A monarch flits through the air, touches down on a hot pink cosmos flower and then gets taken by a breeze. It fights its way back and stays a moment before it notices the purple butterfly bush. A goldfinch sits on a cosmos munching some seeds.
Also in the garden on a recent sunny day, is appropriately named volunteer Tanya Flowers. She’s planting whorled milkweed in the Enbridge Butterfly Garden located inside the Tri-Town Safety Village, 1350 Eagle Ridge Drive, Schererville,
“This is for monarchs to lay their eggs,” Flowers said.
“Butterflies like pretty, colorful flowers and so do we,” said Donnee Smith, the Master Gardener charged with developing the butterfly garden. “And that’s pretty wonderful.”
Butterflies are not the only species attracted to the garden. Smith said she recently found a 6-inch praying mantis in the sedum. The flowers are also attracting honey bees, another important group of pollinators.
In May, the White House, on behalf of the Pollinator Health Task Force, released the “National Strategy to Promote the Health of Honey Bees and other Pollinators.”
The strategy aims to achieve three goals: reduce honey bee colony losses during the winter; increase the Eastern population of the monarch butterfly to 225 million butterflies occupying an area of about 15 acres in the overwintering grounds in Mexico and restore or enhance 7 million acres of land for pollinators over the next five years.
All three goals are expected to be achieved through public education and public-private partnerships. And while much of the report highlights statistics and economic factors, one of the messages that shines through: “The actions of a single person can make a difference — every citizen can contribute to pollinator conservation and should have the opportunity to become engages in ways that area meaningful.”
Similar to that national effort, Saturday, Sept. 26, is National Public Lands Day, the nation’s largest single-day volunteer effort on behalf of public lands. Volunteers can assist in restoration efforts at Cowles Bog, participate in native seed collection or help remove invasive plants at the Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore in Porter. The annual day started in 1994.
In Schererville, however, the Enbridge Butterfly Garden needs local volunteers on an ongoing basis, said Smith.
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“We want people to adopt a garden,” Smith said. “You can have as much or as little of these beds as you want. If we get 10 people to adopt a garden, we can teach them what needs to be kept and what needs to go.”
Smith said she wasn’t always a gardener. She lived in the city, but recalls visiting her grandmother who tended acres of flowers and vegetables. Twenty years ago, Smith started gardening in raised beds.
“I knew what cosmos were — but not how gorgeous they looked in mass plantings,” she said and scoped the clouds of pink, purple and white cosmos throughout the garden. “Butterflies are myopic. They can’t find the plants without these mass plantings. They need to be all the same color.”
Affable and hard-working, Smith demonstrates her new and most favorite tool that makes the volunteers’ lives much easier: a broad fork. It is guaranteed for life and fabulous for weeding. She pushes the sharp tines of the broad fork into the ground and turns over the earth, weeds and all. With that tool, she was able to clear white clover from a section of the garden in less than three hours.
“This is year three (for the Butterfly Garden). We started in 2012. Bill Jarvis (executive director of Safety Village) asked if someone (from the Lake County Master Gardeners) could come out here. He had ideas for a garden,” Smith said. “He walked me back here and it was all grass then. It is a huge project. The whole organization had to be on board.”
Beyond the Lake County Master Gardeners, other community members also invested themselves in the Butterfly Garden. Schererville’s Boy Scout Troop 532 built a Human Sundial and some rails for the bridges. Lake County Waste Management donated soil, Dyer Public Works provided rocks and bricks. Schererville Public Works hauls away all the weeds.
“We are all working hand-in-hand for the good of the community,” said Jarvis. He said Enbridge Co. has invested about $4,500 in the Safety Village gardening efforts.
He makes a special mention of Smith’s efforts and said many of the plants in the butterfly garden, got their start in her garden.
“A lot of it did — the brown-eyed susans, the sedum,” she said. “We also got a lot of plants from the Master Garden plant sale. We don’t dead head. We want them to come back.”
Yet, Smith in turn gives a lot of credit to Russ Tomjanovich, assistant project manager of Safety Village. She said it was his idea to invite the Boy Scouts in to build the Human Sun Dial in a garden of thyme plants and help him get the wooden bridges built. She also credits Dolly Foster, horticulturist for the Oak Lawn, Ill., Park District.
“She’s been out here us and says ‘keep this (plant) get rid of that’. Without her, it would not be anything,” Smith said. “I wasn’t sure what milkweed looked like. Now I know there’s a gazillion kinds.”
“My hobby became my full-time job,” she laughed. “What stands out, is how much I still don’t know. I like learning. The more I learn, the more I realize I don’t know — and there’s a (gardening) app for that.”
Nancy Coltun Webster is a freelance reporter for the Post-Tribune.