"Love is something if you give it away, you end up having more," sang activist Malvina Reynolds in "The Magic Penny," a song about the rewards of sharing.

	Martha Rial/Post-Gazette
	Mary Alice Pollock, of Munhall, recalls her mother's love of pink during a video shoot Sept. 19 for the Good Grief Center for Bereavement Support outside the Carnegie Library of Homestead in Munhall. Pollock was donating a pink peony in her mother's memory for the Magic Penny Memory Garden being created at the library.

The song inspired artist and gardener Stephanie Flom, of Highland Park, to establish Magic Penny gardens around Pittsburgh, including her latest one, a Magic Penny Memory Garden at the Carnegie Library of Homestead in Munhall.

The gardens are part of her art and gardening initiative, the Persephone Project at Carnegie Mellon University, which seeks to elevate gardening from a hobby to an art and to integrate art into gardening.

She has created gardens at Frank Curto Park on Bigelow Boulevard, and in Polish Hill, the Hill District, Wilkinsburg and Lawrenceville.

Through videotapes and stories she gathered from visitors to those gardens, she recognized the need for a memory garden to help in the grieving process.

"What struck me was that so many people's stories were somehow related to loss," she said.

The newest garden site was inaugurated Sept. 19 with a program that saw neighbors and visitors doing crafts, writing personal stories on journal sheets and donating plants from their own gardens.

It was also when Dr. Mark Miller, psychiatrist and the Good Grief Center's board chairman, videotaped those who wanted to share memories of lost loved ones. At the end of the day, he had gathered more than a dozen five- to 10-minute stories from visitors as they sat before the camera, most with plants on their laps.

Mary Alice Pollock, of Munhall, brought stargazer lilies in memory of her mother and peonies from her grandparents' yard. "I was going to take them to the cemetery and put them on the grave," she said. "This way, all the generations can enjoy the plants, too."

Stacy Piscitelli, of the South Side, donated a purple aster in memory of her father, whom she called "Poppy" and who died April 10, 2003.

"My father would sit at the kitchen table and look out into his garden," she said, pausing to control her tears. "Asters were very special to him. He was just bigger than life."

The videotaped stories can help others deal with their grief, Miller said. "People who have come to a place of acceptance can impart their wisdom after having done it themselves."

The garden will be laid out by landscape architect Mark McKenzie, and designed by three local artists -- Lisa Austin, sculptor and professor at Edinboro University of Pennsylvania; Eric Sloss, a member of the Steel Valley Arts Council, and sound sculptor Frank Ferraro, who will use a modified version of a "sound pole" and various materials to create soft, ambient sound for the garden.

So far, said Lulu Orr, executive director of the Good Grief Center, the center has raised more than half of the garden's $60,000 budget. A third of that is from individual contributions, some of which were collected by selling commemorative seating areas and engraved bricks for the garden's walkway.

Although ground will not be broken until April, plant donations will be accepted before then. The plants donated Sept. 19 are being "heeled in," Orr said, a process that gets them used to the spots they will occupy.