 My name is Maya, we're at Bookworm Gardens. Hi, my name is Cori Mim. I'm the garden manager at Bookworm Gardens in Sheboygan, Wisconsin. Bookworm Gardens will be three years old this coming October. And the gardens began back in 1999 when Sandy Livermore was attending a perennial plant association conference in East Lansing, Michigan. And one of the classes she took for that was photographing the children's garden at Michigan State University. When she was there, a group of teenagers came and tealed t-shirts and spread through all the gardens and children came and sat around listening to the teenagers telling stories. And that's when Sandy decided, oh my goodness, we could have an entire garden based off of children's books here in Sheboygan. So she began fundraising and lots of people began helping her trying to figure out how to make that a reality. They brought in a designer, Herb Shaw, who's from Fort Collins, Colorado. And he's a world-class children's garden designer. He came and helped sort of come up with the concepts for the gardens and having the gateways in the different areas. All the gardens are based off of children's books. We have about 60 of them here. And they're all interpreted a little bit differently. We have gardens like our Good Night Moon Garden, which is basically a garden of white flowers and white flowers reflect moonlight. We also have our garden, the Three Pigs, which is where we have actual structures of the Three Pig Houses. So that's sort of a little more literal translation of the book, so they're all interpreted a little bit differently. We continue to keep adding gardens. Right now we're just completing our secret garden. We've had to do a lot of fundraising for that and we're still continuing to fund it. So we're always continuing, again, with the fundraising. We have our event coming up at Christopher Farming Garden which helps to do those. We also have a lot of volunteers, about 1,000 volunteers to date who have helped out in the gardens to keep it where it is today. So we keep growing and growing. We have a lot of field trips and camps and things like that here at the gardens as well that people can participate in. It is free admission, so you're welcome to come. We're open between May and October, so or through the end of October. So basically where the gates are open from dawn till dusk, you're welcome to come through anytime during daylight hours. So I guess we'll go take a walk through the gardens and I'll show you some of our gardens. So this is Harry, the dirty dog. Harry is a dog who is white with black spots and he doesn't like to get baths. So one day he buries his dog brush and runs away and plays all day long and ends up getting really dirty and decides he wants to come back home. Well, when he comes back home, he's actually now so dirty that he's a black dog with white spots and his family doesn't recognize him. So Harry decides to go find the bath brush that he's buried and he gives it to the family. They give Harry a bath and they realize it's actually their own dog, Harry. So they realize it's okay to take a bath. Otherwise people might not recognize you, I suppose. So this is our dinosaur garden. It's based off the book, Dinosaur Bones and Steve Petraeus is the artist who created our dinosaur for us. Underneath you can see that there are some fossils that the children can dig for. Normally they're covered up so that they have to dig a little harder to find them. Also in that garden we have plants that are from that period. So the plants that you see there were around the same time of the dinosaurs and there's not a whole lot of flowers that were around then. Except for the Magnolia shrub that you kind of see across from the dinosaur here that gets nice flowers in spring. But for the most part, they're kind of furs, the trees are evergreen cone bearing plants. So that's sort of an interesting aspect of that garden as well. So this is our ravine. The ravine actually surrounds the whole outer edge of our gardens and we have seven acres total on our property and two acres of developed gardens and the rest is our ravine. In this area we're having a company, Merrick Landscape. Come in and they took out all the invasive and other vegetative parts of this ravine area. The engineer who came in was real concerned with the stability of the slope behind the amphitheater fence which is in that direction there. So we called this company and they suggested the slope interrupters that you see in here which are kind of those long sock looking things and they've put in some plugs, some plants that are gonna take hold there as well as some seed is going in and so it'll kind of reflush and we'll get nice new native plants growing in this area that'll help stabilize the bank for us better. So this is, they actually were just here yesterday. This is day two, I guess, of the installation. So we'll just have to see over time how it progresses. The aspen trees that you see back in there will continue to multiply and they shoot out new trees from the roots so they'll continue to help stabilize the bank that way as well. So this is Twitch and actually the story of Twitch began with a little mouse who would visit a class of students, younger students out in California and the students would write notes to Twitch and Twitch would write notes back to the students. So the teacher actually wrote a children's book about the story of that and here at Bookworm Gardens we have our own mailbox for Twitch. If children want to write him a letter they're welcome to go ahead and we have some pencils and paper here and leave Twitch a note and he doesn't always answer back the notes that are left here though mostly because we don't know how to where to send them back to most children don't leave their addresses for him, so. Yeah, he's a pretty popular guy though. He gets a lot of good mail. This is Playhouse for Monster and the story about Playhouse for Monster is about a little monster who likes to play with himself and he's not very good about sharing his things or his places. So he has a sign on the front of his house that says keep out. But as the story goes on, Monster realizes that it's really a lot more fun playing with friends and sharing your things. So then he decides to welcome all of his friends in and then him and his friends all can play together inside the Playhouse and we have tables and chairs and some books in there for you to read. Dick Bemis built the house along with other, let's see, it was Max Bloom, I believe. Chris Carr, our volunteer coordinator, did the painting as far as the little bench with the monster on outside and the inside artwork. Kathy Bloom also helped with some of the painting and things like that. So a group of community members put it together. Okay, this is one of our gateway pillars and there are six gateways located throughout the gardens and they all have a different theme. This is our creative garden area. We also have, oh, okay. This is one of our gateway pillars. We have six gateways located throughout the gardens. They all have a different theme. This is our creative garden pillar. Inside of here, there are books that are laminated and they relate to all of the gardens within that area. So the lamination just kind of helps protect them in case they get in the rain. We ask people to put them back into the pillar where they found them, but sometimes they do float around. Some of the other gateways are our woodland area, farm area, pond and wetland, animal, and our multi-purpose. Japanese garden and it's based off of the book One Leaf Rides the Wind. In that book, it's a counting book and you'll find the same elements in that book in our garden. For instance, there's two food dogs up by the tea house and 10 lanterns that line the walkway. Those are all elements from the book. We also have the Japanese tea house, which is true to a Japanese design. And to the left of it here, we have our zen garden, which is basically a rake in some stones and it's meant for just sort of raking pretty patterns and contemplating your thoughts while you're doing that. Hello. We are at Bookworm Garden interviewing Jim Rippenthal. What do you, have you been to Sheboygan before? My arms are glad you asked. This is my hometown originally and I moved away in 1970. My family has come back periodically over the years and now my wife and I drove from the Boston area here and we spent about three weeks in the area and we're enjoying every moment. Somebody recommended this site as a must-see and it really has to be one of the happiest places on earth, forget about Disney World. So I'm so glad you stopped and asked me to say a few words and get re-appointed with some of the folks around the Sheboygan area. There's a couple of things strange here in front of the barn, a pig that's filled in with garden stuff and he's eating plant. And there's another thing that's strange. There's an owl up in the fake tree and it has big eyes and it has polka dots.