A heron sits in the water of the pond at White Park last Sunday, October 23, 2022 with the reflection of the last of the fall colors as a back drop. GEOFF FORESTER—Monitor staff
A heron sits in the water of the pond at White Park last Sunday, October 23, 2022. GEOFF FORESTER—Monitor staff
The water at White Park Pond is clear of invasive lotus plants but it’s still attractive to wildlife, and with any luck will be frozen enough for ice skating on a very important weekend.
The city has recently lowered the water level of the pond and cleaned the area to prepare for winter operations.
“Over the next couple of weeks, the pond will refill to winter level and we hope to be ice skating by the end of December (weather permitting),” City Manager Tom Aspell noted in his weekly newsletter.
Indoor ice skating and ice hockey have already started over at the indoor Everett Arena on Loudon Road. It will continue through mid-March.
As for those pretty but pesky lotus plants, they had covered almost half the surface of the water by mid-summer.
City Parks and Recreation officials working with Solitude Lake Management mowed them out in August, but the fast-growing plants will almost certainly return next year because seeds are lying in the mud at the bottom of the pond. Permanently removing them would probably require dredging much of the bottom of the pond.
The lotus plant, a native of Asia that is common in home aquariums, showed up a few years, probably because somebody dumped it there. It has been a growing problem for city officials ever since. The city applied herbicide a few years ago but that didn’t kill it off.
In the 1980s, the city dredged the pond and added stone to the bottom to prevent weed infestation. The area known as “the cove” on the west edge of the pond wasn’t done and has continued to be a weed problem each year. The city is now considering re-dredging the entire bottom and an overall pond restoration project in 2023, according to city documents.
The pond was created in the 1880’s along with the rest of White Park, which is one of the oldest city parks in the state. It served as an early water supply for the city and was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1982.
The 25-acre park is across from the University of New Hampshire Franklin Pierce School of Law and hosts the popular Black Ice pond hockey tournament each winter.
David Brooks is a reporter and the writer of the sci/tech column Granite Geek and blog granitegeek.org, as well as moderator of Science Cafe Concord events. After obtaining a bachelor’s degree in mathematics he became a newspaperman, working in Virginia and Tennessee before spending 28 years at the Nashua Telegraph . He joined the Monitor in 2015.
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