‘The Secret Garden’
Horticulture: A renewed focus at International Peace GardenBy DAN FELDNER, Staff Writer, dfeldner@minotdailynews.com
POSTED: May 11, 2008
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Hevenor, CEO of the Peace Garden, said the staff has been in more of a janitorial mode lately making much-needed repairs to various buildings on the grounds. He’d like to see more horticulture work done to make the Peace Garden look more like an actual garden.
To that end, millions of dollars will be spent on a capital project to completely reconstruct the formal garden area this summer. Hevenor said it might not currently look like much, but when the work is complete it will be a breathtaking addition to the Peace Garden.
“We’re just in the midst of launching a $2.5 million restoration and renovation of the formal garden, so when people do come here they’ll see trees have been cut down, stumps are waiting to be moved out of the way, beds have been emptied of plant material,” Hevenor said. “(It’s) a reason to come back and see what’s going to happen.”
The first phase of this project will be a $1 million drainage system designed by Earth Tech, an engineering firm with offices in Minneapolis/St. Paul and Winnipeg, Man.
The heavy flooding at the garden last June justified the necessity of this project, according to Hevenor. He says drainage is the Achilles’ heel of the garden, and this project will hopefully stop what happened last June from ever occurring again.
“We had quite a pounding last year from the rain in June. We had tremendous damage done at that time, and this is an opportunity to mitigate that from ever happening again,” Hevenor said. “Essentially, over time our drainage system has just become compromised, and the water just free-flows across the surface and it erodes beds, it washes soil out of the gardens, it washes plants out of the gardens.”
Along with the drainage system, extensive landscaping will also be done to the garden area. All of the trees that died during the flood are being extracted and will be used to help build a new composting site. The landscaping plans will involve quite a bit of concrete work, and there will be extensive development in the sunken garden to the fountain garden area.
Almost $250,000 will be spent renovating the pool, fountain and patio area. Hand hewn granite will be exposed after being buried under soil for years due to flooding. Hevenor says they are also planning to fascia fountains from 1987 that were on the north and south side by the sunken garden with field stone that will match the existing kiosks that were built in the 1950s.
There will also be some bubbling action in the pool, and it will also be possible to water garden the pool again with water lilies and other types of aquatic plants.
“We’ve tried to honor the past with the design and we’ve maintained the octagon setting ... and what it will create is almost like a mosaic or a maze that you can walk through that will be plants,” Hevenor said. “And we’ll have around the perimeter of the octagon and around the interior of the octagon on the outer walkways, there’ll be shoulder-to-shoulder flowering crabs. So eventually you’ll walk through a tunnel of flowering crabs, in time as they grow together.”
Currently, there isn’t a lot of landscaping in the garden area. Once the new flowering crabs come into bloom, however, Hevenor says it will give visitors another reason to come back to the Peace Garden. Much like a cherry blossom festival, he said the Peace Garden could have a flowering crab blossom festival.
“That’s going to bring different foliage colors in the summer season and then there’ll be different fruiting structures on it,” he said.
The most beautiful landscaping design in the world isn’t worth anything if deer and other animals get a hold of it. This is why there will be measures in place to make sure the flowering crabs, as well as all the other flora in the gardens, don’t turn from breathtaking to breakfast.
To keep this from happening, vertical fencing will go up around the formal garden and well-hidden deer fencing will be used in the woodland areas. With around 800 to 1,000 white-tailed deer on the grounds, it would probably take people longer to plant the garden than it would take the deer to eat or otherwise damage it.
Interpretation
“And within that fence we hope to do in this garden a lot more interpretation,” Hevenor said. “Telling the stories of the garden, letting people know what the plants are, where they’re available, how they can use them in their own landscape, and use this as an opportunity to really teach people the joy of gardening.”
Hevenor ticked off a host of flowers they are not able to currently plant because of wildlife – daffodils, tulips, spring flowering bulbs, gladiolus, Oriental lilies and Asiatic lilies.
“We can’t grow those things in our garden now because the deer eat the flowers off before they ever bloom,” Hevenor said. “We will be able to create a space here within North Dakota and Manitoba that doesn’t exist. We will create a garden that will have global interest.”
With around eight acres to work with in the garden, Hevenor said they can constantly change and add to the flora without fear of deer or moose coming in and destroying everything. As hard as it is to believe, he noted that over the past 75 years, animals have destroyed hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of plants in the Peace Garden.
“It’s a mind-boggling number, but it’s the reality of it,” he said. “We could put a $1 million landscape out there and in five to 10 years it would be gone.”
While some prep work has already taken place, they hope to begin in earnest at the end of this month or beginning of June. By mid-August or early September they should be hauling in some of the shrubby container-grown materials and possibly some of the perennial material. Hevenor said the real skeleton of the plant material will then be put in during the fall.
“And we’re talking, like literally thousands of containerized plants are going into this garden and upwards of 300 individual 36-inch wire basket pieces of 2- and 3-inch caliber trees,” he said. “It’s going to be an awesome sight to see.”
In 2009 they will be completing the spring garden so people should be prepared to have their ‘socks knocked off’ for the entire 2009 season and beyond. When all is said and done, Hevenor said this will probably be one of the largest single-component landscape installations in southern Manitoba or northern North Dakota.
The Peace Garden has never been short of ideas – just the funds to carry them out, Hevenor said. While the governments of North Dakota, Manitoba and other areas in Canada have given the Peace Garden many contributions over the years, more is always needed.
Second phase
And this new garden is only the first phase of the capital project. An interpretive center and conservatory space make up the second phase.
“Imagine in the dead of winter coming to the garden, sitting down and having a meal in the restaurant and then taking a nice gingerly stroll through a tropical oasis in the conservatory,” Hevenor said. “And prior to going into that, having the opportunity to stroll through interpretive display space.”
Traveling displays such as those by the Smithsonian Institution and art displays from the University of North Dakota are the kinds of things Hevenor would like to bring to the Peace Garden.
The rich history of the Civilian Conservation Corps is something else he envisions being told in the interpretive center. He noted the historic CCC Lodge, which was named the most endangered building in North Dakota last year by Preservation North Dakota, is undergoing a $260,000 renovation so the workmanship of the structure can be enjoyed by future generations.
Hevenor hopes these new projects not only will pull in more people to see the Peace Garden during the summer but also during the winter months when attendance historically drops off.
All of these improvements will also help the local economy in the form of people buying gas for their cars or groceries for their families, Hevenor said.
“It affects a 50- to 75-mile radius around this garden in both Canada and the United States. We’re an important part of the local economy, and it’s just great to be able to do this, and again, have the support of the premier and the governor to do it,” he said. “Without them we’re diddled.”
Money needed for project
The total cost for this capital project is around $7.4 million. Hevenor said they’ve currently raised $6.4 million, but raising that last million is getting to be a bit nerve wracking.
“We’ve reached sort of a crises situation, a cash flow situation. We need input, we need funding, we need American funding to match Canadian funding,” he said. “Without it we could potentially lose our Canadian funding and never build this building (the interpretive center and conservatory). And in my opinion that would be a travesty.”
Hevenor said North Dakota’s congressional delegation has worked hard to secure federal funding but so far all the United States has contributed to this project is $295,000. If the final $1 million cannot be raised by the end of June or a plan isn’t in place for some kind of extension, the Peace Garden could potentially lose $2.7 in matching funds from Manitoba if the building is not constructed. This makes upcoming meetings with government officials on both sides of the border extremely important.
“We need help to make this project happen, and this is an incredible project that I think all North Dakotans would be happy to see come to fruition,” Hevenor said. “If there’s anybody out there that would like to send us some funds for this development, we’re here with open arms.”
Hevenor’s e-mail address is dhevenor@peacegarden.com, or he can also be called at 1-888-432-6733.
Even if they don’t get all of the funding required and aren’t able to go ahead with the interpretive center and conservatory right away, Hevenor said they have about a five-year window to raise the money and construct the building. No matter what, though, $2.5 million is going toward building the drainage system and the new garden area.
Always one to dream big, Hevenor said the third phase of the project would be a conflict resolution center and an accommodation center. Many governmental officials from both countries have been hosted here over the years, and Hevenor said it is in fact a “peace garden,” sitting in the middle of the longest undefended border in the world.
“It makes sense. It’s a really good fit to have a center here where we could bring in a bachelor’s program or a master’s program in conflict resolution and transformation,” he said.
Ultimately, none of these improvements matter if nobody is around to take advantage of them. Perhaps more important than acquiring funding, planting gardens or constructing buildings is getting people into the Peace Garden so they can see for themselves what it has to offer.
“We are a secret garden. You’ve seen the film or heard of the film, ‘The Secret Garden?’ Well, we’re it,” he said. “So we need to change that. We need to be everybody’s garden.”
