At St. Michael’s we are blessed with extensive, nicely contoured grounds which have given rise to some serious landscaping.  The church is situated on high ground at the center of a residential city block. On two sides our property borders residential gardens and on the other two sides the borders are formed by streets (Bellafonte Road and Libby Lane).  Hedges keep the streets invisible from the building and despite the high location our property feels secluded.
 
Possibly our most attractive landscaped area is the courtyard, a quiet enclosed space where a brick pavement is surrounded by beds of flowers and shrubs. It has a modern fountain and invites people to sit outdoors in contemplation or in conversation.
 

Our main parking lot, for most institutions a problematic space to landscape, has a center island strip that accommodates a diverse arrangement of trees, shrubs, flowers and grasses.  All of these are drought tolerant, since the surrounding asphalt is a harsh environment for plants.
 
From our main door, the ground slopes downward into a detention basin and we have landscaped that space in recent years with a variety of shrubs, mostly arranged in two borders.  Five lovely young clumps of river birches divide the Libby Lane driveway from the detention basin, and the walk from the parking lot to the church door is shaded, in the afternoon, by 2 maple trees.
 
On the Libby Lane side of the church there is a second much smaller parking lot, and a path from it leads up a gentle slope to the back door.  Just before it reaches the church building, it passes through a flower bed.  The slope on that side of the church accommodates our main a/c unit and has been planted with trees and shrubs, as well as a wildflower bed along a wall, but it awaits more landscaping.  It could possibly some day serve as an out-door worship place or a columbarium.
 
We have 80 ornamental trees on our property, most of them planted when we built the current sanctuary in 1990.  These have begun to acquire some substance in recent years.  Among them are 10 red maples, 8 white pines, 8 hemlocks and 3 tulip poplars.
 
On the Bellafonte side, there is a very large pin oak and a beautiful mature dogwood (in addition to 4 other dogwoods).  Our courtyard is shaded by several crabapples and 4 honey locusts.  At the bottom of our sanctuary, we have a little arrangement of 2 serviceberries flanking a knarly old redbud.
 
Our gardens and grounds are under the care of the Buildings and Grounds Committee, usually chaired by the Junior Warden.  Parishioners take great pleasure in our church gardens and turn out for work days once or twice a year to rake leaves or to prune.  A smaller group of church members deals with regular maintenance tasks.