Garden Destructo

What’s Valued Gets Saved

I was at the gym when I saw the texts and rushed home, livid and nearly in tears.

City lawn care guys destroyed half of my pollinator garden unannounced this morning, and would have gotten all of it if my husband had not gotten out there when he did.

Garden destructo and monarch butterfly

I sadly looked at the mess left behind, then quickly wrote the following letter to a Parks Dept official:

I wish I was emailing you about something better, but city lawn care contractors just weedwhacked down half of my native plant pollinator garden. 😭 Both on the hellstrip and on my private property. My husband ran out there to stop them or it would all be gone. It was a little wild, and a bit worse for the wear with the recent heat wave, but clearly flowers. And even if they didn’t recognize blooming stuff like blue vervain, goldenrod, or liatris, I’d think that hostas, irises, and balloon flowers would have indicated it’s a garden to most normal people.

Also, I know that the hellstrip is city land and I don’t actually have a right to it (although I certainly wish I could formally adopt it), but given the encroachment onto my private property, it comes off pretty shocking.

They even bent some plant stakes I was using to keep things from leaning into the sidewalk (several people with wheelchairs live around here and I believe accessibility is important) and weedwhacked what was behind the stakes.

I imagine it was simply an unfortunate issue of lack of training and oversight - some guy with a weedwacker being sent out by a contractor who wasn’t properly overseeing things - but please let me know what I can do or who I can talk to to get this made right.

I know we share the same love for native plants, so I’m sure you understand how sad and upset I am right now. 😭

After I sent the email, I went outside because I heard the weedwhacking garden destructo guys a block away, and wanted to go give them a piece of my mind.

But after I got the kids ready and went outside, we got distracted by a butterfly. A mother monarch was circling and landing again and again, laying eggs on milkweed in what was left of my garden.

We stayed and watched her and I was taking a video of her as the city lawn care guys packed up and drove past us, losing my chance to tell anyone off.

Just then an elderly Chinese lady walked by, pointing to a plant and looking at me before gesturing at her skin and making an itching motion, trying to indicate that it’s medicine for itchy skin. I nodded because the plant is blue vervain, also known as verbena, used in a lot of beauty products for exactly that reason. So I took out an app and translated do you want plants? into Chinese. She read it and nodded yes.

We communicated back and forth using the app about other plants too. She also took some of the yarrow flowers the lawn care guys had weedwhacked down, and some beebalm that was still standing, but only the lower leaves so as not to cause me to lose my flowers.

Then she insisted I take $2 as payment. I gave her a plastic bag to take her herbs home in and she showed me a piece of mail so I’d see her name and apartment number, a neighbor in the nearby senior apartments.

I was left feeling like it was all a spiritual experience almost. A divine message.

If I was to write a short story about ecology it would all be a bit too on-the-nose.

The juxtaposition of these young men needlessly attempting to level a whole micro ecosystem for a small paycheck, the immediate persistence and captivating beauty of the wildlife that desperately needs it, and a translated message from an elderly woman who knows and wants to share and use these medicinal plants for people too. All back to back in the course of one morning.

Then I got online and saw a notification that this blog is now among the Top 10 in Substack’s Home and Garden Rising category. I am #10.

So if this is the universe giving me a message, I’m both here for it, and here to share.

Welcome to Red Fence Garden, a place where I write weekly essays about the wild urban ecosystem I live in.