BROKEN BOW – It’s National Pollinator Week, and for Broken Bow’s Rotary chapter, a beautification project has recently started to bloom.
The group broke ground on the first phase of its pollinator garden on the Custer County Fairgrounds; Rotarian and Fairgrounds Administrator Michelle Nelson, in an on-site interview with KCNI/KBBN, said that once the seed was planted by member Jessica McCaslin, the ingenuity and ambition of Rotary made it happen.
“We brought in a speaker who specializes in pollinator gardens, listened to him, and decided, ‘Yes, this is something we want to do.’”
The garden’s planning stage, according to Nelson, took the better part of a year. Nelson says that Rotary’s original vision for the garden was impressively expansive, bordering on overambitious.
“We had big dreams and plans and had it all staked out at one time. It was a huge pathway. We were going to do a couple of different gardens, but because of time and money, we scaled it back for this year, at least.”
Nelson adds that despite the financial and temporal setbacks, her Broken Bow Rotarians, in keeping with their well-known tenacity, have tweaked the garden’s initial idea, but are still dreaming big when it comes to future plans.
“Eventually, hopefully, we can put a path through our park area, or around our flagpole. This is just one step of it.”
Part of the Rotary’s original dream involved using the fairgrounds’ landmark flagpole as the garden’s centerpiece, but concerns about difficulties in raising and lowering the flag led the group to scrap that idea, opting instead to start planting several feet away, around the nearby Rotary monument.
Nelson, however, says that implementing the flagpole is still very much a part of the garden’s future layout.
“We had kind of talked about implementing our Rotary wheel, planting different gardens as the ‘spokes’ around the flagpole. I think that’s the way we want to go, as long as we can map it out.”
The Fairgrounds Administrator adds that the garden could serve a greater purpose than just drawing in threatened native insects; the Rotary, she says, is always turning its gears when it comes to inclusivity.
“We’d even talked about maybe doing a handicap-accessible cement path from the pollinator garden to the bathrooms.”
The Broken Bow Rotary is continuing to look not only for possible funding sources to complete its pollinator garden but also for volunteers to help with its growth. The group plans to work incrementally on the project until its completion one summer at a time.
