On Friday, one year to the day after an ivy-covered trellis fell over at Millstone Park, off Main Street in East Hampton Village, a plan to cover the side of the commercial building the trellis had obscured was revealed.
Last June, after the trellis collapsed during a storm, it was propped upright with wooden frames as a temporary measure. “I guess the combination of the water and the weight pulled it over,” Michele Allman of the Garden Club of East Hampton, which maintains the park as well as the Nature Trail and other spaces, told the village board at the time. “From what we know, it’s about 30 years of growth that was on there.”
Ivy was planted 20 to 30 years ago “on the wall of a building that the village doesn’t own,” Mayor Jerry Larsen said. “We don’t know if there was an agreement to do it or not. But eventually,” he said, “the ivy became very heavy.”
The ivy had obscured the lower half of the wall of the adjacent building at 63 Main Street, which houses a Compass real estate office and offices of Phil Kouffman Builder. “The side of the structure is just so unattractive that we feel it really, really would just destroy that beautiful space not to make every attempt to try to repair the ivy,” Ms. Allman told the board last June.
On Friday, Dana Tripp, a certified arborist and the tree care department manager at Whitmores, presented a plan to the board. “To keep this park as beautiful as it once was, we’re trying to meet many different objectives,” he said. “One of those is trying to keep that wall green without having any sort of material growing on that wall.”
The plan, he said, is to install “panel trees” — in this case, organic trees selectively pruned and trained to grow flat against a surface — to cover the bare lower half of the brick building. This, Mr. Tripp said, “keeps it very two-dimensional” and “will help maintain the beautification of that park.”
When it fell, the ivy-covered trellis “actually caused damage to the building, which is, again, not the village’s,” the mayor said. “We wound up settling with the owner of the building and we have to repair the building for him.” That, he said, prompted the discussion. Mr. Larsen called Mr. Tripp’s proposal “a great solution, because it’ll still give us the beauty that we’re looking for but without attaching to the building. The problem with the ivy, even if we replanted it eventually, even if we replanted it away from the building, it’s going to find its way to the building. So this is a great solution. ”
