Chittenango Lions Botanical Park & Creekwalk

"My wife and I love this park!! Just this morning we took our Jack Russell puppy here and she loved it as well. This park is so beautiful we love the fairy gardens. It's awesome that the even keep dog poop bags nearby with receptacle trash cans to dump the dog poop. However it is too bad that people bring their dogs and just let them poop wherever and not pick it up."

"Trees of all kinds. ,loved ones of past days ,memory finds. Accomodating for dogs and older folks as well,sweet times to tell"

"Peaceful and well kept."

"Nice place to walk my dogs. Peaceful. Well maintained. Has a garden and several benches to sit on and enjoy the sound of the creek and numerous birds"

"I had planned to walk the creek walk and take pictures. I walked from the diner to the trailhead of the creekwalk, a trail that should join to the Erie Canal towpath trail but doesn't yet. The final lengths have to be purchased from private owners. And who wouldn't want that land for a trophy house on a swift running trout creek? If the houses are built, the trail might not go through is my worry? I saw a sign putting up the needed forest land for sale, financing available, probably easy terms. I took a picture of the sign and proceeded on the trail. The waters of Chittenango Creek flowed high and strong, swelled by the three days of rain that completed on Saturday. The locals had decided to focus on trout habitat, and several artificial waterfalls constructed in the flow made sure that the water absorbed oxygen from the air. Beautiful to look at and yet, I couldn't imagine taking a kayak down that stretch of creek, portaging around all those small waterfalls. It was hardly easy to cross Genesee Turnpike to find the Lions Botanical Park, a spur of the Creekwalk. The Lions have worked on this floodplain for many years, carefully planting native saplings according to a plan guided by the forestry department at the State University of New York. The young saplings had been watered all summer long from a well, winterized last weekend by a hard working team of Lions. The saplings enclosed in cylinders of screen had survived the innocent nibbles of the local deer, and I found footprints of the local fawns, does and bucks in the gravel of the paths. The gravel paths had a tidiness that one might expect in the garden of Versailles. Every foot of that path had been dug and filled with gravel shovel by shovel by men and women of the club, who have treated it like a garden in their backyard. Near the artificial waterfalls for the trout, benches had been set so people could sit and visit and enjoy the music of the creek running over rocks. All the trees had little signs to identify the species. More than a few trees had a sign remembering a man or a woman in Chittenago who had made a difference in the town during their lives. The benches commemorated local heroes with tasteful plaques. I stared up at a tall bole and looked into its boughs still yellow with leaves. Standing where it had grown on the edge of a creek for at least a half century, I had found a butternut, a swamp walnut. I searched its base for the nuts but actually the squirrels had already spirited them away. At least the ones that had fallen on the ground had vanished. The ones that had fallen in the swift creek had been carried down stream, maybe to a suitable strand of dirt to crack open and take root."