The future of this country’s wild spaces may depend on changing the way suburban Americans think about plants.
NASHVILLE — Our yard is separated from our backdoor neighbors’ yard by a small city easement. For the first two decades we lived in this house, our elderly backdoor neighbors kept a deep border of hardwood trees and woody shrubs on their side of the easement, a shelter for songbirds and a corridor for wildlife — deer and opossums and rat snakes and box turtles and red foxes and great horned owls, among many others.
When those neighbors died, a construction company bought their house and tore it down. Then they cleared the lot, edge to edge. The mature trees and plants in the easement weren’t bulldozed, though many of them died anyway, killed by the weight of construction equipment lumbering across their roots.
But nature, as you may have heard, abhors a vacuum, and new plants have sprung up in the easement: privet and bush honeysuckle and winter creeper and a host of other shrubs and vines. With so many of the big trees gone now, more sunlight reaches the new plants, and they have grown like something possessed, something determined to fill the gaps left by all the red maples, hackberries, poplars and cedars lost to development in this neighborhood.
You’d think I’d be happy about all this new green life. You’d think I’d be grateful that the warblers have a new place to rest on their long migration. But I’m not happy. I’m discouraged...
Margaret Renkl, continues
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