Please click on image below for larger view of some unidentified shrubs planted on Hill Place complex. Each plant apparently has its own miniature water line. Is that a sustainable practice? People at Town Branch Neighborhood Association meetings in 2007-08 with the developers asked for native plantings and never suggested wasteful watering. Will more such ridiculous landscaping be allowed on future construction projects in "Green" Fayetteville? Our city has so many invasive, nonnative plants now that the struggle to remove it seems overwhelming, just on acreage where people are trying. Planting sod, decorative shrubs and even trees in shallow soil with a rocky or red-dirt base is NOT creating greenspace. Real greenspace has deep natural soil and collects enough rainwater to keep plants alive and growing. Ideally, spots selected to be identified as greenspace on a construction site in the bottomland or prairie portions of Fayetteville should NOT be graded or changed but protected from the beginning so that water can percolate down to it if if the planting beds and median areas are surrounded by filled areas. Street water should be allowed to flow into such beds for watering when rain occurs. Plants should be native species without mulch between them. If the soil is covered with anything but living vegetation it isn't truly greenspace. It is just a bit of green veneer.
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A cultivar is just a variety of a particular species. Green ash is native.
A cultivar is a manipulated variant created through selective breeding, as I understand it. Green ash is native but invasive. I could have directed them to enough local wild ones to dig and move to have saved them many thousand dollars.
On the other hand, digging them out with the machines they use would have compacted soil and mixed clay with topsoil and created worse problems for the native species.
For instance, buttonbushes and willows are the main woody plants that appear naturally on seasonal wetland areas hereabouts and deserve protection. They don't spread to drier areas of the prairies and they can tolerate standing water in the wettest years. The green ash may spread all over and many die or lean and even fall during the wettest times.
For some reason, they grow next to buttonbushes. If some of our local prairie-restoration professionals and enthusiasts get their way, both species get burned back or brushhogged indiscriminately in the effort to encourage native tall grass to dominate.
For me, it is about balancing the habitat to provide for the maximum number of species.
For example, Pinnacle Prairie and WPWP both have willows, buttonbushes and milkweed.
The buttonbushes support numberous pollinators.
The necessity of protecting the milkweeds through fall is well known to monarch-butterfly fans. The willows are essential to a look-a-like, the Viceroy. Its caterpillers appear on the willows and require willow or aspen or cottonwood to survive.
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