Park neighbor catalogs natural contents

For Eileen Starr, the neighborhood park down the street not only is a nice place to get back to nature but also is an opportunity to learn about the environment and share that knowledge with others.

Starr worked as an earth scientist at Eastern Washington University and at Valley City State University in North Dakota. When she retired, she decided to catalog as many plants as she could at Hamblen Park.

Dedicating four years to the 7-acre park south of 37th Avenue between Napa and Crestline streets, she found 130 species of plants, both native and not, identified them, cataloged them and made pressings.

Then she organized them into a PowerPoint program, listed in order of blooming dates with pictures and a map of where the plants can be found in the park. When she was finished, she took the program to a local copy store and organized everything into a book.

The cost of the book was high. With developing the film and printing, each one cost Starr $86. She printed 20 books and is donating them to Hamblen Park Elementary School, the Moran Prairie Library, the South Hill Library, the Main Library and other schools.

She also donated all her pressings to Spokane Falls Community College.

“We’re very appreciative of Eileen donating these,” said Lawton Fox, a biology professor at SFCC. “We’re going to use them this quarter.”

The pressings will be used to teach students how to identify plants and to show examples of structure and plants they study in class.

“It’s a nice bunch of plants,” Fox said. “They’ll be very useful.”

“I want to get the information out,” Starr said. “This is not a moneymaking project.”

Starr hopes that when kids bring in bunches of flowers to show their teachers and want to know what the flowers are, the teachers will have a resource to find the names.

The blooming season at Hamblen starts around Feb. 12, depending on the weather. The first plants are mosses, lichen, ferns and fungi.

Soon after that, Starr starts looking for blooming sagebrush buttercups.

She’ll check every day, making passes through the park from east to west one day and from north to south the next.

In 2005, the buttercups bloomed as early as Feb. 26. This year, they bloomed in late March.

Once the buttercups have come up, Starr notices other flowers.

One of the problems she encountered during the project was yard waste. Years ago, someone must have dug up plants in their own yard and dumped them in the park. This is why she found tulips and irises.

She also found garbage and a lot of cigarette butts in the park.

This was when she recruited her husband, John Douglas, to help with the cleanup. Not only did he pick up garbage, but he also helped remove noxious weeds, such as Dalmatian toadflax, which, according to Starr, is a pretty yellow flower that grows everywhere.

“He just enjoys getting out,” Starr said. “He’s a protector of the environment.”

Douglas wasn’t the only helper whom Starr found for her project.

She worked with Kenneth Swedberg, a biology professor emeritus from EWU; Suzanne Schwab, a biology professor at EWU; and Linda Forman, of the Spokane Mushroom Club. The three helped her identify the species of plants.

Another reason for consulting the biologists was to get their advice in conducting her study of local plants.

Starr said Swedberg advised her to spread the study out for more than one year to compare blooming dates year by year. There are differences in weather patterns, and sometimes plants aren’t there from one year to the next.

Starr’s favorite plant, the sagebrush mariposa lily, appeared only during July 2005.

Starr said some people have suggested she conduct a similar study at Lincoln Park. That park is much bigger than Hamblen, and Starr plans to continue to study the plants of Hamblen Park.

“Seven acres is about all one can do by themselves,” she said.