Homeless in Vancouver: Power flower

Spring means fresh landscaping opportunities.

Where the new generation of multi-unit pedestal towers are concerned, the law apparently specifies a footprint that’s just shy of putting the building’s front entrance right on the sidewalk. This doesn’t give landscapers a lot of canvas to work with and often they’re reduced to just pegging a handful of flowers into a few thin ribbons of dirt.

That’s about the sum of what a landscaper was able to do around the entrance of a pedestal tower on the southeast corner of Spruce Street and West Broadway Avenue. Just a weak show of small yellow flowers, but for one—the one pictured above. The flower that’s obviously in charge!

It’s much larger than the others with glossy blood-red petals, seemingly brushed with cyan and yellow—but you can more or less see that in the photo. The neon electric quality of the colour was, however, too big to fit in my little adventure camera.

Under the green thumb of oppression!

I like this flower and I worry for its safety. This particular building has already demonstrated a callous disregard for the plants it has under its green thumb. They have already all but killed a so-called living wall of greenery (now brownery) which they inexplicably stuck around back along side the underground parking entrance.

It’s probably the case that they only included the right angle planting to get some benefit from the city. Once it served its purpose, they left it to wither. I think they just leave it hanging around to serve as some kind of grim warning to the other plants.