A watery field filled with native grasses, wildflowers, insects and birds is coming for the first time to an Akron park near you.
The pilot project, known as the Hardesty Park Meadow Project, will be the first meadow built in a city park and will stretch across 8,000 square feet of the park’s northwest corner at the intersection of Wallhaven Drive, Sabetha Place and Alton Drive.
“I am ecstatic about it,” said Akron resident Deborah Bartle, who lives in the Wallhaven neighborhood and grows wildflowers and vegetables in her backyard.
Bartle loves to garden and volunteer, and through a friend she heard about a neighborhood meeting that the Akron Parks Collaborative, which works to engage Akron neighborhoods in the revitalization of the city’s parks, was holding to build interest in the meadow.
“I could ask questions,” she said. “I could give comments. We had two meetings, and I volunteered and I put flyers in each of the houses to get people to come to the meetings.”
Most folks are in favor of the project, but some “are a little wary of a project coming in and they just want to make sure it gets maintained well,” said Bridget Ambrisco, executive director of Akron Parks Collaborative, who continues to have conversations with area residents.
Bartle initially had concerns about the toxic spray used to kill vegetation before planting native plants, which are natural plants that grow within a region. But after researching it, she discovered the poison only lasts about three days, she said.
“We know there’s a lot of different groups that use the park for sports and that kind of thing,” Ambrisco said. “So we didn’t want to touch any of those areas.”
Planting seeds around Akron
The idea of establishing meadows started a few years ago as part of a goal Akron Parks Collaborative had to bring native plants into the city’s parks and to reestablish “certain areas with wildlife habitat.”
The City of Akron had similar goals.
Of the 160 parks in the city, more than 500 acres of lawn space that require staff to “mow, sometimes twice a week,” said Leah Heiser, a landscape technician for the City of Akron. “So, in order to spend more time on other park improvement projects, we need to get all our crews off of the mowers and back into the landscape.” By doing that, staff can shorten their mowing time by 100 acres.
So who will do what?
Akron Parks Collaborative will oversee community engagement by holding neighborhood meetings and talking to residents about the project while the city will provide manpower and supplies to convert the landscape. But that’s not all — Wild4Ever Foundation, an organization that helps preserve wildlife, is helping to back the project financially.
The city plans to begin installing the meadow this fall as long as the weather allows for it.
Casey Shevlin, Akron’s director of sustainability and resiliency, wants to expand similar projects to other city parks.
It could be a year-round program “that we’re little by little kind of transforming park spaces and replacing some of the grass with these meadows,” Shevlin said.
There’s plenty of environmental value to be gained from a meadow. These include fewer “emissions from mowing, the benefits it brings to wildlife, cleaner air, carbon storage [and] healthier water,” just to name a few, Ambrisco said. It also adds “beautification, which is also a big piece to bring to our neighborhood.”
The group is already working on plans for future parks such as Margaret Park in the Summit Lake neighborhood, along with an unused area behind the BARC Akron Dog Park at 499 Memorial Parkway. Once each neighborhood’s residents are informed, the team hopes to start installing the meadows in 2026.
In addition to Hardesty Park, crew members spend more time mowing these lawns than other city parks, Heiser said.
The spaces are also underutilized, part of the same reason for choosing the northwest corner of Hardesty Park, which is “like a depression” that slopes down on all sides, Ambrisco said.
Do other parks in the Akron area have meadows?
Summit Metro Parks did a “complete overhaul of restoration on site” in 2016 to the former golf course in the Valley View Area of Cascade Valley Metro Park, said Chris Chaney, one of its biologists.
“There were also wetlands restoration done,” he said. “We started by planting, I want to say, about 200 acres of meadow and prairie species.”
In 2011, the parks system established a meadow at Springfield Bog Metro Park in Springfield Township that consists of shrubs and forestry. Every three years, “we’ll burn Springfield Bog to maintain that,” Chaney added.
A few meadows in the Cuyahoga Valley National Park include Howe Meadow on Riverview Road in Cuyahoga Falls and Kendall Lake in Peninsula.
While there aren’t any new meadow projects going on right now at Summit Metro Parks, Chaney said, they’re always tweaking “things here and there” to “combat invasive species” such as shrubs, trees and aquatic species.
What is the timeline for the Hardesty Park meadow?
Phase one of the plan for the meadow included a July 16 Ward 8 meeting hosted by Akron City Council Member Bruce Bolden. Details about the project were shared, including the benefits to having a meadow. Attendees were curious about how the northwest corner of Hardesty Park was chosen and whether the city uses herbicides.
Ambrisco said a survey sent to neighbors who live around the park had more votes for that location in the park.
Heiser said the city uses an herbicide called AquaMaster, whose active ingredient is glyphosate. It’s a rebranded version of Roundup.
Before the fall, signage will be going up at the park to notify people of the project and that grass and weeds will be killed by the herbicide.
Phase two includes prepping the site and planting
Around August, the area will be sprayed with herbicides.
Then, this fall, the City of Akron plans to plant plug seeds, weather permitting. These are seeds that have been started in individual trays.
“There’s no need to irrigate this site since we are doing fall planting,” Heiser said.
In February of 2026, the site will be seeded with native plants.
Maintaining the site
Initial maintenance, or phase three of the project, will begin in the spring and summer of 2026. It includes removal of litter around the space and keeping the edge lines between the grass and the meadow area clean.
By mowing these lawns one time each year, “it is going to reduce our maintenance,” Heiser said. “So once the meadow has established, that is really the main form of maintenance.”