The wild growth of long grasses in some parks across Vancouver isn’t by accident.
Well, not entirely by accident.
What started as a pandemic-era measure to protect staff has transformed park policy and expanded the parks’ ability to support wildlife along the way — and all it takes is leaving some areas alone.
Where once there was just short-clipped grass, now across the city, landscapers, maintenance staff and researchers at UBC are partnering to create meadows for BC’s pollinator species — which include hoverflies and the province’s 400 native types of wild bees. In city green spaces totalling 43,000 square metres, plants are benefiting too, with species like clover, hawkweed and vetch to help support all that insect diversity.
“They’re all entirely different,” said Jack Tupper, landscape architect for the Vancouver Parks Board. “If you let the lawns grow, what happens? And clearly, it's been shown to be incredibly beneficial.”
The pollinator meadows project started during the pandemic when the city was figuring out how to maintain parks with limited staff and social distancing, Tupper explained. Then, from 2021 to 2023, the city partnered with PhD student Jens Ulrich at UBC, who studied the effects of this program.
Ulrich’s paper, published in Ecology Letters and co-authored by his supervisor, Risa Sargent, showed that the meadows attracted about 34 more species of pollinators than areas that were maintained as usual. More species of plants also thrived in the meadows.
“In that first year after they put these meadows in, a bunch of pollinator species moved into them,” Ulrich said.
Further, they found various species of bees and hoverflies stayed for the next three years as they continued monitoring the meadows.
Diversity is important because not all bees and hoverflies respond to changes in the environment the same way. Having many species helps support all pollinators in the long run.
“Maybe one species doesn't have a great year, but if another species is doing just fine that year, then they can help complement the losses of another species in that individual year,” Ulrich said.
Having a diversity of flowers and plants in the meadows is also important to ensure pollinators are supported throughout the season, Ulrich said. Bumblebees are active all summer, so it’s important to have different flowers that bloom at different times so they have food through the season.
But researchers still don’t know which meadows are best for the health and diversity of pollinators or if meadows are better than typical gardens — something they might investigate in the future.
‘The public think we’ve forgotten’
Tupper said it was quite simple to make meadows across the city, because it didn’t require anything except changing the way they maintained the parks.
“It was really easy, actually,” Tupper said — and the changes are completely reversible, should the city decide to do so. “They’re not actually changing the park, so we can always revert it back to lawn space.”
That doesn’t mean the public always saw it that way, especially at first. Tupper says it was a challenge communicating to the public that they were letting meadows grow intentionally, and the long grass wasn’t a result of the neglectfulness of maintenance staff.
To show the meadows are deliberate, Tupper said they have to mow a clear perimeter around the edges. “If we don’t do those mown edges, the public think we’ve forgotten and we’re not looking after the site properly,” Tupper said.
People tend to be more receptive to gardens with lots of flowers and colour, he said, and don’t understand the natural meadows as much. But now that they can see meadows have enriched some of the wildlife in the city, they’re more open to it.
“After the first year, the complaints stopped, and we've actually got more support now for the meadows, because I think people understand what we're doing,” he said. “They can see flowers and birds, bees, butterflies.”
For those who would like to support wild bees in their own backyard gardens, the city recommends growing flowers that pollinators love, such as lavender, white clover and sage. Perennial flowers native to BC, like aster, are also great for wild bees.
“Wild bees are adapted to like the native plant species that they have co-evolved with through time,” Ulrich said.
While this initiative is currently operating only out of Vancouver, Tupper said they have shared their data with other municipalities in the Lower Mainland — as well as larger cities like Toronto, Ottawa and Boston — to spread the word as widely as possible.
“We believe that it's a change that we need to make as a civilization to help our ecology,” Tupper said. “We make a point of sharing all our findings, all our data, the management practices, the seed mixes with anybody that asks.”
Comments
Good on them!