Rocks around the block Art and community are flourishing in gardens of painted stones inviting passersby to claim a treasure and reseed with their own offering By: David Sanderson Posted: 3:00 AM CDT Saturday, Sep. 2, 2023

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This article was published 02/09/2023 (1100 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Like a lot of parents, Maggie Rodrigues was searching for ways to keep her young children occupied after the province closed schools during the early days of the pandemic.

After being reminded about Winnipeg Rocks, a Facebook group whose followers hide brightly painted rocks in public places for others to find, she began escorting her three kids to different parks to see what they could unearth.

Unfortunately, the exercise proved to be easier said than done.

Finding a painted rock is difficult enough, but finding three on the same day, one for each of them, was nearly impossible, Rodrigues says, introducing her now 10-year-old daughter and seven-year-old twins, all of whom are more interested in a frog they’ve been tailing than in a newspaper scribe’s questions.

In the summer of 2020, Rodrigues learned about a separate rock-related endeavour called Winnipeg Kindness Rock Gardens. She read that kindness rock gardens function similarly to little free libraries, whereby visitors are encouraged to remove a rock of their choosing, leaving another behind in its stead.

How wonderful, she thought; gone would be the days of consoling a sad toddler who’d failed to retrieve a rock during an outing.

Using a provided map that listed the addresses of local kindness gardens, the four of them began heading out almost daily to “seed” one garden or another with rocks they had personally decorated, in addition to selecting new specimens to take home. (Garden is a broad term; while the majority of what are also referred to as inspiration gardens are set on the ground, near a bush or tree, they can be housed in pretty much anything, including a wooden cabinet or an emptied-out bird bath.)

“In August 2020 we opened our own garden, the Magical Rainbow Kindness Rock Garden. Checking it, adding to it and posting photos of rocks that had been left behind by strangers quickly became part of our daily routine,” Rodrigues says, walking us over to their setup, which consists of a large wooden chest containing dozens of rocks of various sizes and shapes, many of which boast enriching messages such as “you matter,” “you are loved” and “be kind.”

“We’ve since made lifelong friends from within the group, all of whom are incredible, and all of whom have the same goal: to spread kindness near and far.”

Nancy-Tina Coutu is the founder and lead administrator of the Winnipeg Kindness Rock Gardens Facebook group, which currently has over 1,300 members.

In August 2018, Coutu came across a rock painted to look like a strawberry a few blocks from her home in Amber Trails. She wasn’t sure what she was staring at, but was later told by her sister that it had likely been left by a person associated with the Winnipeg Rocks movement.

Intrigued, Coutu, an artsy type, was soon spending a good chunk of her spare time painting rocks, which she would turn around and distribute in her neck of the woods for others to discover.

The following spring she read an article about a woman from Massachusetts who was placing painted rocks in a designated section of her yard for passersby to pick and choose from. She vowed to do something comparable, but there never seemed to be enough hours in the day between working full time and helping care for an elderly parent.

Then along came COVID-19. Suddenly, she was stuck at home with all the time in the world, she says.

On the boulevard outside the Leila Avenue home she shares with her mother is an ash tree she had long referred to as the “happy tree.” That’s because it had been planted by the city after its predecessor was destroyed by lightning, and had thrived immediately, catching up in height to neighbouring trees seemingly in the blink of an eye.

Coutu couldn’t think of a more ideal spot for what she dubbed the Happy Tree Kindness Rock Garden. After stringing solar-powered fairy lights through the foliage and suspending stuffed yellow emojis from the limbs, she surrounded the tree’s base with dozens of painted rocks that, according to a hand-rendered sign, were free for the taking. (Talk about a rock star; among Coutu’s specialties are rocks fashioned to resemble members of the Beatles.)

She officially opened her kindness garden to the public on July 1, 2020. She circled it with patio stones soon thereafter, which visitors are encouraged to draw or write on, using one of 10 felt markers she leaves in a plastic bucket near the tree for that purpose.

It didn’t take long for the Happy Tree Kindness Rock Garden to live up to its positive moniker. During its first month in existence, a young girl who lives in the neighbourhood was out with her parents searching for their dog, which had escaped from its enclosure. The girl paused in front of Coutu’s tree, asking it to help them find the pooch.

When she returned home, the dog was running around in the back yard, having returned on its own.

“She came back the next day, to write a note of thanks to the tree and the garden for answering her prayer,” Coutu says, running her hand over the trunk of the tree.

Coutu started the Winnipeg Kindness Rock Gardens Facebook group in mid-July 2020. By the end of the year there were close to 75 kindness gardens in the city, a number that more than doubled in 2021. And while she does allow that she got the ball rolling, Coutu refuses to take any credit for Winnipeg kindness gardens’ ongoing popularity.

“I may have provided a spark, but it’s everybody else that has done the hard work of seeding the gardens and helping spread messages of kindness,” she says.

Lisa Laferty’s kindness rock garden, simply called Laf’s Garden, is only a few months old. The Fairmont Road resident has already seen the difference it has made in her part of town.

“We moved here last year and I hadn’t met too many of my neighbours, but that changed after I added the garden,” she says, standing in front of a wooden shelving unit laden with rocks, together with a sign reading, “Take a rock, leave a rock, paint a rock, be kind.” Now when she’s outside doing yard work, people who used to walk by without uttering a word stop to introduce themselves and to ask questions about her project.

Also, her home office faces the street and there isn’t a day that goes by when she doesn’t notice a half-dozen new faces, from toddlers to seniors, sifting through the menagerie.

“I don’t pretend to call myself an artist, but I did feel like I needed a hobby and told myself if kids can paint rocks, so could I,” she says, adding the pay-it-forward mantra of kindness gardens really appealed to her. “I’m a big fan of the Blue Bombers and I have to say, every time I do a blue-and-gold rock with a W on it, it’s snapped up in a matter of hours.”

Back at the Rodrigues abode, Mom and her three children have since moved over to the front porch, where she has spread out a plastic sheet ahead of a family painting session.

Her eldest announces she is going to put the finishing touches on a Rapunzel-inspired rock she started last week, adding, “Great idea!” when a visitor suggests she use six additional rocks to depict the character’s lengthy tresses.

“We make a point of parking ourselves out here for at least a couple of hours every week,” Rodrigues says, handing paint brushes to the twins. “Not only is it a great activity to do that doesn’t involve screens, it’s an opportunity to talk with the kids about why we’re doing this in the first place… how it all started with people wanting to do random acts of kindness for others.

“That’s a great lesson to be taught, no matter how old you are, right?”

david.sanderson@winnipegfreepress.com