From the
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel online
Thorny issue isn't gardener's work in park
Laurel Walker
July 22, 2011
Mary Krauski is a guerrilla gardener, but her initial feelings of guilt for tampering with public property are behind her.
At first she would show up at her favorite park in the Town of Lisbon during odd hours - Sunday mornings, for instance - when she figured the town workers wouldn't see her. Then she'd get busy.
"I didn't want anyone to yell at me," she said.
Her crime?
As any gardener knows, when you see weeds after a recent rainfall, and the pulling is easy, you pull.
She returned often, pulling mounds of thistles and other weeds each time. Pretty soon, she was planting perennials and prairie plants, all the while looking over her shoulder for fear she'd get in trouble.
She started just for fun. Now, it's a commitment. Mary Krauski has adopted a spot in the Lisbon Community Park that's "hers."
And no one's yelling.
In fact, Lisbon parks director John Greiten is shouting for joy, wishing there were others like her.
"Mary's a godsend, I tell you," he said. "I can't say enough. The way staffing and budget cuts are, to have someone get that involved, it just helps tremendously."
On a sweltering morning this week, I met Mary at the 125-acre park at Lake Five and Oakwood Roads in Lisbon. We drove past manicured playgrounds, picnic shelters, acres of wild areas covered with prairie plants, and then we walked along a trail until we reached some raised, landscaped flower beds,
"This is my area," she said, pride in her voice.
For the third year, she's the self-designated caretaker who hauls her own tools, plants - many of them donated by others, sometimes a little mulch and, in hot spells like the one this week, buckets of water from a distant water supply in the park.
"This is the culprit," she said, a thin thistle in her gloved hand. After three years, she's still pulling them, but they're not nearly as difficult as that first batch.
In June 2009, Krauski was taking a birthday walk with a friend on a trail that passes the raised round flower bed, about 15 feet across. With the soil damp from rain, they both started pulling weeds. She worked on cleaning it up that first year but figured it would never look good because two other raised beds next to it were filled with thistles. So she started on those, too, pulling what she figures is thousands of thistles last year and this.
Not until her second year of guerrilla gardening did she meet Greiten, who's learned to trust her instincts.
She's met many other park users along the way - a bonus.
"People used to tell me, 'You're never going to be able to get that (bed of thistles) out.' " Now, they give her encouragement and compliments.
The beds - heavily mulched and looking spiffy when I saw them - have some lovely plants: blazing star, coneflower, wild geranium, coreopsis, Japanese anemone, and now in bloom, day lilies. In order to introduce a little color and happiness early in the growing season, she also planted 80 tulip and daffodil bulbs last fall, though the deer nipped at the tulips.
She looks around and sees small beds elsewhere in the park where others could make a difference - and no, she's not looking for help in "her" area.
"I think that when people see something like a park that has gone to ruin, they wonder, 'Why doesn't someone fix it?'" she said. "I used to think that, but now I see there's room for me to fix it ."
Greiten said the idea could catch on. One woman who home schools her children adopted a small waterfall area in the park and tends to that, using it for lessons.
It's the kind of thing people could do in any park that doesn't have the benefit of large supporting casts of "friends" - like "Friends of Retzer Nature Center." There is, I suppose, always the danger that some overly helpful soul will do more damage than good, but when in doubt, ask.
"It kind of gives people a sense of ownership," Greiten said.
Krauski, who isn't even a Lisbon resident, lives minutes away from the park, which includes part of the county's Bugline Recreation Trail.
"I love this park," said Krauski, an artist who uses the park for inspiration in her creative work as much as she uses the trails for exercise.
Mary Krauski and her husband, Bob, own Krauski Art Glass in Hartland, a studio that produces stained and etched glass art. Mary, who does much of the design work, said they recently finished a commission for the University of Wisconsin's Department of Forestry and Wildlife Ecology that was nature-focused.
Though she spends many hours a week gardening in the park, she still spends full time and then some on their art glass business.
"My real work is so picky and precise, and I'm always trying to please my clients," she said. "But this (gardening) is freeing." She can be spontaneous. She'll plant something that she came across on sale or that someone gave her.
She likes to think of her little section of the park as her personal art work. But in the business, she can usually visualize the end result and work toward it.
"I never get there with a garden," she said. "There's always more to do."
WGM Anna Zatonskih
GM Daniel Fridman
