This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: You've probably seen it before: A native garden starts out lush and intentional, then slowly unravels. A meadow is overtaken by weeds.
Native grasses are cut down to sad little stumps. A pollinator garden somehow loses its pollinators by year two. The follow-through wasn't.
Haven Kiers has a name for this: "photographed and forgotten." Kiers, an associate professor of landscape architecture and environmental design at UC Davis, spent the past year digging into one of the least glamorous corners of her field: what happens to biodiverse landscapes after the designer packs up and leaves. The answer, she found, is often not good. "We do our designs, maintenance is there for maybe a year, we take our pictures and then it's gone," said Kiers.
"Without that long-term maintenance, you don't get the long-term performance we're designing for." Kiers' obsession with maintenance started at the UC Davis Arboretum and Public Garden, where working closely with grounds crews opened her eyes to a side of landscape design she'd never heard from—the people trying to keep it alive. Kiers now teaches a design course in which she invites grounds crew members to lecture about the mistakes designers make. Her findings from the past year resulted in a report produced with Sacramento-based landscape architect Brenna Castro of Atlas Lab and funded by the Landscape Architecture Foundation.
The work drew on interviews and surveys of landscape architects and maintenance professionals who work on biodiverse public lands across the country. One finding is both obvious and universally ignored: Design and maintenance exist in silos, and those silos are setting up projects to fail. The problem shows up most acutely in large public spaces such as university campuses or city parks, where budgets are thin.
Maintenance crews learned their trade on lawns and hedges, not native plants. The disconnect results in what Kiers called "mow and blow" maintenance. Plant a meadow in one of these spaces, Kiers said, and you've essentially set a timer.
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