chores such as grass-cutting and keeping the watering tank full.

The project manager had completed yet another project.

"This place looks a lot better than when the city had it," said Brown, the ukelele player. "Ten times better."

But the big benefit is getting to know neighbors better, said Thibadeau, pausing from tilling his 10-foot-by-10-foot plot. He nominated Kellar for a Hometown Hero award, which the city presented earlier this year.

"You meet people you wouldn't meet otherwise,"  Thibadeau said  "It's a real community builder."