Neighbours of the Hendryx Street Park gathered last Saturday to brainstorm ideas for cleaning up the derelict park. They're hoping the community will help out by volunteering and contributing donations. Nelson Post photo.
A neighbourhood meeting at the Hendryx Street Park last weekend resulted in plans to band together and try to save the downtown greenspace.
The garden park was established about 10 years ago by Earth Matters with the aim of giving the Queen City’s downtown core a self sustaining green space for community enjoyment and educational purposes,
Earth Matters and a number of local citizens started out strong and turned the blank piece of land (located next door to the former Holy Smoke Culture Shop building at the foot of Hendryx Street) into a low-maintenance, self-sustaining garden filled with fruit and nut trees, herbs and self-sowing plants.
But over the years, as funding from governments and other sources has dried up, the garden has fallen into disrepair because no one has been on the site regularly to do the maintenance needed.
The situation came to a head recently when a local man, described by garden neighbour, Jan Formby as “a colourful sort of guy,” began living in the garden and started taking maintenance into his own hands.
“He started changing the garden,” Formby said. “He cut boughs off the trees and changed some of the entrances.”
She said he also did damage to some of the delicate perennial plants in the garden and began planting vegetables, which is not allowed by law in parks like the Hendryx Street Park.
It was when these two situations came together that neighbours began to make contact with the Nelson Cares Society, which oversees Earth Matters, to see what could be done about the state of the park.
Nelson Cares Society executive director, Rona Park said the society currently leases the land from the City of Nelson, and if the park can’t be cleaned up and viable in the near future, the land will have to be turned back over to the city.
“We have a license to operate the park with the city,” Park said. “We’ve kept it running every year with the hope that we might be able to manage it. But we’re at the point of giving it back to the city because there’s no money and no plans.”
She noted that the park has never had core funding, and has always been operated from grant funding garnered by volunteers with Earth Matters who wanted to create work for themselves.
Neighbours hope community will help
While the prospects for retaining the park might seem dim, the spirit that came out of the meeting on Saturday was that the community must come together to keep the Hendryx Street Park alive.
Formby and other neighbours around the park have plans to come together to clean up the park and help restore it to near its former glory.
They’re also hoping other community members and businesses will come forward and volunteer to help out, or make donations – either in the form of cash or plants.
The group is hoping to come up with enough money, through donations and grants, to pay a gardener to take care of the park during the summer months.
“We’re reconstituting the community around it,” Park said. “That means so much more to me, to pull together and have Earth Matters maintain the contract.”
Formby hopes the garden will not only be cleaned up, but returned to its original glory – to be used by local school groups for educational purposes.
City would consider proposals around park
Nelson city councillor, Deb Kozak was unaware that the park was in trouble and said she hopes Nelson Cares will bring any concerns to the City of Nelson before abandoning it.
“If Nelson Cares would come to council with a proposal, saying this it the work we’ve been doing, then we would consider it,” Kozak said. “If they’re unable to maintain it, I hope they’ll come back to us with some deeper information so we can make a good decision on it.”
She said another option could be for Nelson Cares to partner with a local service organization that could help with the operations, like many other parks in the city.
Kozak could not say what would happen to the land if it were to be transferred back to the city.
To get more information on how you can help with plans to maintain the Hendryx Street Park, contact Rona Park at Nelson Cares by telephone at 250.352.6011.