They’re not only planting flowers, but also the idea that driver-dominated downtown Freeland can function for other people, too.

Friends of Freeland, an eight-year-old nonprofit organization with hundreds of volunteers, has just completed its latest project to improve pedestrian and bicyclist safety.

The group has installed 24 planter boxes to define the entrance openings to several parking areas along Main Street.

“Until about three weeks ago, there was a lot of open asphalt in that area,” local architect Richard Rhydes, Friends of Freeland president, said Monday.

“Three years ago, there were only 150 feet of sidewalk in the downtown zone,” he added for perspective. “Meanwhile, 9,000 cars a day use Main Street. It’s extraordinary.”

The new concrete planters, roughly all the same size, are the first phase of a landscaping and beautification project designed to better control vehicle approach to businesses while providing safer access for bikes and pedestrians.

“The goal is to just spread out through town with more pedestrian walkways,” Rhydes said of the endeavor.

The project began in 2004 with a college paper on the effects of sidewalks and landscaping in Freeland written by Noah Roehl, an intern in Rhydes’ firm, Whidbey Island Architects.

The paper was the basis of a successful $45,000 federal grant application for materials for the project. An additional grant for $2,500 was obtained from Whidbey General Hospital, and another $125,000 in in-kind services was pledged by area businesses, residents, artists and merchants.

Rhydes said Friends of Freeland also plans to continue landscaping projects throughout downtown, and to finish gravel pathways for people to get around the downtown core without walking on the roadways.

He said the downtown area, the commercial hub of South Whidbey, has become bracketed by senior citizen housing and new housing developments, and that more and more people will need to be able to walk safely into town.

“Freeland has the opportunity to be an ideal town of the 21st century,” Rhydes said.

He said Friends of Freeland was formed in 2001 to protect 15 acres of wetlands from commercial development, and since then the group has secured the protection of 45 acres of wetlands bounded by

Highway 525 and Double Bluff and Newman roads.

“We’re stewards of wetlands,” Rhydes said, “but we also decided we should be involved in community development.”

“We’ve had an extraordinary response to a call for volunteers,” he added. “They’ve really stepped up.”

One, local resident and artist Jan Swalwell, summed up the volunteer effort in Freeland.

“We are, step by step, discovering and strengthening the experience of becoming a community,” she said. “Building community is the foundation for healthy growth. I am so excited.”

For more information about Friends of Freeland, or to volunteer, call

331-1224, or visit www.friendsoffreeland.net.