June Van Steyn making a difference with flowers

Melissa Haneline
The Post and Courier

June Van Steyn

A bed of red roses brightening a busy North Charleston intersection. Day lilies blooming in a park where syringes were once found.

June Van Steyn has lent a hand, with a green thumb, to numerous beautification projects in the area. She views her surroundings as a gift from God, maintaining them as an obligation.

"It is our responsibility on this earth to do what we can to preserve it," the Hanahan resident says.

So she regularly waters plants and pulls weeds at Cypress Gardens, and prunes the crepe myrtles in the medians of her Otranto neighborhood. She has picked up trash on Rivers Avenue, Spruill Avenue and in Quarterman Park.

Her volunteer activities, most of which are related to her love of nature, take up about four days of each week.

"I like to be doing," the 67-year-old said. "I'm not one to sit and tell you what to do or sit back and watch. I like to get my hands dirty."

Van Steyn is involved with Keep North Charleston Beautiful, a city-sponsored nonprofit of which she is currently chairwoman.

"She does everything and anything, and always wants to do more," said Carmen Hanlon, the organization's director. "I'm very fortunate to have her as a volunteer." Van Steyn constantly offers to help, shows up at every event and gives 100 percent, Hanlon said. When she takes on a project, she sees it through to the end.

Most recently she organized a program to teach every first-grader in North Charleston the importance of taking care of the environment.

Keep North Charleston Beautiful bought copies of the environmentally themed book "The Wartville Wizard," and area garden clubs are reading the books to every first-grade class before leaving them with the school libraries.

Van Steyn is behind the 50 knockout rosebushes in the median on Rivers Avenue near Ashley Phosphate Road, and has found sponsors for two more rose gardens on Dorchester Road. The knockout rose was chosen because it can handle the pollution and lack of water, and blooms nine months each year, Van Steyn said. It also happens to be one of her favorite flowers.

As a Clemson University Cooperative Extension Service master gardener, she has been instrumental in a rehabilitation of the city's Quarterman Park, Hanlon said. More than 250 plants were added, including blueberry bushes, hydrangeas, perennial hibiscus, yarrow, hostas, irises and day lilies.

The park was a place people didn't want to take their children to, but that's changing with Keep North Charleston Beautiful's frequent clean-ups and care, Van Steyn said. Visible results are part of what keeps her going.

Van Steyn is also president of the 937-member Council of Garden Clubs of Greater Charleston, whose projects include placing Christmas trees in hospital rooms each December, and establishing an outdoor classroom and circa-1830 garden at Grove Plantation.

Van Steyn helps teach a Charleston-Dorchester-Berkeley master gardener class, and also has volunteered with the Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts, Knightsville PTA, St. Mary's Episcopal Church and United Way's Day of Caring.

She's an avid square dancer, which is how she met her husband of 19 years, Bernard Van Steyn. As past president of the local square dancing club, Harmony Squares, she helped organize a 24-hour square dancing marathon that raised $10,000 for muscular dystrophy.

As a volunteer at Cypress Gardens, she's de-bugged roses, propagated camellias and shared her knowledge with visitors in the butterfly house. But the simple task of watering the property's plants is her favorite.

"It's so beautiful and so quiet and you can hear the birds," she said. "It's like you're one with nature."