Spending time in the redeveloping inner communities is another interesting comparison. Each lawn and house has such a high degree of variability from a combo of factors, redevelopment of older parcels with mature vegetation only being one of them. More noticeable is the completely random level of interest people have in their lawns and gardens which have deviated greatly over time as the community ages and each property has had many owners since.
Here's a few highlights I recall from the past summer wandering around and some specific:
- 1950s bungalows with only grass and no shrubs
- 1950s bungalows with rocks instead of grass
- 1950s bungalows with about 2 feet extra of top soil and decades of meticulous gardening
- Recent infills with incredibly manicured lawns and gardens
- Recent infills with plastic grass and no trees
Example 1 - someone who loves gardening, hates lawns and has been giving 100% effort for decades:
View attachment 458834
Example 2 - someone who never thought about gardening or lawns in decades directly across the street from #1:
View attachment 458839
Example 3 - Someone who hates gardening and lawns and has 1000x the wealth as the rest of us. Glad this guy is saving on the maintenance costs with the plastic lawn, that should help with the $50,000 / month mortgage payments
View attachment 458835
Example 3 is the funniest to me - I'll never understand the extremely wealthy's choices. There's a middle ground between cheap zero maintenance plastic and being a passionate DIY gardener. Especially if the goal is to show-off your wealth a bit. Just hire someone to take care of it for you.
EDIT - notably, all these examples are within a kilometre of each other. Climate is a thing that effects trees and what plants we can grow, but clearly it's not the actual critical issue to why we do or don't have trees or vegetation.
