Letters

Time for the town to take over

To The Editor:

To the gotcha guy and any one else who wonders what’s going on but doesn’t bother to inform themselves:

There seems to be confusion and misinformation about what’s going on with the Town gardens. We were even caught up in some guy’s gotcha moment when he thought he had captured some horrible crime because each of us from Perennial Point of View (under contract yes, but paid by the hours we work) were working together in teams with two town guys, on the gardens. He made remarks and took pictures and said, “Peabody’s gonna love this.” response — “Phew, finally — at least we had one month with a few good edibles.”

Me and my local small business — Perennial Point of View (PPV) — first began working in Bridgton’s downtown in 1987, just after the Revitalization project of that time, winning the contract to plant the peonies that had been designed into that plan. It was a steep learning curve as we put in some 800 peony roots that fall, following every detail of the specs in the plan, though there was nothing in there about how dogs would dig the roots up for that yummy bonemeal! Some of the “beds” were gravelly soil laid over where the former pavement had been left and had to be jack hammered before we could plant.

I learned quickly to always know what I’m digging in.

After the peonies, we went on to take care of the plantings that had been put in. At the time, Bridgton didn’t have any gardens or plantings, we didn’t even have a lawn mower, as the only grass was at cemeteries or ball fields and the mowing was hired out. Over the next 10 years, I redesigned and replanted just about every planting to work better for a small town with snow. New plantings were added and Bridgton became the garden town it is today; the gardens themselves blamed once by a planning person for being a ‘narcotic,’ blinding everyone to the huge and hard tasks at hand, like wastewater.

In my neighborhood, there have been almost no mushrooms on the forest floor in recent years — certainly last year there were fewer than I have ever seen in 35 years of hunting. The tree trunk species were fairly successful, but the ones that do not grow on wood were quite missing. The exception was a certain type that grows on lawns — which are usually watered.

As the earth has been warming, weather patterns have shifted in ways that are unpredictable and difficult to characterize, partly because there are new things happening that we don’t have enough experience with to understand, we don’t know what to focus on, and we need new vocabulary. It’s