Theodore Largman didn't know why he'd been called to the Township Committee meeting that January night. He was hard of hearing, so when officials announced they were naming Morris Township's new community garden after him, he missed it entirely. His son Rich had to explain it afterward. Ted had moved to the township in 1964, spent fifty years on the Environmental Commission, and had been asking for a community garden for most of that half-century. Now there was one, and it had his name on it.
If you've driven past the Ted Largman Community Garden at ValleVue Preserve on Picatinny Road and assumed it was just another township amenity with a donor's name bolted onto a sign, the actual history runs the other direction. This patch of ground exists because one resident refused to accept the township's answer for decades, and the reasons that answer kept coming back no say something about how slowly municipal land gets repurposed in this part of Morris County, even when the idea is a good one.
Fifty Years of Being Told No
Largman joined the Environmental Commission because his water came out of the tap rusty. That's a small, almost funny origin story for what became a half-century of volunteer service, but it explains the kind of problem-solver he was: practical, persistent, unbothered by bureaucracy that moved slower than he did.
He wanted a garden long before he got one. He eyed fifteen acres near the old Morristown Armory, land the township had bought and mostly let sit, fenced and overgrown, with a small dam officials had decided wasn't worth reconstructing. No water access, no parking, too costly to develop. He tried Fosterfields next and hit the same kind of wall. For years, the township engineer kept redirecting him to sites that had no water and no parking either.
"This was one of my challenges: what can I do with that 15 acres? It still sits there."
That's not the voice of a man who got what he wanted quickly. He watched Morristown build a school-based farming program that sold food back to the community and wondered aloud why his own township couldn't manage the same thing. It took a change in land and circumstances, not persuasion, to finally make it happen.
The Plot That Finally Worked
The parcel that eventually became ValleVue Preserve came from an entirely different source: the Rosenhaus family, longtime owners of Vallevue Farm in the township's Washington Valley. In 2015, the county, the township, and the Morris County Municipal Utilities Authority preserved 21.5 acres of the 58-acre farm using roughly $1.6 million in open space funding. In 2021, another 7.76 acres followed, this time protecting a six-acre meadow along Picatinny Road and a remnant farm pond that drains into Gillespie Brook, a tributary of the Whippany River. The Rosenhaus family itself chipped in a $21,800 donation toward that second purchase, on top of the land they'd already sold for conservation.
That 2021 acquisition also did something practical: it let the township finally complete a loop trail around the property, starting from the Ted Largman Community Garden parking lot. As of this writing, the township's own trail maps page still lists the ValleVue trail network as under construction, with a map to come once it's finished. Ten years after the first acres were preserved, the loop still isn't fully mapped. If you've been waiting for a marked trail to walk the whole preserve, the honest answer is not yet, though the garden and the meadow it protects are already there to visit.
The garden's own handbook pegs 2016 as its first growing season, which puts 2026 at roughly its eleventh year in the ground. It's easy to walk past a row of raised beds on Picatinny Road and see only vegetables. What's actually there is the resolution of a fight that started when Largman was still a working research scientist, decades before he retired and became, in his own telling, an artist and a founder of a nationwide Renaissance Group.
What Growing in His Name Looks Like Now
The garden isn't a monument. It's a working plot system, and its most distinctive feature is the one Largman insisted on from the start: a portion of it, called the Giving Garden, exists purely to produce food for other people. Under current garden rules, any gardener can volunteer time planting and maintaining a Giving Garden bed, and produce from those beds goes to the Interfaith Food Bank and Market Street Mission during the growing season. If a member has surplus from their own private plot, the handbook asks them to leave it in a cooler at the site kiosk rather than let it rot on the vine.
That mechanism has outlived the man who fought for it. This year, the Native Plant Society of New Jersey awarded the Ted Largman Community Garden a 2026 mini-grant for a project called "Plant This Not That," a public demonstration bed comparing native shrub choices against less beneficial ornamental alternatives. It's a small grant in the society's broader 2026 slate, but it's a direct continuation of the environmental-stewardship instinct that got Largman onto the commission in the first place: don't just tolerate a problem, build something that teaches people a better option.
The garden also has an active managerial life beyond Largman's original vision. At the Frelinghuysen Arboretum's annual Community Garden Conference this year, garden manager Ned Gardner joined Randolph Community Garden manager Mike Dziomba for a coordinator's roundtable, the kind of practical, unglamorous exchange where garden managers compare notes on what's working and what isn't. It's a reminder that the garden runs on an ongoing network of local volunteers, not a single legacy.
If you're a Morris Township resident thinking about getting a plot yourself, the basics haven't changed much since the garden opened:
- Only individuals who live in Morris Township are eligible. Commercial enterprises can't apply.
- Plots are rented first come, first served, and every gardener, new or returning, has to attend an orientation and introduction-to-organic-gardening class.
- The garden is organic only. No synthetic fertilizers or pesticides are allowed in any plot, including the Giving Garden beds.
- Parking is shared with hikers using the preserve's trails, so the lot fills up on weekend mornings.
The Rest of the Loop
ValleVue isn't the only piece of Morris Township's outdoor calendar that got a refresh this year. On June 13, the township held a grand opening for the new Collinsville Playground and Splashpad, with a ribbon cutting, a set from the Mess Around Band, face painting, and a FIFA watch party timed to an afternoon game. It's the kind of event that turns a park upgrade into an actual afternoon out. The splashpad hasn't run trouble-free since, though. As of this month, the township is operating it on modified hours, 10 a.m. to noon and 4 to 7 p.m., while they wait on a repair part. Worth checking the township's page before you load up the car on a hot Saturday.
That's the pattern this part of the township keeps showing. Big, worthwhile additions land, and then the actual mechanics of running them, whether it's a splashpad part on backorder or a trail loop that's been under construction since at least 2021, take longer than anyone would like. The garden on Picatinny Road is proof that the wait can still end somewhere good. It took Largman roughly fifty years of being redirected to sites with no water and no parking before the right piece of land, donated by a family that had nothing to do with his original request, finally solved the problem he'd been trying to solve since 1964.
If you're new to Morris Township or you've lived here for years and never actually walked into ValleVue Preserve, that's the thing worth knowing before your next visit. The rows of vegetables are ordinary. The fact that they exist at all, and that a slice of them still goes to the Interfaith Food Bank every season, is the part that took half a century to arrange.
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