(Press Staff Photo by Juno Ogle)
Reese Kwnnberg, left, adds more paint to her sponge, while Jojo Schramski presses a dragonfly stamp on a card at the botanical art station Sunday during the celebration of the completion of the first phase of the master plan to expand and refine the Silva Creek Botanical Garden.
By JUNO OGLE
Daily Press Staff
Although the threat of rain meant Sunday’s garden party didn’t go exactly as planned, it didn’t stop the Gila Native Plant Society from celebrating the growth of its project, the Silva Creek Botanical Garden.
“We’re Southwest plant lovers and we love rain, right?” Marty Eberhardt, chair of the group’s garden steering committee, said in her opening remarks. “Except for when you’re celebrating three years of work on an October afternoon, a hurricane isn’t quite what you were looking for — but hey, it seems to have worked out.”
Presenters coming from the Mimbres Valley for a puppet show, plant science and archaeology chose not to risk the forecast remnants of Tropical Storm Raymond hitting the area, but around 70 people turned out for garden tours, informational booths and refreshments. In addition to Eberhardt, District 2 Silver City Town Councilor Nick Prince spoke.
The event marked the completion of the first phase of the Plant Society’s master plan for the town-owned botanical garden. Over the past year or so, that has transpired in the renovation of the children’s butterfly garden, addition of interpretive signage, reworking of some of the other gardens and adding of a wall and murals around the base of the water tank.
Much of the work was completed with a Trails+ Grant from the New Mexico Outdoor Recreation Division and private donors, who are recognized on tiles on the water tank wall.
Eberhardt also acknowledged the work of the volunteers from the Gila Native Plant Society and other organizations who have worked in the garden, including watering, planting and putting up the new signs.
“It’s truly an army of volunteers. Our treasurer and I have not counted up yet all the hours, but I can tell you that it is thousands,” she said.
The front entrance and the pathways were reconfigured during the work, in part to keep cyclists from riding too fast through the garden on their way to or from the bridge over Silva Creek, and a new front-yard garden at the entrance will show visitors what kind of native plants are available in area nurseries to include in their landscapes.
A revamped desert garden can be found on the opposite side of the entryway, and on the north end of the grounds is the habitat thicket, which directs stormwater into basins and features dense plantings and wood piles to attract insects and birds.
“It’s very exciting. It’s a great resource for the community,” said Naava Koenigsberg, a member of the steering committee.
With the first phase completed, the Plant Society will be able to make the garden more than just a park.
“We’re going to continue working on the infrastructure, of course, but we’re going to really focus also on programming, having more classes, more tours, really making it do the work of a botanical garden, which is really being a living museum,” Koenigsberg said.
The location of the garden — in a residential area near the historic Waterworks site and Jose Barrios Elementary School along Silva Creek, where Aldo’s Youth Conservation Corps has built up the trail — makes it an ideal location, she said.
“Just to have all these public spaces sort of embraced by, encircled by a neighborhood, instead of something you have to drive to. It’s all right here,” she said.
“We already knew that we had a beautiful garden, but we wanted to make it even more beautiful, tranquil and a place of contemplation,” Eberhardt said. “But we also wanted to make it a place of learning, more than it was, and so we chose three themes.”
Those themes, reflected in the tilework done by the Youth Mural Program, are the relationships between native plants and wildlife, native plants and people, and native plants and the climate.
“The people of this region have been using native plants for thousands of years, and there’s much knowledge to be gleaned,” Eberhardt said.
A planned ethnobotany garden that will encompass the existing traditional medicine garden will reflect that, Koenigsberg said. It will expand on the medicine garden’s showcasing of healing plants used by the Apache and Hispanic cultures and today’s herbalists, to include plants used for dyes, food or shelter, for example, she said.
Overall, the Gila Native Plant Society’s goal with the botanical garden is to help people connect with nature.
“We live in one of the most biologically diverse areas in the world,” Koenigsberg said. “So many people, particularly kids and young people, have never been to the Gila River, have never been up into the mountains.”
She acknowledged there are many reasons people might not be able to have access to the river or the forest, but the garden can be available to all.
“For me, this is about bringing the Gila to town to make it accessible for everyone, and maybe inspiring people to get out there that wouldn’t have otherwise — and for those who can’t to at least begin to have a relationship with our plant neighbors,” she said.
Juno Ogle may be reached at juno@scdai lypress.com.
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