Native Plant Rescue, trial run.

Native grasses, rescued from Kernan Boulevard.


Yesterday Matt and I drove out to the future site of Beazer Homes' mega-development on Kernan Boulevard to rescue native plants. With the help of Pete Johnson and the rest of the Ixia Chapter of the Native Plant Society, we're going to be providing our future homebuyers with beautifully landscaped lawns that require almost no water. We salvaged some grasses, and some small and medium-sized shrubs, which we're going to care for at the Green Street site until we're ready to install them at 703 Ralph.

The Beazer site is about 300 acres total, of which we've yet to explore much more than a couple dozen. It's VAST. It's heartbreaking. It's full of lovely plants that will soon be under pavement, condos and strip malls.

There are far more plants on this site alone than we can foresee using in the next year or so, and there are plenty other developments in the works. I'm hoping to be able to arrange agreements with other nonprofit groups in the city to rescue plants like this for the sake of promoting water conservation and neighborhood revitalization simultaneously.

This project just makes so much sense.

Please get in touch if you're interested in helping us with future rescues. There are 300 acres worth of valuable plants here, and they're going to be destroyed if someone doesn't give them a home.

It'd be great if Beazer would pay me to rescue the plants for use in THEIR future landscaping. The wastefulness of the situation destroys me. They will clearcut hundreds of gorgeous acres of Floridian plant life, then ship trees from some nursery to put in little concrete boxes here and there. Surely it would be more cost effective to have a kid rescue trees and shrubs from the site before they destroy them all, and just replant them once the construction is finished.