The celebration will include vendors from Pride of Dakota and Manitoba’s Apple & Pine Market, live music and a historic village demonstration by the Manitoba Living History Society. The Peace Garden is working with the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa and other tribes and First Nations in the state and province to present a powwow demonstration.

Plans are to offer a supper that Friday evening called “The Taste of 1932.”

Summer-long historical displays will lead up to the event.

Even though the garden’s centennial remains 10 years away, the board and staff want to start engaging people to share their stories and histories associated with the garden, said Tim Chapman, executive director of the Peace Garden.

Submitted Photo The water fountain is one of the many sites to see when exploring the International Peace Garden.

“We know there’s folks in the local communities who are in their 90s who were here that day in 1932 when they dedicated the garden for the first time,” he said. “We’ll be reaching out to people and putting calls out over social media and our website, so that anyone who has that good history, whether they were here in person or it’s been passed down to their families, we would love to record their stories and start to build up the audio database as well.”

Prior to the primary celebration, there will be a special observance taking place from Friday, July 1, which is Canada Day, to Monday, July 4, American Independence Day.

Triathlon Manitoba is organizing a Peace Garden Triathlon that will feature a bike race, swim and run. The first triathlon in 2019 drew about 200 participants, but future events were suspended due to COVID-19, Chapman said.

“We’re pretty excited to be working with Triathlon Manitoba again, helping them find American partners to really make that a staple, annual event here in the garden. It went off really well the first time because the organization didn’t have to shut down any highways. It’s not a full triathlon that you might see at other locations. There’s an abbreviated form,” Chapman said. Still, the event brought a lot of people and drew them to see different parts of the garden, he said.

On Saturday, July 2, the Peace Garden will hold a grand opening for the new children’s play area.

Submitted Photo The Cacti & Succulent Collection at the International Peace Garden will have room to grow with an expansion of the conservatory currently under construction.

The Peace Garden had received a capital grant through the State of North Dakota that was matched by Manitoba to provide about $2.5 million for garden improvements. Money for the playground came from those funds.

The playground consists of a series of zones patterned after animals. There will be a turtle zone, wolf zone, hawk and eagle zone, fox zone and beaver zone. Children will be able to move through those different play structures and understand what it is like to be those animals and learn about why the animals are important to the local ecology, Chapman said.

He said the Peace Garden has a variety of play structures but they are dated. The new playground will be close to the heart of the garden, near the conservatory, gift shop and cafe.

“We really wanted to make the garden a more family-focused and friendly place right there in the court,” Chapman said. “The play area is located just between the formal area and terraces and the conservatory, so it actually creates more of a flow.”

The Peace Garden is conducting a capital campaign that gives large donors naming rights to the conservatory that is undergoing expansion and its inside features. People also can sponsor flower beds for $500-$5,000, which come with an option to participate in garden tours this summer.

The Peace Garden also encourages visitors to take advantage of its advance online reservations for camping, events, day or annual passes, kayak rentals and picnic areas.

Other great news for this coming summer is that music camp will be back after taking a couple of years off due to the pandemic.

“The Peace Garden is just not the same place when you don’t have six or seven weeks of music camp and all the energy that brings. So to celebrate and welcome the International Music Camp back, we have themed our annual flower bed designs around music and the arts,” Chapman said. “For the first time we’re actually offering sponsorship of the individual flower beds to support our budget and help us recover after a couple of years of lost revenue due to COVID. So, yes, it’s going to be a really exciting time to have the new play area, and the conservatory will be getting close to finished at the end of summer and early fall. And then just having all those students back who really bring a lot of life and play a lot of music for seven weeks. It’s going to be transformative and really help everyone, I think, start to feel a little bit more like normal again.”