celery pond

A couple weeks ago on a Friday morning around 11:15 am, a yellow school bus packed with teenagers stopped by the North Pier, parallel parked, and out came a group of 20 kids armed with huge plastic bags. Once unloaded, a few adult group leaders gave directions to the group. The kids then went off on their mission: to hand clean the public beach on the North Side of town. What a wonderful picture was painted, alive and moving with youthful determination and energy!

The kids criss-crossed the whole length and breadth of the beach, collecting plastic cups, paper wrappers, etc. in the course of an hour. They came with a few adults, one of them their group leader, Thomas Funke, who is Director of Conservation Education at the Binder Park Zoo in Battle Creek. (www.binderparkzoo.org)

Funke said that the Zoo pays the adult professionals but not the kids, who volunteer their time in a program called Adopt-A-Beach. The kids were enjoying the beautiful weather and seemed pretty happy to be doing what they were doing, even though it did not have the usual monetary reward; they were truly kids of good will sent to South Haven. What a wonderful thing to witness.

The smiles on their faces as they lined up for a group photo says it all. As they did their quiet beach clean-up, a city’s mechanical truck, that goes back and forth on the beach starting at 6am on the South Beach and that ends on the North Beach around 11:30am, was also doing its task. Wouldn’t it be great if these two sources of clean-up could be used together all the time? It might save time and money for everyone.

Wouldn’t it be great to have South Haven kids adopt their own beach, as something to do from a community service level? We could start a youth program for environmentalism, working first on our valuable asset, the public beaches that border the Big Blue Lake. This level of community spirit might inspire all sorts of ideas as to environmental clean-up on various projects around the city. A big thanks to the 20 kids from Binder Park Zoo’s program and to their professional guidance.

The idea of conserving Michigan’s dune land was born in the 1960s when Sleeping Bear Dunes Park was first opened to the public in 1967. Now a National Lakeshore, the 7.4 miles of a self-guided auto tour gives the visitor an education in how nature makes a dune. It’s no small task.

The Sleeping Bear, called the great mother, looks out to two islands, the North and South Manitou, which look like 2 bear cubs floating out in Lake Michigan looking back at her. A whole legend has been born by the geography of the land, showing how nature inspires the poet in all of us.

Not only is the history of the area given in this park, but there is an abundant sampling of the vegetative communities found within it. To spend time in this pristine landscape is truly a wonder.

The foresight of saving the land came from the efforts of many people working together. The love of the woodland, along with the self-taught knowledge of nature, took Pierce Stocking into the Michigan forests. Wanting to share this beauty with others, he conceived of the idea of a road to the top of the dunes. This thought inspired hundreds of people working together to make it happen.

The pale champagne and burnt sienna in the sand are framed by a huge canopy of sky. Sunset is breath-taking on a good day; on a windy evening, it’s a real adventure.

Saving the environment comes from the relation of man to it and honoring it. In this case, it moved those positive feelings into preservation of a world-class vista, atop a dune, that could be another wonder of the world! Nature and all people can come together in a new harmony. Educating ourselves about the enviroment like this demands many return trips!

New Policy:

Only comments related to the wetland and environmental issues will be allowed.

footnote on August 13: Due to the recent controversy over a blog entry made on 7/24 and edited on July 25th, the comments proceeding from that event were diverting attention from the wetland issue and we were advised to remove them. We will accept comments that deal directly with the project, thus separting the issue from personalities. We ask in the future that you sign your given name to the comments. In retrospect, and in all fairness, we have removed all comments written during that controversial period as of today’s date.

Every year hundreds of people have the chance to visit several ’secred gardens’ which have been chosen for public viewing in an event hosted by the South Haven Garden Club. For me, it’s the highlight of the summer.

Gardens can create delight. They can also give an oasis of peace. Whenever they’ve been cared for and nurtured by the love of their caretaker, you can feel it.

Every flower tells a story: what it’s like to come from the dark chamber of the soil into their joyful bloom into light and life. Trees, flowers, even weeds, make a remarkable symphony. Every garden is unique and changing, determined by the gardener’s attentiveness, the climate conditions and amount of sunlight, etc.

My favorite book as a child was The Secret Garden. While I don’t remember the details of the story, I do remember that the garden was a secret meeting place for two children who found friendship and sharing in its sacred space. One of the children was handicapped. Through their encounters in the garden, the ‘handicap’ disappeared in their minds. They developed a love for each other in a garden that became renewed as well.

The Dunkley Avenue public lands are 10 acres of land that are in good need of a gardener or two, or three. In the past, these lands served various city needs for storage, but now, even those buildings are abandoned like the land.

Monday night, August 6th, the City Council will meet at City Hall at 7:30pm to look at the proposals that are under consideration for these public lands. One of them is the Celery Pond Advocates proposal, presented in conjunction with the Cool Cities proposal would keep public lands in public hands by changing them into an Arboretum and Black River Cultural Arts Center.

Because of the way the Master Plan was written, the area was asked to be considered for development of a residential and/or commercial nature. The city fathers who created this plan were coming from a way of thinking that was in tune with the idea of South Haven as a maritime-beach-tourist destination.

But if you re-interpret the Master Plan, you could also choose to keep the land as public property, preserving the floodplains and wetland by converting them into a unique city park, inspired with arts and ecotourism as a new means of creating economic stability. This is the way the Celery Pond Advocates proposal has envisioned the area (see the city web site, www.south-haven.com).

In today’s new awareness, these lands are termed ‘valuable’ to be kept as they are, first because they serve to maintain the natural function of being a water purifier with floodplain ability to control flooding levels of lake surges or rain. If converted into an open green space, this could be a new highlight of the community that would be with us year-round.

To garden such a project, we’d need gardeners: people from the community who might like to help create and tend to something wonderfully ‘theirs.’ By keeping public lands as an open area, a special arboretum, nature could teach all of us how to come together. We could also learn more about what a wetland does in relation to the river, the lake and the watershed and its various waterways.

All ages of the community could get involved with it, from kids to adults to senior citizens. What better gift can we give to ourselves and each other than the shared experience of making an arboretum in abandoned lands.

A garden makes us understand the power of transformation.

As I’m a gardener, I can testify to the rewards and lessons of experimenting with different combinations in what works and what doesn’t work in a garden. Gardens can be wonderful teachers if you really work with the ground and the choices of what might be put together as a creative space of beauty.

A garden with its adornment of flowers, trees and waterways, brings all eyes of its beholders together. Each flower and tree exist for all to share, simply being who they are, freely giving us shade and beauty while offering us a way to find harmony and peace.

We hope to become better caretakers of ourselves and our community, as it is nature’s way to give us her bounty, when such care is taken. Let’s concentrate on the positive forces which can come together as we decide as a community what we really want to do with the public lands.

“The important thing in this world is not where we stand, but in what direction we move.”

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

To all you who care about Celery Pond, we’re moving forward toward our goal to save Celery Pond and the public lands adjacent to it.

Tomorrow is the blog’s one year anniversay. As author of it, I can say that it’s been like taking care of a garden which you love and nurture.

The blog was set up to be an informal way to communicate, to give information and insight. It was also meant to be a public forum to air issues or misunderstandings.

In the case of recent criticism, I have extended my sincere apology to the Council and I extend it to whomever has read the posting who may have found it offensive. Let’s not be diverted as a community and an organization who is devoted to saving the wetland and public lands.

Let’s move on. Freedom of speech is a right that allows us to be able to write and speak as individuals. Freedom of speech thus opens the door to be misunderstood or taken out of context in any situation. But both sides of the story need to be clearly understood.

The City Council is scheduled for their Monday, Augusth 6th Council Meeting at 7:30pm. We are waiting to see the agenda.