Best community project

Visitors to City Park in recent years may have noticed the Box Canyon ruins meandering behind the Denver Museum of Nature and Science and wondered what the heck it was all about. Well, it was once quite something -- designed in 1953 by noted landscape architect S.R. DeBoer, the miniature canyon waterway ambled through the park before emptying into a lily pond and Ferril Lake, evoking the kind of scenery we're used to seeing up in the Rockies. But over the years it fell into disrepair -- until this spring, when volunteers from Denver Urban Gardens and the Garden Club of Denver joined hands with Denver Parks and Recreation to restore the little gorge by solidifying its rock walls, landscaping it with river alders, ginnala maple, river birch, mountain mahogany, squaw currant, apache plume shrub and other native plantings and building two trails. DUG co-director Michael Buchenau deems that unique partnership a success, which bodes well for the future of similar large-scale restoration projects in public places.