Berwyn Roots-A Community Garden Movement

Just a reminder, there is no story time this week July 3rd due to the holiday. The library will be closed.

Today I got a call from the Berwyn Public Library that our garden cart and what looks to be many of our stolen items were located hidden on their property.

Police were notified and I sent in the photo.

It’s making its way back to our garden via the Park District Staff, and I will head over this afternoon to see what is there and re inventory.

Thank you to everyone who supported us during this time, and for getting the word out which helped us recover our lost items. We want to also thank the community for the several donations we have received this week.

Big changes at Proksa Children’s Garden! We learned last spring/summer that a new ADA accessibility plan for the City would be impacting our side natives garden at Proksa Park, so through the fall and into this spring, we began the process of rehoming the natives in and around the garden. At Proksa, we used a huge number of plants to create a natural barrier around the children’s garden, which should start blooming this summer.

Because we knew we had a surplus of plants, more than we could ever reuse in our space, last fall and this spring, we hosted “dig your own natives” community events, sharing with anyone who stopped by, making sure we shared as many plants as we could into the neighborhood. Finally we pulled most of the remaining native plants for our plant sale, which found new homes last Saturday!

This plan was a huge endeavor, we had to move hundreds of plants and relocate and find new homes for them, so we want to take a minute to thank both our regular volunteers, and those who came out when we needed you to lend a hand over these several months, we appreciate all your support!

Today the park district took us the final stretch, they helped transplant our last native tree (an American Plum with a huge tap root we couldn’t budge) and razed the remaining weedy mess. Grass will be added until the plans for the accessibility entrance are finalized.

If you want to check out the progress of rehoming our native garden in person, our black currents are almost ripe, and we should start seeing a sea of yellow blooms surrounding the children’s garden shortly!

The fruit orchard at the children’s garden will start getting new to us natives planted this Friday, salvaged from the pollinator garden at Serenity Park.

If this all sounded interesting, and something you might like to be a part of, we always need extra hands, check out our events calendar or message us for more info!