Geneva Park District win national awards

Geneva Park District is tops in the nation for conservation leadership, and its Mill Creek Community Park has great native landscaping.

The Environmental Protection Agency recently bestowed its Leadership in Conservation Award. The district was one of 45 being considered for the merit, which honors commitments to obtaining, preserving and enhancing open space and developing it into crucial habitat for plants and animals. Only four awards were made.

And the EPA, in conjunction with the Chicago Wilderness organization, gave Geneva the Conservation and Native Landscape Award, for the prairies it integrated to Mill Creek Park alongside ball fields, a basketball court, a playground and paved paths.

"We're really proud of those two awards," said Sheavoun Lambillotte, the district's executive director.

The EPA award is for the district's overall conservation efforts, Lambillotte said, but especially "we've done so much work at Peck Farm Park," she said.

Peck Farm Park, on Kaneville Road, is a 395-acre natural retreat featuring hands-on nature and history rooms, an observation silo, a sensory garden, nature and bicycle trails, a wetland and an outdoor butterfly house. It also has a picnic area, baseball diamonds and soccer fields. It was made out of a former sheep and cattle farm, starting with the purchase of 191 acres in 1991. Naturalists run educational programs at the site. The observation silo has a mural on the inside depicting what the land may have looked like from prehistoric times through the present.

Mill Creek Community Park is 34 acres off Keslinger Road. The prairie that makes the outer eastern and southern border of the park has provided a nesting area for the Illinois chorus frog, smooth soft-shell turtles and the black-crowned night heron, all of which are on the state's list of threatened wildlife.

Chicago Wilderness is a coalition of private and public entities that have established a 250,000-acre "nature reserve" of protected properties from southeastern Wisconsin to northeastern Indiana.