We’ve all heard the term “parking lot plants”, correct? And most of us think of them with with at least some measure of disdain. They are common to the point of nauseam, they are often sheared into nearly unrecognizable green things by mow-and-blow crews with zero finesse, and they often have very little nutritional value to indigenous pollinators.While I agree they might be “boring”, I have earned a whole new respect for some of these plants. They truly are the fast-food workers of the plant world; they do their job underappreciated and taken for granted. While they might not thrive, they do survive – in often just awful conditions. They tolerate all those fumes and reflected heat as champs, and might even recover after having been trodden on or backed into.
I’m here to tell you that the world of landscape designers are trying hard to be different – and not always with much success. I write a lot of quotes with the most outlandish requests. In last week’s post, I tried illustrating the different layers of the horticultural growing world. In terms of plant procurement, that is the framework we are confined to. For the most part, anyway. In terms of construction schedules, landscape installation is obviously always the very last to go in, so if the projected completion of a job with an unusual plant list is several years out, one option is to contract grow the plants. We don’t do it a lot, but it definitely happens.
You can definitely tell when the landscape architect behind the plant list is a “plant person”. They might include some really interesting varieties which makes writing the quotes more fun, as I can envision what they are thinking. In theory, anyway. Often, though, what I see is that once planted, some of the plants they prescribe would be doomed. Sub-alpine grasses just aren’t going to be all that happy in an urban setting – especially not without the guarantee of specialty care. Which – quite frankly – they usually don’t get. And while they request said grasses in a 5g pot, we’d be lucky to find them in a 4″ pot here in Oregon.
These kinds of plant lists often prompt us to go to California for our purchases. Timing is crucial here, and construction schedules often change. A delay might mean these glorious plants from the Sunshine State may have to endure the sogginess of an Oregon winter. Climate change aside, we’re not quite there yet, to make these beauties feel at home, so that’s not always a pretty sight, as you can imagine. Truth be told, they may not have survived had they been in the ground either, unless they had been given the proper soil, drainage, etc. Which is obviously the responsibility of the landscape architect to specify, but ultimately falls on how well the plan is executed. And, as any gardener knows, on how long these plants had to get themselves established.
There are lot of moving parts in new construction, and our part at the end is the only one that deals with living things. This gets forgotten a lot. Construction managers have minimal sense of plant needs. And architects usually have minimal sense of the world of horticulture. They tell us what to buy, and we buy it – often twice, sometimes three times. It reminds me of how aghast I was when in architecture school, the only color we learned was crammed into two afternoons in sophomore year. I suspect landscape architects get about the same amount of training in regards to plants and horticulture as we did with color – in other words minimal. For some, personal interest and affinity will fill in the gaps over time, but for the most part, they project a vision that might not be entirely feasible in the circumstances following the installation, even if very pretty in theory.
And that, my friends is why parking lot plants are so common. They can handle both rough conditions and how little most of us know. And – occasionally – they are put together in a way that makes them look really good. That’s one part we need to work harder on.
