CATCH A STAR
B1 Your Community Recorder newspaper serving the communities of southern Campbell County E-mail:kynews@communitypress.com
Sophia McIntosh
Volume 4, Number 39 © 2009 The Community Recorder ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
T h u r s d a y, J u l y 2 3 , 2 0 0 9
cmayhew@nky.com
Through July 24, you can win daily cash prizes and get entered for a $500 jackpot from CincyMomsLikeMe.com. Go to MomsLikeMe.com/cincy contests for all the info.
Magic’s in the air
The midnight release of “Harry Potter and the HalfBlood Prince,” the movie adaptation of the book by J. K. Rowling of the same title, brought in young and old dressed as wizards and other creatures from the novel to AMC Newport 20 Theatres July 14. “It’s magic,” Brian Becker of Wilder said of the Harry Potter books and movies. “It takes you out of this world to some fantastic place where anything is possible.” LIFE, B1
Web site: NKY.com
B E C A U S E C O M M U N I T Y M AT T E R S
Paula Edwards of Camp Springs and Cindy Johnson of Batavia are nuts about their jobs as botanical architects, a job that requires an artists touch and green thumb. Using twigs, leaves, acorn nuts, and dried pea pods, and plenty of varnish, Edwards and Johnson recreate the world in miniature one building at a time as two of six botanical architects employed at Applied Imagination in Alexandria. “We always say we have the best job in the world,” Edwards said. The buildings are used in Applied Imagination owner Paul Busse’s elaborate public garden railway displays for botanical gardens and conservatories across the U.S. Busse’s creations include annual holiday displays outside Rockefeller Center in New York City and the U.S. Botanic Garden in Washington, D.C. They’re currently working on a miniature version of the former Penn Station in New York City for the New York Botanical Garden. Edwards and Johnson are key to creating the artistic vision, Busse said. “There’s no way I could do this all by myself, the displays are so big,” he said. Almost every detail of the
buildings are made from plant materials of some kind. And they’re not called models, because they’re not meant to look or feel manufactured, Edwards said. “In the natural world things aren’t perfect, but they still look beautiful,” she said. Now whenever she’s outside she usually starts filling a bag with pine cones or other materials that look like they would be good details on a building. Edwards said her favorite part of the job has been seeing the joy it brings to people when she has helped set up the finished displays. The adults feel like little children when they see the finished displays, Edwards said. “If you can make somebody happy it’s a good world,” she said. Johnson joined Applied Imagination about 11 years ago after she couldn’t stop staring at Busse’s rotating holiday music box that he built for the Krohn Conservatory’s Christmas display. The music box featured trains revolving around a hillside filled with plants and Busse’s homemade buildings. Johnson had always been interested in model trains, history, plants and gardening architecture, so she asked Busse if he ever hired anyone. “The things that I was interested in all congealed into one
CHRIS MAYHEW/STAFF
Cindy Johnson of Batavia displays some of the dried pea pods and pine cones she uses in the making of miniature buildings for garden railway exhibits created by Alexandria-based Applied Imagination.
See more of the work
To see more photos of Applied Imagination’s miniature displays visit the company’s Web site at http://appliedimagination.biz.
Share your vacation photos
Whether you’re headed to the beach or the mountains this summer, we want to publish your vacation photos. To get started, go to NKY.com/Share and follow the steps there to send your photos to us. Be sure to identify everyone in the photo and what community they live in. Photos will appear on your community page and may even make it into your local newspaper, so start sharing today!
Kings Island bound Readers who won tickets to Kings Island as part of our Readers Choice survey are: • Mark Class of Alexandria • Michael Brunner of Cincinnati • Tara Reese of Hamersville • Darla Hartmann of Cleves Watch the newspaper for more Readers Choice announcements in coming weeks.
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It’s a small... wooden world By Chris Mayhew
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RECORDER
CHRIS MAYHEW/STAFF
Paula Edwards of Camp Springs built this recreation of President Barack Obama's home in Chicago including acorn tops and twigs for the front porch columns for an upcoming Applied Imagination garden railway exhibit at the Chicago Botanic Garden.
thing,” Johnson said. One of Johnson’s recent projects has been the building of a ship made out of a hollowed out gourd and leaves to go along with a display for the children’s fable “The Owl and the Pussycat.” Johnson spent months search-
ing for just the right gourd, finally finding it in a flower store in Williamsburg, Ohio. “I’ve had this boat in my mind for a long time, I really needed to make it,” she said. Johnson said she’s still amazed at how they start with nothing but a pine cone or a honeysuckle branch and end up making a dream world filled with buildings she’d enjoy living in and trains she’d like to ride in. “It’s the magic of it, is what I like,” she said.
New educational trail vandalized By Chris Mayhew cmayhew@nky.com
Vandals are hampering preservation efforts at St. Anne Wetlands again, but this time they’re targeting educational signs and kiosks and befouling the area with trash. While incidents of damage from ATV riding at the Ohio River wetland area have decreased since reported earlier this spring, vandals have carved graffiti onto the educational signs and kiosks erected this spring and littered the area with trash, said Rebecca Kelley, Ph.D., director of environmental sciences at Northern Kentucky University. NKU is helping maintain the educational trails on the property along with the Campbell County Conservancy. The Congregation of Divine Providence, which operates
There were crude symbols and names carved into the cork board of an entrance sign and several of the six information kiosks were damaged along the trail. There were also food wrappers and bottles on the grounds. nearby St. Anne Convent, granted management of the property to the Conservancy in 2008. The most recent damage was discovered July 15 when Kelley led a group of middle school students enrolled in a week-long summer science camp on a tour of the educational trail through the about 100-acre wetland along the Ohio River near St. Anne Convent on the border of Melbourne and
Silver Grove. The students received a lesson on the impact of vandalism in addition to learning about how a wetland functions, what they mean for water quality, and what organisms rely on the area. Kelley said she spoke to the children after they saw the vandalism. “They all got it wasn’t a good thing to do,” Kelley said. There were crude symbols and names carved into the cork board of an entrance sign, which Kelley tried not to point out to the children, and several of the six information kiosks were damaged along the trail. There were also food wrappers and bottles on the grounds. There are about 10 NKU students helping develop lesson plans and information that will be posted on the kiosks, and there is
a concern that once that information is posted it could be vandalized too, she said. The wetland was a nice place, but it was sad seeing the signs vandalized, said Jackie Kremer, 11, of Wilder, a member of the science camp. “I’m not sure why people do that,” Kremer said. The educational signs were hard to read, she said. “They scraped off what was originally on them,” Kremer said. Olivia Whaley, 11, of Independence, said she got to see box elder trees, poison ivy and vandalism during their trip through the wetland. “I just thought it was disrespectful because they had just put the boards in,” Whaley said. For the latest Campbell County news visit NKY.com/CampbellCounty.