Civic Pride: Town Square edition

Recently my out-of-state relatives were in Anchorage enjoying the warm weather, and possibly my company, but this is debatable. One of the things that non-Alaskans seem interested, nay, obsessed about are the plethora of giant things around here. I include bears, political egos, and vegetables in this category. So naturally I took the opportunity to show off our city-maintained plantings in Town Square (544 W. 5th Avenue) which usually feature giant kale or obese cabbages. That is if the homeless don’t get them first.

(True story sidebar: My sister, in a previous life, worked in the Town Square gardens, planting, weeding, and watering for our city. She said, besides being threatened by the occasional bum, she found used drug needles, human excrement, and once, a copulating couple in the plantings. Replacing the kale or cabbage due to human poaching was both expected and planned. If they ran out of spare cabbages, they just replaced them with something else. Gotta love downtown, eh?)

Civic pride seems strong downtown (just step over those drug needles, would you?) but lessens with each step southward, and by the time you hit 15th Avenue and head down Minnesota past the “flower picture” in the hill you’ve pretty much seen the last of it, with a few exceptions. So take this review as the somewhat jealous observations of a resident of south (unbeautified on the public dime) Anchorage.

Town Square is the hub of the floral explosion and it radiates out from there. There is a fountain in the middle of the square and if one can but avoid the skate boarders, panhandlers, and idiots stopping suddenly to take photos (oh, wait, that was me….), it is a lovely place for snapping a picture, consulting a map, or checking to see if you still have all your shopping bags/children. Each bed seems to have a color theme of it’s own. This year I noticed a yellow theme, white theme, pink theme, dark red theme, and rounding them all out, a dahlia bed with no color theme I could discern.

Now some pictures of the dahlia border. My legal team tells me I must disclose the fact that I have two dahlias in my own garden. They encourage me to state this means I am neither a “hater” nor a “dahlia nut.” Their words, not mine.

OK, enough of the Town Square dahlias. For additional flower sightings, head to the visitor information log cabin. If you aren’t sure which log cabin it is, it’s the one with the sod roof, and this summer, the sod is crispy. So head north from Town Square until you find a shack with dead grass on the roof and you’re there (546 W. 4th Avenue).

For those visitors inclined to censure, I feel I must mention the reason we have hanging baskets of blue lobelia with a white eye and yellow marigolds every year without fail: they are the colors of our state flag. “Eight stars of gold on a field of blue….” Thus begins our state flag song. Does this excuse rampant marigold and lobelia use? The jury is still out.

There were still some intact cabbages as of this writing, so gather the kinsfolk and head downtown. Just find Town Square and you and yours will get an eye full, and see a lot of flowers, too. If the cabbages run out, you’ll have to wait until the Alaska State Fair starts on August 22nd. See my coverage of that here.

 

How do you show off your area to visitors?