To the Editor:

For many years I walked and drove by the rain garden in front of the Senior Center at Spruce Circle on Harrison Street, taking great pleasure in its beauty and the knowledge that it was helping bees and butterflies. It was really lovely: I can recall seeing joe pye weed, cardinal flowers, milkweed, and various grasses swaying gently, softening the otherwise undistinguished line of lawns, buildings, and same as always plantings.

The garden used water running off nearby roofs to sustain plantings that in turn sustained pollinators like hummingbirds, bees, and monarch butterflies. It made me proud to live in a town that would devote a piece, even such a small piece, of private property for the benefit of the general public: to help people passing learn about what native plants like those in the garden can do for us and the creatures with which we co-exist.

But yesterday, I drove by and was shocked to see a piece of bare ground. What had happened to the beautiful rain garden?

I’ve since learned that it was bulldozed.

What amazes me is that we’re surrounded by news of dropping pollinator populations, threats to bees, and huge declines in monarch butterfly populations. And just when the very few monarch butterflies people are seeing have arrived, the rain garden was razed to the ground. The milkweed growing in that garden, now destroyed, may already have been the site of eggs laid by the very few monarchs some have seen in Princeton.

How sad. And what a loss to the community.

Hilary Persky

Cuyler Road, Princeton