The leaves are turning and the inevitable feeling that fall is coming is upon the streets of Sapulpa. Officially, it’s already here, and as the 90-degree days fall off the calendar, you get the sense that summer has finally released its grasp on northeast Oklahoma.
There’s another summer upstart that began showing up this year and it too brought a bright bit of color and it’s only just getting started—pollinator beds.
Downtown flower aficionado Kent Daniel called us over to one of the most vibrant pollinator beds, literally buzzing with activity—Waypoint Lounge at 111 S. Main Street. Along the busy street was a flower bed teeming with life and color, insects and butterflies buzzing and floating about from flower to flower.
The bed was one of several now established in downtown Sapulpa for the season, and despite the heavy car traffic directly adjacent to the flower bed, it’s continued to thrive with the quality care it’s received from Kent Daniel and his team.
Daniel gave credit to property owner Joni Rogers for the success of the pollinator bed, a concept he was already aware of, but it was Rogers who gave him the resources to pursue it. “She pretty much gave me free reign,” he said. “We were able to take a right-of-way that was nothing but concrete and we gained about 1,000 feet of pollinator space.”
Rogers, who has also established beautiful flower beds and arrangements at her other Sapulpa properties—including her SeneGence office on Main Street and the Burnett Mansion—says it’s part of their core value of trying to leave things better than they found them.
“In all that we (SeneGence and the Kante Family) have done throughout the years, we’ve done our very best to leave a positive imprint,” she told Sapulpa Times in an email. Rogers pointed out other practices that SeneGence the Kante Group follow with a similar mindeset, from giving back to communities through the Make Sense Foundation, to utilizing green office and manufacturing procedures, to the eco-friendly ingredients they use in their products. “The thought of having the opportunity to use one of our facilities to help repopulate one of Mother Nature’s most beautiful and necessary creatures—Monarch Butterflies…well, that was a huge YES!”
At Waypoint Lounge, the success of the program shows by the new addition to the flower beds, aside from the flying insects—the black, white, and yellow striped monarch caterpillar. The presence of the caterpillar shows that not only is the flower bed providing a safe and nourishing environment for the butterflies visiting the beds, but that these butterflies may now be modifying their migration patterns and making Sapulpa a regular stop in their travels.
Joni Rogers says having Kent Daniels and his experienced hand in Sapulpa has been critical to making this program a success. “Kent Daniels has the expertise that, when applied to what we are already doing in making our facilities attractive and comfortable, became an easy win-win,” she said. “The Monarch sanctuary at the WayPoint, plus the additional repopulation of the local bees made possible by the beautiful petunias planted throughout the town will surely not only help our townspeople grow and maintain beautiful gardens but will ensure the continued growth and reproduction of these much-needed species for our community.”
Along with other attractions like Route 66, the Christmas Chute, and the Bubblegum Pink Supertunias, Kent Daniels says that the introduction of these pollinator beds has the potential to increase tourism in yet another avenue, because there are entire caravans that follow the monarch migration path, and getting Sapulpa on that list could be just another reason to visit Sapulpa. “It will be a draw,” Daniel says.
Rogers says she’s already heard of visitors coming to town to see the “monarch anomalies” for themselves, and she’s looking forward to seeing more in the future. “We look forward to doing all we can to put Sapulpa on the map to attract the ‘naturalist’ type of tourist for yet another type of feature attraction.”
Where to find the pollinator beds
- Waypoint Lounge (111 S Main Street)
- Tulsa Sapulpa Union Railway (701 E Dewey Ave.)
- Custom Woodwork (221 E Hobson Ave)
- Diggum Deep Mortuary (101 N Poplar St)
