Visitors to Detroit’s Palmer Park may have noticed a rather extreme makeover on Pontchartrain Boulevard, the winding park drive, along the border of the golf course. There, workers have stripped out a chain-link fence and the dense thicket of trees and other landscaping the grew along it.
The good news is, it sounds like there’s a plan to replace it with much-improved landscaping.
A before shot of the Palmer Park Golf Course fence line. | Google Street View
“For many many years, that fence has been falling down, missing in places and become overrun with invasive species,” Rochelle Lento, president of People for Palmer Park, wrote on the group’s Facebook page. “The City has finally begun to clear those invasive species, remove dead trees, remove trees that have grown into the fence and clear the area of brambles and overgrown weeds. They will also remove a large dead tree that has been laying on the golf course for over two years.
Lento said the city’s forestry division plans to plant at least 50 new oaks, maple, hickory and other trees, “and large decorative boulders will be brought in to create a more natural borderline. It may take a few months for those new trees and boulders to be put in place, but we have been told it is being designed by landscape architects at the City of Detroit.”
Lento says the plans aren’t believed to affect the Palmer Park Golf Course, which is in its own limbo. According to the Freep, the city-owned course needs $3 million in capital improvements, so the city late last year decided to transition it from an 18-hole course to a driving range. An advisory council will help decide what to do with the course, which suffers from poor drainage and upkeep and overgrown fairways, according to reviews on Golf Advisor.
For now, anyway, the clear-cutting has created vast open space that was formerly fenced off, though easy enough to access. I look forward to exploring its newly opened nooks and crannies. And those unkempt fairways.
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