JOHNSON LAKE — On a sunny October afternoon, Mary Bergstrom walks down the Johnson Lake Hike-and-Bike Trail on the west end of Johnson Lake. “We used to have tons of butterflies and bees here. Now, you can count the bees on one hand,” she said.
“There used to be monarch butterflies everywhere, but now, we might see just four or five in one summer.” Instead of mourning that loss, Bergstrom set out to do something about it. In the spring of 2023, she planted a pollinator garden along the trail, and it’s thriving.
The garden, 82 by 64 feet, is located across the road from DR-19 at Johnson Lake. It has 27 species of plants and flowers. Nearby is a small gazebo with benches.
“My garden is just a stop along the trail,” she said. Bergstrom is too modest. Her garden is much more than that.
It’s shaped like Nebraska, done to scale, and a tiny path through it replicates the Platte River. The idea for a Nebraska-shaped garden came from her son Bjorn’s sixth-grade teacher in Lexington nearly 30 years ago. “I’m a teacher, and I wanted it to be a geography lesson, too,” she said.
“I wanted to raise awareness of the natural world and what we’re doing to it.” Sowing seeds The garden sits along the Paul Masson section of the Johnson Lake Hike-and-Bike Trail, near Mallard Beach Drive 19C. It sprouted after Bergstrom joined the Johnson Lake Trail Committee the summer of 2021.
The committee is a subcommittee of Johnson Lake Development Inc., which strives to make .