YOUNGSTOWN — Parents, children and neighbors came face-to-face with newly hatched monarchs, painted ladies, black swallowtails and a comparatively gigantic polyphemus moth at Saturday’s 12th annual Butterfly Festival.

The event took place at the South Side Community Garden on Williamson Avenue in Youngstown — a labor of love for organizer Lois Martin-Uscianowski. She lived on the property in her youth, but had not been back in a number of years.

Then one morning, she was driving home from church when she heard, in her own words, “The booming voice of God” speak to her. God told her to establish the garden on her grandmother’s land, she said.

Her family had not owned the land since 1979 and the house that was on the property burned down in 1982, she said. Martin-Uscianowski was not sure at first what to do, but then she felt the world was giving her constant reminders of God’s command.

“For the next six months,” Martin-Uscianowski said, “every time I turned around there was something about gardening, something about God, so I was like, ‘OK, fine.'”

The neighborhood had changed a great deal since the days of her childhood before Interstate 680 was built, but Martin-Uscianowski was on a mission from God.

Most of the land belonged to the city of Youngstown, which was only willing to sell if Martin-Uscianowski would buy the entire plot of land.

“So, I ended up with half a city block,” she said.

Since then, Martin-Uscianowski has transformed the space into several small gardens, clusters of topiary plants, a “blooming meadow,” and an orchard with the help of FirstEnergy of Ohio.

Also at the time, Martin-Uscianowski was flying back and forth between Youngstown and Arizona, where she was nursing a sister dying of cancer.

“I ended up taking my sister to the Tucson Botanical Gardens, and they had a setup like this,” she said, referring to the butterfly tent.

This inspired Martin-Uscianowski to build her own.

Butterflies are bred in a large enclosure, tall enough for visitors to walk upright, made of a fine mesh strung over a wooden frame and filled with a variety of bushes and blooming plants.

Visitors were given cotton swabs doused with sugar-water to attract butterflies. The insects landed on children and adults to feed. Frequently, younger children squealed and ran away when insects fluttered up to them.

“It’s funny,” Martin-Uscianowski said. “The children want to reach out and touch the butterflies, but they are afraid of being touched by the butterflies.”

It was not just the children who communed with the butterflies.

Kerri Burge, who lives across the street from the community garden, released a butterfly into the wild in remembrance of her mother.

“My mother passed March 14,” Burge said, two days before her 72nd birthday, “and I released a butterfly in her honor.” The butterfly was a monarch, “and it flew high,” Burge said. “They say if you tell a butterfly that you love someone and send them off, they will take the message to heaven, so hopefully that will get to my mother.”

Sally Young of Boardman was happy to simply stand in a patch of sunlight mellowed by the mesh of the enclosure and let a spangled fritillary butterfly rest, wings open, on her palm. “Butterflies are the only thing that flies that I like,” Young quipped, smiling.

Largely self-trained, Martin-Uscianowski did receive hands-on experience in butterfly wrangling at the Beech Creek Botanical Gardens and Nature Preserve in Alliance, where she volunteered. There, she worked with Jim Nero, a volunteer manager of the preserve’s Butterfly House. Now the community garden in Youngstown is nationally registered by Kansas State University as an official Monarch Way Station.

Martin-Uscianowski brings daycare children once a week to learn gardening and butterfly stewardship, and occasionally assisted living residents come to the community garden when there are fewer people.

Martin-Uscianowski receives funding with the help of 6th Ward Councilwoman Anita Davis. “God just makes it happen every year,” she said.

The community garden and the butterfly festival were also the story of a life-long friendship.

“This property is actually property that Lois and I lived on as children back in the ’60s,” Linda Robinson of Youngstown, a volunteer organizer, said, “and you know how children were back in the ’60s.”

Robinson is black, and Martin-Uscianowski is white. The two families owned duplexes on the property that is now the community garden. “We were actually forbidden to play with each other, but we continued to do so anyway,” Robinson said. “And through the years there was just nothing that anyone could do” to stop them from being friends.

In 1982, when the Robinson family was fortunately away, their furnace exploded, and the building burned to the ground. The friendship between the two women continued, nevertheless.

“This property was always so special to us, because this is where our friendship begins and continues to this day,” Robinson said.

“Her sister loved butterflies,” Robinson said of Martin-Uscianowski, “and so she started this event to honor the memory of her sister as well as the time we spent here as best friends as we are today.”

The festival included live singing, a firetruck for children to explore, food, Mahoning County’s Bookmobile, gifts of free spicebush and buttonbush plants and a butterfly kit containing live caterpillars.

“I wanted people to come and garden like they used to do all over,” Martin-Uscianowski said. “I just want to show people that Youngstown can be a great place.”

Correspondent photos / Russell Brickey
A Butterfly Festival at the South Side Community Garden on Williamson Avenue in Youngstown Saturday drew dozens of people. Harlow Jarvis, 8, of Boardman, holds a monarch butterfly.

Kendall Roddy, 9, of Boardman, granddaughter of organizer Lois Martin-Uscianowski, gazes upon a newly hatched butterfly at Saturday’s festival. Learn how to attract butterflies with a pollinator garden, see Page B8.