High Praise for New Wildflower Field at 123 and Parade Hill

An avid tennis player at the New Canaan Field Club, town resident Suzanne Jonker drives up Route 123 all the time.

Prior to this summer, nothing much caught Jonker’s eye as she passed the (harrowing) intersection at Parade Hill Road.

That’s all changed, with the creation this year of a bright wildflower meadow that’s drawing high praise from locals. Here are a few photos that Terry took on Thursday, article continues below:

“It used to be all weeds, so it definitely caught my eye and I thought, ‘Wow, that is so nice,’ ” Jonker told NewCanaanite.com. “Really good work. Nice colors.”

Asked whether he knew who had created the wildflower field, Tiger Mann, assistant director of the town’s Department of Public Works, answered: “That would be the brainchild of Mose [Saccary], our Highway Superintendent.” (Saccary, a Center School alum, is out this week.)

“I think it’s beautiful,” said Caroline Garrity, president of the New Canaan Garden Club, a nonprofit organization that does a lot of work to beautify the town, as does the New Canaan Beautification League (the group creates the hanging baskets downtown).

“It’s highway beautification, like Lady Bird Johnson used to do. I know that on the parkway in New Jersey they have fields like this, too. This one has these pinks and yellows—it’s a very pretty combination.”

Asked if she could help in identifying some of what’s there, Garrity said coreopsis, poppy, bachelor’s button, cosmos and verbena.

Valerie Monaghan of the New Canaan Beautification League (the organization’s president is Carol Seldin) called the field “stunning.”

“The Beautification League does all the traffic triangles in town, and there’s one there, and we often see the town guys working on [the adjacent field]—for several years they had thrown some wildflower seeds in that little patch of land and it was starting to look pretty good, but it wasn’t the vision that Mose had, so this spring the guys dug it all up and then replanted it with the wildflowers, and this is the best it’s ever looked,” she said.

Monaghan added that she’s “never seen anything quite like” the wildflower garden that’s growing now.

“It’s quite special and its’ very hard to get a wildflower garden to really work, so they did it,” she said. “Everybody who stops by when we are weeding [the traffic triangle] asks about the field. Of course we give them [the DPW highway department’s workers] all the credit. It’s just beautiful.”

For anyone who wants to check it out, the wildflowers field is just north of the traffic triangle here: