The Lowes Parking Lot Wildflower Meadow?
Wow
To my complete astonishment, the highlight of my day yesterday was the Lowes parking lot in Concord. It has the biggest, bloomingest, most successful wildflower meadow I’ve ever seen. I have some cynical thoughts about it — it was probably done to appease environmentalists or the planning commission, it was probably amended with all the damaged bags of Miracle Grow, Monsanto probably supplied the seed mix — but it was impressive nevertheless. Not something I expected to see at a big box store.
Tidy Tips, Layia platyglossa
Tidy Tips predominated in the bio-swale, Chinese Houses on the berms.
I had never been to Lowes before and it turned out to be even more like Home Depot than I expected, but my hat’s off to whoever is responsible for that meadow. It’s pretty incredible.
Tidy Tips, Baby Blue Eyes, Alyssum, and African Daisy
Tags: tidy tips
This entry was posted on Thursday, March 18th, 2010 at 7:01 am and is filed under california natives, plants, wildflowers. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
March 18th, 2010 at 10:49 am
Oh my goodness!! It is hard to believe that beautiful garden is at Lowe’s. I wish our local store would put one in too!
March 18th, 2010 at 3:45 pm
That is amazing! I hope they are able to let it go gently and bring it back next spring. I remember the former Mountain View city dump looked like this the first year after they’d closed it, reseeded with lots of wildflowers (I remember owls clove, poppies, and Lupine). Then the annual grasses crept in, and every year there were fewer wildflowers…But that first year was stunning!
March 18th, 2010 at 4:31 pm
Most definitely not something I’d expect. I’m cynical too. Like TM mentioned, most wildflower meadows slowly fade away. Still it’s a beautiful sight.
March 18th, 2010 at 8:34 pm
I would have asked about it if I’d had more time. I’d like to know how long they’ve had it. I have a vague feeling that I might have heard about this a few years ago, that this store might be known for doing this, but I don’t know for sure. To me it looked like the meadow gets a yearly treatment of Round Up and then amendment and seeding. There are almost no weeds and almost no bare patches, so it’s definitely getting maintenance this year, not just being left to its own devices. However they are doing it, I hope they keep it up, as it was by far the best thing at that store.
March 20th, 2010 at 4:01 am
Wow, that is incredible – even if you’re right and it is just window dressing, it still makes a statement and creates an awareness of the beauty of nature…
March 20th, 2010 at 9:38 am
You’re guessing that it’s a heavily managed meadow, and it looks that way to me too. I’d be curious to see what it looks like in three months. Will they embrace the brown when these die back?
March 20th, 2010 at 6:19 pm
I agree that it makes a great statement. Kinda makes me want to go fertilize my own wildflowers.
I’m guessing that they are going to plow the field in May/June when everyone around there does their fire-remediation weed-whacking and plowing, and that they leave the field bare for the summer. That area has a lot of vacant lots and grassy fields, so it wouldn’t look unusual or offensive for the field to just be bare until the rains started.
January 9th, 2011 at 12:54 pm
DryStoneGarden » Blog Archive » 2010 Miscellany says:[…] in the Lowes parking lot in Concord was the most surprising thing I saw all year. More photos are here. It still blows me away. Elk Mtn. Tumbled […]