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 Tonawanda Botanical Garden.
Since 2018, the organization has been working to transform “11 beautiful acres.” Storm water collects pollutants such as oil, gasoline, brake dust, salt, fertilizer, pesticides and bacteria when it travels across impervious surfaces. Uncontrolled storm water runoff flows into Tonawanda Creek and pollutes the water.
The wetland vegetation absorbs that polluted water and stops it from reaching the creek, Conti said. For example, fertilizer that would cause a harmful algal bloom in the water is absorbed by the wetland plants as food. Gasoline that would pollute the water is broken down by the bacteria in the mulch layer of the wetland, Conti said.
The plants also provide food for local pollinators, including bees, birds and butterflies. Bees climb over milkweeds at the wetland habitat at the North Tonawanda Botanical Gardens on Wednesday, Aug. 14, 2024.
(Joshua Bessex/Buffalo News) The North Tonawanda Botanical Garden Organization leads and maintains the wetland restoration. The habitat was funded by a grant from DeGraff Medical Park. The organization is managing two other wetland restoration projects on the site, and is always looking for sponsors to fund the work, Conti said.
The city’s botanical garden was a “local fixture” in the 1960s and 1970s, but fell victim to budget cuts, according to an article in “Clear Waters” magazine about the garden. In 2016, a small group of residents came together to take charge of the garden, eventually forming the North Tonawanda Botanical Garden Organization two years later. Ecological changes have been made to a 1-acre shoreline restoration project unveiled Monday at North Tonawanda Botanical Garden.
In 2021, the botanical garden unveiled a new 1-acre shoreline restoration project, which created more natural shoreline protections to reduce erosion and established fish spawning and resting habitats along Tonawanda Creek for species such as walleye and northern pike. The project also created a native wildflower meadow to attract pollinators and improved public access at the site, with educational signage, fully accessible trails and a bridge. The site has a gazebo and access to boating on the canal with kayak and boat launches.
“It’s a beautiful 11 acres, and we want to make it a place that people want to come and visit,” Conti said. A monarch butterfly rests on a leaf at the wetland habitat at the North Tonawanda Botanical Gardens on Wednesday, Aug. 14, 2024.
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