Reverse curb appeal

Most homeowners want to present a comely face to the public, but one St. Paul neighborhood boasts a number of lots about which one might say, with the utmost respect, "Nice rear."

The reverse curb appeal is a consequence of the Alley Garden Awards, a program begun by the Macalester-Groveland Community Council in 1992 with the premise that community beautification is a crime deterrent. Over the years, the program has also turned neighbors into friends, inspired a good-natured competition and improved city services.

Yet its chief benefit might be the most intangible. Backing a car out onto a narrow lane lined with spires of lilies and profusions of petunias "makes me happy," said Marianne Paulos, who lives on Fairmount Avenue. "And it's just so nice to come home to."

Paulos has been spiffing up her stretch of alley for years, calling it a work in progress. "I can hardly remember what used to be there," she said. "Grass and weeds, and an old retaining wall on one side with a scrappy tree." Her neighbor to the west, Joe Schwarz, encouraged her -- indeed, everyone on the block -- to nurture this overlooked thoroughfare. Today, their alley that serves Fairmount and Osceola Avenues (between Pascal and Saratoga Streets) is among the most lauded in the community.

"It used to be, you'd plant lilacs to hide the alley," said Schwarz, whose alley features barrel plants of calibracoa, or million bells, nestling against fountain grass. Salvia makes a long-blooming border for the ladies mantle, bearded iris and bee balm.

To the east are Paulos' petunias, lilies and moss roses. Across the alley, an Osceola neighbor's spectacular Asiatic lilies resemble miniature fireworks caught in flight.

However, it's not all about the flowers, said judge Sharon Toscano. In fact, the bloomability factor takes a distant fifth to how a homeowner fulfills these requirements: They've planted some sort of garden, even vegetables. The garden is weed-free and maintained. The alleyside property is litter-free, weed-free and neat. And perhaps most important -- and the factor that most often knocks residents out of the running -- there's an easily read house number visible from the alley.

When a garden meets all four criteria, judges leave a pink flag as an award and a flier in the front door seeking the homeowners' permission to include their garden on a map for the Alley Garden Awards Tour, which continues through Saturday. Maps are at area recreation centers and on the Macalester-Groveland Community Council's website (www.macgrove.org).

'A weed is a weed'

Some residents are quite serious about the awards and Toscano allowed as how some noses get out of joint. A dead bush might not necessarily be a negative if everything else is otherwise neat as a pin. "Death happens," she said. "But a weed is a weed."

Unless it's a milkweed. Long discussions about milkweed's place on the hierarchy of weeds concluded with the attractive spire being allowed if it's maintained like a plant, (i.e., weeded around) and because it provides habitat to monarch butterflies, Toscano said.

Several sturdy milkweeds anchor one end of William and Marcia VanDaalen's line of hollyhocks and day lilies along their south-facing garage wall. William VanDaalen is among those residents who would be tending such a garden whether there were a contest or not. He's lived in the neighborhood 35 years, "and we've just always done this," he said, shrugging and suggesting that more notice be given to the huge mural of wolves that his wife painted on the garage door.

Studies have shown that vegetation has an impact on violence, in that exposure to green spaces can ease the effects of crowding and noise in city neighborhoods. The Blooming St. Paul program, while separate from the alley gardens program, works on the same foundation of strengthening neighborhood relationships with greener common areas, said Erin Dady, the city's director of marketing.

Sgt. Paul Schnell of the St. Paul Police Department said that while there's no hard data that can be tracked to the gardens, "we believe strongly that signs of people being engaged reduces criminal activity and disorder, and there's good data to support that fact."

Morning glories vs. siding

As Toscano finished judging her particular grid, one of 17 in the neighborhood, she planted a flag in a planter built along a garage wall for a Princeton Avenue home. That turned out to be the first pink flag awarded to Liz Page, who'd begun gardening "because I didn't want to have the ugliest garage on the block." Hers was a particular challenge because she'd attached a ceramics studio to the garage, making for a long, featureless stretch of "nasty white aluminum siding."

"I thought morning glories would cover that up," and so she built a planter and rigged a trellis of strings so the morning glories could rise to camouflaging heights.

In addition to turning residents' concept of neighborhood inside-out -- or outside-in -- it's also given these narrow passageways a newfound identity. As Page said, "People really have so many interesting things going on in their alleys."