Friends of Murrysville Parks founder has love of nature

“I need to be outdoors — that’s the baseline. I need to be outdoors. That’s why we have windows everywhere,” she said of her Murrysville home, which is filled with cacti placed carefully in the sunlight, budding lettuce seedlings and hanging plants, reflecting her love for nature and her desire to spend hours in the parks.

Starting out, van de Venne used her knowledge of gardening to help her oversee workers who maintained trails and completed various projects in the parks.

“That’s how I got started, and then somebody said to me, ‘You should look at Duff Park and see how many garlic mustards are growing there. That’s an invasive plant.’ ” she said. “I vaguely knew what an invasive plant was. I really didn’t know that it was a problem in Duff Park.”

From there, she immersed herself in learning about invasive plants, taking her skills as a master gardener and applying them to the parks. She also took a seminar hosted by the Mid Atlantic Invasive Plant Council along with several seminars hosted in the area.

By 2000, she was organizing volunteers to help out with invasive plants, making new trails and renovating old ones and putting erosion control water bars across pathways.

Six years later, van de Venne founded Friends of Murrysville Parks. The group has 12 active members and three paid employees. Those numbers fluctuate based on the season, she said.

In the beginning, the group immediately found themselves with a big project — creating an information center in Duff Park as a memorial for a Murrysville resident who had died. Memorial projects took off after that, with several requests for benches.

Over the course of 14 years, the group has added identification tags to trees and flowers, a recognition column in Duff Park for volunteers and donors and planted trees in Pedora Park.

“In the long run, if you look at it, we actually take care of invasive plant control and we take care of trail maintenance. We don’t do everything, we try, but there’s too much park land in Murrysville,” she said, noting the group is active in Duff Park, Townsend Park, Pleasant Valley Park, Bear Hollow Park, Pedora Park and Lilian Kellman Reserve.

Invasive plants

It wasn’t long after van de Venne started learning about invasive plants that she could point them out while walking along a trail.

And the species vary from park to park with Duff Park hosting garlic mustard and Townsend Park that used to be full of multiflora rose and the tree of heaven. Other invasive species including barberry, burning bush, myrtle and ajuga also grow in the parks.

“We really kept on working everyday, practically, on those rose bushes,” she said of her work in Townsend Park. “And then we discovered tree of heaven. I did a lot of work on tree of heaven, but I did do that everywhere, not necessarily in the parks. If I noticed a corner of tree of heaven at the end of somebody’s property, I told them about it and I asked permission to do something about it because I knew how to.”

She does similar work in her own yard, where she previously planted invasive species before knowing what native plants would better benefit the area. But since planting ajuga and myrtle, she has spent the past 37 years trying to rid her yard of them.

“My advice is always plant native vegetation or if you really want to do something else, then do something that the deer like to eat,” she said. “Like tulips. If you like tulips, plant tulips. It will never become an invasive plant.”

Life full of nature

Despite having limited knowledge of invasive species when she started working in the parks, van de Venne did have a love of plants.

Born in Hertogenbosch, Netherlands — which translates to “off the woods of the duke” — van de Venne would often plant a vegetable garden. But it wasn’t until her family moved to Vught that she learned of her true love for nature.

“Even as a kid, I loved flowers and somebody, like my aunt, would give a geranium for my birthday and I was so darn happy,” she said. “And I was what, 9 years old? And then my father loved trees and we had, where I grew up, we had lots of trees around our house and he was always looking at the trees. I actually learned from him that nature and birds are important.”

Now, van de Venne is focused on recruiting volunteers as a weather warms. But she also has another goal in mind — finding someone who could soon take her place.

For van de Venne, finding that person is proving difficult because of the time commitment it requires with no salary. Over the course of 20 years, she has logged more than 7,560 hours of physical labor in Murrysville parks, not including clerical work she does for Friends of Murrysville Parks.

But the position is important, she said, adding, “I think Mother Earth is what we are depending on. We need plants, we need trees, we need healthy environment and healthy ground, healthy nature because we depending on it. Our breathing and even our food is depending on it. We use everything that we find.”