Nurture your Nature

Greenough Park

An edited response to Dustin Mennie who wrote about the restoration of Greenough Park, Missoula, a place he played in as a child:

I come back your note "An Ecological Immersion" after having walked where you planted. I felt I had entered a war zone. And it is in a way. So many non-native maples cut into logs So bare in the spring. Hopefully the ground vegetation adjusts to the sun and the heat this summer. It will not return to being cool for a decade. If they really want native, maybe they should tear out the lawn on the west side of the bridge... not likely to happen. When I need deep shade and a sense of the NW woods I'll take a walk down the Kim Williams path in the shadow of Sentinel where along the Clark Fork, abandoned and not-yet-harassed, the fir and mahonia flourish in the moist fragrant shade.

When I went there it was no longer a shady moist place. True humans had put down paths everywhere, but at least the 50 foot plus maples provided shade. Alders and cottonwoods will be encouraged and most assuredly flourish, but it will take years if not decades. Each human action has loss and gains. Not sure about this one will play out.

Greenough Park is in a cityscape and a "native" arid landscape is not compatible to abusive humans. Scars on the land here last decades if not centuries. The new developments of ranchettes on the hills are considered progress. But they disrupt and turn beauty into something garish and ugly.

So Greenough Park: ponderosa pine, the flutter of alder and poplar leaves, the sweep of birds up and down the highway of the streams and river, the gurgle of water over stone. Logs and brush everywhere looking like an uncleared logging camp; spring growth crushed. The open scar of it all.

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