To the Editor,
Every year I see city workers mowing down very beautiful as well as useful plants on a routine basis, and this careless act needs to stop.
Along Mostar road there is a naturalized patch of arnica, nettle, chrysanthemum, and lathyrus. When I went to gather flowers for medicine the other day, I see that the city had a worker come out and cut down all the vegetation to only a few inches of stem. Why did this happen? it looked absolutely beautiful before, but now the flowers are gone, the ground became vulnerable to the sun’s heat, and now all that is left is an ugly brown patch of dried-up land.
City landscapers should be better educated as to what they are doing. To put it bluntly, it seems as though they’re blindly going around town cutting vegetation down just because it’s their job. My intent is not to place blame or insult the hard-working city employees, but rather to suggest that instead of cutting down useful and beautiful plants, how about we put the workers and our tax dollars into something beneficial like eradicating invasive and destructive plants like the Scotch broom, English ivy, gorse, and knotweed, to name a few. As a community we need to be mindful of how we maintain our land. I believe we can clean up our vegetation the right way.
Richard KuehnelNanaimo