David Card (left) and irrigation contractor Juan Gutierrez work to restore water for the plants at the corner of Temescal Canyon Road and Pacific Coast Highway.
The naked pink ladies were starting to dance in the Rotary Landscaping at the Corner of Pacific Coast Highway and Temescal Canyon Road. But the ground was hard as cement and most of the plants, in the corner by the pump station, looked distressed.
Rotary Club member David Card, who had originally designed the landscaping for that corner worked with Recreation and Parks employees to find out why plants had not been watered for more than a month.
They discovered that a gate valve had been turned off and new batteries were needed for the irrigation controller.
Card also found a sleeping bag next to one of the irrigation boxes, that contain a valve. The water was set to go on at night and he wonders, if whoever was illegally sleeping may have shut it off.
The City worked to make sure that the irrigation water was flowing and on August 15, Card was with irrigation contractor Juan Gutierrez to ensure that system was back online.
At that park site, there has not been brush clearance, and CTN promised to send the photo to Brush Clearance Inspectors.
This dried brush and trees should be cleared by L.A. City Recreation and Park workers.
People who moved to Pacific Palisades after 2006, take this corner beautification for granted.
They never saw the overgrown weeds and the trash and all of the dumping that was done at that corner.
A Rotary Club member Perry Akins suggested that the eyesore was not a good representation of this sweet community nestled between the Santa Monica Mountains and the Pacific Ocean. He recruited professional landscape designer David Card to join Rotary and to lead the beautification.
Two years later, the land was cleared, graded, and an irrigation system and plantings were installed by the Club members, Jamie Hubbs’ Eagle Scout project team (Troop 23), many community volunteers, and with the assistance of contractor Great Western Landscaping.
The Rotary Club funded it, with help from the Woman’s Club (for a solar irrigation controller) and community donors. The installation was done with the City of Los Angeles Bureau of Sanitation (the station) and the Department of Recreation & Parks (the surrounding park land). The landscaping was dedicated with City Councilman Bill Rosendahl on July 24, 2008.
Two years later, the City dug up that site to install more pumps for a year-round diversion system that flows to the Hyperion facility.
After the pumps were installed, the City replanted the area, with plants specified by Card/Rotary.
In 2014, Stuart Muller and the Rotary Club worked on a plan to add plants to the landscaping around the station fence by creating a bed along the Temescal side (replacing the 2 pots), raising the fence (to allow the bougainvillea to cover up more of the equipment), adding railroad timber edging curb, and removing the power pole in the middle of the landscaping.
Keeping the plants alive was often difficult, because of Project O and the storm diversion project that occupied the Canyon from 2010 through 2017.
Troop 23 Eagle Scout candidate Greg Gold led a team of Scouts, Rotary Club members and other volunteers that built a two-rail wood fence in the park at the Rotary corner 2017. Over two Saturdays, 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.
Pink Naked Ladies bloom in the fall. Many of the plants at the Rotary Corner are in need of water.