jaeleslie

The last couple of days I have been sucked into a discussion of public policy in an online discussion list of our neighborhood association. There are only a couple dozen people on the list so it is pretty much hot air. But our alder reads it, and I think also some city staff in charge of neighborhood relations. Relations with the neighborhoods. Having retired from that very Planning & Development bureaucracy some fifteen years ago I know perhaps too much. Anyhow, the local community development authority has a big retirement center and handicapped housing about a block from our house, at the top of what used to be a big sledding hill (years ago, before my time). Now some bright light has got an idea for putting some housing at the bottom of the hill, using all that nice lakeview front garden, which is just lawn now. How nice for the current residents, a construction site.

The long-term question is what kind of development density our area is going to have, as a fairly underbuilt area very close to downtown and campus. In our city it is all too common for local development to be blocked by wellmeaning neighborhood activists, so that the locals give it up and sell to bigger money interests, which includes the City. Then the property lies vacant for twenty years, until anything looks better than a parking lot.

Many more ideas pop up like weeds about how nice it would be to have a community garden there, and a prairie restoration, and a woodland, and so forth. My observation is that plans are plentiful, but gardeners are scarce. You can see the results spring up in the untended boulevard plantings all over town. After I'd expressed my opinions on these matters half a dozen times, one of the local activist coordinator folk offered me a phone number if I want to talk about a leadership role in restoration planting. Ha! I don't have enough time for my own yard, and I always try to refrain from volunteering other people's efforts.

Meanwhile, I direct those who actually have a pair of work gloves in hand that they might go over to the park at the end of our block and help my spouse Mr S with his lonely work on the prairie remnant we discovered there some ten years ago. He walked through the back of that park to his office every day since we moved here. An old farm house was demolished in a back corner of the city park property, next to the railroad track (evicting a handful of student renters). The next May we took our next-door neighbor down there to see the flowers, and she identified them as shooting stars, a whole field of them under the oak canopy, pink and white, nodding on foot-high stalks above a flat rosette of leaves. We got one of parks botanists to look at it, who identified some more species and decided it was a little bit of native prairie that had survived along the railroad right-of-way. After they finished planting native shrubs, and made sure it wouldn't be mowed anymore, Mr S left it alone for a few years, and now it is full of weeds.

We were in the park there for a picnic last week and after seeing all the thistles going to seed, he went back the next morning and pulled them out until he'd filled a couple of barrels packed with thistledown. Then he really got into it and started hacking paths through the cockleburr and brambles, cutting out invasive honeysuckle and buckthorn, preparing for a tiny little prairie burn. No one showed up today to help either, he says, so I guess my troublemaking is of little use. The hickories are doing well, and the wildflowers. The good news is that the new oaks have sprung up just as they ought around the edges of the opening, where the mowing line moved out, and are now three and four feet tall.

Il faut cultiver notre jardin.