Retiring Naperville park commissioner keeps eye on district garden plots - and its finances

"I'm proud of this area," Ron Ory says, standing at the north end of the Naperville Park District garden plots that soon will bear his name.

The retiring park board commissioner is amid the Idea Gardens, an area he has been developing since 2011 to showcase examples of native plants and ways to be green.

"The intention is to help home landscaping folks figure out what they can do for their front yard or backyard with sustainable practices," said Ory, whose last park board meeting after 20 years as a commissioner will be May 14.

Ory smiles easily in his straw hat and Master Naturalist badge as he points out elements of the gardens.

There's the sensory garden in a French formal style, added in 2013 when the park district adopted the tagline "Engage Your Senses." Beside it is the native garden in an English informal style, with red-twigged dogwoods from Ory's backyard and prickly pear cactuses, which surprisingly are native to Naperville.

Back a little further from West Street there's a sedge meadow, a savanna, a rain garden and a prairie.

Signs installed as an Eagle Scout project explain the plantings, and the gardens are growing. But they're not complete.

Ory, 73, consistently finds reasons to spend hours at the site working the land, working with his hands. The news that the district plans to rename the garden plots after him came as a surprise, but also as a logical honor.

"They all know I'm a pretty active gardener," Ory said about his fellow commissioners.

As Ory retires from the panel on which he's served for two decades, those who know him say he's leaving a legacy of fiscal oversight and institutional knowledge of Naperville that dates to 1844, when early generations of his family first moved to the city.

But Ory's most significant contribution might be his love of gardening, which went a long way to show why a park district should do more than offer athletic leagues, Executive Director Ray McGury said.

"He really opened my eyes to the parks and recreation field, that there's more to parks and recreation as an organization and as an industry than just baseball, basketball, football, sports," McGury said. "That was an epiphany for me."

Growing up green

Ory grew up in an established Naperville family whose early generations were farmers. He remembers working the land on a large second lot next to his grandfather's home, where a garden grew fruit trees, vines and vegetables. Gardening was in his genes, but it had to take a back seat during his first career, which lasted 21 years.

"When I was in the military, I never had a garden," Ory said.

When he got out of the Army and moved home to a Naperville condo he had built in 1988, he got to work outside. Ory joined the park district staff as a lawn mower for Springbrook Golf Course, and he started renting a garden plot along West Street to tend in his downtime. Pursuing the interest further, Ory studied for an associate degree in horticulture from the College of DuPage in the early 1990s.

Growing finances

It actually was golfers, not gardeners, who encouraged Ory to run for the park board seat he claimed in 1995. By then, he was working in a business management and accounting role in the clubhouse, so he used his financial knowledge to review the district's books when he joined the board.

He didn't like what he saw. The district was roughly $500,000 in the red, he said, so he pushed for an increase to property taxes to help achieve a balanced budget. During his tenure, there was a failed referendum for facility construction and a long line of executive directors with little continuity until McGury was hired in 2008.

But even after McGury came on board, Ory continued to watch the money and be skeptical of plans to build a recreation center like the Fort Hill Activity Center on which construction began in April.

"Ron was one of the outspoken critics of having an indoor facility when I first got here. He hadn't seen the need," McGury said. "After he heard from the community and looked at surveys, he got behind it 100 percent. That's the kind of commissioner Ron is. He's not going to take things at face value. He will challenge the staff. He's a fiscal hawk and really watches the numbers."

Gardening legacy

Out at the Idea Gardens, Ory keeps his eye on the plants. Black-eyed Susans, sunflowers, blue stem grass and switch grass all have a place among roughly 80 varieties in the natural area he has developed using donated materials for fencing and benches and volunteer time to assemble it all. Using volunteers matches Ory's philosophy of not needlessly charging taxpayers and Naperville's love of contributing to the community.

"He puts in a tremendous amount of time out there" leading volunteers at the Idea Gardens, said Jim Kleinwachter, who manages a home conservation program for the Conservation Foundation in Naperville.

"Ron does a good job of making sure that there's feedback for these people and that people feel connected and part of the team. He brings coffee to them and thanks them. You really need somebody like that."

One volunteer, 16-year-old Jeremy Tang of Lisle, helped create signs to explain the plants in the Idea Gardens as his Eagle Scout project. Jeremy said Ory's knowledge of all things that grow gave him plenty to work with.

"I thought his work was really neat because he was able to showcase his expertise and green thumb in a way that others can really grow in gardening," Jeremy said. "He gave me a bunch of guidelines and threw ideas at me. He was particularly useful in creating the information that would go on the signs."

A Rotary colleague suggested Ory sell the list of plant varieties, sun and moisture preferences and blooming seasons he compiled to accompany the Idea Gardens, but Ory had a simpler idea. Just come out to the gardens, he said, and he'll give the information for free.

"Just to see things grow, it's almost like a miracle," Ory said.

"For something to come from that small of an entity ... to something you can taste," he said, "I still have the 4-year-old's wonder about the miracle of it all."