Event Details:
Event Description:Jim Kessler of rural Grinnell will present the March 13 Bucket Course entitled “Restoring Life and Hope: Biodiversity, Mind, Body, and Spirit.” Contributing to the presentation will be Master Gardener Effie Hall, who will share her experiences in creating a garden using native plants in her beautiful yard in Grinnell. The Bucket Course will be held at the Caulkins Community Room in Drake Community Library from 10:00 am to 11:30 am. The course is open to all and is free of charge. Donations are welcome to cover the cost of refreshments. Kessler will talk about the importance of reintroducing native plantings into personal and public landscapes and will show how creating a native plant habitat has positively impacted the mental, physical, and spiritual health of his family. Illustrated with colorful photos, his presentation describes how songbird, pollinator, and wildlife populations have dramatically increased in response to the introduction of native plants to the Kessler Prairie property. “My goal is to motivate others to plant butterfly gardens and larger native plant habitats to confront the extinction and climate crises. Loss of biodiversity can be reversed by the actions of ordinary people,” Kessler says. Handouts will be provided for participants that explain how to plan, plant, and maintain publicly acceptable native plant gardens and larger habitats. Effie Hall, who is retired from Grinnell College, became interested in native plants when she took a course by Jim Kessler on creating a pollinator garden. After enrolling in the Iowa State Master Gardener Program and encouraged by webinars she attended during the COVID-19 pandemic, Hall started planting native plants in her garden. Hall will share her experience and some lessons she has learned along the way. "It is not hard to do," she says. Jim Kessler taught Environmental Biology and Introductory Biology at Iowa Valley Community College—Grinnell from 2006-2018, and before that, taught Biology at Newton High School from 1972-2005. Jim and Kathy Kessler have restored 30 acres to native habitat south of Grinnell. The property includes reconstructed prairie and restored wetlands, stream banks, oak savannas, and oak/hickory woodland; they donated 27 acres of the restored habitats to the Bur Oak Land Trust in Iowa City for perpetual preservation and management in 2017. Kessler has shared presentations and workshops over 120 times in Iowa and around the US about the importance of native plantings to pollinators, songbirds, other wildlife, and people.
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