Proud to be part of river project planting

WILKES-BARRE – Spending days on the road inspecting trees, feeling pressure to get more than 50,000 plants in the soil to fulfill an entire county’s vision, dealing with a gauntlet of regulations – the roughly $650,000 contract to beautify the River Common project hasn’t exactly been one of Green Valley Landscaping’s easiest or most lucrative.

“But it’s a job we wanted to take because we’re a local contractor,” said Lee Turner, co-owner of the Plains Township company. There’s a “sense of pride,” he said, in being one of the few companies on the East Coast that could handle the project’s complexity, especially when it’s in his own backyard.

“I was very influential in every attempt to get this job because it’s our community,” Turner said. “When (project manager) Josh (Pesta) was bidding this thing, I was looking over his shoulder.”

Though a landscape architect decided the positioning and species of the plants, Pesta was tasked with finding more than 50,000 plants. Many of the orders had to be placed ahead of time with nurseries because they had to grow special batches to meet the demand, he said.

They even accompanied county representatives to hand-pick the 250 trees.

“Normally, we would just do this over the phone, but in this case, they wanted to see each individual tree that would go into this site,” Turner said. “We went down, and we started in Maryland and lower Pennsylvania and tagged all the trees for the job.”

Having to wait for other contractors to finish, much of the company’s work, which also included 500 shrubs and thousands of day lilies and “ground cover” species, was crunched into the past month and a half to make the park presentable for its dedication this weekend.

Work still needs to be done at the Northampton Street portal and around the county courthouse. The company hopes to complete much of it in time for the city’s fireworks show on July 4.

“That’s the problem being a landscaper. You’re the last guys on the site … so it puts a lot of pressure on you,” Turner said. Laborers Union Local 215 was instrumental in recent weeks, Turner said, when 15 workers were at the site daily to rush it forward.

Another concern was ensuring the plants didn’t interfere with the levee’s primary purpose: to prevent flooding. A product called “root barrier” was installed before any trees were planted on the levee so that if they died or were pulled out, they wouldn’t affect the levee’s integrity, Pesta said.

Created in 1972 with co-owners Dale Schuman and Jerry Natishan, Green Valley has had plenty of experience with similar projects. The 75-employee company did the landscaping for Mohegan Sun at Pocono Downs, various projects at Misericordia University, King’s College and Penn State’s main campus.

It recently finished a project at Heinz Field in Pittsburgh, Turner said, and it’s completing various beautification projects for PennDOT.

“We’ve done bigger projects,” Turner said, “but I don’t think we’ve done one of this complexity.”