group accepting grant check for native pollinator garden

Grant benefits student-led garden project

The Diamond Lakes Area Master Naturalists recently awarded the Arkansas School for Mathematics, Sciences and the Arts a grant to benefit the school’s Native Pollinator Garden.

Students in the Senior Research in the Park course will use the $1,120 grant to improve the sloped portion of the garden that is located in front of the ASMSA Student Center. Planned improvements include terracing and adding stone steps to the garden slope to help prevent erosion and increase accessibility to the plants on the upper portion of the slope.

Students in the course will plan and execute the improvements, said Dr. Lindsey Waddell, an instructor of excellence geoscience and chemistry. She serves as a co-instructor in the course along with Dr. Allyn Dodd, an instructor of distinction in biology.

“We are incredibly grateful to have the support of DLAMN,” Waddell said. “They have actually supported us from the beginning by offering us advice and a venue through which our students could share the progress they have made in creating the garden. I think this specific support will help improve the appearance of our garden tremendously, and it something we have wanted to do from the beginning.”

The first plants were installed in the Native Pollinator Garden in November 2020. The garden has different zones such as a native shrub and perennial slope (which the grant will improve), a Zen garden, an herb spiral, a Monarch Waystation and a Diana butterfly patch. Other planned improvements this fall include a hummingbird bed, a prairie bed and a checkerboard garden.

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The idea for the garden grew after Casey Chandler, director of educational development at Mid-America Science Museum in Hot Springs, contacted Waddell in August 2020 about the museum’s desire to sponsor a team for the Smithsonian Teen Earth Optimism grant.

“I had started having the students in that course complete a service project in addition to a research project, so the Teen Earth Optimism competition was a perfect fit,” Waddell said. “Dr. Jon Ruehle (a former ASMSA biology instructor) had inspired an interest in these students in studying interactions between pollinators and native plants, so starting a campus pollinator garden was the clear choice for the class project.”

Waddell said the project took on even greater importance to the students after Ruehle passed away in October 2020. In February 2021, it was announced that the project had received a $500 grant in the Smithsonian competition.

The Research in the Park students were also acutely aware of the damage invasive exotic plants that have escaped from landscaping have caused in Hot Springs National Park. Research in the Park students work on various research projects with the National Park Service and Hot Springs National Park as part of the course. Students had removed some of the invasive vegetation as park volunteers.

Waddell said students in the Senior Research in the Park students this fall are the fifth cohort to work on service projects to improve the garden space. Students in the Environmental Science course will propose and undertake projects in the spring. Incoming students are introduced to the program during each fall semester’s orientation, Waddell said, “so everyone understands its purpose and can take part in logging observations of wildlife in the garden on iNaturalist, especially any sightings of Mondarch or Diana Fritillary butterflies. All of our students are from Arkansas, and we hope to really showcase what is special about the Natural State through our garden.”

The garden currently has 85-plus species of native plants that are labeled and cataloged, including many endemic species. One of this fall’s Senior Research in the Park projects is to improve an online catalog that will make the garden more available to the public, which can be found at pollinatorgarden.asmsa.org. The garden is also used as a learning space for students in botany courses, summer camps and for other research by students and outside researchers who use the space to study insect species, Waddell said.

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