A subdued garden at Eastern State

If you're a gardener, here's one challenge you probably haven't faced - how to manage a prison garden without a captive labor force.

At times, we've all felt like prisoners among the snapdragons, enslaved by weather, tortured by pests. But it's a different dynamic for Julie Snell, a landscape architect with the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society.

For 12 years, she's actually managed the terrace garden at the foot of the massive walls and castle towers of the defunct Eastern State Penitentiary in the city's Fairmount section - and the volunteers who maintain it.

"It's very big," Snell says.

And how. The terrace measures 800 feet long and 10 feet wide, 4 to 8 feet above the sidewalk. In 1829, when the prison, known as "ESP," opened, there was a severe, closely cropped lawn in this space, a metaphor for the repression within.

"It was as austere and as stern and unattractive as possible, and that was the whole idea of the architecture, too - to scare the wits out of you and persuade you that you didn't want to end up there," says Patsy McLaughlin, a longtime garden volunteer who lives on nearby Wallace Street.

After the prison closed in 1971, the lawn - and the rest of the 11-acre site, bounded by Fairmount Avenue and Brown Street, 22d Street and Corinthian Avenue - went straight to the devil. As did the interior.

Multiflora rose moved in, with junk trees and the detritus of city life - dead cats, empty beer bottles, corroded batteries, bags of trash.

"It was a terrible eyesore," recalls McLaughlin, who in 1976 planted a dozen roses out front to soften the weedy prison landscape. (Two survive.)

Today, the prison is a nonprofit museum that has undergone $10 million in stabilization and restoration work with more to come. The terrace garden costs about $2,900 in upkeep a year, most donated by the prison nonprofit.

The volunteers who take care of the garden are a hardy band that started big in 1990, four years before prison tours began. Their numbers have ebbed and flowed ever since, and they're mostly ebbing now. They're down to a dozen hard-cores like McLaughlin; the youngest is 50, and only a handful consistently show up for monthly work days.

Summer is critical. This is when everyone seems to be on vacation. It's also when the weeds go nuts and the sun is punishing. "At this time of year," Snell says, "I don't think of it as gardening. It's more like strategic weed-removal."