Southington Land Trust Restores A Lovley Property
- Philip Thibodeau
- 6 days ago
- 5 min read
Updated: 5 days ago
What should a town do with its undeveloped land? Let it be, to allow nature to recover and give residents more wilderness to enjoy? Or use it for new houses and businesses, to grow the population and the tax base?
Questions like this often pit developers against conservationists. Yet occasionally the interests of the two groups converge. That happened recently in the case of a 60-acre parcel on Welch Road that developer Mark Lovley donated to the Southington Land Conservation Trust.
For many years the land in question was a popular 18-hole golf course. The North Ridge Golf Club went up for sale in 2016. Mark’s firm, Lovley Development Inc., won a bidding contest and paid $8 million for the rights to the property. The plan was to divide it in half, build homes on one part, and create a nine-hole course on the other.
But then Covid struck. During the recesssion that followed the idea of spending over $4 million on refurbishing a golf course began to seem less than wise. At that point, Mark started looking for someone who would be willing to take ownership of that section, perhaps to turn it into a wild area with hiking trails – an obvious use, since it was already zoned for recreation.
He approached the town first, but found no interest there – it was considered too much for the overstretched Parks and Recreation department to handle. That is when Lovley had a conversation with Al Fiorillo, an engineer with the Water Department.
At the time, Al was president of the Southington Land Conservation Trust – a local non-profit that, contrary to popular misconception, is not part of town government. He explained that if the Trust took possession of the property, it would be legally bound to keep the land undeveloped forever. Rather than build on it, the Trust would conserve it – that is, manage its return to something like its natural state.
A series of conversations between Lovley and the Land Trust began, and they continued when Val Guarino succeeded Al as its president. The final deal was announced in February of this year. The parcel will be named The Lovley Property in honor of Mark’s father.
In return for his donation, which was assessed at $800,000, Lovley will receive some tax relief. But according to the developer, the decision was about more than money. He favors open space preservation and says that when he builds on wooded parcels he tries to keep a large share of each property undeveloped.
In addition to the land, Mark also donated a driveway and a small parking lot where visitors who want to hike the trails on the property can park safely. Once the lot is finished, Lovley’s involvement with the property will come to an end.
The Land Trust’s commitment, by contrast, is only just beginning. In fact, from a legal point of view, it will last forever.
Into The Rough
“Don’t record me, I have a tendency to ramble,” Val Guarino says as I greet him on the parking strip of the Lovley property. In truth, Val, a dry-humored man whose time in the US Army still shows through, tends to get right to the point when he speaks. While leading a group of Land Trust volunteers on a loop around the new property, he is constantly pointing out the good guys – from a conservationist’s point of view – and the bad guys.
The bad guys are the fast-growing invasive plants like bittersweet and multiflora rose. The good guys are the native plants. Many natives, like goldenrod or white pine, can thrive without human help. What conservationists are concerned with are the less common natives like aquatic pickleweed or sweetpepper bush – plants that often provide endangered insects or birds with food, or a place to lay their eggs. One aim of conservation is to remove invasives so that native species, especially those that are rare, have less competition and more room to grow.
Armed with an assortment of tools, the volunteers set to work. Paul Mills cuts the base of a multiflora rose with a saw; Dan Nardini hits one with a hedge trimmer. Many invasives are resilient plants which grow back vigorously even after they’ve been razed to the ground. Lynn Sokolowski sprays the stump of one rose with concentrated triclopyr, an herbicide, to ensure that it doesn’t grow back.
No conservationist wants to use herbicide, which can harm neighboring flora and fauna. But the Trust only has a limited supply of volunteer hours and resources. A single ounce of herbicide, when applied correctly, can achieve a goal – the killing of a large, sprawling, invasive thorn-bush – that would otherwise require many hours of manual labor or heavy machinery. As with surgery, a small wound is inflicted on the environment on the understanding that this will allow it, over time, to fully heal.
The Lovley property is still recovering, with signs of its golf-course history still visible everywhere. Dan Nardini recalled teeing-off here several years ago – “I think this was a par three,” he says of a long stretch of goldenrod that covers the remains of a sandtrap. Here and there one finds abandoned tiki-torches, the remains of a sprinkler system, and of course the occasional golf ball:
Eventually nature will reclaim her own. But it takes human effort to speed the process and set it going in the right direction.
Volunteers Wanted
In addition to the Lovley property, the Southington Land Trust is responsible for seven more wildlife sanctuaries and pieces of protected land in town. Some are a mix of woods and wetland, like the Wedgewood Sanctuary on Wedgewood Road, which also has a trail system. One off Roaring Brook Drive contains a steep stream whose bed cuts through The Great Unconformity – a place where two pieces of the earth’s crust that differ in age by nearly 300 million years touch each other.
Managing these properties is labor-intensive, especially when they first come into the Trust’s possession. Val and the other volunteers at Lovley were taking part in what the Trust calls a ‘work party.’ Two other work-party regulars, Sabraé Boisvert and Alissa Nelson, are both on the Trust’s Board of Directors.
The two joined the Land Trust almost by accident. It was in 2022, just as the era of pandemic quarantines was winding down, that Sabraé began searching on Google for things to do that would put them in contact with people in town. They found the Land Trust’s website and, intrigued, showed up at a meeting held in its basement office at 76 North Main.
They were moved by the warm welcome they received there. So moved, in fact, that they were soon spending dozens of hours working to get the recently-acquired Johnson Family Wildlife Sanctuary into shape. That meant cutting down and chipping a stand of invasive autumn olive trees. Johnson now features a beautiful meadow that is home to countless pollinator-friendly plants.
Sabraé and Alissa have spent time at the other Trust properties, too. They have had some unforgettable encounters with nature there.
“My favorite was at our Tomasso property,” Sabraé says, “when we were going out into the bog and seeing pitcher plants for the first time ever. It was very, very cool. We’re lucky to have that in Southington – it’s absolutely beautiful.”
Alissa seconds that and adds a mention of Wedgewood, where she is the property manager. “We have an annual herpetology walk there. A local herpetologist, Dennis Quinn, will come out and he’ll walk you through the wetlands and pull out, say, a frog eggsack. You find things you wouldn’t typically find on a walk – you flip over a rock, and there’s a salamander. To foster a good environment for these creatures is so impactful.”
