People take landscaping for granted in a city doing the same types, styles and practices that have been done “forever.” They never ask if they are still appropriate or the best that we can do for a sustainable future.
One type of outdated and ineffective landscape cities and developers continue to employ is the Park Strip. The strip of lawn located between the street and the sidewalk, often planted with trees. They are found in neighborhoods throughout our city.
The big problem with these park strips is that they are filled with too many sprinkler heads that shoot beyond the lawn. They end up watering the sidewalk, street and waste a lot of water. These irrigation systems deliver toxic fertilizers and lawn chemicals into the storm drains. Damage from lawn maintenance often girdles tree trunks. When a tree can no longer bring nutrients from the roots it suffers.
Lawn strip irrigation doesn’t provide enough water for the trees planted in the lawn either. Grass roots only penetrate a few inches, while the roots of trees are down a foot or more and you can’t overwater the lawn to keep the tree happy.
This scale of the problem came into even sharper focus for me while doing a project for a client earlier this year. My client was bothered because the trees in his park strip had died and he was being charged with replacing them. Along with his dead trees, my client was concerned about the amount of water being wasted in his park strip. He had to get permission from the home owner’s association to do something different with his strip. As a scientist he took it upon himself to do some calculations to plead his case with the committee.
I reviewed his calculations and did my own, this is what we came up with” *the average park strip in his neighborhood was 300 square feet. The sprinklers on his strip put out .05 gallons of water per minute/per square foot. The sprinklers run for 30 minutes per week and 26 weeks per year for his section of park strip. There are about 800 homes in the neighborhood with similar sized park strips. If you take 800 homes x 300 square feet x .05 gallons x 30 minutes per week x 26 weeks per year= just under 10,000,000 gallons of water per year for one neighborhood’s park strips.
We took out my clients grass, planted new trees and replaced his sprinklers with drip irrigation. We planted low water grasses and perennials. It looks great and uses less than 1/5 the water it once did. I am grateful to my client for bringing me real numbers on this issue. I knew we were wasting water and killing trees, but if you multiply this once more by all the neighborhoods in Bend that have these park strips, does your conscience begins to bother you as much as mine does?
Wasting water, and killing trees is not a success story. We live in the high desert, we are not getting the snow pack that we used to, our neighbor California is in the throes of a multi year drought. It’s time to stop using so much water for bad results – all this waste is expensive. You and I can predict that the future price of wasting water will be higher still!
The time to start landscaping for the future is now.
Sarah J Whipple
BendPineNursery.com
541-977-8733
