In Camden, tulip bulbs planted with hopes they'll spring forward

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CAMDEN — On a crisp Friday morning, a group of young women swung shovels into the hard dirt at the base of a tree on a busy North Camden street.

"Is there treasure down there?" a passer-by joked.

Just bottle caps and slivers of glass, they replied.

But there will be a kind of treasure buried there once they finish dropping more than 100 tulip bulbs into this patch of earth.

Over the past week, more than 60 volunteers from local nonprofits, schools and businesses planted about 5,000 of these bulbs around all the trees along a four-block stretch of State Street.

The $3,000 project was spearheaded by Hopeworks 'N Camden, a nonprofit youth training agency, and funded by Campbell's Soup Co.

Jeff Putthoff, executive director of Hopeworks, said the idea was to connect the people who live and work on State Street by coming together to "make this huge beautiful thing happen in the spring."

"It's a really simple thing," Putthoff said. "People say, 'Oh, we need more police.' Yes, we do. But we also need beauty. And this is making some beauty happen."

Campbell's also dispatched employees to volunteer alongside the Hopeworks trainees and representatives from other agencies.

"It's a little thing," said Barb Bassett, a research and development director at Campbell's.

But it shows the people living in North Camden that "somebody cared enough to do something for them," Bassett said. "If they can see a pretty bed of flowers maybe it'll start their day a little better."

And maybe "staking a claim" that someone cares will encourage people to treat the area with more respect, said Morgan Stuart, 23, who's interning in North Camden as part of her Rutgers-Camden graduate program in public administration.

Her classmate Chelsea Milko, 24, agreed.

"When you see beauty, you're more likely to take ownership in a place," Milko said.

Hopeworks trainee Ashatai Anderson, 18, said she believed their efforts could help reverse negative perceptions about the neighborhood and "make people want to come here."

"They're going to say, "Wow, this community's coming together just to make their community look good,' " Anderson said.

"It's almost like food," explained Biko Burton, 20, another Hopeworks trainee. "If it doesn't look good, it's not going to taste good."

Right now, the street doesn't look all that different. The rain postponed plans to paint porches and eight abandoned homes, but Putthoff said that should be completed next week. And come next spring, he said, the 300, 400, 500 and 600 blocks of State Street will be covered with bright red blooms.

"What's really cool is we're going to forget about it and then it's going to be four, six months later and we're going to be reminded of what we did together," Putthoff said.

Reach Deborah Hirsch at (856) 486-2476 or dhirsch@camden.gannett.com