St. Patrick’s Butterfly Garden

The Butterfly Garden is located on the south side of St. Patrick’s Episcopal Church. The garden has four raised beds, four surrounding beds, and two benches for enjoying the beauty of the garden. The project is a native pollinator garden to attract and support butterflies and bees. The garden is also used for teaching and education, reflection and relaxation, and enjoying the beauty of God’s creation.

Rainbow Gardens

The City of Perry have allowed the Community to use the space of Rainbow Park for a Community Garden. The vision for this garden is for multiple purposes. It will be the Outdoor Classroom for Perry Schools, it will host community raised beds for individuals and families, and another area will be specifically planted to donate to the local food bank and organizations like Food Bank. Pollinator gardens will be on the perimeter or the garden, which is 1.8 acres, and sprinkled between the food plots.

Payne County Pollinators Garden at the Courthouse

This is a recently added butterfly/pollinator garden at the Payne County Courthouse, on the northeast corner of the lawn located in Stillwater. Chris Reding shared the photo with us at a Monarch Meet Up and also reports that his team has been working with County Commissioners across the state to spread pollinator protector species on roadsides in need of maintenance updates. They grade with pollinator beneficial plants while reforming ditches. Way to go Payne Co crew!

OKC Belle Isle Library Garden

Belle Isle’s new garden also attracted lots of visits from pollinators. We collected quite a few caterpillars there to raise in the hut at home. These were part of the 60-count mentioned above.

We’re planning a second garden next year, closer to a main entrance, to encourage more patrons to get involved. We are thrilled that Carolyn Manes (Master Gardener) will continue to volunteer, and newly-minted Master Gardener, Rick Wicker, will adopt it, since he lives in the neighborhood.

Thanks so much to all the volunteers who are signing up to make these gardens a reality! Our dream is to install a garden at every library in the Metro system.

Thanks to the managers of Warr Acres (Barbara Beasley) and Belle Isle (Cassie Spindle), for allowing us to use their libraries as the “guinea pigs” for this project. We’re proud of our libraries for joining this important educational effort.

OKC Warr Acre Library Garden

The Warr-Acres Library garden enjoyed lots of Monarch visitors last summer, although we didn’t get many tag-and-release opportunities. We released about 60 butterflies, but few hatched on the weekends. We’ll hope for better luck next year, but of course we can all feel good just knowing how helpful this garden was, to the Monarchs and other pollinators. And a fun new sighting occurred there recently: a clutch of Bordered Patch caterpillars on our Cow-pen daisies!

Thanks so much to all the volunteers who are signing up to make these gardens a reality! Our dream is to install a garden at every library in the Metro system.

Thanks to the managers of Warr Acres (Barbara Beasley) and Belle Isle (Cassie Spindle), for allowing us to use their libraries as the “guinea pigs” for this project. We’re proud of our libraries for joining this important educational effort.