Our New Rain Garden Interactive Exhibit is underway!
We are partnering with the Chautauqua Watershed Conservancy to introduce a Rain Garden to our campus and programming. The Rain Garden will educate our community on environmental safety, with a focus on improving the watershed and attracting important pollinators like butterflies, birds and bees.
We broke ground on June 16, 2021, and are excited to announce that the Rain Garden outline mirrors the shape of beautiful Chautauqua Lake! The Rain Garden is located on the lawn outside of the Safety Village Classroom Building, which overlooks the lake. We thought this was the perfect spot to add the Rain Garden!
Children’s Interactive Space
Students will learn, through fun hands-on sifting and active play througout the rain garden, the importance of using natural elements in a garden to promote life-long lessons and habits. A chemical-free, safe environment for them to experience and enjoy, the rain garden will also feature some natural play structures. The Audobon Community Nature Center will be helping us develop the play structures in the near future. We believe it is crucial to show today’s children the importance of preserving life in the watershed, and being safe to play outside by avoiding toxic chemicals and using plants instead!
Native Species Plants
The Chautauqua Safety Village Rain Garden will feature native species plants, sourced from Royal Fern Nursery. Using native plants indigenous to our area helps ensure we attract the beneficial pollinators, like butterflies, birds and bees. The plants will add beauty and natural methods of weed control. Runoff from our campus will be purified by the plants’ roots, before it reaches the lake. Some of the plants we will be planting include: Butterfly Milkweed, Queen of the Prairie, Wild Bergamot and Cutleaf Sunflower. To sponsor plants in your business or family name, see the link below.
Help us Preserve our Future
We hope to inspire, through hands-on fun, our youth to develop environmentally-safe habits which will preserve the watershed, and help curb environmental toxins and resulting accidents, deaths and illnesses.
To help us with costs, we offer low-cost plant sponsorships, all the way up to interactive signage sponsorship donations. Please see below.
