Mourning the Loss of My Favorite Commute Spot

[Trek420]

The older housing developments can be very pleasant, with big shady trees and homes set well back on good-sized lots. If they built new ones like that now, I'd be kind of OK with it. It's the cookie-cutter McMansion developments that have been going in all around this area that I'm afraid will happen here, too, and that's what makes me so sad: Losing something unique to the Wal-Mart of housing.

I agree with you on the aesthetic. I prefer a small space with big yard to the big house where you can reach out the window to borrow a cup of sugar from your neighbor.

But trees don't grow on .... well trees. Wilderness is wonderful and we must preserve it, and rural farm land too but the human landscape with trees and people takes people. Gardeners particularly.

Take my condo .... please nearly 500 units in the development, my mutt and I walk around it daily and I can count on the fingers of one hand the units where folks log off and turn off the TV long enough to garden. I'm not blaming TV per se but walk around and you see all these smallish condos with monster flat screens in the front room.

Most are satisfied to have the same agapanthus and ivy (two plants I really dislike) in front that the blow and go gardener guys maintain. It's not the builders fault that there's lawn and ivy.

Not to overgeneralize but the human landscapes we prefer came from generations of people who gardened and a lot of that culture is gone.

See "vegetable gardening" thread for more info on this interest returning