H.B. nonprofits helping road to Central Park go green

A residential street leading to Central Park in Huntington Beach is being spruced up.

Two nonprofit groups, the Huntington Beach Tree Society and the Woman’s Club of Huntington Beach, plan to place trees and other plants on a newly built median on Central Park Drive as part of a continuing effort to beautify the city’s largest park.

“That street was so ugly, and it’s been like that for years,” said Jean Nagy, president of the Tree Society and a member of the Woman’s Club. “It’s one of the gateways to Central Park. Everyone that comes to the park sees that street first, and it’s just ugly.”

Nagy approached City Manager Fred Wilson about two years ago proposing a project to add a center median to the street – on the west side of the park, off Edwards Street – and place a few trees and drought-tolerant plants on it.

The Tree Society and the Woman’s Club raised $10,000 and hired Ann Christoph, a landscape artist and former mayor of Laguna Beach, to design how the entryway should look. The city paid $39,000 to build the median, according to Public Works Director Travis Hopkins.

Christoph has worked on larger projects such as Irvine Ranch Historic Park and the Shakespeare Garden at the Huntington Library in San Marino, but she said she likes to work on smaller projects like the Central Park Drive median.

“Every project that I work on is really different from every other previous project,” she said. “I do individual projects for individual situations. I don’t work on 40,000 tract homes or gigantic street plans for Caltrans. This project is just as interesting as every other project because each one has different people to work with, different challenges and different possibilities.

“I’m thrilled to be working with the Tree Society because it isn’t often that you have people that are so devoted to trees, landscaping and beautification,” Christoph said. “They really devote most of their time to that kind of thing in the Huntington Beach community. I think it’s exemplary.”

Nagy said the plan calls for about 30 different drought-resistant plants, with a shade tree and a red flowering gum tree as centerpieces. There also will be a plaque on a rock dedicated to the Woman’s Club and its 100 years of service to Huntington Beach, she said.

Nagy said the median was finished recently and that members of the Tree Society and Woman’s Club will help plant the flora over the next couple of weeks.

Nagy founded the Tree Society in 1998 to help maintain the trees in Huntington Beach and add some where she could.

“I want to make our city the most beautiful city around,” she said. “I want to make sure that when people get off the 405 Freeway and they pull into Huntington Beach that their blood pressure goes down. If you don’t put these trees in to make the city beautiful, all you got is the 405.”

The finished median is scheduled to be unveiled during a dedication ceremony at 11 a.m. Nov. 4.