Coming back to life
Beautification project tweaks what was bleak
The flora gracing the grand entrance to downtown Port St. Joe has come back to life, reversing the pounding it took at the hands of Hurricane Michael.
“It was scraggly to say the least,” said Angela White, from Port St. Joe’s 25-year-old Coastal Design and Landscape, on a tour several weeks ago.
White was accompanied by the Port St. Joe Garden Club’s LeeLee Doughty, who was instrumental in securing close to a quarter-million dollars in state beautification grants for a multi-phase project along U.S. 98, between 1st and 5th streets.
“It was basically hard soil, no irrigation,” she said. “It looked kind of like a landfill and we beautified it. We’ve taken an area that was neglected after Hurricane Michael and we’ve turned it into something quite beautiful.”
Together with White’s business partner, Hal Keel, the trio showed off the work to Willson McBurney, a senior landscape architect with the first of Moffatt and Nichol, out of Lake Mary, which has a continuing services contract with the Florida Department of Transportation to serve as the landscape architect for FDOT’s District 3.
“This looks really nice,” said McBurney as he surveyed the work Coastal had done at 4th Street, and the corner of 3rd street.
After the sunken marshland was dug up, the suffering underplantings pulled out and the soil rectified with nutrients and fertilizer, work began on the putting in of a variety of plants that would do the job, and offer color and not present any sort of visual liability that might obscure the line of sight of traffic.
Key to the project’s success, in boosting the blooming fortunes of the six crepe myrtles and three bald cypress trees, shrub oleanders, Indian hawthorne, palmettos, Mexican sage, spider lily, and carpet rose and coontie palms (along the intersection at 3rd and 4th), all mostly obtained from G&S Nurseries out of Live Oak, is water.
Carefully controlled and allocated water.
The city installed an irrigation backflow preventer and made any needed repairs to the main line and Coastal took care of the sprinklers and drip irrigation technology, all controlled by battery-powered rain sensor gauges to measure and efficiently allocate the precious liquid needed by the plantings.
“It measures precipitation, and then does whatever the rain sensor tells it to do,” said Keel.
At first the landscapers maintained a watering schedule every day for 30 minutes, and have since cut it back to three or four days a week, depending of course on what Mother Nature has chosen to do.
“We basically took an ugly retention pond and made it look pretty,” said Keel.
Stay tuned for more to come as the project moves on to phase 2, at 1st and 2nd streets.
“The highway is one of our gateways to visitors and residents driving by our town. As with most city beautification programs, the result is improved economic development for the downtown districts, and in many cases, significant development. It draws them in to visit our downtown, come in and shop at our stores and eat in our restaurants, instead of driving by,” said Doughty. “Beauty begets beauty and the city embraced it.”
Meet the Editor
David Adlerstein, The Apalachicola Times’ digital editor, started with the news outlet in January 2002 as a reporter.
Prior to then, David Adlerstein began as a newspaperman with a small Boston weekly, after graduating magna cum laude from Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts. He later edited the weekly Bellville Times, and as business reporter for the daily Marion Star, both not far from his hometown of Columbus, Ohio.
In 1995, he moved to South Florida, and worked as a business reporter and editor of Medical Business newspaper. In Jan. 2002, he began with the Apalachicola Times, first as reporter and later as editor, and in Oct. 2020, also began editing the Port St. Joe Star.