New Life Blossoms at Pussy’s Pond
When Michele Carlson heard heavy rain pounding down one day recently, she did not burrow into a cozy chair. Instead, she hurried to Pussy’s Pond along School Street in Springs to see which way the rainwater was flowing.
A designer of sustainable landscapes whose firm, Carlson Design and Planning of East Hampton and New York City, was chosen by East Hampton Town to restore the Pussy’s Pond area and establish a small park there, she was excited to see that two recently installed trenches, called bioswales, were catching, holding, and filtering the runoff, just as intended. The swales help prevent pollutants from entering the pond.
A virtually single-handed force behind a mysterious-looking forest of short stakes and colored flags that has sprouted on the grassy slope to the pond behind snow fencing, Ms. Carlson spoke animatedly on a recent brilliant day about the project, which has been underway since late summer. It was funded by a grant obtained by the town.
In addition to the bioswales, the plan calls for stabilizing and planting along the shores of the pond and creating two meadow areas and several paths leading to an existing wooden bridge over the pond.
Students from the Springs School, where classes worked several years ago with architects on designs for rebuilding the bridge, are involved now in the park, learning how to work with nature to protect and enhance the ecosystems.
Lisa Seff, who teaches science and academic enrichment at the school, said in a recent email that studying Pussy’s Pond and Accabonac Harbor was already part of the curriculum called STEAM, an acronym for science, technology, engineering, art, and math.
“Students have been learning about the area’s water quality,” Ms. Seff said, adding that they had helped plant indigenous species there. Groups of students also will be collecting water samples from Pussy’s Pond and Accabonac Harbor to begin a long-term study of water quality variables such as dissolved oxygen, temperature, salinity, pH, nitrates, and turbidity.”
“This describes my passion,” Ms. Carlson said, as she stood on the bridge watching two egrets sunning themselves and the reflections of the colored flags, which mark new plantings and add dots of bright color to the more muted but brilliant tones of turning fall leaves.
“It’s about community and education. t’s about public space, and habitat. There’s so much opportunity here,” she said. Referring to the students, who she hopes will remain involved, she said, “Their hands have been in the dirt.”
Ms. Carlson, who has a master’s degree in sustainable landscape design from the Conway School of Landscape Design in Massachusetts, noted that Wendi Goldsmith, the director of the Center for Urban Watershed Renewal in Massachusetts and an expert in stormwater management and wetland and aquatic habitat restoration, has been a technical and logistical adviser.
In tuning in to the natural ebb and flow of nature’s systems in a particular area, Ms. Carlson said, she becomes something of a detective. Determining how stormwater flows, and managing it, is “very simple, but very specific. You have to follow the water.” One telltale sign, she said, is the line of sand or other sediments along the ground left by puddles or flowing water.
The long and narrow bioswales — trough-like depressions lined with a coconut fiber and jute fabric and planted with a cover crop of rye to hold the soil in place — capture water during a rainfall, particularly the runoff that carries pollutants from roadways.
Contained in the troughs, water seeps slowly into the ground so that the contaminants are filtered out of the soil before running into the pond. Plastic pipes or a sluiceway of stones create an “exit,” Ms. Carlson said, for water to flow out of a brimming swale, if necessary. “The whole premise” of what she called green infrastructure management, is “slow, store, and filter,” and keep the water “close to the source.”
The process mimics nature, and when the plantings eventually take root and fill in, the park is designed to look as if it were always that way. But in the meantime, she acknowledged, the project creates what looks like a construction site. People driving by, like one man who stopped to ask about it recently, wonder what is going on.
A spidery web of crisscrossed lines of thin twine tied to posts scattered across the park is meant to keep ducks and other waterfowl away from seeded areas and from new wetland plants. Nibbling waterfowl can take out up to a thousand plants in an hour, Ms. Carlson said.
The ducks at Pussy’s Pond have been fed for decades, she said, but students have been learning that feeding them handfuls of bread interferes with natural ecosystems and their lives.
In the spring, a “meadow mix” of seeds for plants, from bluestem grasses to goldenrod, will go in and be left to grow, but open areas will be mowed so that it is easy to stroll through the park.
Dozens of upright plastic tubes now support river birch, oak, maple, and other nascent trees and bushes. The saplings will become a guide to where visitors may walk as well as where plants are to be protected.
Near the edge of the pond, Ms. Carlson is working to reverse the effects of sea-level rise as well as erosion from animals and people walking along. Native plants are going in along the banks to create a riparian buffer. Several U-shaped areas at the edge of the pond have been cordoned off with a coir fascine — rolls of densely packed coconut fiber, a substance that will degrade over 20 years but in the meantime will help stabilize the shoreline. The rolls, planted with small plugs of spartina, a native grass, will fill in for a natural look and allow water, sand, and mud to flow in, but then trap the sediments along the pond’s edge.
Beyond the scope of her work for the town, Ms. Carlson would like to see a seating area of logs along a sloped area of the park, creating an outdoor amphitheater-style space. She is hopeful that community members would help make that happen.
Among Ms. Carlson’s many goals is opening wetland areas at the edge of the pond that are now filled with phragmities. She intends to slowly choke out the invasive plant by diverting the fresh water that helps them thrive, tying them in bundles, and attaching biodegradable bags of salt that will seep out when it rains and send them into decline.They will then be cut, and black plastic laid down to “cook” the roots in a pilot program to eliminate them without herbicides.
Ms. Carlson also is working with the town’s Land Management Department to develop protocols for future upkeep of the area. An occasional East Hampton resident in the past who now lives here fulltime, she has worked with Concerned Citizens of Montauk and, with Ms. Goldsmith, is installing a similar green infrastructure on the Ruschmeyer’s property in Montauk to prevent pollution of Fort Pond.
The Pussy’s Pond installation should be completed in about three weeks and native meadow plant seeds will go in in the spring. “And then it’s just waiting and protecting,” she said.
“I think people are starting to realize,” Ms. Carlson said. “East Hampton is water-centric, socially, environmentally, economically, and culturally.”
With Reporting By
Christine Sampson