Remembering Gail Wells, founder of Buffalo’s Freedom Gardens

BUFFALO, N.Y. (WKBW) — We remember a beloved member of Buffalo’s East Side community, Gail Wells, who recently passed away and founded Freedom Gardens in Buffalo, helping to plant flower gardens and of vegetable gardens in the city to improve life.

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7 News Senior Reporter Eileen Buckley brings the voices of some of her family members, who reflect on the work of beautifying her life and her legacy as a family matriarch.

“Aunt Gail was full of life,” said niece Shola Clark.

“She gave people life,” remarked Allen Redmond, cousin,

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Loved ones remember Gail as a woman full of love for her community.

Her niece, Challenger newspaper editor Shola Clark, told me that Gail was a “mother to the community.”

“She’s really focused on our community just because of the things that we’re suffering from in the community economically, nutritionally, you know, food deserts,” Clark noted. “She was fighting for these things – to get out of these disparities. … To recognize that there are disparities in our community that many of us don’t understand, so she was really trying to advocate for it.

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Gail, who suffered a stroke at the end of May and later died, was a teacher and urban planner, but it was through gardening that she “sowed” his advocacy in our Queen City. Founder of Freedom Gardens, she was also a longtime grassroots gardener.

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“She had been planting or going around the community offering seeds and beds that people could put in their gardens to grow flowers and food, just to give people inspiration,” Clark said.

“She was a master gardener, and I’ll use that analogy, with the way she worked with people, through people, for people. She was always of service. She wanted the best for everyone,” Redmond described.

Redmond is originally from New York and is Gail’s first cousin.

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“In my family, she’s like the perfect example of education and development, just unifying others,” Redmond said.

“How will you always remember his legacy?” » “I will remember her as a person who gave of herself to the world and to her family,” Buckley asked.

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“She was kissing. She was encouraging, always trying to uplift people,” Clark responded. “The seeds that she planted in a community and the things that she wanted to see happen in our community. »

Photo provided by Gail Wells’ daughter.

I asked Clark what his favorite memory of his aunt was.

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“My favorite memory of my aunt is dancing. I will always remember my aunt as being dancing and being alive in every moment,” Clark recalled.

Redmond told me that he spent a lot of time with his cousin.

“I spent my summers in Buffalo here with her. I went to the University at Buffalo because of her. We were just together for Thanksgiving and we talked a lot,” Redmond remarked.

Photo provided by Allen Redmond.

Redmond told me that Gail was always helping others and serving as an “inspiration.”

I asked Redmond how he wanted all of us in Buffalo to remember Gail.

“Continue sowing seeds, not only literally, but spiritually. through people, continue to build yourself and love yourself because that’s who she was,” Redmond responded.

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Her niece tells me that the day her aunt suffered a stroke, that morning she told her husband that she was coming here to JFK Park, off Hickory Street in Buffalo, to water the fruit trees that she had planted.

“And that was her plan that morning to go until, you know, God called her home,” Clark said.

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Now there’s an incredible sign of Gail’s care for these trees: an apple is blooming.