Garden Centre

Saturday, September 1, 2007

What is the point?

I know that local councils are being encouraged to ‘green’ their city spaces both literally and figuratively, and I’m all in favour of getting as much natural beauty into people’s everyday lives as possible, but what’s the value of this?

To begin with, the plants are only visible if (a) you know they are there - because they are twenty-five feet up on the side of a building and (b) you crane your neck while standing on the pavement outside a busy multi-storey car park that is fronted by a taxi rank – something of a recipe for curses, if not for actually being hit by a mad taxi driver or maddened car park user.

Second, these plants might not have much visual utility, but they could have been a wonderful environmental resource as bee and insect attractors, or pollution sinks. But they are neither – they aren’t the right species to meet either of those criteria.

And third, they are in such awful shape: desiccated, straggly and ugly, that any good they might have done is completed negated by their appalling condition.

What a waste of an opportunity.

Labels: garden design, urban plants

The All Seasons Gardener at 9:28 AM

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