Archive: Around Town

Garden plan by The Plantsmen NurseryVolunteers take a lot of pride in the Lansing Community Library.  Before the library was chartered they raised private donations for two capital improvement projects that expanded the indoor space, and added many features like a children's reading room, a spacious lobby and office area, and an art gallery/meeting room.  Individuals like Katrina Binkewicz, various scouts and others worked on plantings, and in 2006 Mark Baily designed and executed a reading garden on the northwest side.  Last Saturday a dozen volunteers could be seen creating a large garden with a variety of plants, walkways, and a fence.

"They aren't all native plants, but by far the majority are," says Suzanne Hinderliter, who has been part of the Friends of the Library since the beginning.  "We purposefully tried to do that.  We have a lot of variety.  For instance we have a lot of grasses, but they aren't all the same species.   Our hope is that we can incorporate some nature programming that we don't do now.  We want to involve children or families."


Hinderliter says that landscaping the grounds has always been part of the plan, but volunteers have taken one project at a time.  A group of people in the  Friends of the Library started talking about it in earnest a year and a half ago, and a committee was formed.  The Plantsmen's Dan Segal and Mike Fitzpatrick signed on in early 2009, and they provided a plan for the garden.

Fund raising started in earnest this year in the late spring.  The group raised about $,000 in private donations through a targeted letter writing campaign, and another $2,000 in a grant from Tompkins County Beautification through Cornell Cooperative Extension.

"We wanted people in the community to appreciate the garden, but we didn't want them to feel we were taking away from the purchase of books or something like that," Hinderliter says.  "That's why we did everything from grants and donations.  No tax money was used for this purpose."

The Plantsmen Nursery donated labor for preparation work, which took place over the course of a couple of weeks.  Meanwhile Hinderliter and volunteer Linda VanApeldoorn picked out the plants.  The library has also had trees donated to mark the two southern corners of the property.  An Armur maple tree will be planted in the corner of the garden within the fence, and a similar tree will be placed at the southeast corner to provide shade for garden benches that were also donated.


Hinderliter says the library has a small collection of gardening books that will be expanded to include new books about the selection of plants in the garden.  She says this will tie the garden in with the available books, as well as library's nature programming.  She says that she hopes the library will host an opening event like a garden party later this month.  Meanwhile, volunteers are following a watering schedule and thinking about events that can fold the garden into educational programming.

"It's just fun," Hinderliter says.  "I love gardening.  It was hard for me to see just weeds here when I knew there could be something really beautiful and fun and educational here as part of the library.  So it's just an extension of volunteering for the library and I enjoy it."

"Just come and smell the roses," she adds.  "Well... we don't actually have roses, but come smell the other flowers and appreciate the beauty of it all."

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