Metro Vancouver Parks & Green Space

[Sheba]

Eyesore or urban oasis? Vancouver's 'roadside meadows' mow up controversy

A few feet of grass on a busy Vancouver roadway has residents split over a recent decision by the city to refrain from mowing some of its boulevards in a bid to increase biodiversity while combating climate change.

Some, who approve of the urban meadows’ pilot project, are eager for the return of pollinators such as birds and bees the change could bring. Others want their sidewalks back to being free of weeds.

Yaletown resident Peter Meiszner said he first noticed the “unsightly” presence of unkempt grass last month while passing a median along Pacific Street on his way home.

“I was driving back from work and noticed just how tall the grass had gotten,” he said. “It looked terrible.”

By the time the city council candidate arrived home, friends, as well as supporters of his campaign, had messaged Meiszner photographs of the situation. He posted them to Twitter, commenting that the tall grass “leave(s) a poor impression for residents and visitors.”

However, the city said it has intentionally left the grass patch unmown.

In April last year, it launched a pilot program to strategically stop mowing pockets of wild grass and plants in order to provide food and shelter for birds, insects, butterflies and bees, safeguard underlying soil and reduce carbon emissions that lawn-mower use would emit.

Now, the naturalized meadows cover more than 37 hectares of Vancouver — more than double the size of Granville Island — including parts Queen Elizabeth, Killarney, China Creek and 15 other parks and three golf courses.

“As meadows age, they diversify and more wildflower species begin to appear. In support of this, we’ve been seeding a specific mix of native wildflower seed, plugs, plants and bulbs within many of our meadows which will hopefully begin to display themselves over the coming year,” the park board said in an email.

This year, it widened the project’s scope to include patches of grass along boulevards including Pacific Street. Called “roadside meadows,” they’re regularly monitored by city staff and cleaned of litter and debris.

The park board said it plans to continue to “widen the meadow landscape” and is currently in the process of assessing more of Vancouver’s underutilized urban lawn spaces as potential new sites for re-wilding.

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Miranda Hart, a plant microbiologist and professor at the University of B.C., said letting lawns grow unruly in Vancouver’s urban areas has numerous benefits for the environment.

“When uncut, grass flowers and produces a seed that can feed all sorts of animals. The bigger a plant grows, the more carbon it pulls out of the atmosphere, which reduces the negative impacts of climate change.”

Another way the meadows curb climate change is by protecting the lawns and underlying soil from extreme heat. According to park board data, the meadows were 1.2 degrees cooler than lawns and contained 20 to 30 per cent more moisture within the soil.

The city also mows the meadows if fire risk is escalated, such as during 2021’s heat dome.

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Vancouver's urban meadows pilot project. Photo by Francis Georgian /PNG

What do you think - to mow or not to mow (yeah I know, cheesy Shakespeare reference )