Waveny To Get Four Dog Poop Bag Receptacles in 6-Month Trial

Parks officials last week voted 7-1 to allow a nonprofit organization that funds landscaping projects in Waveny to pay for six months of having a private company install and empty four trash cans designed to collect used dog poop bags. The Waveny Park Conservancy will pay Stamford-based Doggie Doo Not! $1,930 to install pole-mounted green metal mesh receptacles in three different areas of the park. 

There’s a “burgeoning problem of the pet waste that is being left all over Waveny,” according to Jane Gamber, a Conservancy board member. 

The receptacles would go on either end of what locals know as the “cornfields” area in the southeast corner of Waveny, as well as in the parking lot near the Powerhouse Theater and Lapham Road trail entrance but the Merritt Parkway, she said. “Each of the stations would include one of the round cans,” Gamber said. “They have a lid on them that is spring-loaded so that they remain closed.

New Plan for Waveny House Forecourt Calls for Removal of Memorial Trees

Trees planted outside Waveny House in memory of a former first selectman and a New Canaan youth who died in an accident would be removed under a plan brought forward by an organization that takes on landscaping projects within the park. Recreation Director Steve Benko noted last week that two cherry trees that would be removed under the Waveny Park Conservancy’s plan had been planted in memory of Charles Kelley, first selectman of New Canaan when the town acquired Waveny. “And there’s a place there with a plaque with [Kelley’s] name on it,” Benko told Conservancy board President Caroline Garrity and board member Jane Gamber during the May 19 Parks & Recreation Commission meeting, held via videoconference. 

“His daughter and her family still live in New Canaan, so I don’t know if you would speak to her about removing those trees. But they were planted in his memory. And there’s another dogwood tree—if you are standing in front of house looking left toward the trees there, there’s another dogwood tree, by itself.

Garden Club and Beautification League Partner To Create Wreaths, Holiday Decorations for Downtown New Canaan

The white lights are in the trees on Elm and, thanks to a longstanding effort of two of New Canaan’s most cherished volunteer nonprofit organizations—with help from the town—the village center will be fully transformed into a winter wonderland come the Holiday Stroll on Friday night. More than 40 members of the New Canaan Beautification League and New Canaan Garden Club gathered Friday morning to create the wreaths, bows, garlands, holiday arrangements and evergreen roping that will adorn Town Hall, the police and railroad stations, library, new Post Office and windows throughout town. “Our members are vitally interested in this from both organizations because it’s such a great joint effort,” Jane Gamber, president of the Garden Club, said from the Visitors Center at the New Canaan Nature Center, amid tables piled with ilex bush cuttings, winterberries, pinecones and branches. “We enjoy collaborating together. It’s the holiday spirit and it’s a great way for everybody to give back a little to this town.”

For the past week, members of the Department of Public Works have been collecting the greens and—together with others supplied by New Canaan-based Mill River Tree Service—supplied the makings of the decorations.