The Garden in spring — sweeps of purple woodland phlox and white foamflower bordering a stone path, with a Spruce Hill Victorian in the background.

4300 Osage Avenue · Spruce Hill

The Garden

A Legacy

A small piece of earth

In 2025, Barry Grossbach quietly bought the lot at 4300 Osage Avenue and committed it to green space — in perpetuity, for the neighborhood he and Mike Hardy had loved and tended for more than fifty years.

In dedication

“He was very interested in greening, and I was very interested in saving cities.” — Barry, on a life shared with Mike

Partners, then husbands — fifty-three years together.

Portrait of Barry Grossbach

Barry Grossbach

1939 – 2025

The city-saver.

For decades, Barry led the Spruce Hill Community Association, helped found Friends of Clark Park, and in the mid-1990s persuaded West Philadelphia’s institutions to create what would become the University City District. He served on its board from inception until 2025.

He was unpretentious, stubborn, generous, and very funny. He cajoled university presidents and developers alike into caring about the small things — a tree pit, a bench, a corner — that quietly make a neighborhood a place.

Buying this lot, in his final year, was a last small intervention. Like the others, it was for the block.

Portrait of Mike Hardy

Mike Hardy

1936 – 2021

The one who planted.

Mike taught history at the Community College of Philadelphia for thirty years and spent the rest of his hours making West Philadelphia greener. He co-chaired the founding of Friends of Clark Park, chaired UCGreen, and worked tirelessly with Baltimore Avenue in Bloom.

He was famous for badgering property owners about their empty tree pits — and famous, too, for quietly funding the trees himself when no one else would. In 2009 the Arbor Day Foundation gave him the Lawrence Enersen Award for it.

The trees along Baltimore Avenue, the Trolley Portal Gardens, countless side-street plantings — much of the canopy you walk under here is his.

One part Jane Jacobs, one part Mother Teresa, one part Larry David — Barry was an unpretentious force of nature who never stopped advocating for his block, his community, and his city. — after Matt Bergheiser, The Philadelphia Citizen

A wider legacy

The neighborhood they made.

Between them, Barry and Mike shaped the civic and natural fabric of Spruce Hill and University City for over fifty years. The Garden is one corner of a much wider quilt.

Read more about Barry & Mike

The Garden, designed

Where their two lives meet the ground.

The Garden is a small triangle at 43rd and Osage — a slope of native woodland phlox, foamflower, ferns, and young trees, terraced by a low fieldstone wall.

It was designed as a quiet pollinator habitat and a year-round neighborhood edge: somewhere to slow down on the walk home, somewhere a sparrow will reliably be sitting on the sign.

Landscape Design

Susan K. Weiler, OLIN

Detail of The Garden in late spring — woodland phlox in bloom along a stone retaining wall.
Spring 2026

In bloom

Through the seasons.

The Garden is planted almost entirely in natives. Something is always at work — even in winter, when structure carries the show.

Spring

  • Golden groundsel Packera aurea
  • Woodland phlox Phlox divaricata
  • Foamflower Tiarella cordifolia
  • Eastern redbud Cercis canadensis

Summer

  • Summersweet Clethra alnifolia
  • Cardinal flower Lobelia cardinalis
  • Smooth hydrangea Hydrangea arborescens
  • Purple coneflower Echinacea purpurea

Autumn

  • Aromatic aster Symphyotrichum oblongifolium ‘October Skies’
  • White wood aster Aster divaricatus
  • Franklin tree Franklinia alatamaha
  • Tupelo Nyssa sylvatica — foliage

Winter

  • Winterberry Ilex verticillata — red fruit
  • Wintergreen Gaultheria procumbens
  • Christmas fern Polystichum acrostichoides
  • Lenten rose Helleborus orientalis
The Garden sign in pale mint with deep forest-green lettering reading 'The Garden — A Legacy', with a sparrow perched on top.

Come by

Visit The Garden.

4300 Osage Avenue
Philadelphia, PA 19104

Spruce Hill · open to all, always

The Garden sits at the corner of 43rd and Osage, a short walk from Clark Park and the Trolley Portal. There is no admission, no hours, no gate — just a slope of native plantings, a stone wall, and a sign.

Open in Google Maps

Questions, or want to help tend it?
hello@thegardenalegacy.org