Telkwa council is in favour of a new garden to be created beside the Telkwa Reading Room.
At the Jan. 28 regular council meeting Telkwa Elementary School students, and their teacher made a presentation about creating a new flower garden beside the library.
“Creating a garden will help pollinators such as bees and insects and continue to make our community a greener and more colourful place to live,” said student Lily. “Another reason is that the fact the natural bee population has gone down to dangerous low levels in recent years and if we don’t play out part in helping them recover we may share the same fate.”
Her teacher Linda Kusleika added the students want to make a difference in the community.
“A lot of time for students, the question is we learn about this, but what can we do? We are only children. I think we can do a lot,” she said.
The idea is to build a garden with perennials, possibly a bird bath and maybe an arbour, depending on funding.
“We’ve got a lot of volunteer labour and we’ve got a lot of support. I think it can be very educational and inspirational,” said Kusleika. “It would be set up so that the little walkway that you go into the reading room would be separate. The garden would be out front towards the river so people who are afraid of getting stung won’t be in the direct fly way.”
They would like to label the plants and have brochures at the reading room to explain the plants and hopefully inspire other people to build gardens.
The students passed around their ideas and plans for the garden.
Councillor Leroy Dekens, who was chairing the meeting, made sure they had support from the reading room before making a motion to support the idea.
Councillor Meerdink and Councillor Fuerst, who was participating in the meeting via phone, supported the motion.
Mayor Brad Layton and Councillor Annette Morgan were not in attendance.