Green box with the text "You spoke, We listened."

Introducing: In Your BIG Backyard

Your Centerville-Washington Park District is serious about providing the park and recreation opportunities you want! CWPD perpetually seeks resident and stakeholder input to build strategic plans, master plans, programming plans, capital improvements plans and budgets. This allows us to align…

Text overlay: You spoke. We listened. Gray-headed coneflowers in the background.

Conserving Habitats and Ecosystems

Your Centerville-Washington Park District is serious about providing the park and recreation opportunities you want! CWPD perpetually seeks resident and stakeholder input to build strategic plans, master plans, programming plans, capital improvements plans and budgets. This allows us to align…

You spoke. We listened.

Throwing Shade…the Good Kind!

Your Centerville-Washington Park District is serious about providing the park and recreation opportunities you want! CWPD perpetually seeks resident and stakeholder input to build strategic plans, master plans, programming plans, capital improvements plans and budgets. This allows us to align…

clearwing moth and wild bergamot

One Picture, So Many Questions

Mid-summer is prime time for our meadows and prairies. Butterflies are prominent among the insects visiting the yellow, pink, and purple flowers, drinking their nectar and distributing their pollen. But look carefully and you may spot the occasional moth among…

Two giant swallowtail caterpillars on a hopwood leaf

Hoptree: Worth a Second Look

The common hoptree, Ptelea trifoliata, is the northernmost New World representative of the citrus, or rue, family of plants. It’s a relatively small tree, less than 20’ (6 m) tall and less than 10” (25 cm) trunk diameter, found in…

flowering mayapple

April Showers Bring … Mayapples

Nothing says May like mayapples! Mayapples (technically, Podophyllum peltatum) have no relation to apples, and they first poke up through the leaf litter around the end of March. It takes a few weeks, though, for the large, umbrella-like leaves to…

A male green darner, with its blue abdomen, holds on to the female while she deposits eggs

The Dragonflies of Spring

Ohio is home to something like 100 species of dragonflies, and to a large extent, they are creatures of summer. Both the abundance and the diversity of dragonflies peak in June and July. But a few species stretch those seasonal…

close up view of an opossum

Oh, oh, oh, opossum!

For most of us, the word “marsupial” brings to mind kangaroos and koalas—animals we might describe as cute, or even charismatic. But those adjectives probably are applied less often to our one local marsupial, the Virginia opossum, Dildelphis virginiana. With…