Growing fruits, vegetables, and flowers in his community garden was therapy for Hayward T. Ford.

"I come here so tired, I can hardly open the gate," he once told an Inquirer reporter, "but I can stay here all day and work, and think about the garden and nothing else. It's beautiful."

Mr. Ford, 70, of Wynnefield, past president of the award-winning Aspen Farms Community Garden Club in the Mill Creek section of West Philadelphia, died of an apparent heart attack Sunday at his home.

"Hayward was the epitome of a leader - an innovator, an organizer, a green developer, a teacher, host extraordinaire, humanitarian, and a true inspiration to everyone who had the privilege to know him," said J. Blaine Bonham Jr., executive vice president of the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society.

In the 1960s, Mr. Ford was operating a photo studio on Lancaster Avenue when the city tore down a row of crumbling rowhouses on nearby Aspen Street. It didn't take long for the vacant lot to become a dump, he told a reporter in 1997. "If you stood on one side of the street, you couldn't see the other, there were so many old cars, motors and mattresses."

In 1975, Philadelphia Green, a Horticultural Society program, established the Aspen Farms Community Garden on the site.

Mr. Hayward joined a fledging group tending a small area. In two years, the garden doubled in size, and it quickly filled the entire lot with a variety of plants, including herbs, berries, greens, pansies and pumpkins.

Under Mr. Ford's leadership, gardeners worked with Philadelphia Green to design walkways and raised planting beds, and install benches. In 1983, the Penn State Cooperative Extension Urban Gardening program sponsored a wood-frame greenhouse. Landscape architecture students from the University of Pennsylvania helped the gardeners to build a gazebo, three ponds, and a butterfly garden.

Mr. Ford and his gardeners embraced green technologies and recently installed solar panels on the garden shed to power water pumps for the ponds and to light a farm scene mural. They also constructed a cistern to collect rainwater from the shed roof.

In 2006, Aspen Farms joined the Horticultural Society's project to provide fresh produce to area food banks, and Mr. Ford and the gardeners grew more than a ton of produce to contribute to the project.

When Aspen Farms won a power tiller from the National Gardening Association in 1997, Mr. Ford said, the machine would be used to pull up weeds, cultivate the plots, and teach children about making mulch. Students from neighboring schools also learned organic tricks to ward off bugs - such as planting garlic between greens and hot peppers between eggplants.

"Everyone here can already do a garden," he told a reporter in 1997. "We need to start grooming our young people to take over."

He was tour guide to garden clubs, international visitors, and the national media. The garden won many awards from the Horticultural Society and other organizations, and appeared on Good Morning America and in National Geographic.

Mr. Ford was former chairman of the Philadelphia Green Advisory board and was a member of the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society Council. He was a founding member and three-time president of the Neighborhood Gardens Association. He traveled widely as an ambassador for the Horticultural Society and community gardening, including visiting Russia, said a son, Terrance .

Mr. Ford grew up in Sumter, S.C. After serving in the Navy in San Diego, he moved to Philadelphia, where he had family. For several years, he operated a photo studio, and then worked for a box manufacturer in Philadelphia. In 1979, he had to quit his job and go on medical disability after losing the use of his larynx. He learned to speak again with a permanent tracheotomy, his son said.

After he went on disability, he earned a bachelor's degree from Temple University.

In addition to his son, Mr. Ford is survived by sons Kenneth and Andre; a daughter, Rosalind; three sisters; a brother; three grandchildren; and his former wife, Visla Taylor.

A memorial service will be at 1 p.m. tomorrow at Kent Funeral Home, 6506 Haverford Ave.