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HORTICULTURE DEPARTMENT VOLUNTEER OPPORTUNITIES 2008
Hold These Dates & Grab Your Garden Gloves!

Operation Arboretum Renewal is underway! Click here for more details.

Painted by volunteers especially for the Cereal Festival Parade in 2006, the aging ranger can be seen all over Battle Creek greening the city!

Saturday, September 27th is National Public Lands Day 9am-noon Meet at the Leila Arboretum entrance to volunteer for this great event. We will plant some trees, pull some annuals and replace them with pansies and even spruce up some other spaces in the arb that have needed some attention for quite some time.

Saturday, September 27th, 9am-3pm volunteers are needed to staff the Children's Garden for Scarecrow Jubilee. Guide families in activities throughout the garden, help kids learn to make scarecrows, and be available to answer questions or give tours of the garden.

Saturday, October 25th, 4-8pm volunteers are needed to help staff the Haunted Garden. This is the last event of the year and is always fun! Guide families in scary activities throughout the garden and be available to answer questions or give tours of the garden.

Saturday, November 8th, 10am-1pm volunteer session in the Children's Garden to put the garden to sleep for the winter. This involves putting away signage, removing scarecrows and Halloween decorations, covering many sculptures and cutting back a few perennials. Dress for the weather and call ext. 131 for last minute changes.

There are so many different kinds of jobs to be done through the Leila Arboretum Society!

With a small staff, we are very dependent on the skill and goodwill of our volunteers in making community beautification and environmental education a reality in Battle Creek! We have all kinds of jobs at LAS! Together there are so many things we can accomplish!

Please call Leila Arboretum Society at 269-969-0270 ext.125 for information and to sign up for ALL ACTIVITIES and the day of your scheduled volunteer activity, please call ext. 131 for changes, location details and any other last minute details. Thank you for your support!

An Overview of Volunteer Opportunities at Leila Arboretum

Get involved in OAR (Operation Arboretum Rescue) and make a difference in our community. If you can remember what the Leila Arboretum was like before it was rescued in the early 1980's by volunteers, then we need you! As another terrible economic time looms on the horizon, the Leila Arboretum staff are already struggling to keep up and have fallen way behind. We need help! Call our office to find a special place in the Leila Arboretum and make your mark! Call Dinah for more information today at the above number, and read on for more fun stuffs!

Outdoor Gardeners---Leila Arboretum Society has a great many opportunities for people to volunteer their time gardening outdoors. Come and help the Society and your community by coming out and joining friends and neighbors in helping to make this area a place of lush and lustrous beauty! Here are our main opportunities. You do not have to be a Master Gardener to volunteer for LAS!

Leila Arboretum Display Gardens---annual plantings around the fountain areas are planted twice each year—once in late Spring and then in late Fall.

BC “Green Teams”--Gardeners volunteer in neighborhood projects as well as some of the park areas in Battle Creek. These teams are supplied by LAS and given support to make sure plantings, mulch and people-power are available in order to maintain neighborhood sites.

Children’s Garden—Gardeners will always be needed to help take care of an acre of plantings in the LAS Childrens’ Garden. This is a wonderful garden containing many small gardens of different themes.

'Lord Baltimore' Hibiscus is amazing in the Healing Herbs Garden.

Specialty Gardens---Throughout the community, there are wonderful examples of different kinds of gardens for those who wish to specialize. There are rose gardens, rock gardens, butterfly gardens, gardens of just annuals, native wild flowers, perennial gardens, Japanese gardens etc.

Business District Plantings---Communities seem more vibrant when their business districts come alive with plantings of annuals, bulbs and trees. Note: the container plantings that you see in the downtown area are planted and maintained by Leila Arboretum.

Greenhouse Gardeners---The LAS Greenhouse offers many opportunities for learning also. Greenhouse gardening is different than gardening outdoors. Greenhouse gardeners learn the fine points of growing plants from seed in a controlled environment, grafting, transplanting, pruning at important intervals, and insect control. The LAS Greenhouse Gardeners go into a “high production phase” starting in mid-January to begin producing plants for the Arboretum, the Children’s Garden, various community locations and the Annual Plant Sale held in early May. Although we don't expect volunteers to help, there are more greenhouse rooves to replace this year and many hands make much lighter work!

Garden & Greenhouse Guides —one of the newest volunteer assignments at LAS. Since the Children’s Garden opening in June of 2003, we have depended on trained volunteers to take people on tours around the Children’s Garden and do hands-on-activities with children. In this children’s learning garden, we show kids how plants effect their everyday lives. There are so many fun and creative ways of educating children. We always concentrate on learning through fun!

Children---For most assignments all children are welcome. We encourage their involvement as positive outdoor experiences early on in a child’s life tend to produce children who are more environmentally aware and more committed volunteers when they grow older. Their participation is our joy! We do ask that parents/guardians participate along with them in any volunteer activity.

Special Skills Volunteers---Like many non-profits, Leila doesn’t have the funding to hire out some of the special tasks that we need done around here. It’s always great to have volunteers who have skills that they are willing to contribute such as carpentry, electrical, mechanical and artistic skills.

Administrative Duties---filing, calling, assembling bulk mail—Most of the mailings that go out through LAS for the Volunteer and Education Departments are made possible by volunteer efforts. The tasks required are inserting, folding, labeling, sealing and organizing these mailings so we can get them out on a timely basis. This task is usually done in a team effort.

There’s always a place for you at Leila Arboretum Society!

For more informtion on any of these volunteer opportunities please fill out the form below, or call (269) 969-0270 ext 125.