Around Town

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

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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.

Around Town

‘A Full Rich Experience’: Conservancy Reviews History of Waveny Park, Future Plans

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Perhaps the most important step taken by the last family to own privately what is today known as Waveny Park was in hiring the renowned Olmsted Brothers landscape architecture firm to design its grounds and gardens, a local expert said Wednesday. Led by the Brooklyn-born founder of Texaco Oil Company, the Lapham family not only built Waveny House but oversaw creation of the carefully cultivated area immediately around it, including the walled garden, according to Keith Simpson, a New Canaan-based landscape architect. Yet since New Canaan acquired the property in 1967, its main house, outbuildings and grounds all have needed regular repair and upkeep, such as when Simpson and the Garden Club restored the walled garden east of the prominent brick structure in 1982. “But it’s only a small area,” Simpson told more than 100 listeners gathered in the Visitors Center at the New Canaan Nature Center for an hour-long talk on the cherished public park. “More places need attention.

Around Town

‘Lovely Little Touches’: Mysterious Mini-Christmas Tree Reappears at Maple and Main

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There would seem to be little room for what’s happening at Maple and Main Streets—after all, New Canaan’s Christmas tree traditions are well established. There’s the Exchange Club’s annual lighting of the Lou Moreno tree at Kiwanis Park, for example, and the Dec. 24 caroling by the tree at God’s Acre—a cherished tradition that the Civic League started exactly 100 years ago, according to the historical record. Even non-tree decorating practices are fixed—the New Canaan firefighters’ precise, orally communicated tradition of decking the firehouse, or the wreaths affixed to public buildings such as Town Hall and the Post Office. So when a tiny Christmas tree began to appear each December in a disused corner of the Center School Parking Lot about 10 years ago, it was a curiosity to passersby catching sight of it.

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

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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.

Around Town

PHOTOS: New Canaan Beautification League Thanks Volunteers, DPW Workers at Annual Breakfast

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Members of a nonprofit organization dedicated to beautifying New Canaan gathered Monday morning at Mead Park to thank their volunteers and town employees during an annual breakfast. About 25 representatives from the New Canaan Beautification League met at the colonnade with Department of Public Works employees to celebrate their longstanding collaboration to maintain plantings around town. The league’s co-president, Faith Kerchoff, said the organization’s services include creating 207 hanging baskets for the downtown, plantings at 33 traffic triangles in New Canaan and seasonal holiday wreaths, as well as overseeing a public garden off of Chichester Road. The league last week won town approval to demolish a single-family residence at the Lee Memorial Garden and replace it with a potting shed. “We have about 150 members with a core of 30 or 40 that are really ‘in the dirt,’ ” Kerchoff said on a bright, cool morning from the grassy area inside the colonnade, where a table had been laid with coffee cake, muffins and coffee.