Garden gets ready to spread its wings
$3.6M expansion starts today, and 'we're not done'
Monday, October 10, 2005
The Huntsville Botanical Garden will break ground today on a nature center and children's garden, additions being billed as Huntsville's answer to the Tennessee Aquarium in Chattanooga.
The official ground-breaking ceremony is scheduled for 10 a.m. at the garden, 4747 Bob Wallace Ave.
The $3.6 million project includes a nature center with what the garden says will be the largest seasonal butterfly house in the country, an education center, an amphitheater and a 2-acre children's garden. The complex will be built near the entrance and is scheduled to open June 1.
Since the garden opened in 1988, the focus has been on developing the landscape and becoming part of the community, said Paula Steigerwald, chief executive officer of the garden. For the last several years, the garden has added attractions specifically for children and families such as water play features during the summer and the scarecrow trail now on display, laying the groundwork for the latest project.
The expansion "raises us to a level not just of being a garden in Alabama that we're proud of, but something people all over the country will talk about," said Harvey Cotten, the garden's chief operating officer.
The garden's expansion includes a nature center with a turtle pond, frog pond, waterfall and "critter corner" as well as a 9,000-square-foot shade-cloth-covered butterfly house that Cotten and Steigerwald hope will become a major destination for students and tourists.
At the new 4,000-square-foot education center, students can receive an orientation to the garden and have educational programs. A 250-seat amphitheater will provide a "classroom under the sky."
Volunteers have designed the children's garden area, which includes eight separate spaces. A space garden will include a space station node, a clock that will shoot out water at each hour and an aquaponic area to show a different way to grow plants. The section will also include a dinosaur garden where "bones" will be buried in sand, a rainbow garden featuring a hand-cranked windmill that has prisms where the blades would be, a half-acre wooded area, a bamboo garden, a maze garden, a storybook garden and an international garden.
"We want this to be their place they remember warmly as they grow up," Steigerwald said.
The project's scope is a result of a marketing research study the garden commissioned in 2001 from New South Research in Birmingham. The research company said the nature center and butterfly house "would allow us to do for Huntsville what the aquarium did for Chattanooga," she said.
The garden had quietly worked on raising the $3.6 million for the project, launching the public phase of the campaign last spring. The current total raised is almost $3 million. Other improvements beyond the nature center and children's garden include a restroom near the aquatic garden and a half-mile road extension that will open up 45 acres of the garden's undeveloped land.
The road extension will be put to use for the garden's annual Galaxy of Lights, which opens in November.
Along with soliciting its 6,000 member families for donations, the garden also is selling engraved bricks for the expansion area and naming opportunities for the new exhibits.
Even with the nature center and children's gardens in the works, Cotten said visitors can continue to expect changes over the next several years at the garden.
"While this is the largest project to date, and the one we're most excited about, we're definitely not done," he said. "We're still adolescents in the world of botanical gardens."
© 2005 The Huntsville Times
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