The summer has quickly slipped by and in the blur of a busy summer time, we haven’t had a chance to tell you about some exciting improvements that we undertook in the park earlier this year. In the winter and spring of this year, our staff, volunteers, donors and partners did some major updates on some of the park’s gardens.
The Berkshire Hathaway Garden
Last fall, Tracey Goetz from Berkshire Hathaway had a huge fundraising event for the park to benefit the gardens. Over the winter, our staff put our heads together with our neighbors at Old North State Garden to re-imagine the Berkshire Hathaway Garden on the west side of the park. This garden had become a bit overgrown so we decided to let it breathe. With a lot of volunteer labor, we removed a number of large shrubs, pruned trees, removed weeds and vines and from there re-imagined a lovely dry forest garden. In February, Old North State Gardens installed a variety of ferns, hostas, ajuga, and hellebores as well as a variety of colorful native perennial plants, including penstemon, campanula, anemone, and heuchera. This garden has grown in spectacularly well over the summer and we can’t wait to get in there this fall with a volunteer crew to clean it up a bit for the winter so that it can have a truly beautiful spring bloom!
Piedmont Prairie Garden
Have you noticed that part of the hillside behind the pavilion looks a little different? It’s no longer getting mowed down like the rest of the hillside and there are flowers peaking through. It looks a little wild but that is the idea! This spring, we used a generous grant from the Healthier, Greener, Kinder Foundation to install a Piedmont Prairie planting on this hillside. What is a Piedmont Prairie? It is a grassland ecosystem that was once common to the piedmont (or foothills) of the eastern United States. There is a great article about Piedmont Prairies on the Duke Gardens website.
We wanted to install this new Piedmont Prairie Garden for several reasons. The area that we chose for this garden is on a steep slope that was very difficult for our partners at Durham Parks and Rec to mow, so we wanted to change the area to a lovely, native garden that required very little maintenance (the goal is to only have to do quarterly or bi-annual maintenance). We also wanted to see how it would work to plant this type of plant mix directly into un-amended soil. We did no soil preparation, like tilling, and we did not add additional compost or topsoil to the area for planting. The soil in the Durham Central Park is relatively poor, compacted clay soil, some previously had buildings on it in the last century and other was overgrown city lots. Finally, we chose a piedmont prairie style garden because native plants can survive and even thrive in poor growing conditions and native flowers provide forage for the native pollinator and bird populations and grasses can provide habitat and habitat materials for both. Downtown Durham is growing and changing and we want to shift the parkland to a haven for both the growing human community and our native wildlife populations. 
On April 9th, North Meets South Fine Gardening planted about 75 plants, ⅔ native grasses (Panicum and Mulhenbergia) and ⅓ native perennials (Rudbeckia, Monarda, Rattlesnake Master, Verbena, Mountain Mint and others). We have been very pleased at the results that we have seen over the past 3 months! These native plants are extremely drought tolerant. From April-June, there was very little rainfall at the park and even though the planting was brand new, it required very little water and all of the plants had gotten established with no sign of distress in the early summer drought and extreme heat. As the planting becomes established, park visitors will be able to enjoy an attractive garden that has color and interest 12 months a year.
Another remarkable feature that we have enjoyed is that this garden is absolutely buzzing with life! We have seen pollinators including bees, wasps, and flys, butterflies and birds enjoying the new plants. This area, as a tightly mown lawn, was completely absent of life until we planted these new plants.
Thanks to the Healthier Greener Kinder Foundation for providing the funding to make this experiment come to life! We hope that this planting is just the beginning of a shift towards more sustainable, native plantings not just here in the park and downtown Durham, but be an example of how to change planting practices to prioritize native plants can have an effect far beyond our little park. It would be very easy to have mown grass throughout the park, but adding attractive native plants, helps to bring life (not just human) to the park and provide just a little more magic and wonder to visitors.
What’s Next?
In the winter and spring of 2025, we will be putting a renewed focus on the east side of the park. During the construction of the new condo building (The Vega) next to the skate park, a bunch of the park was used as part of the construction easement and it got torn up. So, with what we have learned from our Piedmont Prairie experiment by the Pavilion, we will be installing more native grasses and perennial flowers next to the skate park and down the hillside to connect with the pollinator garden.
To do these improvements in the park, we rely on the generous time and energy of our volunteers! If you would like to join us or if you are part of a service group, we will be having monthly or bi-monthly park workdays through the fall, winter and spring. To get on our volunteer list, you can sign up here. We hope to see you at the park soon!