Many factors are taken into consideration on construction projects large and small, and one that should get consideration is native vegetation.
The Chattanooga area is blessed with some of the most unique and varied flora in the world. But areas of land that have not been disturbed and which still produce an astonishing array of year-round beauty without the aid of any landscaper are becoming more and more rare.
One of the beauties of my home area of Golden Valley in Rutherford County, N.C., was the dirt road up the mountain and the continually changing wildflower show along its banks. The road was paved a few years ago and, in the process, the wildflowers were scraped away. A monotonous lespedeza mono-culture was installed in its place. Maybe others did not notice, but I thought Golden Valley lost a lot of its sparkle and uniqueness.
I often admired an old homestead on a former dairy farm that somehow survived at the end of a long stretch of manufacturing and warehouse facilities in Lookout Valley. The location was on a hillside overlooking a valley that extended to the foot of Lookout Mountain. The setting was breath-taking. But equally as amazing was the beauty of the native flowers and shrubs that adorned the hillside below the old house.
There was a magic formula for that beautiful hillside that only nature knew. From time immemorial, there had been a complex cycle of annual regeneration of hundreds of plant varieties that have become part of the Chattanooga natural landscape. It only takes an afternoon of bulldozing to break the ancient cycle.
That was the case here, of course. The farmhouse was demolished. The hillside was gashed and completely reshaped into a leveled pad for a mew warehouse site, while hundreds of acres of already-scarred land within the city sat idle.
This is not a call to halt development.
It is a suggestion that one factor to think about is RNV – Retain Native Vegetation – whenever possible. Nature will continue quite on its own producing a bounty that no skilled landscaper can replicate.
John Wilson
news@chattanoogan.com