In Defense of Nature

 

CONDON’S CORNER

 

“The Living Landscape—Even Parking Lots Can Buzz with Life”

 © Marlene A. Condon 2025 All Rights Reserved

  [Published November 26, 2025, by The Daily Progress, the daily newspaper of Charlottesville, Virginia and The News Virginian, the daily newspaper of Waynesboro, Virginia.]

 

This non-native Glossy Abelia (Abelia grandiflora) in the author’s yard has provided food for bees and other insects for decades. In its mature form, it also keeps birds safe from predators within its branches. (© Marlene A. Condon)

  

“The Living Landscape—Even Parking Lots Can Buzz with Life”

 

The past few times I’ve gone to Barracks Road Shopping Center in Charlottesville, I’ve been extremely dismayed to see workmen digging out perfectly healthy plants from the islands located across from the storefronts, and even at the corner of Millmont and Barracks Road.

 

If they’d been removing the sickly trees so prevalent within the various parking lots (where the trees shouldn’t have been planted in the first place), it would have made sense. But no, the ailing trees still stood in their spots, and the healthy shrubs below them or in islands populated solely by shrubs were being completely replaced.

 

This situation troubled me for many reasons. First, it seemed such a waste to be throwing away perfectly healthy, mature plants. The shopping center store fronts were being renovated, but “refurbishing” areas of plants that were doing very well was a waste of time, effort, money, and—saddest of all—numerous useful plants!

 

The ultimate landscape scenario is the one that has withstood the test of time by producing healthy, mature plants. Yet someone made the decision to get rid of the fully grown shrubs that had survived the rigors of growing in a sea of asphalt and vehicle exhaust fumes so customers can instead see small, immature plants without much interest for either people or wildlife. And herein lies the much more serious problem with this ill-informed choice: Wildlife can most often only make use of mature plants that have begun to flower and possibly produce fruits or seeds later.

 

On my most recent trips to the shopping center, I’d observed small bumblebees and honey bees busily visiting the abundant blooms on the several shrubs of dwarf Abelia directly across from the Harris Teeter store. The Abelia was fulfilling its role in nature by supporting these bees with food at a time of year when sustenance has become much more difficult for these critters to find. Most plants are shutting down by the month of November, with precious few making flowers at a time of year when most overwintering insects would have already been hibernating in decades past.

 

Thanks to global climate change, however, our seasons no longer function as they once did, with alterations in temperature and rainfall that interfere with the lives of both plants and animals that evolved under a different set of conditions. It’s one of the reasons our wildlife (and native plants) is disappearing from our midst.

 

However, we do have plants here that originated in other countries and can do quite well under such conditions. In fact, they do so well with a dearth of rain and extreme high and low temperatures throughout the year that uninformed people now consider them “invasive”. They blame them for the disappearance of our native plants and spend a lot of time getting folks outside to destroy these plants, but it’s a huge mistake born of a lack of true knowledge.

 

If people had properly learned in school to observe their surroundings carefully before taking action, they would realize that the so-called invasive plants mainly come up in barren areas devoid of plants. In other words, by filling in empty areas with wildlife-useful plants where native plants obviously are not capable of growing, non-native plants assist our critters to survive.

 

These fall-colored, beautifully red-leaved Euonymus alatus along a roadside should not be interpreted as “invasive”, but rather as “helpful”. They will feed birds and mammals in an area where most native plants struggled to survive in 2025 because of drought that is becoming much more common. (© Marlene A. Condon)

Of course, another reason wildlife is becoming scarce is because most people want their home and work landscapes to reflect what they themselves want to look at instead of taking into account the needs of their wildlife dependents. Yes, in the 21^st Century, wildlife depends upon humans for their welfare because humans are in control of the entire world. And as evidenced by the remodeling efforts at Barracks Road Shopping Center this fall, wildlife is getting the short end of the stick. 

 

As numerous people walked by me across from Harris Teeter, either intent on getting their shopping done inside the store or returning to their vehicles to move along to new places and tasks, they either didn’t notice or didn’t care that the Abelia shrubs were supporting the life forms that keep our natural world functioning properly for their benefit. Not one person took a few moments to stop to ask what I might be studying so intently. And even more sad is that no one will have been made aware of how crucial those Abelia blooms were to the insects that so assist mankind to survive.

 

In January 2025, the Doomsday Clock—the symbol of global catastrophe—was set to the closest time ever: 89 seconds to midnight,

   

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doomsday_Clock

 

When the clock runs out, our time is up. And it may well run out, thanks to landscapes based upon people’s preferences rather than those of wildlife. Trust me, we need living landscapes that work for our benefit, not artificially contrived ones based upon aesthetics only.