UNIQUE WILD FLOWER GARDEN DEDICATED IN LA GRANGE

By ANNE MARCISZ

This quiet slice of woodland habitat will be covered with blooms in the spring, (photo courtesy of Suburban Life/Citizen)

For the friends of Nettie Schmuckal, the dedication of the Nettie Schmuckal Memorial Wild Flower Garden in Denning Park in La-Grange on June 26th was the fulfillment of a long-held dream.

When Mrs. Schmuckal's friends in LaGrange, a pleasant, 104-year-old community in Southwest Cook County, were looking for a way to establish a living memorial after her death in June, 1982, they approached the Park District of LaGrange. The District, founded in 1929, had acquired seven acres in 1975 which comprises its newest park. It is developed as a picnic and playground site, with a caretaker's house and the District's office located there. Part of the park is woodland, mainly pine and oak trees. Ed Marcisz, a longtime LaGrange resident and friend of the Schmuckals, volunteered to design a wild flower garden in the woods, and to create a habitat conducive to the growth of wildflowers. Wildflower enthusiasts in the community had long wished for a public garden devoted to the preservation and identification of naturally occurring Illinois grasses and flowers, and this seemed to be the right place at the right time.

The Park District Board gave Marcisz an enthusiastic go-ahead, and he spent countless weekends creating walk ways and carrying in old logs and outsize stones to shape the area into a garden. Nettie's friends and family have helped to shovel gravel and to dig, and have chipped in to have a local wood-carver, Chuck Wilken, carve a sign for the garden. Helena Schmidt, now a newly elected commissioner of the neighboring Pleasantdale Park District, donated plants and seed from her own extensive wild flower garden, and Ed regularly makes excursions to an abandoned railroad site 30 miles away to pick up trillium, may apples, Jacob's ladder, jack-in-the-pulpit and bee-balm. He has already planted wild strawberries, wild raspberries, Texas bluebonnet. bell-wort, Dutchman's breeches, green dragon, wild roses, white bineberry, Solomon's seal, ferns, native grasses, coneflowers, blazing stars, black-eyed Susans, hepatica, bloodroot, spring beauty, and a bewildering variety of multi-named others.

Helping with the planting during the dedication of the Nettie Schmuckal Memorial Wild Flower Garden at La Grange's Denning Park were (left to right) Tom Kigin, Park Board President: Harry Schmuckal, Nettie's husband; John Hausmann, LaGrange Village President; and Ed Marcisz, garden designer and planter, (photo courtesy of Suburban Life / Citizen)

There has been very little expense to the Park District so far for the garden. The District's maintenance crew brings fallen branches there, and occasionally a load of gravel, but all of the labor to date has been done as a public service by Marcisz and Nettie's friends.

The hundred or so persons who came to the dedication each brought a wildflower from their gardens to plant in the park, and more are promised in the fall. The dedication was the first step in establishing the garden. Now, the real work begins with the identification of each variety of flower. Marcisz and the Park Board would like to see the garden used as an educational tool by nearby Lyons Township High School, and possibly work up a catalog of the plants to be found there and a slide collection for the LaGrange Library. Nettie, who was herself a wildflower enthusiast, would have been ecstatic about the whole project.

Illinois Parks and Recreation   40   September/October 1983