Last week, Deb and I discussed “the New York Times‘s increasingly goofy treatment of landscape and horticulture, including their astonishing discovery of the tree lawn, aka the “parkway” (Illinois) or “verge” (Britain).”
This week, it’s The Wall Street Journal that’s on the verge. In an article on the Dictionary of American Regional English, they write:
It’s surprising how many different names Americans have for that strip of ground between the sidewalk and the street: “boulevard,” “grass plot,” “parkway” and “tree bank” are among them. So after a child abductor in the ’90s left a note demanding that ransom be deposited in a trash can “on the devil strip” at an intersection, a forensic linguist used the dictionary to help solve the crime—because the term was common only in a small part of Ohio.
See? Landscape literacy saves lives.
Deborah Howe
Toby Wolf
I’m a little boggled by that NYT article. Seems plain dopey to encourage the belief that there are “carefree” plants available for near-impossible urban conditions that will establish themselves firmly and create a lovely garden with minimal fuss. And to quote an expert who suggests English ivy and periwinkle as the first options to try….yikes. I think the desire to find a plant that you can just “throw down and it’ll grow” almost always causes more problems than it solves…
Here in LA we call that patch of territory the “parkway”, and it is almost always turf (and irrigated with poorly maintained heads so that it douses the parked cars on the street, lavishly waters the gutters and sidewalks, etc.) Other attempts at plantings in this space almost always wind up either threadbare or hideously overgrown (our “throw it down” options include Algerian ivy, which eventually creates a big ugly streetside nest of sticks.)
In other arid and semi-arid cities I’ve seen more use of hardscape options in this space. In Denver, I’ve often seen the parkway space filled with rocks or even boulders, a pretty good effect and low-maintenance. I propose we’d do our cities and our street trees more favors to just use permeable hardscape in the “parkway”, and save the gardening for spaces where we can create less “hellish” conditions for the plants.
I love seeing individual property owners colonize the tree lawn with plants other than turf or trees.
Usually it’s a homeowner who has done away with the front lawn, filling it with shrubs and perennials, who simply extends that treatment all the way to the street. It’s a bold statement, and it makes a walk down the sidewalk into a walk through the garden.
My favorite tree lawn anywhere was on Heights Court in Ithaca NY, a quiet block-long street where I lived as a grad student. The tree lawn was less than a foot wide. At that dimension it was more vestigial than functional — no trees, certainly — but as such it felt like a courtesy offered to the street and the pedestrian. In front of our house, it was just turf, but the next-door neighbors had filled theirs with Sweet Alyssum. (It also happens to be my favorite planting of Alyssum anywhere.)
I’ve been tempted, in this town of curb-free residential streets, to fill our tree lawn (or, as my husband, a native of the Rockies, calls it, our berm) with daylilies. Stella d’Oro and Happy Returns look a bit overdressed in a garden to my mind, because they’re always blooming, but in Newburyport several houses have great masses of them filling the tree lawns, and they look celebratory and tough. It helps that their crowns can hack plow scrapes and salty slush, so that they flush out without fail in the spring.
Daylilies, too, can spread out of bounds. How would poplars do? too twiggy? too leggy in old age? Would they take road salt? Rocks hold heat in summer.
Or, try purslane:
http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/07/10/urban-forager-from-sidewalk-cracks-a-side-dish/
Purslane is just the tastiest of urban survivors; there are plenty of plants that are tough and aggressive but not truly invasive. Chickory, dwarf snapdragon, queen anne’s lace, and wormwood would all be better than bare dirt.