l is for landscaping

Monday, April 14, 2014

Midtown Atlanta

Many American cities take enormous pride in their city-scaping, changing out flowers at least every season all throughout the cities sidewalks, round-abouts and flowerbeds. Some places (huh-hem Georgia Tech campus in Atlanta) even spray paint their grass green when it's in less than perfect condition!

Although I'm the first to admire an elaborate flower bed, the sad part is what happens to these immaculate flowers once their seasonal relevance has passed... :( They get pulled out of the ground and thrown away - most often while still looking fantastic! I hope they are taken somewhere nicer than the city dumps to die. I wish it could be a glorious field or a compost bin, at the very least, where garden worms could enjoy their decay and where they could transfer their living energy to a grateful belly instead of the torture and screaming pain of a dump. (Yes, I do think of things like this!)

I always cringe when I see flowers being pulled out of the ground and tossed unceremoniously into black garbage bags. It seems like a horrible waste! At least I have been fortunate enough to capture some photographs so that they may live on in my memory... Here's a small sample I've collected over the years - most are from Atlanta but there are some other American cities thrown into the mix as well - of flowers that are planted for and live only a season just to be thrown away :(

PS: In tomorrow's post I'll talk about personal home landscaping and why it starts with the letter 'M' will surprise you!