Drainage Problem Prompts Redesign

 

Sculptor Barney Zeitz?EUR??,,????'???s Immigrant Memorial occupies a prominent spot in Plymouth, Mass.?EUR??,,????'???s Brewster Gardens Park.

A renovated Brewster Gardens opened in Plymouth, Mass. in time for the summer tourist season. Town workers were planting bushes recently, and contractors were laying bricks at the new entrance. The site is near the spot where Pilgrims landed in 1620.

The waterfront park has suffered increasingly from poor drainage in recent years, as old fill from its original construction settled. The park’s irrigation system was not to blame, although part of it was reinstalled along with a new drainage system. Water puddled in winter and soaked the grass in summer in the area near the Pilgrim Maiden monument.

If you got off the trail, you could be knee-deep in mud or lose a shoe,” said Bill Wennerberg, of Dreamscape Landscaping.

Three years ago, the town set aside $450,000 to solve the drainage problems.

From an environmental point of view, he cited improvements to the streambed to quicken the flow, a new weir to make it easier for herring to run upstream, a drainage plan that moves water and collects it underground, the creation of a wetlands garden, and the use of plants to filter water and improve stream water quality.