By Rick Bogusch
Moving Forward with a Master Plan at Bridge Gardens
The past 15 years have been busy for Bridge Gardens. With your support, we created the vegetable and community gardens and made growing food and edible landscaping an important part of who we are. We adopted low impact, sustainable gardening, lawn, and landscaping practices and, through our programs, encouraged others to do so. We added hundreds of native trees, shrubs, perennials, and grasses, so all visitors can appreciate the beauty of these plants and learn how important they are for birds, pollinators and other wildlife. Knowing of your commitment to our fragile environment, we developed a master plan that features natural habitat gardens that will foster the rewilding of the East End. Through our varied and extensive programs, we made education and engagement with the public important goals and became a community resource for the East End and greater Long Island. Bridge Gardens became a public garden, a local park, a destination from one end of the Island to the other, open every day with free admission, where people, can visit, enjoy, and learn.
In the future, your continued support of Bridge Gardens and the Peconic Land Trust will enable us to continue to fulfill our mission, and with renovation of the garden house, become even more accessible and accommodating for all. We want Bridge Gardens to become the Trust’s education center on the South Fork, a place where visitors can learn about the Trust and all its good work and why it’s important to us all, a place where the Trust and Bridge Gardens can host meetings, lectures and conferences and a place to learn about important environmental issues as well as sustainable gardening and landscaping.