Purchase a Green Valentine to Buy Native Plants for New River Center Landscaping
For more information: Laura Dubois, [email protected]
Looking for something different for your Valentine(s) this year?
The Dungeness River Audubon Center is raising money now to purchase native plants to landscape the new building at Railroad Bridge Park, currently under construction. Planting will begin this spring.
For $30 you can contribute to the Center’s purchase of plants in your Valentine’s name. Your special person will receive a pretty, hand-signed “green valentine” just in time for Valentine’s Day, Feb. 14.
You can order your valentines now CLICK HERE on the River Center’s secure payment site. Deadline for ordering valentine(s) is Feb. 9.
Annette Nesse, formerly Jamestown S’Klallam Tribe Chief Operating Officer who managed landscaping projects for the Tribe, is overseeing the River Center project. “Selected native plants will be low maintenance, drought resistant and will be chosen for year-round color,” she said. “That includes such plants such as Serviceberry, Ocean spray, Oregon grape, red-twig dogwoods, huckleberry, vine maple, and snowberry.”
The road into Railroad Bridge Park has been rerouted off Hendrickson Road through a bare, adjacent field that will be planted with trees, shrubs and plants native to the Olympic Peninsula.
Plantings will also include enhancement of the 60-space paved parking lot with vegetative hedges and trees. To offset parking lot runoff, a sunken “rain garden” is planned for the center of the lot, containing plants that like to get their feet wet, but can also tolerate period of dryness.
“We will be planting vegetative screens that provide both sheltering habitat and berries for birds,” she said. Before the project began, the River Center was visited daily by a large family of quail and hundreds of birds drawn to suet and seed feeders. A natural garden, planted between the Center and the Dungeness River was designed for birds, animals and insects that thrive in the understory of fallen leaves, downed branches and logs, has been relocated during construction of the new 5,000 square-foot building.
Planting will begin when trees are dormant in March and will continue throughout the year as sections of the project are completed. The new River Center expansion is scheduled to open in the early fall of 2021.