Around Town

Garden Club’s Newly Planted Wildflower Meadow Blooms in Irwin Park

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Visitors to Irwin Park have yet another spot along the Flexi-pave path that circles the property where they can stop and ogle a beautiful planting. The wildflower meadow that the New Canaan Garden Club planned last fall for a prominent area below Gores Pavilion has taken root and started blooming its reds, blues, pinks and yellows. Inspired by the Mose Saccary-planned (and Murphy Pennoyer-fertilized) wildflower meadow at Route 123 and Parade Hill Road—in fact, relying heavily on the formula developed by Saccary, highway superintendent in the New Canaan Department of Public Works—the colorful area at Irwin is blooming with baby’s breath and poppies. “It looks great,” said Katie Stewart, a club member who serves on its Irwin Park Committee. “With each rain, I think, each week it will look different and better as different things come up.

Around Town

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 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.

News

New Trees Grace Entrance to Irwin, Thanks to Garden Club and Town DPW

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[Editor’s Note: The following information was submitted by Katie Stewart of the New Canaan Garden Club, a nonprofit organization that’s been doing this type of great work in town for more than a century. Find out more about membership here.]

The three photos below were taken on Tuesday, September 30, 2014 by Judy Neville when the New Canaan Garden Club Irwin Park Committee installed five new trees at the Park entrance with the help of the town backhoe and Parks Superintendent John Howe, Highway Superintendent Mose Saccary and Tiger Mann. In 2005 the garden club members accepted the stewardship of New Canaan’s newest park on Weed Street from the Irwin Family when the club members were given an endowment fund to continue the beautification of the property/park and improve the quality of life in our already special town. The garden club gladly collaborates with the Park and Recreation Commission, the Office of Selectman and the Public Works crew on the maintenance and beautification. Annually improvements and new projects have been undertaken using the funds.

Government

Mill Pond to Get ‘Dry Hydrant’ during Biennial Dredge

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The biennial dredging of Mill Pond is underway, an approximately $10,000 maintenance project that alternates each year with Mead. Mill Pond, which gets a far heavier sediment load from the Fivemile River than Mead does from the subterranean waterway that feeds it, additionally has a screening system called a “gabion weir” installed, according to Mose Saccary of the New Canaan Department of Public Works. “We put this in and the plan is if we keep pulling debris out of the weir, the rest of the pond will stay clear,” Saccary said. The pond—site of the popular annual fishing derby—had gone without a dredge for some 25 years until 2008, when a $1 million project was needed to clear the pond, just eight inches deep and sprouting weeds at the time. The contractor on the job is Norwalk-based Hussey Brothers Excavating.

Now & Then

Back to School, Back in the Day: The Knockout Pit

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Some first day of school images in New Canaan persist through the years: bright new outfits, embarrassing photo shoots at the bus stop, tearful kindergarten farewells, nervous classroom energy, locker combinations, crisp notebooks, teacher introductions, excited and awkward classmate reunions. The playground equipment and areas have been double-checked—for example, the New Canaan Department of Public Works last month diligently crack-sealed parts of playgrounds at East and West. Yet for many years, and for scores of nostalgic New Canaanites who attended Center School—demolished after the 1982-83 academic year to make way for the Center School Parking Lot ($120 per year for a permit) opposite Maple Street from New Canaan Library—the centerpiece of the playground was a narrow, long, recessed, cement “pit” around the back of the school itself. A place of physicality, perhaps even violence, as well as fierce competition and glory—and, of course, wholly unfathomable at an elementary school today—the Knockout Pit at Center School remains a singular touchstone for alumni more than three decades later, despite no official historical record of it and at a school far better known and remembered among educators for its innovations in student learning and curriculum. “My best memory of the school, other than some friends, is the Knockout Pit,” said Bill Taylor, a 1981 New Canaan High School graduate who attended Center in the early-‘70s.