In Fairmount’s small front spaces, carefully tended container gardens make a colorful neighborhood

Marilyn Storck enjoys reading outside at her red table and chairs. The furniture matches her front door, the verbena in a window box made by her son, and the geraniums in pots under the window. Jade and peace lily plants, yellow cosmos, and rudbeckia also adorn the front of Storck’s beige, two-story rowhouse.

Storck’s mini-garden, with what she called an “English country look,” won first place in the small garden category of the Fairmount Civic Association’s 2024 Flowering Fronts of Fairmount Competition. Though she has owned her home for 20 years, Storck entered the Flowering Fronts contest “on a whim” for the first time this year, she said.

The contest is open to amateur gardeners living in the Philadelphia neighborhood bound roughly by Corinthian Avenue and Fairmount Park to the east and west, and Girard Avenue and Fairmount Avenue to the north and south.

The area’s rowhouses have tiny backyards, and only a few homeowners have front yards, so most instead plant flowers in pots and window boxes.

The contest was the brainchild of Dorene Martin, a member of the FCA activities committee. Now in its ninth year, the contest had over 50 entrants between May 1 and July 1 in the small, medium, and large garden categories, as well as a window box category.

Martin visits and photographs each entry with fellow activities committee member Miriam Galster in early July. The women, who have experience judging gardens for the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society, look for “symmetry and variety,” Martin said.

They confer with the rest of the activities committee to determine who earned a prize in each category. Winners are announced at the FCA summer social and receive gift cards to Lowe’s.

A block away from Storck’s home, Maryanne and Mark Phillips’ garden came in second in the same category. A curved-back, black bench in front of their gray stucco home sits beneath two window boxes, overflowing with white and yellow petunias and pink miniature hibiscus. The bench is flanked by an evergreen in a white pot, a red rose bush in a black planter, and another evergreen in a tall urn.

The Phillipses have owned their two story, 14-foot-wide home for two years, and entered the contest for the first time this year.

Mary Ann Makary and Chad Moss won first place in the medium-sized garden category. Their three-story house, built in the early 20th century, has a porch and a 10-by-10-foot in-ground planting bed in front.

When Makary and Moss purchased their home a decade ago, the garden bed was just dirt and a few sad evergreens, she said. Now it is resplendent with trumpet lilies, a Japanese maple, pink wingpod purslane, creeping jenny, purple petunias, and maroon and green-striped coleus. Planters filled with coral-colored hibiscus line the steps to the porch, which is decorated with blossom-filled planters and hanging baskets.

A few streets away, Joan Kimball and Bob Wiemken have a sprawling front garden across two brick rowhouses, which won first prize in the Flowering Fronts large garden category.

Kimball owns one of the houses and co-owns the other with Wiemken. They have been tending the gardens for six years and entered the contest for the first time this year.

They have filled more than a dozen artfully arranged pots with hibiscus, canna lilies, tall junipers, pink hydrangeas, variegated coleus, a Rose of Sharon, white flowering hostas, and more.

After the flowers fade, contest winners and their neighbors will nestle pumpkins and gourds around their pots for Halloween and deck evergreens with lights and Christmas balls in December. Fairmount’s fronts will remain colorful for months to come.

Do you have an amazing garden? Tell us about it by email (and send some digital photographs) at properties@inquirer.com.