Reading helps!
Thanks to my love of reading, I picked up a copy of a local magazine called Echo. And I got lucky because one of the weekly columnists is a gardener by the name of Ondrej Fous. I will write about him later, but for now, I should mention that he writes widely.
So when I found a collection of his columns in book form, I bought it. He covers four main topics, and the chapters are appropriately grouped under those four topics. Now, one of the chapters deals with shrubs. How they’re treated in the city and why.
City shrubs
Now, what Fous writes about I personally observed daily on my walk to and from the tram station. The shrubs running between the sidewalk and rail lines were either harshly pushed back or extremely shaggy. I had to duck or move to the side to pass by.
If you’re on vacation, you can afford to slow down and take a peak inside the shrubbery. You’ll find a lot of tin cans, garbage, and cosy places for unhoused people to live in. Once, we walked to the station with a lady who promptly disappeared from the sidewalk, and beat us to the train stop. She knew a shortcut through the shrubbery and bravely took it.
Lowest bidder
Back to Ondrej Fous, who writes that, sadly, shrub maintenance in the city goes to the lowest bidder, not to qualified, experienced gardeners. Experienced gardeners are getting pushed out.
That’s why you see shrubs pruned off the sidewalk but not all the way. Nobody bothers to prune all the way to the top, for example, which leads to weird looking shrubs.
Even worse is the timing: shrubs are hacked back at the wrong time, which means they don’t flower. When your flower buds go missing before flowering, you have to wait another year for the show.
Harsh pruning also creates gaps like the ones I noticed in the neighbourhood where I stayed. That makes it easier to dispose of garbage and walk into the shrubs.
Low-skilled and low-paid
I got to see one maintenance crew in action and I would hate to make fun of them, but I could tell they weren’t professional landscapers. One tip-off was their plastic fan rake which is used for leafy lawn areas in the fall. It’s not very effective for woody debris from shrubs.
And the shrubs should really be pruned to the top, in one line because it looks better. I presume they didn’t have a ladder or pruning extension. So clearly, the plan was to quickly eliminate the sidewalk obstruction and move on.
Now, I know the workers are happy to have their jobs, but multiplied across the city, the municipalities do lose a little bit of beauty. It all comes down to budgets, which makes me wonder where skilled workers practice their trade.
I find that public spaces are poorly maintained around Prague.
