Across the street from North Tonawanda’s Deerwood Golf Course sits a little-known public garden. The North Tonawanda Botanical Garden is not only a scenic community destination along Tonawanda Creek – part of the Erie Canal – but an 11-acre hub of sustainability education, focusing on native plants and pollinators, clean water practices and sustainable gardening. Next week, the botanical garden plans to unveil its restored wetland habitat, a 5,000-square-foot area full of plants that act as a natural filter, removing pollutants and contaminants from runoff before reaching the creek.
Work to transform the land – it previously was a lawn with a big pond in the middle – to a wetland started in 2018, North Tonawanda Botanical Garden Organization President David Conti said. A sign marks the border of the wetland habitat at the North Tonawanda Botanical Garden. “The difficulty there is that it floods,” Conti said.
“From fall through the spring, there’s a lot of standing water in there. You have to have plants that can that can survive in that environment.” The group figured out which plants would thrive in a wetland environment, cultivated them in the botanical garden’s greenhouses and planted them.
Now, the area is full of colorful flowers such as blue flag iris, red lobelia and buttonbush, and sturdy plants such as switchgrass. “It’s a great transformation,” Conti said. Native grasses, bushes and flowers grow at the wetland habitat at the North Tonawan.