celery pond

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