News

Open Space Advocates Eye Dream Greenway in New Canaan

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Open space advocates are eagerly anticipating the sale of a Weed Street property that could lead, if all goes well, to the creation of a pedestrian path connecting Irwin Park to the New Canaan Nature Center. If things pan out as they hope, New Canaan could see a “greenway” from the woods out back of the Nature Center, through New Canaan Land Trust property and all the way to Weed Street and Irwin Park (which itself may eventually connect via sidewalk to the top of Elm)—in other words, a walk-able loop encompassing the heart of downtown New Canaan and all those town treasures along the way. All that’s needed is the transfer to the town of a strategically placed 425-foot strip of land that’s about 15 to 30 feet wide (see map detail at right), according to New Canaan Land Trust Board of Trustees President Chris Schipper. Right now, that strip is part of a property at Weed Street near the intersection of Wahackme that has been on the market for a little over one year. Asked about the status of the property, listing agent Susan Blabey of William Pitt Sotheby’s International Realty confirmed that there’s an accepted offer and declined to say more, citing the owner’s privacy and the fact that the deal is not yet done.

Around Town

New Canaan Nature Center, Town, Businesses and Organizations Mark Earth Day 2014 [VIDEOS]

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“Where have those flowers and butterflies all gone

That science may have staked the future on?”

—from Robert Frost’s “Pod of the Milkweed”

 

The migration of monarch butterflies through New Canaan—and everywhere else along the East Coast—is happening less frequently in recent years, to the point where some are calling the insects’ once widely anticipated journey between the Northeast/Canada and Mexico “endangered.”

The major reason, experts say, is a lack of milkweed, which monarch caterpillars feed on. “The butterflies can go to all kinds of flowers for nectar, but the caterpillars can only eat milkweed plants. They’re having a hard time with loss of bio-habitat, so we are encouraging people in town to plant these free milkweed seeds,” Susan Bergen, a volunteer for the New Canaan Garden Club, said Tuesday morning from a table inside New Canaan Library. There, she and Jen Rayher (nee Sillo, a 1994 New Canaan High School graduate), director of membership and volunteers at the New Canaan Nature Center, handed out the seeds (“Got Milkweed?” on the packet) to mark Earth Day here in town. It’s one of several initiatives and events planned by the Nature Center for the next week, which New Canaan’s highest elected official today declared “Environmental Awareness Week 2014Week” (see video below).