Community Corner
Watch for Further Daffodil Developments in West Roxbury
This environmentally friendly column is brought to you by West Roxbury Saves Energy, a community-based organization committed to spreading the word that individuals can make positive choices that save money as well as the planet.
West Roxbury Saves Energy hopes you will enjoy watching for the splashes of yellow that will pop up next spring around our town because of our (and others') participation in the "Boston Blooms with Daffodils" program this month.
The City ordered more than 120,000 daffodils, and Mayor Thomas Menino offered some 40,000 of these to individuals and organizations willing to plant them on city property on October 22 and 29.
WRSE wanted to make sure that West Roxbury benefited from this initiative, and we were able to dig some holes and bury some daffs ourselves as well as pass a hundred or so along to the . Katie Tunney, principal of the primary grades at the Lyndon, arranged for one of her science teachers to use the bulb planting for a combined math and science lesson on the school grounds.
Find out what's happening in West Roxburywith free, real-time updates from Patch.
Other places where WRSE spread the yellow wealth and where you should watch for developments in the spring include the , the , and . We will keep the remainder of the spots secret and let you see if you can locate them when the flowers start to bloom — "guerrilla planting," as one WRSE member involved calls it!
We reached out to the Evening Garden Club of West Roxbury to ask about enhancing the grounds and learned that the EGC had secured bulbs for the library and also passed along flowers to the for the students to plant. Gardener-extraordinaire and WRSE Steering Committee member Karen Sauer points out that daffodils are a great choice for this kind of initiative because they "need to be planted only once, they come back year after year, and in fact, they multiply all on their own."
Find out what's happening in West Roxburywith free, real-time updates from Patch.
According to Dot Joyce, the Mayor's press secretary, the impetus behind the bulb-planting program was to get more flowers into the neighborhoods of Boston. "Everyone is so used to seeing the flowers in Copley Square and the Public Garden," but it is important to also add some beauty to areas beyond the downtown. Volunteer planters also received T-shirts sporting the lovely Boston Blooms logo and excellent instructions for how best to bury the bulbs.
Many thanks to Ryan Woods, of the Parks Department, for managing the distribution of the thousands of bulbs and to all the volunteers who gave their time, used their tools, and took to the dirt to help make this Boston initiative a success in West Roxbury.
