Growing pride in community

Green Bay Botanical Garden (GBBG) was recently named the second-place winner in a garden design challenge hosted by All-America Selections (AAS), a non-profit seed testing organization aiming to bring the best of the best seeds to the general public.

[AAS] would test new seeds that weren’t released to the public against ones on the market to see if they were better than what was existing,” said Mark Konlock, director of horticulture at GBBG. “And if it was, then it got in and could be marketed and branded under All-America Selection. On the package, you’ll see an icon for AAS on there, and that means it’s been nationally tested and proven better than what’s out there on the market… We are a trial garden site for ornamentals in the ground and we’ve done some vegetative trialing. We started out, though, as an All-America Selection display garden. [AAS] will send you seeds from the last three years of winners for free, and then you grow them and display them… It’s a way to promote and market those plants to the general public.”

This year’s garden design challenge was simply to film a video touring the display garden, but staff at the Green Bay Botanical Garden took the challenge a step further, choosing a theme to reflect the community surrounding the garden.

“I chose ‘Pride in Community’ because I had a group of volunteers that came out weekly from Aspiro to help me plant and harvest,” said Amanda Hatton, seasonal gardener at GBBG. “Our mission as a garden is to connect people with plants.”

Individuals from Aspiro worked alongside GBBG staff to maintain the garden and donated produce from the garden to Paul’s Pantry, inspiring partnerships with several other local organizations.

“We wanted to celebrate that partnership…” Konlock said. “We then also reached out to different groups within our community. Casa Alba Melanie helped us plant a hispanic part of our garden. We had someone from Wello come and help us plant a Hmong herb garden… We wanted this Pride in Community garden to go beyond the borders of just the [Aspiro] partnership and to incorporate it more throughout the Green Bay Botanical Garden. So we also had the Oneida Nation with the Three Sisters in the partnership garden as well as in our children’s garden… We also had an African-American section of our garden. And then we painted our fence to celebrate all communities and to show the pride we have in Green Bay and in all the communities that make up the community of Green Bay.”

By celebrating the diversity of Green Bay’s community, Konlock said he hopes the garden helped members of the community to see that they also share a lot of similarities.

“Green Bay is changing and growing and there’s a lot of different people,” he said. “We wanted to try to connect everybody through plants, and also through food... A cool thing Amanda did in her garden is to include the same crop in all those different gardens. It just shows that even though we sometimes label each other, we’re more alike. We’re all really eating a lot of the same foods — we’re all using tomatoes but in a different dish. It’s a way to show that we’re really all connected through plants… One of the overarching things at Green Bay Botanical Garden is to connect people and plants, but we’re also looking at how we can grow in the community, beyond the borders of Green Bay Botanical Garden… We get all of these AAS seeds and we can’t grow them all on site, so we’ve donated different vegetables to different organizations over the last three or four years. We’re continuing to do that and then we’re also working on pollinator habitats — food for insects… We’re trying to grow off-site by connecting people to plants through food and through biodiverse habitat creation.”

With a second-place win under their belt, GBBG staff already have their sights set on next year’s design challenge.

“We’re very proud of Amanda for winning this award for us at Green Bay Botanical Garden and we’re looking forward to planning next year’s theme, which is STEAM (science, technology, engineering, art and math),” Konlock said. “We’re going to reach out to our education team and other organizations to see what we can do to get first place next year.”

This year’s display garden celebrating pride in community has already been cleared to make way for the upcoming Garden of Lights, but more information about the display challenge and GBBG’s involvement with AAS is available at gbbg.org.