Local News

Butterfly, pollinator garden created at elementary school

ELKINS -- After learning about pollinators and nature during the 2020-21 school year, Sarah Wamsley's fourth-grade class at Midland Elementary School decided to convert some of the lawn at the school into a butterfly and pollinator garden.

The class's first attempt at the enclosure didn't go as planned, due to water gathering at the garden's original site. So the students went to work and came up with a different plan to make it work.

"In May of 2020, Linda Shomo of the Emma Scott Garden Club met with me and we started building and creating a pollinator garden," Wamsley told The Inter-Mountain. "One of our gardens just wasn't producing the way we wanted it to produce, so we kind of went back to the drawing board and we discovered that one of the reasons it wasn't doing well was because of how much water was pooling there."

Wamsley said she and Shomo began researching what to do, and with the help of the WVU extension office, learned of some different things that they could change to make the garden flourish.

"We came up with making a Wetfoot Garden," Wamsley said. "So we worked together to try and figure out the different plants and species we could put in there. We got hooked up with the Monarch Alliance Association and we decided to put in a Monarch Weigh Station and purposely get some plants that would do well in that wet environment."

A team of volunteers met up Sunday and dug 180 holes for the students to put the plants in the following day. During the planting session, Elkins Mayor Jerry Marco attended and cut a ribbon to open the garden.

"We talked about how when Midland was built in the 1970s and how all of the land the school is on was once farmland," Wamsley said. "We discussed how we take away from the native environment when we build things like the school. So coming back to 2021, we talked about how we are putting back in some of those things to help the Monarchs and pollinators out.

"We had both fourth-grade classes, mine and Miss Smith's, and a kindergarten glass helped out. It was hands-on learning and the kids were able to discover why we were planting those plants and what pollinators are."

Marco also helped put the plants in the ground, which included three types of milkweed, wild Columbine, eastern nluestar, wild blue indigo, wild geranium, Joe Pye weed, wild bergamot, black-eyed Susan, foxglove beardtongue, bee balm, native asters, seadum and goldenrod.

"Linda (Shomo) is the genius behind all of this," Wamsley said. "And it was great that Mayor Jerry Marco and the school resource officer, Rocky Hebb, took time out of their schedules to help. Plus all the ladies from the Emma Scott Garden Club who gave so much of their time. It was a really good experience for our kids to interact with other adults that they normally don't get to see and interact with."

Emma Scott Garden Club played a vital role in helping with the entire project. The ESGC formed a group of volunteers who helped rototill a bigger plot, add compost and move all non-native plants from the original spot to the new location.

Many of the native plants had to be transported from Maryland, so two volunteers from the ESGC, Abby and Jason Hohn, drove more than 400 miles round trip to get the plants from Boonsboro, Maryland. A donation was made by the ESGC and matched by Midland Elementary to purchase the mature native plants from the Maryland nursery.

The new Wetfoot Native Pollinator Butterfly Garden, which will engage Midland's students for years to come, is the only one of its kind in the state of West Virginia. It will allow future students to learn about native plants and pollinators, and teach them how important both are to the environment.

"I'm a local beekeeper and I love honey bees and pollinators, so it's a passion of mine," Wamsley said. "Through our local beekeeping organization, the Highland Agriculture Association, we were able to apply for a grant through the state agency for bees. So we were awarded some money from that to help create the garden."