Someone informed me of some landscaping changes on Main Street in downtown Richardson. The trees in the median were reportedly ripped out and replaced by shrubs. Someone said it's the second time. That can't be, I thought. The trees were just planted. The Main Street redevelopment project was just celebrated in October, 2021. Sad to say, the news appears to be true, as the photo above shows.
I'm not an arborist, but the shrubs in the photo appear to be vitex. One source describes vitex as "a large shrub native to the Mediterranean and Asia. It can grow 10 to 15 feet tall and has lots of stems, so it's actually more like a tree. The trunk is grey and it grows purple flowers that attract butterflies and bees." If that's what these shrubs are, vitex might turn out to be a good shrub to grow in a median. But...
Let's take the time machine back to 2021. The photo above shows the ribbon-cutting for the Main Street redevelopment. Look behind all the smiling Councilmembers and you can see two of the trees originally planted in the median. Others went down Main Street all through downtown. They look to my untrained eye to be perhaps fifteen feet tall with trunks perhaps 4 inches in diameter. Today's replacements are shrubs. Why? Dunno.
Were the wrong species planted? Were the root balls too small for survival? Were the wells they were planted in too small to support the size of trees that were planted? Were the trees not watered properly? Dunno. Dunno. Dunno. Dunno. Did the taxpayers pay for the replacements? A big dunno. The City hasn't published a post-mortem on this expensive mistake. Was one even done? Funny how that goes. The initial ribbon-cutting gets all the publicity. The subsequent failures, which might be worth learning from, get covered up and fixed on the down-low, with no public accountability and no lessons learned shared with the public. Where is the oversight?
Speaking of highly-publicized ribbon-cuttings, the "Richardson Replants" initiative was announced by Mayor Bob Dubey at the City's Fourth of July Celebration five months ago. "Replant Richardson" is an effort to recover from a natural disaster. This latest Main Street replanting is fixing a mistake. I can see why the City might want to do it on the down-low. Bigger, more mature trees are being replaced by shrubs that will never provide the shade the ripped out trees would grow to provide. Hardly the kind of replanting you'd want to draw attention to in a "Richardson Replants" kind of way.
By the way, the decision to do a "Richardson Replants" program itself seems to have been done on the down-low. It wasn't discussed in any public City Council meeting before Mayor Dubey announced it to the public in the most public way possible at the Richardson Fourth of July celebration. (Mayor Dubey: "So tonight, you're going to hear this for the very first time, and learn that this City Council and I have tasked our City management team to develop a plan that we will call "Replant Richardson.") That decision-making (not the announcement) appears like it happened at some meeting of the City Council out of the public eye. If so, that could be in violation of the Texas Open Meetings Act (TOMA). In short, good idea, bad execution.
The City plays fast and loose with some announcements and makes no announcements when covering up mistakes. We can and should do better.
"Vitex may bring blooms,
Purple hues to charm the eyes,
But trees were lost. Why?"
—h/t ChatGPT
3 comments:
Who is the city aborist? Why plant a non-native invasive plant? There are so many good choices for native plants for an environment like Main Street?
While I’m certainly no tree expert I’ve been watching the trees on Main Street too. I (think) they originally planted Sycamore trees which can live 50-100 years or longer. Then the horrific week long deep freeze that started 2/14/21 did most of them in and they were replaced with the same trees. Under warranty? Who knows?🤷♀️. Most likely not under warranty as landscape warranties are very expensive and typically never needed. Then the freak storm that hit early last June snapped many of those trees in half by those abnormally violent & sustained winds. Now I think the latest “bushes?” could be Desert Willows. If so, they are considered shrubs and need virtually no maintenance and can live 50+ years.
Personally, I’m not convinced they enhance that area but that’s just my opinion. Some people might think they look better than the trees originally planted. I might have considered cactus & succulents & boulders & stones. Native as well but indestructible and can be artfully arranged like Plano has done in renovating their medians in recent years.
Every landscape architect that I deal with questioned the choice of species for trees. I don't know who the landscape architect of record was, but I suspect they are not local, and while I'm sure well-intentioned, sold the city on an inappropriate choice.
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