TOWN OF DEWITT – The Friends of Clark Reservation held an official dedication of a cottage garden to one of the group’s founding members on July 2.
The occasion paid posthumous tribute to Diane Wheelock, a noted volunteer-turned-employee at the state park who helped to develop what was originally called the Council of Park Friends.
In July 1979, as part of the first known event organized by the Friends group, Wheelock gave an informational slide presentation and led a walk around the Jamesville park as its designated naturalist coordinator.
While serving as an environmental educator for the New York State park system, she was said to have spent much of her time in the Clark Reservation Nature Center, which she also assisted in bringing up to speed as a public access resource consisting of a library and historical exhibits.
Wheelock, a longtime DeWitt resident born in Ohio, passed away in September 2020 at the age of 82.
After graduating with honors in biology from Kent State University, she worked in virus research at Parke-Davis Pharmaceutical Company in Detroit.
According to her husband of 57 years, Frank, she later turned down a job with Bristol Myers Squibb to instead follow her passion for nature.
“This park was her baby,” said her daughter, Heather Wheelock-Alfreds, at the dedication ceremony.
At one point that sunny afternoon, the East Syracuse resident also noticed a hummingbird, her mother’s favorite bird, hovering overhead during one of the speeches—a subtle sign that she was listening from somewhere.
“My mom was the most loving person,” Wheelock-Alfreds said. “She was my best friend, and she was officially Mother Nature.”
Known also as a skilled tennis player, skier and golfer, Diane Wheelock loved gardening, sightseeing and traveling, having been to over 60 countries across six of the seven continents in her lifetime.
Located right outside the Nature Center, the cottage garden commemorating her is a monarch butterfly waystation that contains wild geranium, swamp milkweed and blue wood aster.