Cross the bridge at 9810 South Forty Drive and you're standing on what used to be a pile of shredded leaves. For nearly three decades, the eleven-acre strip behind the subdivision was where the City of Ladue processed residents' yard waste, a working lot the city bought from Ameren back in 1988. Today the same ground has a creekside bridge, benches, a young stand of native trees, and a Little Free Library that a Washington University student built and donated. None of it was inevitable. The mulch program shut down in 2017 because barely one in ten households were using it, and what filled the vacuum was not a developer or a park district with a construction budget. It was two garden clubs, a city advisory committee, and a slow, deliberate public process that took the better part of a decade to turn a maintenance yard into a trail.
That trail is Deer Creek Preserve, and it is worth understanding on its own terms before the next phase of it changes what it connects to.
From Ameren's mulch pile to a city park
The land carries the name of Edie Spink, who served as Ladue's mayor from 1975 to 1995, a tribute attached after the mulching operation itself was retired. The city's own account of the site is unusually candid about why the change happened: participation in the leaf and brush program had fallen to roughly 11 percent of households, and the cost of running it kept climbing. Rather than prop up a service few people used, the city set the property aside for something else, a 14-acre parcel with just over 11 of those acres earmarked for passive recreation and habitat restoration.
That decision didn't produce a park overnight. In 2019, Ladue secured a planning grant from the Municipal Park Grant Commission specifically to figure out what the site should become, and the resulting master plan went through public meetings before the City Council adopted it that September. The work was led by the city's Beautification, Open Space and Tree Advisory Committee, known locally as BOSTA, in partnership with landscape architecture firm SWT Design. Then, between 2021 and 2023, the Metropolitan Sewer District ran its Deer Creek Sanitary Sewer replacement project directly through the property, delaying construction by years. The preserve residents walk today is not the product of a single budget cycle. It's the output of a planning grant, a sewer easement, two garden clubs, and roughly six years of sequencing before a single tree went into the ground.
What Phase I actually built
Construction finally caught up with the plan in 2024. Phase I added the initial trail loop, a bridge over Deer Creek, scattered benches, interpretive signage explaining the site's habitats, and an installation of 69 native trees, with another 43 planned under the city's Living Legacy program, which lets residents fund a tree in memory of a person, a group, or a pet. The Garden Club of St. Louis and the Ladue Garden Club, which had been at the table since the 2019 planning process, contributed grants toward the plantings on top of the roughly $750,000 that the Metropolitan Sewer District and the Municipal Grant Foundation covered for construction.
The ceremonial ribbon cutting landed on Arbor Day, April 27, 2024. But the city's own update from October 2025 was still describing the trail's opening as recent, pointing to the past spring, meaning the version residents can actually walk end to end likely didn't finish until roughly a year after that ribbon was cut. That gap between a ceremony and a finished path is a small detail, but it's a useful one if you're trying to gauge how long municipal outdoor projects in Ladue take between announcement and actual use.
The garden itself, planted specifically to attract pollinators like bees, butterflies, and moths, was a Ladue Garden Club project layered onto the same restoration. The Little Free Library is smaller still, a single donation from one student, but it's the kind of addition that tends to show up only after a place has already become somewhere people stop, not just pass through.
The civic calendar that comes with it
Deer Creek Preserve isn't a static amenity. The city runs recurring programming there that gives the site a rhythm beyond dog walks and evening laps:
- Arbor Day, held most recently on May 2, 2026, with sapling giveaways and the return of Goats on the Go, a herd brought in specifically to graze down invasive honeysuckle along the creek corridor.
- The Ladue Native Garden Tour, a self-guided walk through residents' native-plant gardens across the community, held June 6, 2026, with garden owners on hand at some stops to answer questions.
- No Mow April, an annual policy that waives the city's grass-height restrictions for the month to give early pollinators a head start, paired with yard signs for residents who want to participate visibly.
None of this is unique to Deer Creek Preserve specifically, but it reflects how the city treats its green space generally: as something residents are asked to participate in shaping, not just visit.
Phase 2 is still a survey, not a shovel
The next stage of the preserve exists only on paper right now. In October 2025, the city opened a community survey on a proposed Phase 2, a second looped trail with benches and a scenic overlook along Deer Creek, the kind of vantage point Phase I didn't include. That input is intended to strengthen an application for a 2026 Municipal Parks Grant, which means Phase 2 is currently a concept plan and a data-gathering exercise, not a funded project with a start date.
The same slow-build approach is playing out a few blocks away at Rodes Park, the small green space at the corner of Ladue and Warson Roads. The Garden Club of St. Louis has planted daffodils there for years and traditionally added a dogwood in memory of members the club has lost. Now the city, GCSL, and the Ladue Garden Club are working on a longer-term plan for that park too, adding a bridge, paths, benches, and native plantings, essentially the same formula that built Deer Creek Preserve, applied to a second site.
The part that actually changes the preserve's shape
The most consequential project isn't inside the preserve at all. It's the South 40 Drive Shared-Use Path Extension, a separate infrastructure effort funded through the federal Transportation Alternative Program. The city hired Horner & Shifrin as the engineering firm, and the Ladue City Council approved that contract at its October 21, 2024 meeting. The design phase is underway now, with preliminary plans under review by the Missouri Department of Transportation, and construction is scheduled for 2027.
What the project actually builds is a shared-use path extending east from the preserve to the Trails End Subdivision and west to the intersection of Clayton Road and South 40 Drive, with pedestrian signal improvements at that intersection built into the scope. In plain terms, this is the piece that turns Deer Creek Preserve from an isolated loop into a connector. Right now, a walk through the preserve starts and ends inside the same eleven acres. Once this extension is built, the same trail will feed directly into the Clayton Road business district, without requiring a car to get there.
City staff and the BOSTA committee have also said they're in early discussions with local utilities, country clubs, and residents about extending the preserve trail further still, potentially linking it into Great Rivers Greenway's countywide network, which currently covers roughly 300 miles of trails across St. Louis County. That conversation hasn't produced a funded project yet, but it signals the direction the city is thinking, treating Deer Creek Preserve less as a finished destination and more as one segment of something larger.
For now, the tangible timeline is this: MoDOT review this year, final plans once that review clears, and construction in 2027. When the crews finish, a walk that starts at the preserve's new bridge will end, for the first time, at a marked crosswalk on Clayton Road.
If you're curious how projects like this reshape day-to-day life in specific corners of Ladue, The Ryan Tradition keeps track of exactly this kind of detail. Contact us if you want the ground-level view on South 40 Drive or any other pocket of the neighborhood.
