Lanscaping on the canal
Not sure if you've seen the landscaping latelyon the canal, but it's just gorgious. The Park's Department is really doing a nice job.....turning it into a Myriad Gardens type feel! It's great! Anyways, there was a great article on it in Today's Oklahoman.
Here it is, in case you didn't get to see it:
Lush landscaping transforms view all around canal
By Jon Denton
The Oklahoman
The Bricktown Canal was just a minimalist expression in landscape art when canal supervisor Greg Crotchett arrived in 1999. The Bricktown Canal is an ambitious project conceived by MAPS planners and funded by taxpayers.
Acres of grass, trees, shrubs and flowers adorn the winding waterway. With its pumps and fountains, the $23 million canal is as modern as the Bricktown warehouse district is vintage.
Yet, the idea of a downtown watercourse has been around for more than a century. Here's a timeline:
1889 -- City leaders promoted a plan to link the North Canadian River to downtown Oklahoma City via a canal. The project sprung a leak, and bankruptcy and legal battles ensued.
1993 -- The Metropolitan Area Projects proposal conceived a downtown waterway as part of a river development project. The project shifted the canal to California Avenue so it could intersect a decaying block of Bricktown properties and boost redevelopment.
1999 -- The canal opens July 2, with one restaurant, Chelinos, onboard for business.
2004 -- Open along the canal are 17 Bricktown restaurants, clubs and shops.
He remembers the waterway's winding banks with their strips of amended soil, scattered trees and start-up flower beds.
"The plant material was small, but we could fertilize it," recalls the city parks and recreation department official.
That was five years ago this month. To meet MAPS (Metropolitan Area Projects) standards, a landscaper was hired to overhaul the north end of the waterway. In the next year, complaints about defective or missing trees and plants were answered with fresh material.
Now, the north end of the canal is taking on the look of an urban parkway. The south end is extensively landscaped, partly in preparation for Oklahoma's 2007 centennial celebration.
Separating the two areas five years ago with not much anybody could do about it was a big field of red mud and clumps of weeds. Motorists crossing on Interstate 40 got a good view of downtown's bare backside, and it wasn't pretty.
Today, the muddy field of streams is shrinking. In its place is the massive Bass Pro store, the Sonic Building, a Courtyard by Marriott hotel and the soon-to-open 16-screen Bricktown theater.
All are a part of a bold plan to refashion a former warehouse district into one of the state's choice entertainment venues. To that purpose, the Bricktown Canal is blooming.
Slow and steady
The vision of the topography's original designers, JoAnne Vervinck on the north and Scott Howard on the south, is slowly emerging. Just as he expected, Crotchett said, their landscape designs needed about five years to mature.
That's typical for public gardens, observer Paul Johnson said. It takes time to find plants that do well and those that don't.
"Now, things are really coming along nicely there," said Johnson, a landscape consultant at Oklahoma Gardener Institute.
Frank Sims, executive director of the Bricktown Association, is an unabashed Bricktown booster. But he said he is genuinely impressed with the rapid change in the canal's landscape, calling it "an amazing transformation."
"We are compared to the River Walk in San Antonio ... They have had 50 years of foliage growth, and we've had five years. It's amazing to see people strolling down our canal, admiring all the landscaping and flowers. It's a very peaceful environment."
Yet, Crotchett is candid about what hasn't worked. A fungus attacked the park's loblolly pine, bringing on brown needles and an ugly dieback. Almost a dozen sago palms have outlived their original tropical setting and must now be trucked around in container pots.
It's a struggle to keep the bird of paradise trees going in Oklahoma's frigid winter, despite their crowd-pleasing appeal. They are by nature tropical, a flash of yellow and orange amid the greenery.
"Those came with the landscape. I don't know if we are going to plant any more of them," a cautious Crotchett said.
Still, it's not a bad record of losses. The landscape crew imbeds as many as 5,000 annuals in the spring and again in summer, then installs 2,000 winter plants. Crotchett hopes the variety keeps frequent visitors to the canal guessing about what comes next.
Among his daily burdens is foot traffic. Sometimes, thousands of people stroll the canal's seven landscaped acres. The visitors generally behave, but when they go astray, "We ask them politely to get out of the flower bed," he said.
Tried and true
What works best is no surprise. For vertical effect, the dependable Oklahoma redbuds are thriving. Lacebark elms are starting to throw shade. Shumard oaks are stretching, someday to reach their potential as giants of the landscape.
Royal purple smoke trees sport feathery blooms and striking orange fall colors. The colorful tamarisk, often found along Oklahoma's streambeds, is trimmed to prevent it from taking over as a shrubbery nuisance.
Another charmer, the pink dawn chitalpa, presents bell-shaped blossoms in profuse summer blooms.
Topping the trees for color and variety are the flower beds. As standard annuals in the north canal, begonias and impatiens are abundant. Purple cone flowers and hardy hibiscus perennials also contribute to the cottage garden effect, Crotchett said.
The canal's south section offers wild blue flax and buffalo grass. The Indian blanket, gaillardia, adds red and yellow splashes from the state's official wildflower. Wildflower fans also can count on seeing coreopsis and the nodding ox eye daisy.
Taking a cue from Oklahoma's prairie preserves is the drought-resistant little bluestem grass. Colors of the sideoats grama, at three-feet tall the largest of the grama grasses, vary from blue-green in spring to rust red in fall.
For all its beauty, there's still too much red dirt showing, landscaper Johnson says. Until development fills all the vacant lots, he recommends a blanket of ground cover.
"For water quality, for aesthetics, it would be a good idea to go ahead and plant or mulch. Mother Nature does not like empty spaces, so she's liable to plant weeds," Johnson said.
That's for developers to deal with. Crotchett says his purview remains the canal, the pump stations, water features, lights and landscaping.
To those responsibilities, he recently added the Oklahoma River, 14 miles of weed-infested shoreline formerly known as the Canadian River. For that most visible of downtown water features, he's starting with an attractive plant he can count on, the Oklahoma redbud.
Originally Posted by mranderson
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