Troop 23 Eagle Scout candidate Greg Gold led a team of Scouts, Palisades Rotary Club members and other volunteers that built a two-rail wood fence in the park at the corner of Temescal Canyon Road and PCH, next to the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power pump station.
Over two Saturdays in May, Gold and his team installed the fence on the back side of the landscaping in order to prevent people from walking through and damaging the plants.
The team planted additional plants (agave Americana/century plant (blue color) and optunia Santa Rita/purple prickly pear near the fence, and did some weeding.
The pump station landscaping project started because the area was overgrown with weeds and trash. It was an eyesore for anyone driving by, but especially for motorists stuck at the red light on Temescal at PCH.
Rotary Club member Perry Akins originally recruited fellow member David Card in 2006 to design a planting plan.
Two years later, the land was cleared and graded and an irrigation system and plantings were installed by Jamie Hubbs’ Eagle Scout project team (Troop 23), Rotary members and volunteers, with the assistance of Great Western Landscaping.
Funding came from the rotary club, the Pacific Palisades Women’s Club (for a solar irrigation controller) and community donors. The installation was done in cooperation with the
City of Los Angeles Bureau of Sanitation (the pump station) and the Department of Recreation & Parks (the surrounding parkland). Councilman Bill Rosendahl was on hand for the dedication in July 2008.
Two years later, the city dug up most of the landscaping for the Prop. O project in order to install pumps for year-round diversion of stormwater, away from the beach to the Hyperion treatment facility.
The city cooperated with the Rotary Club to modify its design to maximize the remaining planting area, and the city re-landscaped the site with irrigation and shrubs in accordance with the club’s planting design.
In 2014, Pacific Palisades Community Council member Stuart Muller and the rotary club devised a plan to add plants to the landscaping around the station fence by creating a bed along the Temescal side, raising the fence (to allow the bougainvillea to cover up more of the equipment), adding a railroad timber edging curb and removing the power pole in the middle of the landscaping.
Card, a professional landscaper, said that the corner park has been difficult to maintain because of frequent water shutoffs caused by work on the storm-drain diversion project upstream on Temescal and due to an old park irrigation system that breaks down regularly.
Rotary club members visit the site about twice a week to make sure the irrigation is working and to monitor the site.
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