WAUNAKEE, Wis. — A Waunakee woman has donated her front yard to the community.

What You Need To Know

  • Deb Nies' front yard is immediately recognizable to the Waunakee community

  • She turned her ornamental pear tree into a Wishing Tree in 2015

  • After her father's death, she added a wind phone so people have a place to grieve

  • When lightning hit the tree this summer, the community stepped in to save the tree

“I’m striving to be that eccentric old lady,” Deb Nies laughed on her front porch. “I think I’m there.”

She’s lived in Waunakee for decades. Just about everybody in town knows her yard and knows the special tree out front.

“I live on Main Street and 20,000 cars go by a day,” she said. “Why not do something with this tree? And maybe it will make a little magic on its own.”

In 2015, when her ornamental pear tree had been struck by lightning, a friend was in Budapest. That friend saw a Wishing Tree there.

“Yoko Ono started this concept,” Nies said. “You hang a wish on the tree, and then the wish is taken up into the heavens. And so I thought, ‘I could do that!’”

In the eight years since, she’s posted wishes on the tree’s Facebook page. Some wishes really stand out.

“One was like, ‘I want to propose to the woman I’ve been with for 10 years. I hope she says yes.’ Of course my family and I hope she says yes,” she said. “They came back and added another wish to the tree… she said yes!”

Nies recently added a wind phone, too. The concept started in Japan as a way for a man to talk to a cousin who had died. After the 2011 tsunami, he opened the wind phone to the public. The first day it opened, more than 1,000 people visited.

“My dad passed away in 2019. From the time we found out his diagnosis to the time he passed was six weeks,” Nies said. “He wasn’t old. It turned out that he had Non-Hodgkin lymphoma that none of us knew about. And he did… I was angry. Why wouldn’t you tell us?”

The idea is to have a one-way conversation with a loved one who died, and release some of that baggage into the wind.

“The very first night, two younger girls came up, one talked on the phone for a while,” Nies said. “I saw she was crying, and then her friend gave her a big hug… it’s doing its job.”

Lightning hit the tree again this summer. Nies had an arborist come out, who said the tree needed a bolt in the middle to keep it alive. It would cost over $1,000. Nies’ daughter convinced her to create a GoFundMe. Within nine hours, the Waunakee community raised enough money.

“It’s not just a tree. Somebody said to just cut it down, get a new tree,” Nies said. “It’s not the tree! It’s everything the tree means.”

Nies said at first, she felt like she was giving a Christmas present every time someone left a wish at the tree. Now, she feels like she’s the one getting a gift.

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