Butterfly garden is latest addition to Sevier Avenue in South Knoxville
This summer, Ijams won’t be the only place to see sunflowers in South Knoxville. Bob Riehl and Rev. Jenny Arthur of Borderland Tees are planting them right on Sevier Avenue, inside the butterfly garden they’ve been quietly and sustainably cultivating.
When the couple originally bought the property – two adjoined lots near their screen-printing shop – five years ago, it was nothing more than a compacted gravel parking lot. Today, the space is an urban meadow in the making.
“This was really a riot of color last July and August,” Riehl said, gesturing to the garden. “People were stopping, taking pictures.”
Blooming season has yet to come, but already, new growth is starting to peek through the garden’s soil. A swath of mountain mint is already wrapping itself around a small sign that reads “Coming soon!”
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“We just experiment and stick a lot of things in the ground and see what takes,” Arthur added. “And everywhere there’s a blank space, we’re just going to stick sunflowers just to make a spectacle.”
The project began as an endeavor to build a permanent butterfly garden in the Old Sevier neighborhood, which happens to be a certified monarch waystation. Most of the plants in the garden, Arthur explains, are native plants that are friendly to butterflies, either as host plants or nectar plants.
In addition to a mix of fruit, vegetables, and flowers, Arthur and Riehl have planted milkweed. Essential to the survival of the monarch butterfly, this fragrant wildflower was provided by Monarch Watch, a Kansas-based conservation nonprofit, as a grant.
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“A lot of people know about the monarch decline, so we started doing it just because Bob liked butterflies,” Arthur said, with a smile. “We have several other butterfly gardens around the neighborhood. But we were looking for a way to tap in and do something a little bigger because a lot of them get mowed down, frankly, when they’re on public property.”
For years, Arthur has led the neighborhood’s efforts to create habitats for butterflies and pollinators. She also happens to be a self-taught soil expert. The back of the garden was built using a German permaculture technique called hugelkultur, which uses logs to create a drought-resistant gardening area.
“We’ve been developing the soil for two or three years now, and we do it by getting cold organic produce from Three Rivers Market every week, eggshells from Magpies Bakery, and then Preston Roberts of Ironwood Treecare keeps dumping wood chips for us,” Arthur explained. “So we’ve just been developing the soil over time. And when we were working on it one day, David Talmy came by and said 'What’re y’all doing?'"
Talmy, a microbiologist who works at UT but hails from England, remembers it being an unseasonably beautiful day. He’d spent the morning watching rugby with his colleagues at Alliance Brewing, but had just taken a quick walk to Honeybee Coffee in the afternoon.
“At first, I just thought it was really awesome. I’m not handy with garden work, so I just started coming down and chatting to them and learning about what they want to do.”
Now, Talmy is working to create research opportunities in the garden and secure grant money to pay for educational displays for the public.
“I’m not sure it’s well understood that you can actually get a parking lot, like the ground we’re standing on now. And if you do it in the right way, if you’re smart about it, then you can actually get ecosystems to retrieve the nutrients from the material and use it to sustain their growth. ... It’s kind of depressing when you see all this development going in everywhere and the destruction of natural environments. So it’s really sort of refreshing and cathartic in a way to see how ecosystems can recover land.”
As the neighborhood continues to become increasingly walkable and interconnected through the greenway, Arthur and Riehl hope the garden will serve as an accessible place to learn about permaculture and soil regeneration for residents and visitors alike. In particular, they would like to incorporate the students of South Knoxville Elementary School. But it’s not all in service of science and education. It’s about breathing life into a dead space.
“The garden is for us too,” Arthur said. “We want to sit there and watch butterflies.”