October 30, 2008 | Read Time: 3 minutes
A dozen years ago, Tom and Kitty Stoner went for a stroll in central London to kill some time before checking into their hotel. On their walk, the couple came upon a red brick arch that led them to an enclosed garden.
“We instantly felt as though we had left the city behind and had entered a place of serenity,” writes Mr. Stoner, a retired broadcasting executive, in the introduction to a new book he co-wrote, Open Spaces Sacred Places: Stories of How Nature Heals and Unifies.
The garden was canopied by towering plane trees that overlooked a series of narrow pathways. Benches dotted the paths, some with plaques that memorialized the generations of people who had enjoyed the park.
That chance visit to Mount Street Gardens led the Stoners to establish a foundation that would give money to help create parks and other open spaces for contemplation. The grant maker, which is based near the couple’s home in Annapolis, Md., gives roughly $600,000 each year to groups in Maryland and neighboring states.
The Stoners called the organization the TKF Foundation, after Tom, Kitty, and “firesouls.” Firesouls are what the couple calls the local leaders whose vision and hard work has helped turn their ideas for quiet spaces into a reality.
Mary F. Wyatt, the organization’s executive director, says the foundation seeks to create spaces that will help people connect with nature. The foundation’s leaders also want the places they help build to be inclusive.
“When you’re in a garden, it doesn’t matter what your beliefs are, what your economic class is, where you’re from,” she says. “We ask all of our partners to make these spaces as open as possible, so anyone, of any belief, would feel welcome.”
A Prisoners’ Garden
Some of the open places created by the foundation are designed to bring peace to an urban setting, such as the stone-and-pebble labyrinth built behind a church in one of Baltimore’s toughest neighborhoods.
Others are built, in part, to help people grieve. With a grant from the TKF Foundation, employees at Baltimore’s Franklin Square Hospital Center built a garden for parents to remember children they have lost.
The grant maker has also set up places that can fill people with hope or bring them joy. A warden at the Western Correctional Institution, in Cumberland, Md., enlisted an architect to design a garden where prisoners go to take in nature and feel a sense of dignity.
Citizens in Mount Washington, a neighborhood in northwestern Baltimore, turned an abandoned lot into an arboretum where children learn to identify plants and search for fish and butterflies in and around a 3,500-gallon pond.
Most of the spaces have a portal, to create a sense of enclosure. They also have paths, to encourage exploration. To inspire reflection, the places have a bench, built by prisoners at the Cumberland facility, with a journal attached to it.
“People share the most amazing thoughts,” says Ms. Wyatt. “Some are sad, some funny. That reinforces for us that the spaces mean something to people and they are fulfilling a need.”
No Money for Upkeep
The foundation faces several challenges in its work. Perhaps the biggest, says Ms. Wyatt, is the difficulty of creating spaces that feel both safe and private. The preservation and maintenance of the spaces can also pose problems.
While the foundation does not give money specifically for upkeep, it does set aside $100,000 per year to help past grantees add new features to their gardens or develop new programs.
“When people know there’s money available to keep making a space better and better, they tend to be more committed to its ongoing maintenance,” says Ms. Wyatt. “But that is always an issue.”
The foundation has helped create more than 100 spaces since 1996, and its employees stay in touch with about half that number.
