The 13 locals who make up this year’s newly-minted batch of Cullman County Master Gardners have a special kind of bond. In a way, they’ve grown together like the well-tended local flora they nurture and adore.

Or, you might say, they’ve grown together like a bunch of high school teenagers, veterans of the kind of in-group war stories that tend to forever unify a particularly epic graduating class. They even have their own informal nickname: The “OMG ‘22s.” It’s a fun, self-referential designation that sounds all the more well-earned when you step back and look at what this gang of recent interns already has accomplished.

“We called ourselves the ‘MG 2022 Master Gardener’ class at first, and then it got turned into the ‘MG ’22,’ and somewhere along the way it became the ‘OMG ’22’ class,” jokes recent alum Teri Mobley, with fellow grad Brad Mitchell explaining the extra ‘O’ came from the way the abbreviation looked when one member of the group circled “MG ’22” on paper. “Now,” surmises Mobley, “we affectionately refer to ourselves as the ‘OMG ‘22s.’”

They might just need a mascot and a cheer squad, because in only a few short months, the Master Gardener class of 2022 has made a winning, once-in-a-generation impression on Cullman’s beautification landscape. In need earlier this year of a class project to put their training to the test, the group settled on the Cullman Wildflower Garden at Sportsman Lake, a longtime community asset whose weeds, wear, and tear in recent times had begun winning the wild battle against the diligent-but-dwindling group of tenders who’d first sewn the peaceful plot more than 20 years ago.

“This project started out with us just trying to pull a few weeds and make it less overgrown,” says Mitchell. “Now, it’s really taken on a life of its own.”

“It was around July or so, and it had gotten to be some really hot weather,” adds fellow 2022 graduate Richard Carpenter. “That’s when Kira [Kira Sims, the energetic new local agent for the Alabama Cooperative Extension System] approached us and said, ‘Hey! I’ve got a project for you guys! Would you like to come out to Sportsman Lake and clean up and weed the garden?’

“Well,” Carpenter muses. “That led to a lot of work and a lot of sweat. But out of it came a good camaraderie that’s happened among us.”

Though the wildflower garden at the lake isn’t far off the beaten path, lots of visitors never know it’s there. None of the 2022 “OMGs” is ready to advertise that its rehabilitation is quite complete: “We’re still in the ‘discovery’ phase” of revealing the secrets hidden in its undergrowth, explains Mobley. Yet each believes the garden already makes for a special place that locals can explore now — as well as a living, vital testing ground for their still-emerging gardening skills (not to mention the voluntary elbow grease required to make it all flourish).

“Uncovering everything that’s kind of been hiding underneath has been fun,” confesses fellow Master Gardener Susan Boyd. “As we clear things away, we’re like, ‘Hey! There was a path here!’ Or, ‘This tree is breaking a creek in half — why?’ — and then realizing that maybe there was once a bridge there. Uncovering it…it was beautiful in its ugliness. It’s truly been like an archaeological dream, in a sense.”

“One of the things that really affected me about that ‘discovery’ phase,” adds Carpenter, “is the way it connects with the past. About six weeks or so after we started, we uncovered these stones with people’s names on them, and dates, as we were cleaning out these beds. Finally we realized, ‘Hey — these are the names of the people who built this!’ They were real people with real names, just like us.”

The local office of the statewide county extension system administers and, in an intentionally aloof and hands-off way, guides the overarching program that the local Master Gardeners follow. Sims says the program’s best chance to flourish comes when its volunteer participants have their hands on the day-to-day reins, a philosophy that appears to be validated by the busy class of 2022’s prodigious activity in such a short time.

Founded in 1991 by the recently-disbanded Cullman Native Plant Society, the Wildflower Garden at Sportsman Lake had simply gotten a little too wild, in recent years, for the society’s remaining active volunteers to tame. The new Master Gardener grads credit longtime society member Nona Moon — who “really was what had been keeping the garden running,” as Mobley notes — for remaining stalwart in tending the garden at the county-owned property until this year’s gang of enthusiastic newcomers emerged to put their own touch on the society’s original mission.

Sims says there are about 40 Cullman Master Gardeners in total, which makes the 13-member “OMG” class of 2022 a disproportionately sizable chunk of the larger group’s makeup. Though it requires no prior training, obtaining a Master Gardener certification isn’t exactly a casual lark of an undertaking: It’s conditional on completing a 13-week educational course, as well as 50 volunteer hours spent hands-on in the field — exactly the sort of requirement that initially led Sims to suggest the Wildflower Garden as the ideal working laboratory for this year’s class.

Now that they’ve uncovered enough of the garden’s past to envision some pretty ambitious possibilities for its future, the “OMGs” (and, to be fair, all their senior Master Gardening peers who’re similarly inclined) hope to make the Wildflower Garden a place that beckons guests at Sportsman Lake, instead of one that simply lies in wait to be discovered. Weeding and revealing buried, overgrown secrets is its own kind of improvement, but the gang knew they’d eventually achieve the feat of shifting from rehabilitation to actual building. With help from a team of Walmart Distribution Center volunteers, they’ve already painted the garden’s Japanese torii gate-style arbor an eye-catching shade of red, helped renovate a potting shed, and expended sweat equity on a slew of other maintenance overhauls and upgrades…all with an eye toward the garden’s future.

“We have some visionaries within the Master Gardeners, and there are some really good ideas,” says Mitchell. “This thing could be a simple wildflower garden…or over time, it could turn into something that’s bigger than that. There’re a lot of things on the drawing board right now.”

“We want to educate the public and let them know what’s there,” he adds. “Even now, some of us walk up to the plants that are there and have no idea what they are. We want to get all of the plants labeled, which serves an educational purpose to the community, and obviously to revitalize the garden and its existing features.”

That community-facing focus already has enlisted some even newer recruits: students at the Cullman Area Technology Academy who’re prepping a new pedestrian bridge project at the garden with guidance from Building Construction instructor Mike Burkett.

“He’s very excited about it,” says Carpenter, “because there’s some engineering — calculating the span and load — that has to go into it. He has a good program, and there are young fellas and girls in there who, if they’re training for something like carpentry or welding or body shop work, would find the experience from a project like this one to be very important.”

The goal, say the “OMGs,” is to make the Wildflower Garden at Sportsman Lake a true “park within a park,” offering a distinctly curated experience for visitors that complements, yet stands apart from, the recreation on offer just a few short steps beyond its confines.

“It has hiking trails that will be bordered by wildflowers in different seasons,” says Mitchell. “When you walk through the wildflower garden in April, it’s gonna be different than when you do it in September. It’s a place for people to relax, to commune with nature, to be able to enjoy some of the things that God put on this Earth that weren’t manufactured in a lab.”

In the process of slowly yielding back its hidden original beauty, the garden has taken on a singular significance for its new “OMG ’22” custodians. It’s become an outdoor campus for a graduating class of Master Gardeners whose shared story revolves around a place they’ve come to know, together, by heart.

“We started as interns coming into the Master Gardener class,” says Boyd. “The thing is, our 13-member class all come from absolutely different backgrounds. Now we’ve come to learn each other’s strengths; what each of us is good at and what we can contribute in a unique way. It was neat that this group, somehow, came together.”

Learn more about the Cullman County Master Gardeners, including its volunteer mission, its projects, and upcoming events, by visiting the group’s state-hosted web page at mg.aces.edu/cullman. Stay up to date on the group’s doings at the Sportsman Lake Wildflower Garden by following the Cullman County Master Gardeners on Facebook.

Cullman County Master Gardeners will meet at 10 a.m. Thursday, March 16, at the County Extension Office, 402 Arnold Street, NE. At 11 a.m. Brad Mitchell will present information on the Use and Care of Garden Tools. Attendees should bring their favorite tools to demonstrate. Current, former, and prospective members are invited to attend.

The Cullman Master Gardeners and Alabama Cooperative Extension Service will host a Native Alabama Azalea and Wildflower sale at Sportsman Lake Park on Saturday, March 25 from 8 a.m. until 3 p.m. The public is welcome at the sale, which will offer native Alabama azaleas, ferns, butterfly milkweed, coreopsis, cosmos bee balm, Shasta daisy, purple coneflowers and more perennial plants for outdoor home planting. The sale raises funds for the Cullman Master Gardeners and will be located at Wildflower Garden at Sportsman Lake, marked by a decorative red wooden gate just past the driveway entrance to the park’s wooded pavilion area.