Wednesday, December 31, 2008

Though hungry iguanas did their best to eat all the flowers on the trees planted in the Children's Memorial Tree Garden, the real damage was done recently by kids who flipped park benches, kicked in a wooden gazebo and smashed beer bottles at the site in the Plantation Tropical Preserve.

The garden, developed over the past four years by the Monroe Youth Challenge Leadership students at Coral Shores High School, is an attractive landscaped walkway in Tavernier where trees are planted in the memory of young people who have died in recent years. Family and friends of deceased children can pause and rest on two mahogany benches, also built by students in the leadership class, among the trees. There's also a picnic table for eating under the broad sky.

Students from Coral Shores, Plantation Key and Island Christian schools have been adding to the park with plaques and other décor over the years, continuously enlarging and improving the memorial garden, said Sunny Booker, executive director of Monroe Youth Challenge. Unfortunately, the park also grows when another youth dies.

"Some of the kids have died of [natural causes] and some are alcohol-related deaths or drunk driving-related deaths," Booker said.

It's a quiet, somber and enriching place, but some things just can't be left alone.

Two weeks before Christmas, some youths on a drinking spree trashed the park, Booker said.

"The gazebo was torn apart, benches were found flipped and thrown about, alcoholic beverages were strewn about the garden and plants around the gazebo and trees of the departed were mutilated," Jordan Swanson, a member of the Coral Shores Leadership Class, wrote to newspapers in a public appeal for help to repair the park.

Booker estimates the damage at $800, mostly to the gazebo, for which the Leadership students had obtained a grant to build and helped erect.

Kay MacKenzie, the Leadership Class teacher coordinator at Coral Shores, has a special connection to the tree garden. Not only does she collaborate with the students to develop and maintain the garden, but one of the trees represents the loss of her son Lucas "Luke" James Floren. She and her other son planted a mahogany tree for him on Dec. 10, his birthday.

"I'm attached to the tree garden because my own son, who is close and near and dear to my heart, died in July of 2005," MacKenzie said.

The vandalism occurred the day after MacKenzie planted her son's tree. There are no suspects, but Booker believes other youngsters, separate from the students who developed the garden since its inception several years ago, damaged the property.

The tree garden development also involved Coral Shores photography students who helped produce a scrapbook of photos to go with memorial writings about the people honored by a tree. The park also has a Web site with photos and a history of the garden at http://www.childrensmemorialtreegardens.org.

Few people are sure what to make of the landscaped land on the bay side near Tavernier Creek Bridge, Booker said.

"I don't know that a lot of people know what the park is," she said. "I think it's kind of one of those secrets. It is for the people who have children there."

Swanson is asking community members to pitch in with money, labor and materials to help fix the park.

"[The garden] is a place where families that lost a young one can plant a small tree and watch it grow, symbolizing the life and growth of the person lost," he wrote in his appeal. "It helps those in a state of mourning to alleviate some of the pain and hardship caused by the loss."

To contact Swanson and the other students involved with fixing the garden, e-mail MacKenzie at kay.mackenzie@keysschools.com.

jguerra@keysnews.com