New native garden graces Columbia Pike
Volunteers spent hours this past weekend creating a native plant garden on Columbia Pike in front of the ACCA Child Development Center.
The garden is the first project in the “Greening the Greenway” pilot program, which is aimed at enhancing the Annandale Greenway, a five-mile trail between Annandale Community Park and Green Spring Gardens.
On Friday, volunteers removed grass and prepared the soil. On Saturday morning, they planted 40 native perennials and mulched the site. Earth Sangha provided some of the plants at a discount and donated others.
Some of the native plants are broomsedge bluestem, ragwort, beebalm, fleabane, goldenrod, and hawkweed. Native plants need very little maintenance once they get established.
Related story: Greening the Greenway: Native plant pilot combats the heat island effect
Among those who worked on the garden: James Albright, founder of the Annandale Greenway; Erin Albright; Whitney Redding, founder of Friends of Holmes Run; Rosaura Conde; Meredith Hedrick; and Lenny Bankester, the Mason District representative on the Fairfax County Department of Transportation’s Trails, Sidewalks and Bikeways Committee.
“Our hope is that, as this garden matures, we can convince more Annandale businesses – and the government – to expand the use of natives in our core areas,” said James Albright. “This will reduce the need for watering, will provide a habitat for birds and small animals, and make the landscape more climate resilient.”
With so many paved surfaces, central Annandale is a heat island with significantly higher summer temperatures than surrounding neighborhoods. Adding more trees and plants will mitigate the heat island effect.
James Albright urges business owners who would like to install a native garden on their property to reach out.
Nicely done! Hope all the plants do well; tough location with salt spray from the road, but these are all pretty hardy plants. Earth Sangha is a great organization that embodies the native plant concept. Just beware of the weeds that will pop up like crazy next spring and summer.
Can’t wait to see this in person! This will tie in beautifully with the native plant garden in Hands On Harvests’ veggie garden in the Eileen Garnett Civic Space. Earth Sangha also donated to that space.
We celebrate the beauty of the initial native garden put in place by Hands on Harvest on this site – that garden is well designed, easily accessible, and informatively marked. The combination of both spaces as native plant sites will demonstrate the value of extensive areas of native plants on the local urban environment.
Thank you so much, everyone! This is an excellent investment that will pay off in more ways than one.
So….who’s next?
The list of plants is more grass and flower. Trees help far more in carbon sequestering, more drought tolerance, uptake of rain runoff, have less maintenance, and cooling in the urban hear island. Hope they get add some.
Sooo grateful to James & Lenny & Co. for championing this! And to Earth Sangha, for their part. Turf grass is not very absorbent, so the native garden, once established, will be much more efficient, keeping the stormwater from running off into the storm drains. Our streams thank you…. 😉
How do I sign up to do this!? I loveeeee everything plants and gardening, and want to help beautify Annandale too.