Teixeira Park gets a New Path and Putnam Park gets a Rain Garden

Foundation for Path in Teixeira Park

Path Follows the Nubanusit River Beyond; Ruin Garden to the Right

Ruin Garden will be Connected to the Path

"Flintstone's" Picnic Area

Tree work at Putnam Park

Site of New Rain Garden

Site of the New Entrance Garden in Putnam Park

Two of the Peterborough Parks are undergoing projects this year. Both projects involve rain gardens. Rain gardens are a new concept to collect storm water and channel it into a garden that will decrease the amount of storm water that is lost to the public drainage system. Rain gardens combine environmental benefits with aesthetically pleasing plantings.

Teixeira Park is having a new pathway installed made of a permeable hard pavement that will allow water to flow through it. The pathway will loop from the sidewalk in West Peterborough. At each end of the path there will be a rain garden that will collect storm water from the street. It will be planted with plants, many of them natives, that can tolerate extremely wet conditions with periods of intermittent dry conditions. The path will connect to the Ruin Garden and a granite picnic table I like to call the "Flintstone's" table. Stone artist, Ron Higgins designed the picnic table and two benches out of huge pieces of granite. Teixeira Park was designed to have a wild theme. It has rustic granite benches throughout the park and is planted the trees, shrubs and perennials that are attractive to wildlife, particularly birds and butterflies.

The renovation of Teixeira Park is part of a larger project to revitalize West Peterorbough. New sidewalks and streetlights have been added to make that part of town much more pedestrian friendly. The project is funded by the West Peterborough TIF. A TIF is a Tax Increment Financing Plan where any additional taxes produced by new development will be put in a fund to be used to revitalize a certain section of a town. The West Peterborough TIF will be used to improve the physical infrastructure and the visual appearance of West Peterborough. They held a series of meetings with the West Peterborough TIF and members of the community and developed a plan with input from all the concerned parties.

Putnam Park will also have a new rain garden to capture run off from an abutting parking lot that has been eroding the path in the park during heavy rain storms. Our Public Works Director, Rodney Bartlett, suggested a rain garden as a solution and obtained a grant to fund the project. The park also had some tree work done to repair damage to a beautiful Pine Oak , Quercus palustris, caused by the devastating ice storm of December, 2008. Several large white and red pine trees were also removed because they were dangerous and had lost large limbs during the ice storm. We will be planting a new garden near the entrance of Putnam Park where the large pines once stood to buffer the park from the parking lot.

I will be following the progress both of these projects on my blog. If you interested in more information about rain gardens, Nigel Dunnett and Andy Clayden have written an excellent resource called, oddly enough, Rain Gardens.