Gardenopolis Cleveland has, since our inception, been a firm supporter of GardenWalk Cleveland, and has covered it with pictures and text on our blog. This year for various reasons we were only able to commit ourselves to one day, and we chose Slavic Village because it was a place we had not yet been. As Inner Ring Suburb Eastsiders, we’re not very familiar with the neighborhoods of the once great industrial heart of our city.
We got off to a late start due to some trauma inflicted upon one of us by the cat affectionately nicknamed The Brat Prince (there was a lot of blood involved), and then we had trouble getting a map — neither of the two Dave’s we stopped at had maps or even any idea they were supposed to have them.
But we did eventually wend our way to Slavic Village. Like many of Cleveland’s ‘working class’ neighborhood’s it is a place of pleasant sturdy houses, often designed for two families (mostly up and down duplexes), in an area now somewhat denuded by housing-stock loss. But people still make the most of their garden spaces, and have both vegetable gardens and gardens to please the eyes (and birds and pollinators). People express their personal creativity, and enjoy their yards in the summer.
We were especially interested to find one resident with an extensive bee keeping industry. You could wander among the hives and enjoy the singing bees wandering about around your head and in the air.
We hope you’ll enjoy our pictures.
The bee keeper
People found ways to bring comfort into their outdoor environments
And they found ways to add small scale personal touches
They brightened their environments with the colors of flowers
And many people were serious vegetable gardeners
There were handsome houses and handsome trees
Someone was claiming a corner to make an in progress pocket park
This gentleman had been fishing for Lake Erie Walleye.
Little Italy by Ann McCulloh
Little Italy, the other neighborhood visited by one of the Gardenopolis editors, offered more than 30 gardens this year. There are a surprising number of small but lush oases tucked away among the brick fronted homes and hilly side streets. Traditionally Italian grape arbors and fig trees, impressively well-tended vegetable gardens and whimsical decorative touches abound. A brand-new garden discovered at the end of an unpromising alley turned out to be an extensive and delightful outdoor entertainment space, with a pizza oven, water gardens and not one, but two welcoming patios.
Full disclosure: Ann has been involved with the committee that plans GardenWalk Cleveland since its inception.
Put on some comfortable walking shoes, grab your camera/phone, a GardenWalk guide (available at Dave’s supermarkets and online at https://www.gardenwalkcleveland.org/guide), and a water bottle. Gardeners in seven of Cleveland’s distinctive neighborhoods are inviting you to gawk, snoop and tarry in their yards and patios like an old friend. Marvel at gardens that may be breathtakingly colorful, wildly clever and or oddly quirky, but always unique and individual.
GardenWalk Cleveland is a totally free, self-guided tour of private gardens, community gardens, and home orchards in neighborhoods of Cleveland, Ohio. The event is entirely volunteer-fueled, from the tireless organizers to the hosting gardeners. An annual event since 2011, the neighborhoods chosen to be on tour vary each year. Note that this year the neighborhoods will be split between the two days of the GardenWalk!
This year’s venues spread from West to East, with West side neighborhoods Detroit Shoreway, West Park, and Old Brooklyn on display Saturday July 14th from 10am to 5pm.
The East side neighborhoods of Little Italy, Collinwood, Fairfax and Broadway Slavic Village will welcome you on Sunday July 15th, also from 10am-5pm.
Pick up a Guide before the GardenWalk begins at most area Dave’s Supermarkets, starting July 1st! The Guide will soon be live on the GardenWalk Cleveland web site at https://www.gardenwalkcleveland.org/.
Guides with maps and details will also be available in several garden site “refreshment stations” throughout the neighborhoods as well. Prior to setting out you can locate an information station by checking online on the GardenWalk web site. Each clickable neighborhood page from the “Guide” page will list the refreshment station addresses. The stations will be indicated in the printed Guide, as well as on the GardenWalk banner in front of the property. Refreshment stations were a new feature of GardenWalk Cleveland last year and are great spots to garner a guide, rest and refresh, pick up some tips about “don’t-miss” features and purchase raffle tickets.
The raffle prize this year is a wheelbarrow stuffed with garden related items valued at over $600. One ticket costs $5, 5 tickets cost $20. If you don’t need garden tools and a wheelbarrow you can leave a donation in the box to help pay for GardenWalk next year!
This is always a fun, eye-opening event whether you are a gardener, new to Cleveland, or just interested in knowing more about the neighbors and neighborhoods that make up this remarkable city!
Join the Spirit Corner neighborhood on Sunday, June 30 for a neighborly get together to celebrate this friendly, quirky, ‘spirited’ gathering space. The event takes place from 12 noon to 2 PM.
I recently saw this short piece by Bob Brown on Next Door Neighbors. It was charming, and spoke to what makes a place special, the space being, in this case, Spirit Corner.
Serendipity at Spirit Corner
It never ceases to amaze me how our little Spirit Corner green space is put to such unexpectedly wonderful uses! This morning as I walked Ori down the block, I saw a group of little children and parents at Spirit Corner. When we walked onto the site, I saw that they had a large silver cooking pot sitting on our tree-stump table and a copy of the book “Stone Soup.”
I saw the children collecting stones and sticks and dropping them into the pot. When I asked what they were doing, I was told that they were on a little outing to act out the story of Stone Soup.
Since I didn’t recognize anyone in the group, I asked one of the adults how they had chosen to do this at Spirit Corner. The lead person in the group said simply, “This is such a magical place. The children love coming here.”
Moments later another visitor arrived at Spirit Corner. It was a lone deer, who surveyed the activity on the site, apparently decided that all was well, and then proceeded to munch leaves on one of the trees, while the children continued to make their stone soup.
When we designed Spirit Corner, none of us expected it to become the site of a Stone Soup cook-off! Just as none of us expected a group of Tibetan monks to hold a ceremony here and consecrate the site (as happened last year). And certainly none of us expected Spirit Corner to become a Pokemon Go gym, which it is!
We named Spirit Corner after the spirits who were assumed to inhabit the house that sat here vacant for over 55 years. Maybe we should expand the name of the place to become “Serendipity Place at Spirit Corner”! What do you think?
The Origins of Spirit Corner
How did Spirit Corner come to be? A few years back (8? 9? 10?) Green Paradigm Partners (and Gardenopolis Cleveland Co-Editors) Tom Gibson and Elsa Johnson taught a class on permaculture (Tom) and design (Elsa), which was attended by Cleveland Heights resident Laura Marks, who was at that time living on upper Hampshire Road in the Coventry neighborhood. Instead of working with her own plot Laura chose to work with a plot across the street. This was a small corner lot that had had a house sit vacant on it for 55 years. A mythos had grown up around the structure. I was supposed to be haunted. It was a little spooky, and very, very sad. Finally came a release from its misery, and the house was torn down (in itself an event that is always a little sad, though it was a very tight cramped fit on the lot).
Laura wanted to see the space become a public green space. She got the neighborhood engaged in this project and we worked closely with Laura and the neighborhood to design a space that the neighborhood could call its own. It included two gathering ‘pods’ and a walk-through pathway that crossed the site diagonally. It was originally intended to follow permaculture concepts and include appropriate permaculture plantings, and also include as many native plants as possible.
Delightfully, the City of Cleveland Heights was willing to support the project, and supplied many of the trees, as well as ground bricks for the path, and some tree stumps for children to climb and play on. A friend who was deconstructing a tepee donated the long pole supports, which were used to create a sense of enclosure in which a picnic table now resides. Several benches were donated, and two more were constructed from raw materials. A man driving by saw the neighbors building a stone wall and stopped to help. The neighborhood took the space, made changes, donated plants, and made it their own.
Spirit Corner, as the following pictures show you, is not a groomed, polished public space. It is rough and ready; full of weeds as well as flowers; a place where imagination can find space to play. It is a place where this is not forbidden by the unwritten codes of ‘Behavior for Polished Public Spaces’.
It has not evolved exactly as intended: It has strayed from its permaculture intentions, and, to be completely honest, as a landscape architect, there is a part of me that is disappointed by Spirit Corner — that it is not that more polished public place. It will never win an award from the Society of Landscape Architects.
But perhaps that is a good thing. It is a place to hold a stone soup cook-off; that is irreplaceable.
Spirit Corner is one block east of Coventry Village on Hampshire Road. Parking is available in the city parking deck off Coventry.
The Biggest Little Farm is playing at the Cedar Lee Theatre through June 13. It tells the story of how one family converted a conventional lemon farm into a successful organic orchard with diverse crops and wildlife.
The filmmaker and his wife, John and Molly Chester, were interviewed on Fresh Air.
If you have the time, you should see this film! Showtimes here.
Lucky me. My new grandchild lives a half mile from the Botanical Garden in Brooklyn so naturally during a recent visit we went to see the cherry blossoms in full swing.
Coincidentally, and somewhat unfortunately, there was a massive Japanese festival going on, complete with drummers, dancers, food, ceramics, demonstrations and thousands of children and parents roaming the grounds.
Parts of the garden were closed off: the roses were behind bars.
Many tulips in sunnier locations, like beside this water feature, were gone by and the perennials were just emerging, too early for flowers.
Massively large trees, like this wingnut, were featured in several locations. Newer plantings along this meandering creek, were mostly in bloom with daffodils, early tulips and Fothergilla.
huge wingnut
An outcropping of huge boulders was cleverly surrounded by carefully managed conifers and flowering shrubs and was adjacent to a lovely display of early emerging flowers, like Pulsatilla.
The vegetable and fruit area was enviously pristine with stunning pruned shrubs, meticulously planted vegetables, many varieties of small fruit like blueberries, currants, raspberries, figs and some espalier.
A beech hedge sported a sitting bird in nest, surprisingly close to the hordes of visitors.
Wild flowers were carefully arranged in protected nooks around some tremendous very old trees, with paths wandering up and down, giving unique vantage points as you walked.
Turning the corner we came upon the children’s garden, not yet cultivated for the season except for bulbs and early perennials. The greenhouses were crowded as it began to rain, so we skipped to the tulips, and several garden rooms nearby with raised beds of daffodils, a Shakespeare garden and woven wooden enclosures.
At the end of our tour was the Japanese Garden, surrounded by a charming fence and entered through a gate which limits the number of pedestrians allowed in at a time.
The garden was replete with well managed trees, shrubs, and plantings, right off of Grand Army Plaza. Despite the distractions, this is a tour worth repeating during the seasons. Can hardly wait to see it—and my grandchild—again soon.
Hummingbirds are a pollinator. There are a few plants that only they can pollinate, such as Cardinal Flower (photo from my yard above) and Royal Catchfly. We can save hummingbirds with more than sugar water. During the summer, hummingbirds nectar from my plants and rarely use the feeder. They are a woodland bird, so plant native trees for cover and places to raise young. Plant chemical-free, tubular shaped nectar plants for food. Here is a list what I’ve provided in my Ohio yard to save hummingbirds.
Adding native plants to your yard doesn’t need to be weedy. You can landscape them just like you would non-native plants. I was interviewed in the recently updated Ohio Animal Companion articles about going native and how to create a functioning wildlife habitat. Ask native plant vendors to help you with your selection so you can put the right plant in the right place. A link for the Ohio list is in the going native article, but for other state lists, click here.
We can save bees in our yards. They work hard for us by providing 1 out of every 3 bites of our food, so please don’t swat at them. Don’t confuse bees with wasps, hornets or yellow-jackets that sting to protect their nests. Carpenter bees fly beside me and buzz loudly, but they are harmless. If carpenter bees drill holes into your wood that cause problems, paint the wood with polyurethane in early spring right after the bees have emerged. Provide clean water in a shallow dish with rocks, plant the Cup Plant, which holds dew, or make mud or sand puddles. Buy plants from a reputable organic native plant dealer to ensure that the plants don’t contain pesticides that kill bees. Plant a variety of native plants that bloom at different times throughout the season. For a bee plant list, enter your zip code to see your Pollinator-Friendly Plant Guide.
Good news: National Wildlife Federation honors America’s Top Ten Cities for Wildlife. Cincinnati, Ohio is a new one on the list. Be inspired.
Tips for Your Yard
Organic Lawn Care: Apply Corn Gluten when the soil reaches 50 degrees (between 3/15 and 4/10 in central Ohio, when crocus blooms) as a pre-emergent broadleaf weed control
5 weeks after using Corn Gluten (if we’ve had enough rain), over-seed weedy or bare areas with a pesticide-chemical-free grass seed, like TLC Titan, available at most home and garden centers; keep seed damp until grass is 2″ high
Pull out weeds or spot-treat weeds sparingly with an organic product, only if necessary, such as Iron (a few brands are Whitney Farms Lawn Weed Killer Iron, Fiesta or Garden’s Alive Iron X)
Mow high to shade out weeds (3″-4″)
Bluebird houses: Transparent fishing line (monofilament) deters house sparrows from killing bluebirds and other cavity nesting birds in their bird houses, except that 20-lb is recommended instead of 6-lb weight
Birds love moving water, but it’s easy to trip or mow over the tiny hose for a dripper. Using a shovel, create a slit in the lawn about 3-5″ deep and 1″ wide by rocking the shovel back and forth. Push the tiny hose down and close the soil over it to make the soil flat and protect the hose for the season. The hose will be easier to remove when the ground starts to freeze than if you buried it
Plant native milkweed for Monarch butterflies
Leave plant materials in place throughout winter and into the nesting season to supply bird nesting materials naturally. Here are ideas for extra bird-nesting materials
When an invasive Garlic Mustard plant is in its second-year, the flowering stage, gently dig out the entire root of the plant. If you can ID the first-year rosette, gently pull it out. Important: Bag the flowering stage plant and put the bag in the trash (not in compost or yard waste) because the plant continues to go to seed even after removed from the ground
In spring, invasive bushes become green before most native plants, so they’re easy to see. Cut the invasive plant at or near ground level and cover with cardboard. If it is pesky, cover with black plastic
To keep an Invasive Plant away, put an alternative native plant (if a bush: a bush; if a flower: a flower) in its place
Cut flower stalks to 12-15″ and leave them standing until summer (late May to early June in the Midwest) after the small carpenter bees that used them for nests have emerged
Put out hummingbird feeders April 15 to Oct 15 in mid-Ohio to help Ruby-throated hummingbird migrants and summer residents. Watch this migration map for timing in other areas
Contact your Public Health Department to find out if your city does mosquito fogging and, if so, ask how to opt out. These chemicals kill beneficial insects, including bees and Monarch caterpillars
Help migratory birds by turning your outdoor lights off or down 11:30pm-5am from mid-March to mid-June to keep birds from being disoriented and having nighttime collisions
Apply organic tree fertilizer to the root zone to help trees make leaves
When you have your chimney cleaned in early spring, close the damper, uncap it and add a cover 12″ above chimney with openings on the sides so that a pair of Chimney Swifts can use it for their summer home and nest for babies. See tips here
If you find unattended baby or injured wildlife in your yard, here’s what to do from the Ohio Wildlife Center Hospital
Reg now for 4/28, Conversations on Conservation: Basic Bugs 101 with the Bug Chicks, Garden for Wildlife Exhibit, Fee for non-members, Cincinnati Nature Center, Milford
These days everybody’s gotta have an acronym – something catchy to remember you by. Well LEAP is catchy. But LEAP where? What do the letters represent? The short version: Lake Erie Allegheny Partnership. The long version includes two more words whose initials don’t make it into the acronym: for Biodiversity. But there are two more P’s that play a part in this alliterative game I’m playing – Plain, and Plateau.
photo by Laura Dempsey
As in the Lake Erie Lake Plain, and the Glaciated Allegheny Plateau (that area that, thousands of years ago, was covered by glaciers). These are ecoregions lying along the southern shore of Lake Erie, covering an area that stretches from just east of Sandusky to Buffalo, New York. On the western end it dips down in a narrow extension toward Mansfield and Columbus, then back up again before it swoops down at its widest to include Youngstown, before narrowing increasingly and tightening as it pushes up against the Allegheny Mountains in Pennsylvania and New York. It’s an area where northern boreal biome remnants rub up against mixed eastern hardwood remnants, which rub up against more southerly Appalachian forest remnants. Because of all this biological jostling, it is a rich place of diverse and unique habitats and ecosystems, examples of which are to be found within a network of public and private lands throughout the glaciated region of northeastern Ohio, northwestern Pennsylvania, and western New York. The LEAP publication, A Legacy of Living Places, presents an overview of those habitats and where to find them.
A partnership is, of course, a group of people or organizations that come together around a cause or issue. Founded in 2004 and housed within the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, as of January 2018, the LEAP partnership now includes 56 members. Counted among them are cities, park districts, museums, universities, research labs, conservancies and land trusts, watershed districts, nature centers, arboretums, native plant societies, local businesses, and more. Your community or organization could belong, too. What brings all these diverse organizations and entities together, and in sustained communication, is the shared mission of protecting and supporting the LEAP region’s natural biological diversity. There are not a lot of partnerships like it.
photo by Laura Dempsey
Such a broad membership helps dedicated conservation professionals and educators, and enthusiastic conservation nonprofessionals and volunteers, to document and to disseminate information. LEAP does everything from sponsoring invasive garlic mustard pulls in the springtime, conducting counts of West Virginia White Butterflies at the same time (the butterfly unwittingly lays its eggs on garlic mustard, to their detriment), to tracking the spread of beech leaf disease, or the Hemlock Woolly Adelgid in the region’s forests. There is a Conservation fund that attracts and distributes funds for conservation and protection projects. In conjunction with and through its partners, LEAP offers workshops, events, and public programs that encourage environmental awareness.
photo by Laura Dempsey
LEAP meets every two months at a different location each meeting. Each meeting is centered on a topic speaker. The next meeting will take place on Wednesday, March 20 at 10 am, at the Nature Center at Shaker Lakes; the topic will be the proposed removal of the dam blocking the Cuyahoga River in Cuyahoga Falls, where the river begins its turn to head north.
Grand River; photo by Laura Dempsey
The yearly publication of the 3 native plants of the year postcards is an example of a LEAP initiative. This card is produced with the intention that it will encourage the use of native plants by landscape designers and property owners, while simultaneously partnering with the nursery industry to create an adequate supply of these plants.
Recent work: Over the past year the LEAP Regional Biodiversity Plan Committee has been working to create a vision document to help guide regional conservation-related activities ranging from land acquisition and conservation easements to policy-making, restoration, and mitigation. It will identify core habitats and supporting landscapes. Gardenopolis Cleveland will write more about this soon.
photo by Laura Dempsey
There are 14 ecoregions recognized in the LEAP area. You can find all these communities listed and described in A Legacy of Living Places. Many example of each are listed, many of which are to be found in area parks and are thus freely open to the public. Others are part of the Cleveland Museum of Natural History’s collection of protected properties, with restricted access only through the museum. Trips are offered throughout the year. Become a member of the museum, if you have not already done so. Check museum scheduled offerings.
Ready for a break from the winter blahs?? Consider planning a four hour drive to Cincinnati this year to see two horticultural gems.
Cincinnati Zoo and Botanical Garden
The zoo is the second oldest in the country. It resulted from an infestation of caterpillars in 1872. Residents created the Society of the Acclimatization of Birds, purchased 1000 birds from Europe and housed them, then released them in 1873, hoping they would eat the caterpillars. The group changed their name to the Zoological Society of Cincinnati. So what happened to the caterpillars?
first view of the botanical garden and zoo
Traveling with the Master Gardeners, we were given a guided tour by Director of Horticulture, Steve Foltz. (Tours are available for groups with a donation.) You approach the zoo and gardens across an impressive bridge over the road, from the parking lot at a lower elevation. One of the first things you see at arrival is a large sculpture of Fiona, the hippo, who is a kind of mascot and advertising mainstay for the zoo. The zoo is known for the baby animals born on site, and Fiona is the best known.
Fiona the Hippo
The botanical garden is visited, along with the zoo, by 1.7 million visitors each year. The Cincinnati Zoo and Botanical Garden has held annuals trials and displays for 17 years. Over 48,000 annuals are planted and then evaluated by professional staff, volunteers as well as by visitors. Some of the top ten for 2018 included Begonia Babywing Bicolor, Begonia Megawatt series, Canna Cannova Bronze Scarlet, Coleus Main Street Wall Street, Euphorbia Diamond Mountain and Helianthus Sunfinity. View 2018’s top performers here.
gorgeous mass plantings of annuals
Annuals are used as mass plantings throughout the zoo and in containers. They are a magnet for pollinators, providing nectar and pollen through the season. (There is ongoing controversy about the relative merits of natives versus cultivars (nativars) for best pollination success. E.g., Monarch butterflies might benefit from pollen or nectar from non-natives but need native Asclepias (milkweed) to lay their eggs.)
In addition to its outstanding displays of annuals, the Horticultural staff has made a serious effort to include hardy plants as well as tropicals that add a flavor to the areas surrounding the animal displays. Bamboo for example is used extensively, as well as perennials and bulbs like Colocasia (elephant ears) with large and interesting leaves to simulate tropical growth. Large leaved magnolias are used effectively in this way. Water features, rock outcroppings—natural and artificial, wandering paths that twist and turn, elevation changes, surprises around the next corner—this is an interesting and for those with limits on walking, a challenging tour.
lots of annuals and tropicals flamingoes passing by
Smale Waterfront Park
For its first 50 years Cincinnati was a village on the river, between Fourth Street and the Ohio. In the 1830s, a building boom expanded the so-called Bottoms neighborhood into a crowded area with the Public Landing as its center. By the start of World War 1, the area was deteriorated and undesirable. Until—a few years ago, the space close to the John A Roebling Suspension Bridge (am I in Brooklyn?) brought adventure playgrounds, gardens, swings for grownups—in short, a dramatic and welcomed transformation.
Smale Riverfront Park
As of February 2015, almost $97 million in funding had been secured to construct Smale Riverfront Park, a $120 million project: 20 million was given by John Smale in honor of his wife. The cost per acre to construct was estimated around $2.7 million, compared to Chicago’s Millenium Park at more than $17 million per acre. An early estimate was that upkeep per year would be around $600,000.
Chosen as designers in 2001, Sasaki Associates were inspired by input of citizens at a series of public meetings and focus groups beginning in 1998. Their design plans fitted into the Park Master Plan, created by Hargreaves Associates and approved in 1999 by pretty much everyone in power.
From a tourist’s point of view, the most impressive feature of the park is probably the John A Roebling Suspension Bridge which was created by the same designer as the Brooklyn Bridge. Its blue towers stand out over the riverfront, visible from everywhere in the park. The riverfront baseball stadium, The Great American BallPark, home of the Cincinnati Reds (oldest franchise) is right next door. In fact, on a previous trip, I was able to watch the big screen in the ballpark during a game while I was standing half way across the bridge from Covington. (Pete Rose was there. Wow.)
The park splays out along the river with wandering paths, water features, gardens, playgrounds—in short, much to do for children and their parents. Away from the river and a roadway, and up some impressively designed stairs with water rushing down beside them, the carousel sits in a fine spot for looking down over the park. Nearby is a Ferris wheel with great views from the top and further up there are shops and restaurants nearby.
Be sure to try the rope bridge—a little intimidating but worth it. There are some rocks to climb, a large piano which you play with your feet, stones to leap on in a man-made stream, and many flower beds throughout. The rose garden is lovely with annuals full of butterflies and bees as well as a variety of well-kept roses.
The swings under a handsome trellis offer a respite and a great view of the river. Speaking of the river, it flooded last year and the park was once again the Bottoms of old. But it seemed very well maintained and as good as new when we were there.
by Scott Beuerlein; originally printed in Horticulture, Jan/Feb 2019, Vol. 116 Issue 1.Reprinted with permission
LET’S FACE IT, not all people are equal. Perhaps in the eyes of God. Maybe under the law. But in the court of my opinion, they’re just not. Some are way the hell better than others. And the best ones are gardeners. Not new gardeners, God bless them. I’m talking about the battletested old guard. Gardeners on their second round of knee replacements. Weathered, worn and wizened types.
Alchemy happens to those who’ve gardened a long time. The audacity to continually shuffle bits of nature around in the face of cold, hard Darwinian reality, hoping only to nurture a small piece of ground into verdant beauty—well, that’ll teach a person. It’ll smooth rough edges and knock chips from shoulders. In the words of every authority figure from my youth, it builds character.
Which is apparently what you’ve got left after your ego has been blown up, your confidence shattered, your intellect exceeded, your body exhausted, and yet you persevere. And even succeed a little. Anyone who’s gardened long enough knows what I’m saying. Anyone who’s gardened long enough might call it wisdom.
Being outside with nature is the essential ingredient. Other people nurture. Other people are tested. Nurses, for instance. But I’ve seen enough movies to know there’s something seriously wrong with nurses, and my own experience is they force you to wear hospital gowns and chase you around with needles. Too much time inside a hospital will turn the sweetest pea into Nurse Ratched; whereas time outside with the birds, bees and flowers will turn any old jerk into Mr. Green Jeans. Because all that nature reminds us that life is fleeting and of this moment, and it will be here when we’re not. And it will be beautiful just the same. Subconsciously, we garden to find peace, and with enough time working the soil, peace comes.
Yep, gardeners are the best people. They know what they know, and they know that it isn’t even a fraction of it. And gardeners are okay with that. Among what they know is this: gardening is a relationship with nature. And the strongest partner in any relationship is the one who needs it less. In other words, nature has the upper hand on us. And gardeners have come to be okay with that, too.
So, if you want your kids to be good people, start them gardening and yell at them if they try to quit. That’s my advice. Getting sued? Forget a lawyer. Bring a gardener to court with you. If you’re choosing between two surgeons, choose the one with dirt under his or her nails. And, for God’s sake, let us make it a law that a gardener is assigned to every elected politician. Wouldn’t we all sleep better knowing that a friendly, weathered sage with bits of mulch and stems in their pockets has got a pair of dirty boots on that person’s desk, and is saying, “Not so fast, Whippersnapper.”
Scott Beuerlein is a Horticulturist at the Cincinnati Zoo Botanical Garden.
Peggy Spaeth and John Barber, co-chairs Article by Peggy Spaeth
Many of us have been walking, running, bicycling, birding, and botanizing in the Shaker Parklands for decades, in all kinds of weather. These man-made lakes are a treasured place embedded within the residential cities of Cleveland Heights and Shaker Heights, and are a regional destination as well.
We are very alarmed by the condition of the habitat around the lakes. We know that a healthy ecosystem is complex. Yet here the habitat is increasingly simplified by grass and invasive species that do not feed native birds and insects, that outcompete native plants, and that spread throughout the watershed. Please remember that these parks are designated an Audubon Important Bird Area. How are we feeding the warblers that migrate on this route twice a year if their native food sources are disappearing?
Conventional thinking about leaving public parks to naturalize is misguided. The complex balance of native plants, insects, and mammals is now too disturbed to “let nature take its course.” There are several overlapping entities involved in the management of the lake, including the cities of Cleveland Heights and Shaker Heights, who hold leases from the city of Cleveland; the Shaker Parklands Management Committee; Doan Brook Watershed Partnership; and the Northeast Ohio Regional Sewer District. It is typical, efficient, and economical for cities to “mow and blow” rather than create and maintain habitat and our cities are no different. But we can do better if we want to live in a place healthy for insects, birds, and ourselves.
So we asked, “Whose responsibility is it to restore and maintain a healthy habitat at the lakes?” In the end, we realized it is ours.
Although our intention is habitat restoration, we have inadvertently discovered rich local history by simply starting to remove porcelain berry at the concrete canoe launch. This history has been one of the most fascinating parts of the project, both to volunteers working at the site and the ever-present stream of people and dogs coming by while we’re working. Here is what we found out about the lake, and what we are doing:Why is there even a lake there? Before settlement, this site was a forested ravine. (Ohio was 95% forested in all.) When European settlers arrived in northeast Ohio, they made claim to land occupied by Native Americans through, as one author wrote, “unwelcome treaties and paltry payments.”
Surveys were completed during the period of 1790 – 1807 that focused on laying out townships and inventorying trees for logging. The most common trees found in the Doan Brook watershed (as its called today) were Beech, Oak, Maple, and Chestnut.
The Shakers formed the North Union Colony in the 1820’s in this area. They constructed several dams, the largest of which was built in 1836 to form today’s Lower Lake, for the purpose of having a water-driven sawmill. They cleared the trees in the ravine, then used those trees, clay, and rocks to build the dam.
The colony disbanded in 1889 and the gristmills, sawmill, woolen mills and buildings were torn down (or blown up in the case of the biggest gristmill) and today only a few foundations remain.
Developers then purchased the lands around Lower Lake for housing. The lakes have been considered an asset to the residential community since then, often featured in real estate ads.
Canoeing was a popular activity on all of the lakes at the turn of the century. A group of boaters was particularly attracted to Lower Lake, the largest inland lake in the vicinity, safer than Lake Erie, and lately accessible by trolley. In 1907 a group of men formed the Shaker Lakes Canoe Club. They built a temporary one-story boathouse at the Canoe Club site, replaced in 1914 with the pictured two-story building. It was leased to the Shaker Lakes Canoe Club for $1 per year from the City of Cleveland. Its members paid $15 a year in membership dues, and did all the building maintenance themselves.
They held regattas with races and jousting matches, often witnessed by 3-5,000 people sitting on the lake’s (then) grassy banks. There were moonlight carnivals and canoeing lessons for Boy Scouts, resulting in Lower Lake having boats on it often. Today Lower Lake is a popular passive recreation park, and we have no intention of building a canoe club and hosting regattas attended by 5000 people!
The Canoe Club was active in the 1960s but would have been destroyed had the Clark and Lee Freeways been built through the Shaker Parklands. As you know, the Freeway Fight saved the Shaker Parklands and our neighborhoods, and resulted in the founding of the Nature Center in Shaker Heights. However, the clubhouse was razed in 1976 after membership dwindled and the governing city (now Shaker Heights) cited the Club repeatedly for code violations including the lack of running water and no sewer hookups.
Friends of Lower Lake and our project began at a meeting convened by Tori Mills in March 2018. Several people interested in volunteering to restore habitat on a regular basis had approached DBWP. We were frustrated to volunteer at a once-a-year service day, only to watch the invasive plants re-sprout with renewed vigor. John Barber and Peggy Spaeth agreed to chair a project involving regular volunteers and Friends of Lower Lake was created.
Our vision is simply that Lower Lake is a habitat rich with native plants that support insects, migrating and resident birds, and people and other mammals. The project fulfills the DBWP mission to “facilitate and support conservation and restoration projects within the watershed” and “increase public engagement and awareness of the watershed.”
Our goal is to remove invasive plants, replace them with appropriate natives, and create an ongoing stewardship plan. Let’s be clear: this is a project with no end. We can’t let nature “take its course.”
We initially attacked the Canoe Club site because of the huge amount of invasive Porcelain Berry vines dropping seeds into the lake every year. We removed many loads of vines, roots, and seed-infested soil and ended up discovering the foundation.
Doing this work we found 19 species of non-native plants in and around the foundation, all thriving because the site was left “natural.” Invasive plants have few pests to hold them back, and will always out-compete native plants if left alone.
All of the non-native plants we found are on the Ohio banned and invasive plants list and many were first introduced through the nursery trade without realizing the aggressiveness of these species. This includes not only the flowering plants on the site, but also the vines, trees, ivy, and shrubs.
The challenges of our restoration project are complex.
Regional: Here we are removing invasive plants in the middle of the watershed at the Canoe Club site, while upstream Horseshoe Lake has rampant Japanese knotweed and other aggressive invasive species spilling downstream. Fortunately in between we have the Nature Center at Shaker Lakes with Natural Resource Specialist Nick Mikash onboard, and he has been an invaluable ally in our shared project.
Resources: We are a small band of residents who came together to literally dig up decades of invasive trees, shrubs, groundcovers, and vines by hand.
A core group of 8 to 12 peoplehas been working on Sunday mornings since May 20, 2018. A total of 50 have worked at the site, and we welcome people of all ages and abilities. We would love to have crews working around this lake and throughout our community at sites that connect with each other to create a rich unified habitat reflecting our respect and love of the natural world in our community. For the watershed, we need a master plan with a timeline, funding, and resources. This could lead to volunteer crews working under the leadership of a professional natural resources manager.
This has been a truly heartwarming experience to work with people with a shared vision for a healthy environment. We’ve watched eagles, osprey, kingfishers, and other wildlife as we’ve worked. Clearing the foundation has activated the space, with people coming to photograph, talk, do tai chi, tally birds, or just sit. It’s obvious that the Canoe Club was sited at one of the most scenic places on the lake, with friendly prevailing winds pushing canoes west to east back to the launch. Our hope is to create a larger vision for our environment that educates and partners with city government and active residents so that we all take responsibility for a healthy habitat, upstream and downstream.
Please join us! We need more volunteers! Sign up for our newsletter here to stay informed, or email friendsofLowerLake@gmail.com.
