With summer just around the corner, the New Canaan Recreation Department has been making the Waveny Pool ready for the upcoming season.
Outside of the pool, the Recreation Department has added flowers within the island. Photo by Mackenzie Lewis
Recently, the Recreation Department added new landscaping outside the pool to the make the popular summer spot’s entrance more attractive.
Recreation Director Steve Benko told New Canaanite that the town has been working through the past couple of years to make the area outside of the pool look nice, and thinks that they finally accomplished that this year.
“Some of the plants [from last year], just from winter kill, didn’t really make it,” Benko said. “There’s an island [and] because of the subsoil in the island we had some birch trees that didn’t make it, and then we tried a couple crabapple [trees] and they didn’t make it so we took them out and put some annual flowers in because the subsoil is so wet it holds water.”
Throughout the past summers, the Recreation Department has tried many different shrubs along the side of the pool, but none of them have worked out very well. Steve Benko hopes that these annual flowers will bring more attraction to the pool entrance. Photo by Mackenzie Lewis
After working diligently to find a match for the area outside of the pool, officials decided that it would be best to swap out the trees for annual flowers.
“[The annual flowers] make the place look really nice,” Benko told the New Canaanite. “We put in some new Rhododendrons and New Guinea impatiens annuals around so it’ll look nice. It really makes the pool attractive when you pull up.”
Benko hopes the new addition of flowers will help attract members to the pool. The past few weeks have seen many New Canaanites purchasing passes for the summer, he said.
“They actually reduced the family pass a few dollars [this year] so people are coming all of the time to buy their passes,” Benko said. “People just start thinking ‘the pool is open and it’s getting hot so we got to go to the pool.’ ”
The Recreation Department has already sold 471 family passes this season, along with 34 individual passes, 47 nanny passes, and 75 senior passes. Benko anticipates that the Recreation Department will “sell another 200 to 300 [family] passes from now to the end of June,” with other passes trickling in throughout the season.