‘A Win-Win for Everyone Involved’: With Generosity and Care, a Plant-Loving Legacy Endures in New Canaan

Dr. Nicholas and Ashley Rutigliano moved to New Canaan last summer from Manhattan’s Upper West Side. A Brooklyn native whose wife hailed from Stamford, Rutigliano said the couple had been pregnant—their daughter Emilia is now nine months old—and began “thinking of where to set our roots.”

They found an apt home on Millport Avenue. The Cape Cod-style house at number 156 had been owned since 1973 by Bruce Pauley, a fourth-generation New Canaanite and owner of the still-active Pauley Tree & Lawn Care Inc. who had stepped down the prior summer as town tree warden. Pauley and his wife Elaine—together with ‘Deputy Tree Warden’ Bheema, his ever-present and handsome young German shepherd dog—set their eyes on retiring to 33 acres in Vermont, and the Rutiglianos closed on the Millport Avenue house last June. The owner of SANO Physical Therapy & Wellness, providing services to patients in their own homes, Nicholas Rutigliano had come to know the Pauleys through purchasing their home and understood on moving in that they’d “taken care of and nurtured” their property to a high degree.