Cedar Beach Parkway: The good, the bad, the ugly and the What!?

The Good:

The completed pathways in the Rose Garden are beautiful. In my opinion the work done there is fantastic. The stone column array looks good as well and once roses are allowed to grow on the pillars, it should look very nice (I was told by Giuseppe the architect that this was the planned outcome). Also, there are fish in the ponds again, which was nice to see. They are orange and small and very camera shy.


The Bad:

They have indeed paved all the paths around the reflecting ponds and have significantly widened them in places. This will increase runoff but decrease gravel sediment in the creek; so it is a Catch 22. I don’t personally think going this route was the best idea but it has been done and cannot be changed. The paving should end here.



The Ugly:

I first noticed these fissures around the largest reflecting pool over the summer. I had not posted pictures of them because I thought they were going to be taken care of during the construction process. They have yet to be fixed and are growing. Some are filled with standing water and it is my belief that the water comes from a leak in the pond walls and not rain. The water has been there for months.



The What!?:

As documented in this blog post, two weeks ago a group of volunteers spent the day (and later days) at Cedar Beach planting thousands of flowers and some trees and shrubs around certain sections of Cedar Creek’s banks. These areas will serve as riparian buffers. The idea is to increase the beauty of the park, add needed wildlife habitat, and most importantly, help the health of the stream. The most plants we installed were placed in a small grassy strip between where the current buffer ends at the end of the largest pond and the wooden bridge at the end of the Rose Garden. The flowers that were planted would have been beautiful once grown and really added to Cedar Beach Parkway. That sentence is in the past tense because this morning I found that area of newly planted vegetation like this:



It used to look like this:



As it is currently, the reckless pavers have completed eliminated any of the good that could have come from the planting that occurred there. That creek bank is now more threatened than it was before the planting happened. Seriously folks? That is unacceptable and given the fact that nearly half the grass has been replaced by a macadam pile, nearly irreversible. What message is being sent here? Let’s hope other pavers or future mowers leave the rest of what has been planted alone.

Unreal...