Wildflower Power: New Canaan Garden Club Plans a ‘Mose Meadow’ for Irwin Park
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New Canaanites will recall how the town received a wonderful gift of pink, yellow, purple and blue this past summer.
By the end of July, cars were pulling over on Parade Hill Road to photograph the wildflower meadow (see slideshow above) planted in a disused patch of land off of Route 123. A creation of DPW Highway Superintendent Mose Saccary (a Center School alumnus) and his crew, the suddenly and dramatically transformed roadside parcel earned high praise from New Canaan’s experts in lovely plants.
This week, some of those same experts—notably, Caroline Garrity, president of the New Canaan Garden Club and Katie Stewart, a member—received permission from parks officials to create what hopefully will be a similarly spectacular and deeply appreciated wildflower meadow at Irwin Park.
Mose Saccary, DPW highway superintendent for New Canaan. Credit: Michael Dinan
“Mose has tried different things there [at Route 123 and Parade Hill Road], and this summer he had great success,” Stewart told the Park & Recreation Commission Wednesday at the group’s regular meeting, held in the Douglas Room at Lapham Community Center. “He mowed the field, sprayed it, let it sit for a while, not very long, and then planted $100 worth—that’s all—of perennial seeds and wildflowers seeds and it was gorgeous.”
It certainly was.
Irwin Park visitors will know this section of the Flexi-pave path as it winds back toward the main house and away from Wahackme Road in the northwest corner of the park. This (I believe) is where the new wildflower meadow is planned. Credit: Michael Dinan
The commission voted 7-0 to allow the Garden Club, with Saccary’s help, to try for a similar wildflower meadow toward the northwest corner of Irwin, on either side of the well-used footpath there. Stewart said she’d already consulted Parks Superintendent John Howe, and there’s no issue of interfering with playing fields, since part of the area where the wildflowers will go is sloping and un-mow-able and unused now, the other portion in what was until very recently an entirely overgrown area close to Wahackme Road near the smaller park entrance opposite Bayberry.
Commissioner Joan Guzzetti asked at the meeting whether the wildflowers were perennials or a mix, and Garrity answered that some were annuals (the perennials planted at 123 are expected to come up this year, she said). Asked by NewCanaanite.com back in July if she as an expert could ID some of what Saccary had planted there, Garrity said coreopsis, poppy, bachelor’s button, cosmos and verbena.
Stewart said the seeds would be planted in December after the migratory birds have left for warmer climes.