Around Town

New Canaan Garden Club, Beautification League Join Forces To Create Wreaths for Downtown

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Ty Tan, a professional landscape designer from West Norwalk, joined the New Canaan Beautification League about 18 months ago, after attending one of its free monthly programs.

This week, she is serving as the league’s coordinator on joint effort with the New Canaan Garden Club to beautify and prepare the town for the holidays. The two nonprofit organizations for more than a half-century have marshaled their considerable forces together to create huge wreaths and other holiday decorations that adorn Town Hall, the Post Office, New Canaan Library, Train Station, God’s Acre bandstand and New Canaan Nature Center as well as Meals-on-Wheels trays. “I think it really makes the town small and beautiful and unique and more personal, as opposed to going to other towns that do not feel personal,” Tan said on Tuesday afternoon as League and Club members placed finished wreaths on the back of pickup trucks for transporting to their destinations. “It really adds that small town touch.”

The New Canaan Department of Public Works assists in the efforts, hanging the wreaths and supplementing the raw materials that League and Club members gather from their own gardens with those the town workers get from public properties. Maryjane Markey, a 25-year town resident who had been a League member and has been a member of the Garden Club for 17 years—this year, chairing the Club’s Holiday Greens Committee—said she was “amazed” on arriving in New Canaan “that our town looked so gorgeous” during the holidays.

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.

Government

Apple, Plum Trees Near Town Hall To Be Removed as Part of Beautification Plan

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Officials on Tuesday approved a contract for tree pruning and removal throughout New Canaan that includes part of a plan to beautify the area around Town Hall. Two apple and two plum trees above the retaining wall by Vine Cottage will be removed, and work will commence to re-plant the area as per a plan from landscape architect Keith Simpson of the New Canaan Beautification League, members of the Board of Selectmen said during their regular meeting. Representatives of the league “have some low-growing shrubs and items that are going to hang over the wall a little bit, for a very nice planting plan in the area,” according to Department of Public Works Director Tiger Mann. “We passed [the request for tree removal] through [New Canaan Tree Warden] Bob Horan—he wanted to wanted to make sure that there was a plan in place to move forward,” Mann said during the meeting, held at Town Hall. “Once we showed him that, he was happy.”

The plan calls for the addition of a flowering plant—an evergreen shrub called “Euonymus fortunei”—to an area near the top of the retaining wall, while existing ornamental plantings will remain there.

Around Town

Did You Hear … ?

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The gallery for this week’s “Did You Hear … ?” features interior photos from rental units at the newly built mixed-use building at 16 Cross St. in New Canaan, “The Crossing.”

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The Town Council on Wednesday night voted 12-0 in favor of an operating budget of $148,136,106 for fiscal year 2018. The overall figure and amount allocated to the Board of Education ($87,618,405) are the same as had been approved by the Board of Finance. The schools are seeing an approximately 1.6 percent year-over-year increase, while the overall operating budget is going up 2.6 percent.

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.