A meeting will be held on Wednesday, October 23, at 7 p.m., at the Cora Kelly Recreation Center (teen room) to discuss possible enhancements to some of Del Ray’s small parks and open spaces.
The meeting will primarily focus on the parks that the Del Ray Citizens Association helps to clean under the city’s Adopt-a-Park program. The DRCA is compensated by the city for this cleanup, and according to the DRCA bylaws, funds earned must be reinvested in these parks. However, the DRCA has other funds that could be used in other public spaces, and there are options to explore those areas as well. Some of the DRCA money is designated for tree planting and other landscaping.
Ideally, there will be the creation of a basic landscape design for Del Ray’s small parks. This would be worked out with the input of people who live closest to the parks as well as anyone else who is interested. Once there was a design, priorities could be set and various parts of the design implemented as money became available.
But this kind of process could take a great deal of time and commitment. We would have to have some very dedicated volunteers. And, of course, we would need designers. Still, having a landscape design would help us to leverage the limited DRCA funds to raise money from other sources.
The co-chairs of our Adopt-a-Park Committee, Jim Snyder and Cindy Clemmer, have been exploring options for where the next commitment of DRCA funds might be made. A leading candidate is the medians on Commonwealth Avenue, which is now considered a park.
The Alexandria Open Space Plan, approved by the City Council in 2002, calls for conversion of the city’s major streets into “greenways,” with the enhancement of Commonwealth Avenue specifically cited as a model for this. But the city has not made any investment in implementing this part of the plan.
Despite this lack of city action, there appear to be some relatively inexpensive investments that could be made to improve the Commonwealth medians. One current problem is that the soil in the medians is very badly compacted, which hurts the health of the trees planted there. A process called vertical mulching (similar to core aeration of lawns) has been shown in studies to significantly improve tree health. In addition, adding water sources is relatively inexpensive and would allow the addition of shrubs as well as trees.
In the longer run, there needs to be a reexamination of some of the ideas for the greening of Commonwealth Avenue that were developed several years ago by students in Virginia Tech’s graduate program in landscape design, in a project that was sponsored by the DRCA.