I saw a creek in my hometown go from a muddy ditch to full of fish in about 5 years after they planted native trees along the banks.

The city stopped mowing the grass right to the edge and let a local group put in willows and dogwoods, and now the water is clear enough to see trout again, so what's a small change you've seen make a big difference where you live?

4 comments

4 Comments

leehall2mo ago

That's so cool about the creek. I mean, it's wild how just not mowing something can be the whole fix. We had a spot like that where they stopped spraying for weeds and now there are butterflies everywhere in summer, stuff I haven't seen since I was a kid.

hugos462mo ago

I used to think those little patches of wildflowers on road medians were just messy. Then my town planted a bunch of native stuff in a roundabout instead of grass. It's a riot of color from spring to fall, and you can actually hear bees buzzing over the traffic noise. It's a tiny island, but it feels alive in a way a manicured lawn never did. Totally changed my view on what "neat" means.

drew_jones312mo ago

Honestly, that's such a good point. I've been seeing the same thing, where just leaving a bit of land alone does more than all the fancy landscaping. It's like we spent years trying to force everything to be tidy and green, and all it did was make places kinda dead. Now the spots they let go wild are the only ones that actually feel right.

vera1951mo ago

Is it just me or does nobody else think about the downsides of letting everything go wild? I mean, @leehall mentioned butterflies, and yeah that's nice, but what about all the poison ivy and ticks that come with it? My neighbor let his backyard go native and now we can't even let the kids play near the fence line without checking for deer ticks every time. The creek thing sounds great but around here the city tried that and the willows grew so fast they blocked the drainage pipe and flooded the whole park during a summer storm. Sometimes the neat and tidy approach existed for a reason, you know?

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