August 11, 2004
Walks help garden take root
Regional Botanical Garden Society holds public 'walkabouts' on proposed 80 acre site
By Carol South
Herald contributing writer
With 80 acres of varied terrain, the proposed site of the area's botanical garden was open to the public Saturday.
Situated on land near the intersection of Hammond and Three Mile roads, the Botanical Garden Society of Northwest Michigan hopes that this is the parcel to make their dream come true.
This summer, the society has hosted a series of Walkabouts to bring visitors to what is known as the Vanderlip property.
The Botanical Garden Society has an option on this parcel and is currently raising the funds to purchase it. The monthly walks are geared to raise community awareness of the botanical garden and generate excitement about the project. Plans for the site include research gardens, demonstration gardens and destination gardens, the latter available for gatherings such as weddings or picnics.
"We wanted to give people a chance to come out and see the property," said Dean Conners, chairman of the site committee for the society.
"It is pretty hard not to get excited once you see it, when you see the Bay in the distance and all that is here."
Saturday's Walkabout featured Greg LaCross, a science and biology teacher at Northwestern Michigan College. LaCross has been taking a natural features survey of the property since spring, exploring every feature of the terrain, plant life and animal habitat. He guided the Walkabout's 16 attendees through the varied ecosystem, which included a range of significant features such as open fields, a hardwood conifer swamp, a pond and a forest.
"This site is good quality and I think it has lots of potential," LaCross said. "There are a lot of species out here that are only in habitats that aren't too disturbed. There are pockets of different things, even a deer blind."
Shirley Denman of Traverse City is one of the Botanical Garden Society of Northwest Michigan's founding members. Saturday's Walkabout was her first visit to the property.
"This is very nice, they made a good choice," she said.
LaCross has been exploring the property since May and has found 125 plant species, including trees, wildflowers and hedges.
"It is amazing to see the changes that have occurred from May until now," he said of the season's changes.
Giving attendees an ecological and geological history lesson, LaCross discussed the impact that the glaciers as well as white settlement had on the region. He noted that 12,000 years ago the area was covered in ice. When that retreated, the land was bare, a big gravel pit before topsoil, trees, plants and animals returned.
The area was a hardwood forest when the first white settlers began arriving in the Grand Traverse region in the mid-1800s. They cut down all the trees to make room for farmland and grazing land for livestock. The land has mostly stayed open for the past 150 years and much of the topsoil was lost or degraded.
In addition, white settlers introduced many Old World species of plants and trees. LaCross estimates that half of the property's upland plant species are foreign and a quarter of the wetland plant species are.
On the 80-acres parcel of the Vanderlip property, trees are making a comeback in some areas.
"The forest is coming back, it is on the way to becoming a mature hardwood habitat," he noted. "The quality of the ecosystem is pretty good, but not as good as I'd like to see them."
Future Saturday Walkabouts include Don Gorski on The Fallen Log on September 4, Kay Charter on Bird Habitat on October 2. Both events begin at 10 a.m. and are free and open to the public. For more information about the Botanical Garden Society of Northwest Michigan or the walks, call 935-4077.