Around Town

PHOTOS: New Canaan Beautification League Thanks Volunteers, DPW Workers at Annual Breakfast

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Members of a nonprofit organization dedicated to beautifying New Canaan gathered Monday morning at Mead Park to thank their volunteers and town employees during an annual breakfast. About 25 representatives from the New Canaan Beautification League met at the colonnade with Department of Public Works employees to celebrate their longstanding collaboration to maintain plantings around town. The league’s co-president, Faith Kerchoff, said the organization’s services include creating 207 hanging baskets for the downtown, plantings at 33 traffic triangles in New Canaan and seasonal holiday wreaths, as well as overseeing a public garden off of Chichester Road. The league last week won town approval to demolish a single-family residence at the Lee Memorial Garden and replace it with a potting shed. “We have about 150 members with a core of 30 or 40 that are really ‘in the dirt,’ ” Kerchoff said on a bright, cool morning from the grassy area inside the colonnade, where a table had been laid with coffee cake, muffins and coffee.

Around Town

Did You Hear … ?

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We’re hearing there’s a town DPW worker who enjoys Kahlúa in the morning. Locust Avenue resident Lauren Cerretani told NewCanaanite.com that she named her 4-year-old rescued Labrador retriever mix ‘Kahlúa’ as soon as she laid eyes on the dog, adopted from the Myrtle Beach, S.C. area at age 13 weeks. (Cerretani’s previous dog was named ‘Bailey.’)

Each morning after 7 a.m., Cerretani walks Kahlúa downtown, and there, during the summer months, she inevitably spots Walt Jaykus of the New Canaan Department of Public Works. Jaykus’ duties include watering the hanging baskets on the lampposts, and he’s had a connection to Kahlúa since the dog moved to New Canaan. “My dog either spots his water cart or Walt himself and she’s pulling me,” Cerretani said.

Around Town

An Even More Beautiful New Canaan: 150 Hanging Baskets Go Up Downtown on Wednesday

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A cherished addition will grace the village center of New Canaan starting Wednesday, thanks to a partnership between the town and one of its most venerable nonprofit organizations. Members of the New Canaan Beautification League this week put together 160 hanging baskets that the Department of Public Works are scheduled to place on lampposts on Main, Elm and other streets in the downtown. “They do a fabulous job,” Libby Butterworth, a member of the NCBL for four years, said of the DPW workers. Of the Beautification League, she said: “It is a wonderful, very friendly and hands-on group, and everybody is welcome.”

The baskets themselves, which the DPW fertilizes and Walt Jaykus of the public works department waters in the mornings, include angel wing begonias, white wave petunias and blue petunias, Butterworth said. (The white wave petunias do very well in both shade and sun, she said, while the angel wing begonias, which are red, start out very small in June but by August take over the basket.)

The Beautification League itself was founded in 1939 and parts of its work in town also involves caring for the landscaping on traffic triangles throughout New Canaan.