Columnist Susan Snyder: Small towns ready for garden party

Tuesday, Sept. 4, 2001 | 8:28 a.m.

Susan Snyder's column appears Tuesdays, Fridays and Sundays. Reach her at snyder@lasvegassun.com or 259-4082.

The Nevada welcome center in Boulder City is easy to miss.

The turnoff is on the right as you're heading to Lake Mead on U.S. 93, about a half-mile past St. Jude's Ranch for Children.

The center is a small concrete-block building next to a large parking lot. There are five picnic shelters with tables and a couple of benches sit on the surrounding asphalt.

It's OK. But the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority, which maintains the center, says it can be better.

So Boulder City urban designer Damon Ohlerking came up with a plan that shows just how much better. Ohlerking, who works for Boulder City, designed a 10-acre oasis called the Mojave Botanic Garden that would educate visitors about the desert landscape while giving them a place to rest.

"The Mojave is the least-understood landscape. We just don't know how to love it," Ohlerking said. "And we don't have any place to learn to respect it. Imagine making these 10 acres into a vision of the Mojave."

Ohlerking's vision doesn't stop in Boulder City. If one Nevada botanical park is good, then 32 are better. His idea, which he outlines in a proposal titled "Given the Nature of Nevada," calls for placing similar 10-acre parks in such communities as Beatty, Goldfield, West Wendover, Ely, Elko and Jean.

These gateways would break up the monotony for weary travelers on Nevada's long, open stretches. Each would provide restrooms, a gift shop offering ice cream, coffee and made-in-Nevada items, along with carefully planned and explained gardens that would showcase each area's flora and fauna.

"For instance, people are driving in from Kingman (Ariz.). They're blitzed out on the landscape that they don't understand, and here's a place to explain it all," he said.

Initial estimated cost of designing and planting 320 acres spread among 32 such gardens is about $17 million, he said. And it seems the money could be there.

Two weeks ago Ohlerking, who also is president of the Nevada Shade Tree Council, traveled to Carson City with six other members of that council and met with Attorney General Frankie Sue Del Papa and Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev. Ohlerking says both officials thought the proposal was a good one.

Del Papa is a well-known supporter of making more green space, as she is spearheading the Nevada Trees 2000 project, a statewide beautification effort.

Nevada has lured hundreds of thousands of visitors each year by selling a a lifestyle that's fun to visit, Ohlerking said. Now it's time for Nevada to sell an image it can live with.

These gateway gardens will lure a different kind of visitor while giving each community a serene spot in which to contemplate and relax.

"I believe Nevada has done a lousy job of marketing itself to the rest of the country, and Yucca Mountain (the proposed nuclear waster dump) is a result of that," he said.

"We can change the world's opinion of Nevada. And then why would anyone want to send that stuff to the place where you go to recharge your soul?

"We can do these gardens," Ohlerking said with all the passion of an evangelist. "We can build beauty that's wholesome, that has integrity, and that draws on the desert."