A swath of wildflowers became collateral damage from some routine maintenance at a fledgling Saanich park.
“We’ve planted lots of Garry oak, natives shrubs, camas bulbs, trilliums throughout the park, and [parks staff] happened to notice a small 10-foot stretch along the Walter Avenue frontage that had been inundated with weeds, invasive species, thistles,” said Andrew Burger, park operations manager with Saanich Parks.
“They were trying to do the right thing by trying to prevent the spread throughout the rest of the park and inadvertently cut a few native flowers that were mixed in.”
The loss of the flowers that included camas and trillium that were mowed down Tuesday came as a blow to the neighbourhood who have been watching the new park take shape over the past several months.
“There’s nothing left of the trilliums, I don’t know if they will come back. Hopefully some of the camas bulbs will come back,” said Warren Ellam, who has lived in the neighbourhood for the past 12 years and walks by the Gorge area park twice a day.
The property on Walter Avenue and Dysart Road was donated by a resident to Saanich Parks, which has been working to renaturalize the area over the past six months.
Ellam said the park was a welcome transformation for the property, which had been the site of a makeshift homeless camp, with the residents providing food for rats and raccoons.
“There were a number of outbuildings that became infested with rats and raccoons,” he said. “There were drug issues, it was a real terrible eyesore.”
He said neighbours walk through the park every day and have slowly witnessed the transformation of the area.
“It’s almost like when you’ve put up with this ugly caterpillar in your garden for so long, and it’s about to emerge from its cocoon and then you go and kill it,” said Ellam, adding residents are hoping to have the new park named after former councillor Vic Derman, who died earlier this year.
Burger admits cutting the wildflowers was a mistake, but expects new flowers will emerge from the camas bulbs.
“We’ve talked to our staff and used this as a teaching point to create some better protocols around what our maintenance requirements are, and proper identification of some native species,” he said.
“It’s a tough one because you have bluebells and daffodils and all these things that look really nice that are mixed in, but technically those are invasive species as well.”
Burger said Saanich Parks has set protocols, timing maintenance for after seeds have set for native wildflowers.
“In a place where it’s more obvious that there’s wildflowers, we’ll go in there and remove the weeds by hand,” he said.