Print edition: 
When Botanica pushes outside its original site today with the opening of the Downing Children's Garden, it won't be all brand-new plant material, works of art and structures that visitors see.
For some families, it will also include elements of home.
Pete and Janet DeFazio donated a blue spruce that had outgrown its space in their front yard to provide an evergreen screen between the Monster Woods and Cowtown's backyard.
Farm implements from extension agent Bob Neier's grandfather and father are welded into the fence at the Cargill Children's Farm.
The Kansas Pond Society built the Polliwog Pond, and the Prairie Winds Daylily Society gave signature plants.
The donations are just a couple of the $3 million in gifts that it took to build the garden.
Botanica hopes that the new addition will grow a new group of members to help keep the horticultural attraction dynamic. The city of Wichita paid for $1 million in infrastructure to open a whole new acreage in Sim Park meadow to more gardens. Botanica already had filled its original 9 1/2 acres with 25 themed gardens.
A blue spruce for the Monster Woods
At the DeFazios' home in College Hill, a blue spruce that had grown up with the children was getting shaded out by an elm above and encroaching on the driveway and front walk below.
The DeFazios' daughter Mia Jenkins is the communications director for Botanica, and they began to inquire into whether they could move the tree to the children's garden. Landscape supervisor Pat McKernan knew a spot where an evergreen could nicely help block the view of the parking lot and service area at Cowtown. So the DeFazios thought they'd arrange to have a tree spade dig the spruce out and move it.
They hit a snag when they found out that the tree was close to a gas line; it would have to be dug out by hand. The DeFazios, who own DeFazio's Italian Restaurant, almost decided to have the tree cut down.
"I am very sentimental, however," Janet DeFazio said, recalling that the tree had stood sentinel for all the 21 years that the family had lived there and that Pete had strung lights on it every Christmas.
"I just didn't have the heart to chop it down."
So the DeFazios paid to have Hillside Nursery painstakingly dig and wrap burlap around the root ball of the tree —"it looked upholstered," Janet said —and hoist it by forklift onto a flat-bed truck for delivery to Botanica in April.
Despite the spates of 100-degree temperatures since then, the tree has taken to its new home and is doing beautifully. It joins other mature trees that were saved during construction and that give the garden a mature look.
"I thought it looked smaller than it did at home," and it's on a bit of a downward slope, Janet said of the tree's new home.
"But Pat did such a wonderful job. ... The neat thing was he placed it under a tree just the same way it was here — except the tree has a higher canopy — so it's growing in the same kind of conditions. It doesn't seem out of place."
And it overlooks Janet's favorite part of the new garden — the Monster Woods.
"It just makes us feel really good to know other people can enjoy the tree like we did."
Making the old new
Bob and Evelyn Neier also had a connection to Botanica and the children's garden — Evelyn was chairman of the children's garden advisory committee.
She and Bob wanted to give something to the garden, and when she heard the landscape architect describe the concept of a fence for the farm section, she said, "We'll do that."
"It looked like who we are, coming from rural backgrounds," Bob said.
The Neiers had admired the custom iron artistry of Dustin Sypher of Coldwater at the Wichita Garden Show, as well as in Greensburg, and hired him to forge the fence.
Dustin collected most of the items for the fence from Bob's father's and grandfather's farmstead in Mullinville, just west of Greensburg.
"My grandparents were on the farm starting about 1918," Bob said.
Also forged into the fence is a cotton hoe from Bob's maternal grandfather, who farmed on the north side of Greensburg. A copy of Bob's father's brand — IN for Irving Neier — is included, as are wheels from a barrel cart he and his brother used to drag around the farm when they were little.
Dustin wove the implements into wheels and wove steel vines through the elements so that the openings would be a safe size, hand-forging the leaves and beating them out with a hammer. You can see his work on his Facebook page for Tall Grass Forge.
"We're just thrilled with it," Evelyn said of the fence.
"We did it in memory of our parents," Bob said, and Dustin named it "Entwined."
Bob thinks the children's garden really will come into its own when parents begin to take their children there for weekly playdates. The garden has activities built into each area, the staff will have scheduled activities, and there are areas where children can simply run, play, splash and climb.
Evelyn is happy that what the committee set out to establish in the garden is all actually there.
"That site is really so nice, because for a brand-new garden it doesn't look like a brand-new garden. The great big trees are still there, and to the west the woods are still back there, so it gives you a sense of place.
"The fact that there's rolling topography gives you so many nooks and crannies. That really makes a huge difference, so it's intriguing and you want to keep going to see what's around the corner. They didn't have to create all that.
"Probably my favorite thing is crawling up to the top of the tree house and looking out over everything."
