A couple months ago I mentioned that Metroparks Toledo (“Metroparks”) had recently been named the best park system in the country but I want to expand upon that little tidbit today. I just participated in a volunteer meeting on Zoom, along with about 150 other volunteers who help make our park system the gem that it is.

The volunteer coordinator staff expressed appreciation for all we do, whether it’s monitoring invasive plants or breeding raptors or dragonflies (me!), or being a trail safety monitor, or helping with the manor house at holiday time, or any of the hundreds of other things that volunteers do for Metroparks. It felt good to have our contributions acknowledged like that, and it made me proud to be part of it.

The story of how I ended up here is long and complicated, but I’ll just say that it’s ironic that I settled down in a place that I used to scorn as I drove through it on my trips back and forth from Michigan to visit my family in southeastern Ohio. For 15 years, I drove past the city thinking it looked kind of…um…uninviting. From the highway, you see big, dirty oil refineries, and lots of other industrial stuff associated with the major shipping port activity that goes on here (cargo ships and railyards). But if you get off the freeway and look beyond that, you discover that this city has a lot to offer, even when you’re used to living in much larger cities with their ample cultural and recreational opportunities.

We’ve got a wonderful art museum with free admission, a zoo, a symphony, community theatre, the University of Toledo, the beloved Toledo Mud Hens (minor league baseball), lots of ethnic restaurants, and so much more. I’m not much of a sports fan these days, but I absolutely adore our art museum and community theatre. But the thing that made me decide to move here was the metropark system, hands down. And seeing the park system continuing to shine as it is, well, that helps to reinforce in my mind that I made a good decision. Recently I was reading a thread on social media in which somebody claimed that Metroparks were an important factor in convincing people to move to Toledo. Somebody else mocked the idea, and I just couldn’t let that stand…so I stepped in to set him straight by telling him that I, in fact, am a person who chose this city primarily because of the fantastic park system. So there.

In recent years, Metroparks has been telling us they had a goal to build a park within five miles of every resident in Lucas County. At the end of last year, with the opening of Manhattan Marsh in north Toledo, they achieved that lofty goal. It’s hard to keep track, but I believe we have about 20 metroparks now. And they’re not done yet. They’re nearly finished with the first phase of a new park on the riverfront in downtown Toledo; Glass City Metropark will eventually be part of a majorly-renovated riverfront along the mighty Maumee River that should reap big economic rewards for the city. Apparently for each dollar a city invests in riverfront improvements, it can expect a return of $7-20. And already there has been construction of nearly 400 luxury loft apartments right beside the park; the builder has said that he was only able to make this investment because of our metropark system.

And as if that’s not amazing enough, Metroparks recently opened the largest treehouse lodging in the nation, with Cannaley Treehouse Village. The various accommodations there are already being booked nearly a year in advance!

I know that people have different priorities in life, and everyone doesn’t care about the parks in the way that I do. But these parks are central to my life — I spend hundreds of hours in them studying dragonflies and other insects, and walking the trails for exercise or just to give my brain a rest. (Ecotherapy, ya know?)

Metroparks also runs an award-winning nursery that grows native plants for the park system and for other restoration projects in our region. I’m so thankful for their leadership in demonstrating the importance of native plants in our community. Their Blue Creek Seed Nursery supplies many of the plants for our Wild Ones/Green Ribbon Initiative Native Plant sale that takes place each May during Blue Week. Last year we had to run the plant sale as an online event, but we still had huge demand, and are gearing up for this year’s online sale with even more plants. I’ve been spending a lot of time working on the website for the sale, and can’t wait to see how it goes this year.

I hope I’ve not bored you by gushing about Metroparks Toledo. I just wanted to express how important these parks are to my life, and do a little bit to improve the image of my city for anyone who might think of it the way I did before I moved here. My friend Sherry is an avid urban birder, and when people are surprised at the birds she finds in the city limits, she always reminds them that “birds are where you find them!” I’m borrowing her sentiment to express how I feel about Toledo — you can find happiness anywhere if you look hard enough. I’m so glad I kept looking. Thanks for reading!

(All of the photos in this post were taken in the Metroparks system– I have thousands more of them and I’ve only been here four years so far!)