On Monday, Aug. 8, Mike Hietpas cut the ribbon officially dedicating a pollinator garden in memory of former Dane County Supervisor and teacher Julie Schwellenbach. The garden is located near the front of C.H. Bird Elementary School, adjacent to the parking lot accessible from North Bird Street on the north side of Sun Prairie.

A sign containing information about Julie Schwellenbach and the importance of pollinator gardens sits at the new garden dedicated Monday, Aug. 8 in Schwellenbach's honor and memory by her friends and family.

On Monday, Aug. 8, Mike Hietpas cut the ribbon officially dedicating a pollinator garden in memory of former Dane County Supervisor and teacher Julie Schwellenbach. The garden is located near the front of C.H. Bird Elementary School, adjacent to the parking lot accessible from North Bird Street on the north side of Sun Prairie.

A sign containing information about Julie Schwellenbach and the importance of pollinator gardens sits at the new garden dedicated Monday, Aug. 8 in Schwellenbach's honor and memory by her friends and family.

Friends and family of Julie Schwellenbach dedicated a blooming pollinator garden in her memory on Monday, Aug. 8 during a 45-minute ceremony at C.H. Bird Elementary School, 1170 N. Bird St., where students will be able to explore the garden and its many residents.

“I’m absolutely thrilled to have this butterfly pollinator garden and dedication to her in Julie’s memory and her legacy,” remarked C.H Bird Elementary Principal Nicole Toepfer, who said children will use the garden to observe its plants and insects. “I can really see our little ones coming out here and observing what do they see and getting super-excited when they see the insects on the plants and things like that.”

Eva Bellinger told the story of working with Julie after she learned her two youngest children, Karen and Luke, were both on the autism spectrum.

“When Karen’s third grade teacher said I really think you should home-school Karen, Julie continued to give me lots of information even though Karen was no longer at the school,” Bellinger recalled. “She gave me catalogs, she gave me suggestions on what to use for teaching at home and this allowed . . . the long and short of it is that Julie really helped Karen and Luke and they’re grateful enough for it to be here today.”

Bellinger, who describes herself as a self-taught gardener after growing up in Chicago with a concrete backyard and referred to her yard near Bird Elementary as “suburban gumbo,” recalled only recently learning about Schwellenbach’s love for native plants.

The volunteer manager of the Lettuce Dream Garden at Vandenburg Park, Bellinger was thankful for Schwellenbach’s nature. “I do know how much of a blessing she was to our kids,” Bellinger told the small gathering near the front parking lot. “And I am so delighted that she has this legacy here at Bird School — a legacy of of the love and the good, good judgment and the great ideas for helping our kids and her love for the garden.”

Community Schools Coordinator at C.H. Bird School Shenika Moss, a co-founder of the Lettuce Dream Garden, praised the dedication of those who have a vision for the legacy they want to leave — like the teacher who left money in her will to help establish Lettuce Dream.

“I think it’s very important that us who are still here, keep that alive. This is life right here,” Moss said, gesturing to Schwellenbach’s garden. “Those women are here and they watching us and they’re happy because their vision is here. They see it. And we’re going to honor that in every way that we can to make sure that these flowers are beautiful and they remain beautiful and that people can come and look at them,” Moss said.

Moss thanked the crowd for gathering in Schwellenbach’s memory, but couldn’t resist one last look at the garden. “This is just beautiful. When we planted it, it wasn’t like that. So I keep looking at it because the kids need to see this. These were very small, small plants. They were nowhere near this tall at all.”

Former Dane County Board Chair and current District 3 Dane County Supervisor Analiese Eicher recalled serving on the county board with Schwellenbach, but also remembered asking her to run for office. Eicher recalled thinking that Schwellenbach would not want to serve because she recently retired and was tending to flowers.

“But she did and she served incredibly,” Eicher remembered. “Her perspective as someone who had worked so many years in education, and her perspective, as you know, this incredible gardener and just a perspective as this amazing human being made her an incredible county supervisor.”

Heather Dubois Bourenane, who is the executive director of the Wisconsin Public Education Network, co-founded the Sun Prairie Action Resource Coalition (SPARC) with Schwellenbach.

“When she invited me to join this new group that she was starting, I was super excited to do so and especially excited to find a partner in collaborating for solutions that would help us identify and address some of the challenges that might not be being resolved by other organizations in town,” Bourenane recalled.

“And SPARC was a way for us to do that. The Sun Prairie Action Resource Coalition has worked since 2011 to bring people together here in Sun Prairie. It makes sure people are aware of all the amazing opportunities that we have here in our community to come together to understand how and when we can raise our collective voice to make change and to address some of the challenges that are facing especially our kids,” Bourenane said.

Because of Schwellenbach’s work with the Sun Prairie Education Association, SPARC was able to address student hunger with a snack program, getting students registered to vote and educating the community, according to Bourenane.

“But I think more importantly, I’m just grateful to have had the great gift of her friendship, and to have seen the way that she used things like her own amazing garden to bring people together, to pull people in, to create connections and build community everywhere she went,” Bourenane added. “But most importantly, to spread this contagious culture of joy wherever she went — and to put that joy in places where she saw that it wasn’t already. And so I look at this gorgeous garden that’s just in its first year and I’m so grateful that it will bring joy to so many kids and their teachers in years to come. On behalf of everyone at SPARC, I just want to make sure that I can’t emphasize enough how deeply missed she is and how much she meant to all of us and how beautiful her legacy of joy is in the work that we continue to this day.”

Sun Prairie Parks, Recreation and Forestry Department Parks and Forestry Division Manager Cindy Burtley described the Pollinator Garden program the City of Sun Prairie has available.

“I just want to have a sincere thank you to everyone who helped make this garden possible. We’re really lucky here in Sun Prairie to have several pollinator champions just like you guys to make projects like this happen,” Burtley said. “They really wouldn’t happen without all of you.”

Former District 4 Alder Al Guyant recalled moving to Sun Prairie to retire and help raise his grandkids. That is, until Schwellenbach asked him to attend a SPARC meeting.

“And then I met the group. I was so impressed with the group, and I could see that they were literally already in orbit around Julie. I was so impressed with good people wanting to do good things — a network that’s out there forming —- I said, ‘Well, I’ll help you out a little bit.’ And I had no intention to run for council. After we got active and I had some ideas and they needed to be implemented in a certain area, I decided to go for council,” Guyant said.

“And to me, Julie is a star. Not like a movie star or a rock star, but a star that brings people into her orbit and the radiance of her personality, her love, Julie’s possibility of love and caring for all life throughout the world, not just humans. That’s who Julie is. She lives in us and her goodness comes out and what we do next and so there aren’t many people like Julie.”

Mike Hietpas, Julie’s partner, told a story about how Julie encouraged his daughter, Katie, to get into environmental stewardship. He told a story about how the family helped raise Monarch butterflies – a story Katie re-told in an interview panel to get a job working with a professor at the UW.

“Katie spent two summers traipsing around the area counting and marking up areas and looking underneath endless leaves of milkweed. And that led to a relationship with a professor who she’s now going to be working with as a graduate student herself at the University of Wisconsin,” Hietpas said. “I think it’s a cute little story that ties in Julie’s love of this, and she shared it with her family. And it’s it’s gotten Katie to a point where Julie would be very proud. So with that, I want to thank you again for including Julie in such a worthy project andfor all the beautiful words that were said here today.”

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