By JOSEPH KELLARD
This garden, the Oceanside School Six Memorial Arboretum, with its dwarf redwood and sweat gum trees and various other flora, was spruced up recently by a group of youths eager to become eagles.
Some 20 Boy Scouts from Oceanside's Troop 303 spent last Friday and Saturday performing a number of tasks in the garden as part of the work required to attain Eagle status, the highest award in scouting.
Rebuilding six park-like benches and mounting eight birdhouses on this lush grounds were some of the tasks both the scouts and members of the Botany Club of Oceanside High School completed under the hot August sun. They cut weeds overgrowing the fence surrounding the garden, pulled down ivy with thick roots climbing and clutching the chain links, and mowed the lawn as well.
The refurbishing project was spearheaded by scout Anthony Martini, 17, a senior at OHS and Botany Club president. The club members maintain the garden, and Martini thought to integrate this maintenance he's performed for two years with the work required for his Eagle badge.
"I chose this site to do our project because a lot of stuff was breaking and falling apart," Martini explained. "I knew that something had to be done, and we received about $2,500 worth of donations for the project."
Martini and his fellow scouts and botany enthusiasts also installed new signs. The grounds were previously called a botanical garden, since they only featured flowers. But with the planting of more trees and bushes through the years, the new evergreen, black and gold painted signs donated by the Botany Club now designate the grounds as an arboretum, a place for the study of trees.
From outlining the project and writing letters for donations to shellacking the benches and watering the arboretum, Martini and the other scouts collectively accumulated 202 hours that will go toward their Eagle requirements.
"I've been in scouting since I'm 7 years old," Martini said when asked why he hopes to become an Eagle Scout. "I was so close to becoming one, I figured I'd work hard and finish it."
"This is physical labor I enjoy, and constrasts with the mental labor when I go to college," said former Botany Club member Mike Ashley, who now attends the University of Pennsylvania and has worked in the garden for four years.
The arboretum, which also includes the rare ponderosa pine, blue spruce and seedless ash trees, was originally created by Don Maresca, a former principal of Schools 6 and 2 who now sits on the Board of Education, and Geoffrey Fennimore, an English teacher and Botany Club advisor at OHS. After the junior high school at School 6 closed in 1984, the two men decided to transform the grounds, once the property of Florence Smith, a principal at School 2, which then featured broken cement bricks and glass and car tires camouflaged by overgrown weeds.
With the assistance of many people, including the Board of Education, the Kiwanis Club and students who planted over 100 wildflowers in trays in a classroom-turned-greenhouse at School 6, Maresca and Fennimore cleaned up and tilled the concrete-hard grounds and planted a garden within a year.
"The district didn't think we could pull this garden off, but we did get a great deal of help from the community," Maresca recalled. "Dee's Nursery was very instrumental in getting it off the ground. And Oceanside residents donated all kinds of perennial plants and trees. One teacher who lost her daughter in a car accident donated a tree in her name."
"It was such a great school and we were sad to see it go," said Fennimore, who started teaching at the junior high in 1971. "So I decided to plant something permanent in memory of it, and that's where we got the idea for the garden."
Fennimore recalled that when the seeds were first planted and the only evidence was short sticks in the ground, he had a vision that the garden could one day become the lush oasis it is now, where people are welcomed to walk around its grounds.
"The recent project was one of the best things that ever happened to the garden," Fennimore said about Martini and the other kids who upgraded his creation. "Anthony is one of the hardest workers in the garden. He works there during the school year and the summer. And thanks to kids like him, it just keeps getting more beautiful."
For more information on the arboretum, go to its Web site at oceansidegarden.4T.com.
