Volunteers with a YMCA group from the New York region pick weeds, trash, sweep, and rake around the statue of P.G.T. Beauregard in New Orleans. (Photo by Chris Granger)

NEW ORLEANS — Looking at City Park's crape-myrtle-lined entrance drive, flanked by rows of young oaks and accented with cheery garden beds, one might find it hard to remember when the entire park was little more than a Katrina-begotten wilderness.

Scott Discon remembers.

It was the sight of the ruined New Orleans landmark, which changed little in the six months after Hurricane Katrina, that got him out of his car and behind a lawn mower to co-found the City Park Mow-Rons, a group of volunteers who have tended the beds and lawn at the entrance since June 2006.

"Driving past here, it was very depressing," Discon said. "It really captured a feeling of how the city was not good."

Discon said his frustration with the city's slow pace of recovery came to a head when he was surrounded by the park-turned-wilderness.

"I was driving through the park, going to work. It was hot. At the time, (Mayor Ray) Nagin was mouthing off to the federal government that New Orleans was open for tourism, and that's what kind of pissed me off ... because a simple drive through the park showed that it was not," he said.

"The grass was like 2 feet high. I would see tourists looking at it. So I just got out and started pulling some weeds."

The exercise took care of only one patch of weeds in a 1,300-acre park, but it was cathartic, he said.

Discon returned again, with his lawnmower, a few days later. By his third time, he ran into another volunteer landscaper — Ian Dreyer, an architect — and the two men started cutting grass together.

By midsummer, neighbors and friends had joined the effort, and they had officially adopted lawn and beds at the Lelong Drive entrance. They called themselves the City Park Mow-Rons, "Weeding by Example."

Since then, the group, comprising about seven core members and a dozen occasionals, has gathered nearly every Saturday to weed, mow, plant and sweat.

By the end of their first summer, the Mow-Rons had become a nonprofit organization so they could accept cash and in-kind donations, said Discon, who serves as board chairman.

In addition to creating a Web site, www.mow-rons.org, they have raised money to buy a fleet of 10 push mowers and four tractors.

"People say, 'Well, why this?' But I say this is one of the faces of New Orleans. This intersection here is vital to New Orleans," Discon said, pointing toward the statue of Confederate Gen. P.G.T. Beauregard.

"We all didn't know each other before the storm, and now we're really good friends," Stephanie McShane said. "We get together for lunch afterward ... . We get together for Christmas parties, really any reason to have a party."

McShane and her son, Jack, first got involved when Jack, then 12, saw their neighbors loading a lawn mower into their car one Saturday and asked to tag along.

"For all of us, everyone has their own story. Everyone suffered their own nightmare during the storm, and I think this gave everyone a way to focus on something besides themselves after the storm," McShane said, as she watched Jack steer a John Deere tractor among the crape myrtles and live oaks.

City Park has more financial resources to tend its lawns than it did two years ago, but the park and the city still need volunteers, McShane said.

"We've stayed together as a group really well. But a lot of local volunteerism, it's slowed down," she said. "I think a lot of people are just trying to resume their old lives. But it's needed everywhere. Just look around."

McShane waved her hand toward the wilderness still visible beyond the crisp line of freshly cut grass. Three-foot-high grass, overgrown bushes and dead branches are an ever-present reminder that, like New Orleans, City Park is far from completely rebuilt.

The ravages of Katrina remain, but they're harder to see, and that fact breeds contentment in a city that still desperately needs activism, Discon said.

"I know a lot of people have been dealing with their own troubles, but if you can only come once a year, then come once a year," he said.

"We were talking one day about quitting, disbanding," Jack recalled. "We were saying that before the storm, we would never have done this. But after, why wouldn't you?"

(Molly Reid is a staff writer for The Times-Picayune of New Orleans. She can be contacted at mreid(at)imespicayune.com.)