DAYTON, Ohio — For the past three years, Dayton has had its resiliency on display. The city survived the 2019 Memorial Day tornadoes, mourned a mass shooting in the Oregon District and like cities across the country, shuttered and rebuilt its economy during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Despite facing many of the same challenges, the Wegerzyn Gardens MetroPark on the north side of the city has worked to serve as a refuge for Dayton. Though most of its events were canceled, staff worked to keep its grounds open for anyone looking for an escape into nature.
Three years later, though the city and the park are still recovering, the Wegerzyn Gardens Foundation is calling for a celebration. Jessica Wagner, the group’s vice president, is helping to oversee the return of the annual Garden Party on Thursday, for the first time since 2019.
“Like many nonprofits, the biggest thing we hear is I miss being together in person,” she said. “It will be very nice to see people in person and see their faces and not just an email or a text or a phone call.”
Every year, the event serves as one of the foundation’s largest fundraisers, allowing roughly 200 people to come out, mingle and enjoy food and drinks as they explore the grounds, while contributing to the funds that help keep the gardens and programming growing.
“People are just committed to making sure that we have vibrant green spaces that people want to come out and enjoy,” Wagner said.
The past two years’ parties were canceled because of the pandemic and, while the foundation could hold its Garden Party in the months following the 2019 tornadoes, parts of the Wegerzyn grounds remained unsafe and inaccessible to visitors.
(Photo courtesy of Five River MetroParks)
“Some of the trees that fell during the storm actually did some major damage to this boardwalk,” Chris Pion, the director of Parks and Conservation for Five Rivers Metro Parks, said as he walked through the garden’s wet woods.
When the storm blew through, Pion said, the northwest side of the park sustained the worst damage, thankfully sparing most of the formal gardens. Wegerzyn Gardens was able to repair and reopen its boardwalk in the summer of 2020, but recovering the forest remains an ongoing effort.
“We lost a lot of trees that were hundreds of years old,” Pion said. “So reforestation has been a big focus for us here.”
In the years since, Pion said, the park has planted hundreds of new trees and even hosted giveaways to help others across Dayton rebuild their green space. Though full recovery will take decades, the support they saw after the tornado proved how precious this area was to the community and when the pandemic shut down most indoor gathering spaces for months, the gardens’ importance grew even clearer, Pion said.
Wegerzyn Gardens saw a surge in new visitors.
Pion shows off the newly built boardwalk
“The people that wanted to come here, they needed to be here to restore themselves and to bring peace and stability back to themselves,” he said. “It has a healing quality.”
Now, as the gardens and city continue their recovery, Wagner hopes the community can pay things forward, helping the gardens sustain themselves for the future, as events and programming return.
“This year’s theme is about nature’s resiliency and kind of mirroring the resiliency that our community has after here in Dayton the tornadoes in 2019 and then COVID,” she said.
The Garden Party will highlight some of the most resilient plants in the park and ask visitors to find them and learn about what they do to survive. Wagner hopes it can serve as a metaphor for the way the park and the Dayton area have made it through the past three years.
“They don’t die. They come back,” she said. “And that’s so much for all of our communities.”
