One of those community forums was held on Thursday, an hour prior to the AATA’s monthly board meeting. But no one from the public showed up to that particular event – several other meetings are scheduled. The board meeting that followed was over within an hour. In addition to the master plan, the board discussed the most recent quarter’s on-time trip performance, which board member David Nacht described as “abysmal.”

Countywide Transportation Master Plan

AATA’s countywide master plan, due to be completed next year, aims to see what the public transit system could become in the decades ahead. AATA staff has scheduled a number of meetings around the county to get input and feedback on the plan. Details about the effort – called Moving You Forward – are available online.

The project came up during Thursday’s board meeting.

“We want to look at the draft of comments from meetings that [AATA CEO Michael Ford] has been holding,” said board member David Nacht in his report on the planning and development committee. “We’re curious as to how staff and consultants will combine that with the scenarios.”

Jack Eaton raises his hand to speak at the public forum held on Oct. 6 at the downtown public library. Eaton wanted more detail about how the SEMCOG population and jobs projections had been calculated for Ann Arbor over the next 30 years. Eaton, an attorney who ran unsuccessfully in the August 2010 Ward 4 city council Democratic primary, was a bus driver earlier in his career. (Photo by Dave Askins.)

The “scenarios” to which Nacht referred are those being developed by staff and consultants based on information gathered from the community. Hypothetical examples of the kind of scenarios that could be produced are a paratransit-intensive scenario, a rail-intensive scenario, a low-funding scenario or a high-funding scenario. Eventually, a preferred scenario will be identified and form the basis of the master plan.

The board will continue to set aside time before upcoming board meetings to see if the public takes advantage of the chance to discuss transportation issues, said board chair Jesse Bernstein. The community forums include staff presentations on the process for service changes and potential service changes for next year, along with discussions on topics brought up by the public.

Several forums were held earlier this month, and several more are scheduled in the next two weeks:

• Monday, Oct. 25: Saline City Hall, 6‐8 p.m.
• Tuesday, Oct. 26: Ann Arbor District Library, Pittsfield Branch, 11 a.m.-1 p.m.
• Tuesday, Oct. 26: Ann Arbor District Library, Malletts Creek Branch, 6‐8 p.m.
• Wednesday, Oct. 27: EMU Student Center, 11 a.m.-1 p.m.
• Wednesday, Oct. 27: Dexter Township, 6‐8 p.m.
• Thursday, Oct. 28: Manchester Village offices, 6‐8 p.m.
• Wed, Nov. 3: Milan Senior Center, 6‐8 p.m.

MDOT Contract Approval Process, On-Time Performance

During Thursday’s meeting, board members unanimously passed the only resolution on the agenda, allowing AATA CEO Michael Ford to approve contracts up to $1 million with the Michigan Dept. of Transportation without waiting for board approval. Board member Sue McCormick said state programs often have to be approved within 30 days, and since the AATA meets monthly, that could prove to be a problem. Now Ford can approve those contracts himself, though he agreed to inform the board whenever that was done.

In discussing other issues during the meeting, Nacht mentioned that the on-time performance for buses this past summer was “abysmal.” For the three-month period from July-September 2010, 83.3% of trips were on-time. AATA’s goal for this service metric is 95%. Over the previous four quarters, on-time performance ranged from 82.8% at its lowest, to a high of 89.5%.

“On behalf of our riders, this is a big deal,” said Nacht. “If we are going to be a service provider, this is important.”

Bernstein agreed that the numbers were important, but said the numbers were understandable this past construction season when traffic was blocked on many streets. That includes the closing of South Fifth Avenue for construction of the underground parking garage next to the Ann Arbor District Library’s downtown building, where the AATA board meetings are held.

The extensive repaving of Plymouth Road was also a serious problem. “I don’t even know how we got the buses moving on Plymouth,” Bernstein said.

A note in the board packet indicated that the July-September period consistently shows the lowest on-time performance, due to road construction as well as University of Michigan student move-in during September.

Also during Thursday’s meeting. Chris White, AATA’s manager of service development, told the board that a study on the feasibility of a route connecting the corridor from Plymouth Road down to South State Street should be ready in January. [See Chronicle coverage: "Transit Connector Study: Initial Analysis"]

AATA staff also reported that work is continuing on efforts to design and reconstruct the Blake Transit Center, the downtown terminal for all bus routes. The AATA announced earlier this month that it would receive a $1 million federal grant for the work. The center is located north of William Street, between Fourth and Fifth avenues.

At the news conference held on Oct. 11 to announce the grant – which featured remarks from Congressman John Dingell – AATA’s manager of maintenance Terry Black told The Chronicle that the newly reconstructed facility will be nestled in the southeast corner of the same parcel of land where the current facility and drive are located. The direction of bus traffic on the driveway, which splits the block between Fourth and Fifth avenues, will reverse its current configuration, which takes buses from Fifth to Fourth. The driveway for the newly reconstructed center will send buses out onto Fifth Avenue. Black also indicated that a board room, which had been previously mentioned as a possible feature of the new center, would not be included in the new design.

The grant opportunity itself, part of the State of Good Repair Bus and Bus Facilities Initiative, was identified by Chris White, AATA manger of service development, who told The Chronicle in a followup phone interview that he’d seen it on a Federal Transit Authority email list to which he subscribes. He reported that he’d vetted the allocation of resources to make the grant application with other staff, including CEO Michael Ford.

Their decision to invest the time in applying, White said, was based on the good fit between the grant criteria and the Blake replacement project. Because the AATA was well along in developing plans for replacement of Blake, White said, the challenge of the relatively short application window back in the spring – about six weeks – was somewhat easier to meet. White responded to a Chronicle request for a copy of the grant application by emailing a .pdf file, which includes, among other information, a detailed list of the current structural issues identified with the 23-year-old facility. [.pdf of grant application]

Public Commentary

Two people spoke during public commentary at Thursday’s meeting.

Jim Morgensen told the board he is concerned that the board will concentrate so much on attracting new riders that it forgets about the people who depend on the service to get around. Later in the meeting during another opportunity for public comment, he also noted how difficult it is to determine the source of about $2.4 million paid to AATA by the University of Michigan, which picks up the cost for its affiliates to ride AATA buses.

Alex Holden, representing the Ann Arbor Center for Independent Living, also spoke during public commentary, telling the board that many of the people who use the center live outside of town and have a problem with the bus routes ending at 6:45 p.m. on weekends.

Board members present: Jesse Bernstein, Charles Griffith, Roger Kerson, Sue McCormick, David Nacht

Absent: Rich Robben, Anya Dale

Next regular meeting: Thursday, Nov. 18, 2010 at 6:30 p.m. at the Ann Arbor District Library, 343 S. Fifth Ave., Ann Arbor. The board meeting will be preceeded by a community forum on AATA’s countywide master plan. The forum will start at 5:30 p.m. [confirm date]

Chronicle editor Dave Askins contributed to this report.

Marianne Rzepka

The sky was full of fast-moving clouds – disappearing remnants of a morning’s rain – and temperatures were falling from a week of 90-degree weather into the 70s.

A breeze was the final touch to the perfect weather at Kirk Jones’ Good Scents Gardens in Ypsilanti Township.

“Being out here,” said Jones. “I like this.”

Good thing, because the flowers he grows there are his business. Jones uses the yarrow, zinnias, butterfly weed and agastache for bouquets he puts together and personally delivers to regular subscribers.

Jones explains it as a twist on the idea of community supported agriculture, or CSA, in which subscribers pay a set amount for one season of produce from a local farm. Instead of picking up a carton of vegetables once a week, Good Scents’ customers get a floral bouquet delivered to their home or business once a week.

Like a CSA, in which a subscriber’s take depends on what and how much the farmer raises over a season, Good Scents’ customers get what Jones chooses to plant and what comes up each year. No matter what, he said, they will get a bouquet of flowers each week over the 26-week season.

“If I have to buy commercial flowers, I’ll do it,” he said. “You’ll get your flowers.”

Jones, 52, was working on computer software in 2003 when he started Good Scents, selling bouquets through Downtown Home and Garden in Ann Arbor. (He has a B.A. in biology and another in computer science.)

He soon added deliveries to his Good Scents business, but worked both jobs for five years, dropping out of the computer world in 2008 to work and manage the bouquet business full time.

Now Jones has about 70 customers. About 40 of them get their bouquets delivered to their homes, and the rest at their workplaces.

Kirk Jones of Good Scents Gardens arranges bouquets of flowers in his garage, before delivering them to customers at their homes or offices. (Photos by the writer.)

Jones will pick the flowers a day or two before the bouquets are delivered, going out with buckets and wide-mouthed jars to gather whatever is ready. “If there’s anything blooming, I cut it,” he said.

At home – about four miles and two stop signs from the garden – Jones arranges the flowers in his garage, assembling the bouquets among the tools, the lawn mower and a bright yellow kayak hanging from the rafters.

Each of the bouquets is different, depending on which flowers are available. However, he thinks about what each customer has gotten in the past when he decides which bouquet goes to which customer.

So don’t expect the same thing every week, and don’t expect any of the dozens of bouquets he puts together every week to be identical.

Then, in the early hours of each Monday morning, he begins delivery to homes, then goes out again during business hours bringing bouquets to offices. For customers who prefer bouquets for the weekend, Jones also makes deliveries on Friday. Each week he also retrieves the empty glass jars that contained the previous week’s bouquet, which customers set out for him much like people used to leave their empty milk bottles for the milkman.

“He must do it in the middle of the night,” said Nancy Slezak, one of Jones’ customers who always finds a bouquet in the breezeway of her Ypsilanti home on Fridays from May to mid-October. And, she said, Jones has never missed a week.

Slezak started getting the flowers as a prize in a raffle several years ago. Now, it’s an extravagance she allows herself even though she just recently retired from her teaching job in the Ann Arbor schools.

But the bouquets are beautiful, she said. Sometimes they are pink, purple and cream. Sometimes they come in bright yellows and oranges.

She especially likes the yellow sunflowers and the orange lilies, and she likes how the bouquets are arranged. “He puts thought into it,” Slezak said. “He doesn’t just stick things in a jar.”

Sometimes she breaks up the big bouquets up into smaller sprays to spread around the house or give them away. Sometimes a bouquet will become a birthday gift to give a friend.

Slezak knows the flowers are an extravagance, but “as long as I can afford it, I will get it,” she said.

Jones charges $14 per bouquet, a total of $364 if you get a whole seasons’ worth of blooms – though Jones said he’ll consider something shorter.

Kirk Jones at the large plot he rents from Dawn Farm, where he grows flowers for his business, Good Scents Gardens.

Jones was always growing flowers. He had a plot with the community gardening group Project Grow, and over time the flowers pushed out the vegetables.

He’s still on the Project Grow board, but finds he doesn’t really have time to tend another garden.

Though his interest in flowers turned into his job, Jones said it’s still fun to grow and arrange the bouquets. He doesn’t even mind the early morning deliveries, though he admits that the least likable part of his business is dealing with traffic when he delivers during the day.

During his delivery season, Jones spends more of his time tending the business than the flowers.

He figures he spends about 15 hours a week out at the land he rents from Dawn Farm on Stony Creek Road. His plot is out behind the parking lot, within sight of the donkeys and llamas, just next to the turkeys waiting for Thanksgiving. If the wind is right, you’ll get the full smelly effect of life on a farm.

On the day I stopped by, the gusty wind was easily outmaneuvered, and it was a treat to watch the bees, the butterflies and even the giant orb spider while morning clouds cleared out of a blue, blue sky. A wall of goldenrod barricaded the rows of beds on the far side.

Jones has about 100 beds in the garden, each about 100 square feet with either flowers in bloom, flowers waiting to bloom or flowers finished blooming.

The daffodils, of course, have already disappeared for the year, and the short lilac bushes are nothing but puckered leaves. But there are beds busy with colorful zinnia and dahlias, along with pale pink lisianthus, a light green nicotiana and Frosty Morn sedum.

Jones also grows greenery for his bouquets, including boxwood and red cedar, but not firs, which make every bouquet look like Christmas, he said.

The mix means the color and life of the garden changes as the summer moves on. This can make for a less-than-neat plot, but Jones doesn’t care. It’s the difference between gardening for a business and gardening for yourself.

“I have to remember this is not my yard, and it’s not my garden,” he said. “It’s never going to be perfect.”

For information about Good Scents Gardens, including a gallery of bouquets, is on the firm’s website.

About the writer: Marianne Rzepka, former reporter for the Ann Arbor News and Detroit Free Press, is a Master Gardener who lives in Ann Arbor and thinks it’s fun to turn the compost pile.

Flowers soon to be transformed into bouquets for Good Scents Gardens' customers.

Marianne Rzepka

Take a walk through Sunset Brooks Nature Area in Ann Arbor, and you’ll see the next generation of trees that in the past decade disappeared from the streets of the city.

Ash trees are sprouting up in nature areas and woods in and around the city, the successors of the green, white and black ashes we watched die in droves from an invasion of the emerald ash borer. Some of the new trees sprouted from ash trees, but larger saplings were probably just too small for the borers to bother with when the first invasive wave came through and destroyed the larger trees.

“For sure we’ve seen them in a lot of the natural areas,” says Kerry Gray, the city’s urban forestry and natural resources planning coordinator.

The Ann Arbor forestry crew spent at least three years doing nothing but removing ash trees, says Gray. Crews cut down an estimated 7,000 dead ashes along city streets and another 3,000 or so in parks and some nature areas, she says, at a cost of at least $2 million.

Many homeowners tried to save the trees in their own yards, to no avail. An estimated 30 million ash trees in southeast Michigan alone were wiped out.

The emerald ash borer lays its eggs in the bark of ash trees, and the larva proceed to eat the pulpy tissue just below the bark, in the layer that provides the pathway for water and nutrients to reach the branches and leaves of the tree. Soon, the trails of the borer larva effectively girdle the tree, killing it.

David Cappaert in the Sunset Brooks Nature Area. (Photo by the writer.)

David Cappaert spent about seven years working on the emerald ash borer invasion – his home is just a quick walk from the Sunset Brooks Nature Area, which is located on the city’s north side, north of Sunset and south of M-14. Though he now works for a commercial greenhouse, every day he can see a testament to his work on his garage door: the silhouette of a parasitic wasp that bears his name, Atanycolus cappaerti.

The wasp, using its long ovipositor, drills through ash bark to lay an egg near an emerald ash borer larva. When the eggs hatch, they feed on the beetle larva, says Cappaert.

Whether the parasitic wasp exerts some control over the emerald ash borer will be “interesting,” he says. “I don’t predict it will keep (the beetle) under control, but you never know.”

Cappaert got involved in the emerald ash borer saga when the insect was first identified and several counties, including Washtenaw, were placed under quarantine – meaning that no ash wood could be taken outside their borders.

Michigan State University researchers set up shop at the University of Michigan’s Matthaei Botanical Gardens to conduct research on the insect, and they signed up Cappaert, an entomologist, to do some of the work.

What is now Atanycolus cappaerti showed up in ash trees at Seven Lakes State Park near Holly, Cappaert says.

It’s not that common to have a newly identified insect named for you, says Deborah McCullough, professor of forest entomology at MSU and the go-to researcher on the emerald ash borer. But Cappaert is the reason that the parasitic wasp was finally identified. “He leaned on the taxonomy guy to get it identified,” she says. And now that researchers know what they’re looking for, she says, “we’re finding this parasitic wasp in a number of places now.”

Cappaert says that besides Atanycolus cappaerti, two other likely killers of the emerald ash borer have been found in Ohio, and there could be more.

Atanycolus cappaerti, a parasitic wasp that feeds on emerald ash borer larva, is named after David Cappaert, an Ann Arbor entomologist. (Photo courtesy of David Cappaert.)

Will parasitic wasps someday wipe out the emerald ash borers? Cappaert doesn’t think so. Probably the emerald ash borer will continue to be in the environment, since there are always new ash trees around. But it may reach equilibrium either because there are not a lot of ash trees to eat or because of enemies such as Atanycolus cappaerti.

The destructive emerald ash borer invasion first appeared in southeastern Michigan, and studies have found traces of the pest dating back to the early to mid-1990s. Now the borer has moved on, spreading to 14 states and Canada, with its farthest reach so far in Minnesota, New York and Kentucky, as well as Quebec.

Though I had hoped that every last emerald ash borer had moved on from this area, that’s not the case, says McCullough. Research by McCullough and her students show there still are emerald ash borers in the neighborhood, but studies aren’t sure how many. The insects “probably will never be gone completely – at least not for a long, long time,” she says.

And though Ann Arbor might not have many more ash trees to lose, the emerald ash beetle is not far away. The beetle population is very much at or near its peak in the Lansing and Grand Rapids areas, says McCullough.

One positive result of the years of researching the emerald ash borer is that there now is a protective treatment for ash. Emamectin benzoate, marketed under the name TREE-äge (pronounce triage), must be applied by professionals. The root-injected treatment was developed only two years ago but seems to be nearly 100% effective for at least that long, says McCullough.

I remember writing stories about the emerald ash borer invasion for The Ann Arbor News, and one of the most interesting things about the story was how scientists responded to the insect’s invasion. It was known primarily in Asia and somehow was imported into this country, probably on packing material.

At first, there was little information on the bug – only a taxonomic description and a few paragraphs in Chinese (the emerald ash borer is native to China, Korea, Japan, Mongolia, Taiwan and eastern Russia).

Researchers had to find out the bug’s life cycle – when the borers fed, mated, laid eggs and emerged from the trees. Did the emerald ash borer overwinter – that is, did they stay alive through the winter? (Some larva did.) Would the insects lay eggs in any trees besides ash? (They don’t seem to.) Why does the emerald ash borer exist with some native ash trees in China? (Good question.)

At the outset, researchers brought in pieces of infected ash bark to identify emerald ash borer eggs. But at that point, they didn’t even know what the eggs looked like, and the ash bark has “all kinds of weird stuff,” McCullough said. “Eventually, we figured it out,” she says.

Leaves of an ash tree.

Scientists also figured out how to build effective traps. They found that emerald ash borers were attracted to purple and to stressed trees. They measured volatile gases given off by the ashes. They girdled trees and counted bugs.

“We did some fun stuff,” says McCullough. She does admit that there were some not-so-fun times – stomping through poison ivy, sweating through top summer temperatures and slapping bugs.

After all these years, McCullough says she’d still like to know how the beetles choose which ash tree to infect. “Why do beetles fly past really good host trees?” she asks.

Another problem is how to tell if the emerald ash borers have already infected an ash. It can take a year or longer for an infected tree to show signs of dying, and it’s not so easy to see the emerald ash borers flying around. “They’re up in the tops of the trees,” says McCullough. “They’re fast, and they’re little.”

Researchers are still working on the problem, she says. “We want to model how the population spreads, so we can predict where the beetle is,” says McCullough. In the past, she says, “we were always trying to catch up with the beetle.”

Though any new findings are too late to save the thousands of dead ash trees removed in Ann Arbor, the story’s not done. McCullough and others studying the problem are fielding calls from places that are only now seeing the first signs of the destructive insects.

And Gray is keeping an eye on it from Ann Arbor. “We’re kind of all waiting to see what will happen,” she says.

A Second Chance for Would-Be Conservation Stewards

In my April column, I wrote about the Michigan Conservation Stewardship Program in Washtenaw County, a 40-hour course on environmental issues for the public. The program, hosted by the county’s Extension Service, lines up a variety of speakers over two months to introduce ecological issues through talks on wetlands, forests, grasslands and other natural resources.

The course was planned for the spring but postponed until this fall because of a shortfall of enrollees. The course is now scheduled to start on Saturday, Sept. 11, with an introductory class lasting a full day. After that, classes will meet every Wednesday from 6-9 p.m. beginning Sept. 15 and ending Nov. 3, with two additional all-day meetings on Saturday Oct. 9 and 23.

Sometimes participants will be up to their waders in a stream or foraging for plants along a railroad track. Everyone will have to do 40 hours of conservation-related volunteer work before graduating. Last year, projects included surveying parkland and installing a native plants garden.

The course costs $250, which is due by Sept. 2. You can get an application and brochure online or at the extension office, 705 N. Zeeb Road. If you have any questions, call Bob Bricault at 734-997-1678.

If you’re interested in knowing more about how the environment works, this is the course to take.

About the writer: Marianne Rzepka, former reporter for the Ann Arbor News and Detroit Free Press, is a Master Gardener who lives in Ann Arbor and thinks it’s fun to turn the compost pile.

Marianne Rzepka

If you like going touring other people’s gardens – especially because someone else is doing all the work – you’ll love Hidden Lake Gardens.

They’ve got a guy who mows the lawns full time, along with a couple of part-timers. They’ve got people on their staff who can move a full-grown tree in less than half an hour. They’ve got volunteers who help weed and dig and plant, all so you can take the time to literally stop and smell whatever flower is currently blooming.

There are acres of displays, including an extensive collection of dwarf and rare conifers, a hillside of hostas, and the requisite annuals and perennials, along with a tidy conservatory and miles of trails. If you bring your lunch (yes, there are picnic areas) and some bug spray, you’ll be able to spend the day looking at plants, listening to the birds and appreciating the swaths of lawn that someone else has to mow.

“Our mission is the enjoyment and education of the public,” says Steve Courtney, who manages the site for Michigan State University, “and enjoyment is first.”

Courtney recently gave me a guided tour of the grounds. Located west of Tipton, in Lenawee County, Hidden Lake Gardens is at least a 40-minute drive from Ann Arbor (if you can avoid any backups at the construction on M-52, south of I-94). But if it were any closer, it wouldn’t be the quiet hideaway I found when I went to visit last week.

Hidden Lake Gardens is run by Michigan State University, the state’s center of all plant knowledge. Why it is so far from MSU’s East Lansing campus makes sense only when you find out that that’s where Harry Fee chose to live more than 80 years ago.

Fee’s family made its money in utilities, and in 1926 Fee took his share, intending to retire to the countryside. He wanted property with a lake, and Hidden Lake fit the bill. It’s a natural kettle lake, the result of glacial formations eons ago, with a depth of about 65 feet. (Fee had his sailboat sunk in the lake for some reason unknown, and Courtney says it’s down there still.)

The property is located in the Irish Hills, so it includes some interesting geological features, including two other kettle lakes and a kame – a moundlike structure of loose soils left by a glacier.

Fee’s first plan was to become a gentleman farmer. That didn’t work out, so he decided to go into nursery plants. When the Depression hit in the ’30s, Fee decided he wouldn’t compete with local nurseries, and he’d just grow plants.

He was no landscaper. There is no design or plan for this site, which Fee said was simply developed as he went along. So, you still will find nursery stock, like the two hillsides of vinca – properly labeled – as you drive along.

The view from the top of Juniper Hill at Hidden Lake Gardens. (Photos by the writer.)

Fee’s idea was to set up a series of “scenic pictures” for people to appreciate. He put in a road that went around the lake and up onto Juniper Hill. You can still drive up there today and see the wildflowers, the junipers and conifers along the lower edge.

In 1945, Fee donated the property to what was then Michigan State College, though he was still a figure in the development of the property until his death in 1954. Over the years, MSU has added to the property, and today’s Hidden Lake Gardens include 755 acres.

An estimated 50,000 people visit the grounds every year, but when I was out there on a weekday, I had the place pretty much to myself. It is the perfect place to hide away.

There’s the conservatory with a display of bonsai just outside. A colorful demonstration garden is filled with perennials. There are collections of ginkos and maples. (But don’t look for the ash collection, which nowadays is only a collection of dead tree trunks, courtesy of the emerald ash borer invasion.)

If your Aunt Minnie loves gardens, but is in no shape to hike into the back 40, it’s not a problem. You can drive her to the top of Juniper Hill to see the view. The road passes right next to the hosta garden, where she’ll only have to walk a few steps.

Hosta fans probably have already seen the garden at Hidden Lake Gardens, which was set up along one edge of Hidden Lake on the site of Fee’s original rock garden.

Hostas at Hidden Lake Gardens.

The Michigan Hosta Society planted the garden and takes care of the 800 or so cultivars, says Courtney. The thing to appreciate is not some rare hosta – there are none, he says – but to see the variety of plants, including some from hybridizers.

And don’t miss the Harper Collection of Dwarf and Rare Conifers, which Courtney rates as the best in North America. (If he’s pushed, he admits it’s the best if you count South America, too.)

In 2012, the collection is set to host the national meeting of the American Conifer Society. The only problem is finding the closest hotel to put them in, says Courtney, who is on the society’s board. It might not be the worst thing in the world for them to camp out there.

Even if you’re not an expert in conifer taxonomy, you can sit in a tidy gazebo and smell the junipers in the collection, which includes the towering snake spruce and the weeping Japanese larch. There is the Cedar of Lebanon, which shouldn’t even be growing in this climate, says Courtney. “The first five years, it lost every one of its needles,” he says. Now, it’s flourishing.

There are trees that light up the landscape, and some unusual specimens – genetic oddities that look like two different trees growing as one.

The collection was started in the 1980s with trees from Justin “Chub” Harper, who donated his conifer collection when it got too big for his backyard in East Moline, Ind.

Harper, who died in March 2009, was the kind of collector whose interest jumped from roses to day lilies. Then he found conifers, filling his own yard and that of his neighbors. In 1980, MSU staff headed over to Harper’s house and loaded three tractor trailers with 351 trees to start the collection.

Some of those original conifers are still in the collection, but trees are added and subtracted to the collection all the time, says Courtney. Twice a year, decisions are made on whether to keep a specimen or “send it for a short trip on the chipper truck,” he says.

Maybe that’s why those conifers look so good – even lush, if you can use that word to describe a pine tree. But if you start to wonder why your arborvitae can’t look this good, consider the fact that every autumn the Hidden Lake Gardens staff put up an electrified fence around the conifer collection and around the trees on Juniper Hill to thwart the deer looking for a breakfast, lunch or dinner.

The namesake of Hidden Lake Gardens – a view of the lake.

And consider that Hidden Lake Gardens runs with a staff (including the mowers) of six full-timers and about 25 seasonal workers, as well as a number of volunteers who run the gift shop and do some of the gardening. The gardens’ budget is about $1 million, Courtney says, and that includes endowments for the hosta and conifer collections. The rest comes from donations, whatever comes in with the $3 entry fee and things like copyright payments for two kinds of trees. MSU is on the hook for Courtney’s salary and infrastructure, such as taking care of the roadways.

The gardens might not be too close to East Lansing, but it is not forgotten. When MSU horticulturists find they’ve got too many trees around, they might move them over to Hidden Lake Gardens. They’re also working on some new shrub specimens and on cultivating some of the trees with interesting characteristics that are already on the grounds.

And there is other research going on. In the past, a drug company used trees on the ground in their study of the breast cancer drug Taxol, says Courtney. Currently, traps have been set out to see if a new insect pest, the sirex woodwasp, has made it into the area.

Though last week was the first time I’d been to Hidden Lake Gardens, I’ve resolved to come back in the spring to see the corridor of crabapples and lilacs blooming. In the fall, I want to see the colors on the sweet gum and the tupelo trees by the conservatory. And there are a number of sassafras and maples – Mr. Fee had one grove of sugar maples, now towering over everything else, specifically planted in the woods.

And winter will be the time to really see those conifers again.

For Something Completely Different: Dead Beetle Giveaway

The only people who don’t hate Japanese beetles are people who have never had them around.

The iridescent green-and-brown bugs look kind of interesting – until you see hundreds, or even thousands of them, on the plants in your yard doing the two things they have evolved to do: Eating the leaves and, let’s say, reproducing.

A Japanese beetle. (Photo courtesy of Michigan State University)

Here’s your chance for revenge.

On Wednesday, July 28, Michigan State University will be giving away bags of frozen Japanese beetles, an estimated 15-20% of them infected with the protozoan pathogen Ovavesicula popilliae. You don’t have to pronounce it, you just have to know that MSU entomologist David Smitley has been studying it for years and found it effective in cutting the Japanese beetle population.

The frozen bug giveaway will be from 10 a.m.-noon at MSU’s Tollgate Research and Extension Farm near Novi. At 10 a.m., 10:30 a.m. and 11 a.m., there will be talks on the Japanese beetle project, then everyone will get a bag with about 50 of the freshly frozen bugs. You get to take them home and put them in your own yard to help establish the pathogen in the soil. (Go online for more details about this event.)

The pathogen doesn’t kill Japanese beetles; it just weakens them so that, for example, an infected female will not lay eggs.

Brought here from Connecticut, the pathogen infects only Japanese beetles, not people, pets or other insects, Smitely said. His biggest worry is that he’ll have more than the expected number of Japanese beetle haters.

About two years ago, he had a similar giveaway on a golf course south of Detroit and ran out of the infected insects. The people who went away bug-less were not happy, Smitley said when I talked to him a few days ago. “They were mad,” he said. “They were really mad.”

So get in line early. I plan to be there too, to get me some of those frozen beetles. Once again proving that revenge – even on bugs – is best served cold.

About the writer: Marianne Rzepka, former reporter for the Ann Arbor News and Detroit Free Press, is a Master Gardener who lives in Ann Arbor and thinks it’s fun to turn the compost pile.

Marianne Rzepka

There’s a lot to learn from growing a garden, and a lot of Ann Arbor’s schools are finding that out.

Gone are the days when plant studies meant each student sprouted a lone bean seed in a Styrofoam cup. Now students as young as 5 are planting vegetable gardens and watching them grow.

“It’s, like, cool to see things grow,” says Yonatan Hodish, 13, a seventh grader at Ann Arbor Open @ Mack.

I visited garden projects at three Ann Arbor schools – Ann Arbor Open, Bryant Elementary and Burns Park Elementary – to see how tending a garden is helping kids learn. Though much of the growing season is ahead of us, students were able to harvest some early crops before leaving on Friday for summer vacation. Volunteers will tend the gardens over the summer, but kids will return in the fall to see how the foundation they laid this spring has paid off in edibles.

The garden at Ann Arbor Open is in a former sand lot located between Miller Road and a tennis court, along the now-closed driveway and not far from the school’s butterfly garden and a native plants area.

The sand provided a good base for the garden, says teacher Aina Bernier, but it needed a lot of compost and manure before students could start planting there.

Seventh- and eighth-grade students work in the garden as an elective, and in addition to planting, weeding and harvesting, they do experiments, such as planting old seeds to see how they’ll grow, or treating plants differently – less or more water, less or more sun – to see how they’ll do.

Griffin Roy, 13, likes gardening at school. “Having a garden at home is kinda like fun,” he says, “but with friends at school it’s much better, in my opinion, because you can socialize.”

Amani Imran, left, and Rina Ishida, both 7, stayed behind to finish up weeding their class's garden plot at Bryant Elementary School. (Photos by the writer.)

At Bryant Elementary School, students literally had a long row to hoe this semester.

First a strip of ground was plowed up in a large field up a small hill near the school. Then students set to work picking the rocks out of the bed and laying out 17 plots, each about 2 yards square, one for each class.

But the gardens still weren’t ready for planting, because “Mrs. K wasn’t happy with the soil,” says Bryant second-grade teacher Jeanne Kitzmann, making fun of her own insistence. Students had to put in topsoil and composted manure to get the soil in shape before seeds and seedlings could go in the ground.

Kitzmann, who grew up on an Iowa farm, had her second grade sow radishes, lettuce, watermelon and sunflowers. They had a radish harvest several weeks ago and a salad party before the end of the academic year Friday. Not bad for students of 7 or 8 years.

“One of the best things about working in the garden is that it fit into every grade level,” says Kitzmann. Kindergartners were learning about soil, first graders about plants and weather, second graders about plants.

And when Kitzmann’s class was picking rocks out of the soil, they were studying geology in the classroom. When they were measuring out the plots, they were using the metric measurements they were learning in school.

Second-grader Anthony Walker, 7, fills buckets with wood chips to spread on the walkways at the Burns Park Elementary garden.

Students at Burns Park Elementary School started their own garden this year, too. By the end of the school year, kindergarteners were tending sunflowers and morning glories, hoping the two rows will intertwine into a green arch by the time classes start again in the fall. When this year’s first graders return as second graders, they should be able to see how the three types of beans they planted have climbed their three stick-and-twine teepees that were set up this spring.

In the past few weeks, the third graders planted popcorn, which was just starting to poke out of the ground when the academic year ended. Fourth graders have two large beds with pumpkins and honeydew melons.

And since they won’t be back in September – they’re moving on to middle school – the fifth graders worked on the lettuce and radishes, which were harvested before the end of the school year.

Every Thursday, students could spend their recess working in the garden. Students worked on their own class projects or helped with other beds, including tomatoes, potatoes, strawberries, flowers and a row of raspberries.

Parent Lynda Norton estimates that up to 150 students regularly showed up on Thursdays, spending time recording the temperature, looking for bugs and pulling weeds, instead of playing on the nearby playground equipment.

Like many gardens, the 5,000-square-foot garden is much bigger than what was originally planned, says Norton. The idea was to start small, maybe a third of what is there now. “We had a plan,” she says, “then it morphed.”

Students laid out the beds, hauled wood chips and compost and made signs for the rows of vegetables. But parents have gotten just as involved.

They did the heavy lifting – amending the hard clay with compost, building raised beds and some of the structures, such as the strawberry bed. Parents volunteered their time helping the students in the garden, and there have been a number of donations from families, including some stepping stones dropped off near the fence recently.

And now that summer is here, there is a waiting list of families who are volunteering to do watering, weeding and harvesting at the garden.

Though the garden isn’t even a year old, it looks established, with a fence built with the help of a grant from the Ann Arbor Public Schools Educational Foundation, and a neat shed, purchased with a grant from Lowe’s, that shelters gardening tools and garden diaries of some of the students.

Last week, a number of students in the garden during recess headed for the watering cans or spray bottles. Those with spray bottles spent some time watering fellow students instead of the plants. But others made sure their flowers and vegetables got some hydrating.

Thirteen-year-old Alex Schmidt, a seventh grader, shows off the lettuce he picked in the garden at Ann Arbor Open @ Mack on Thursday.

At Ann Arbor Open, watering is just as popular an activity in the garden – last week, that meant making some mud to squish around in – but students really liked seeing how much everything grew over the final weeks of school, especially when they returned after a week away and found both their vegetables and the weeds green and lush.

Not everything grew so well. Early in the spring, 13-year-old Madeline Qi and her friends planted radish seeds packaged about 15 years ago. As might be expected, they didn’t grow very well. Even the radishes that grew from the newer seeds had some problems. “Our poor radishes,” Qi says. “We kept pulling them up to look at them.”

But she has hopes for the pumpkin vine, so she’ll be back over the summer to check out its progress. “I have never grown a pumpkin before,” she says, “so I want to see how it does.”

Bernier says students are encouraged to come out and see how the garden is doing this summer, and she’ll email everyone if something is ready to be harvested.

Eighth grader Marley Beaver, 14, was out on the last day of school helping with the lettuce harvest. She’ll be going to Skyline High School next year and the worst thing, she says, is that “they don’t have a garden there.”

On the last day in the garden last week, the sun was shining and there was a breeze when the students came out to harvest lettuce for end-of-the-school year salads.

You know the answer to this question already, but it was posed to 12-year-old Fiona Powell: In the last days before school is out for the summer, would you rather be sitting inside or out in the garden?

“Definitely,” she says, “out here.”

Seventh-graders Ben Van Dijk, left, and Sam Lewis, both 13, harvested lettuce in the garden at Ann Arbor Open @ Mack at the end of the school year.

From left to right: Taylor Hanback, 7; Shyanne Wilson, 7; Daniel Dotson, 8, second-grade teacher Cheryl Ervin; Aboulaye Sylla, 8; Michael Davis, 7; Omar Mohammad, 7; and Ezra Conway, 7, take a close look at the lettuce in their garden plot at Bryant Elementary School.

Third-grader Quentavia Keene, 9, waters the flowers in the Burns Park Elementary garden.

Third-graders Claire Bott, left, and Callie Hastie, both 9, pick peas in the Burns Park Elementary garden.

About the writer: Marianne Rzepka, former reporter for the Ann Arbor News and Detroit Free Press, is a Master Gardener who lives in Ann Arbor and thinks it’s fun to turn the compost pile.