Spring into Action!
If you’ve driven past Ralph Wilson Park you’ve seen construction vehicles and workers buzzing around the site transforming its landscape. Major work is underway.
Join us on Tuesday, May 20th at Waterfront Elementary for our annual Community Meeting to get a first-hand look at the dramatic transformation of our beloved park and learn about our phased reopening. Register today!
Trees! Trees! And more trees! The City of Buffalo, in partnership with our world-renowned landscape architect MVVA prioritized planting many more native plants, grasses and trees at Ralph Wilson Park. The trees are critical to the park – they create structural resiliency, they provide necessary shade for park users, they improve our environment, and they are beautiful.
You can watch the MVVA team tagging trees for Ralph Wilson Park on their visit to Schichtel’s Nursery in Springville.
The tagged native trees are dug, balled and burlapped, loaded on a trailer, and trucked to Ralph Wilson Park, where our landscape contractor, Scott Lawn Yard unloads the trees to be planted on site.
In the picture below, team members from MVVA and Scott Lawn Yard are doing their best native tree impressions. Each individual represents a tree. MVVA is confirming the best location and spacing in real-time based on conditions on the ground and performance of trees planted last fall. It’s way easier to move your feet to a new location than a 250lb. tree ball! Once location is confirmed, a flag goes in the ground marking the location for planting.
As you know, mulching your garden is heavy work! Can you imagine mulching a 100 acre park!? If only we all had a big conveyor like the one at Ralph Wilson Park that is making easy work of slinging mulch onto planting beds on the south end of the park.
For real-time updates of the park’s transformation, check out the pictures and videos we share on our flickr page – we hope you are as blown away by the magnitude of this project as we are!
