Lawn is Art Friendly, But Not the Most Bay-Friendly

If you walk by the Piedmont Center for the Arts, which opened just last month, you’ll see a welcoming green lawn and newly blooming flowers. Although the community is generally enthusiastic about the new venue for performances, lectures, and art exhibits, some Piedmonters wonder whether an opportunity was missed to create a sustainable and eco-friendly garden on what is a piece of city property.

“A lawn for public gatherings at the PCA is certainly appropriate,” wrote landscape designer Anne Weinberger in an email to Patch, “but wouldn’t it serve the public better if the surrounding planting beds demonstrated a commitment to low-water landscaping?”

The issue was discussed at the July Park Commission meeting where some members of the community suggested that the center’s outdoor space be re-landscaped with perennial shrubs and plants to align it with the city’s “Civic Bay-Friendly Landscaping Ordinance.”

With the ordinance, passed in 2009 as part of Piedmont’s Climate Action Plan, the city pledged to use sustainable and low-water plants on all municipal landscaping projects costing $100,000 or more.

“The guidelines call for $100,000 in improvements,” said Piedmont’s Park Project Manager Mark Feldkamp. “We didn’t do anywhere near that amount of money.”

What’s more, Feldkamp said, grass is better suited for the venue.

“The lawn is needed, there’s going to be all sorts of concerts outdoors. This was a site where we needed people to sit on the lawn and listen to music and not sit on gravel and dirt.”

During the Park Commission meeting, it was brought up that the center was also on a tight deadline to get some sort of landscaping done by its . Repairing the irrigation system and re-seeding the existing lawn seemed like an affordable and manageable solution, although that contributed to the center's start-up costs growing to more than double initial estimates.

The commission also agreed that re-landscaping this property more sustainably could be an evolving project that happens in stages over the next few years.

City Councilman and Park Commission liaison Garrett Keating said that the lawn and surrounding plants are placeholders for now, which took care of an immediate need. In the future he’d like to see the center partner with Piedmont Middle School teachers and students to work on bay-friendly landscaping together.

“The schools are always looking for garden space,” Keating says. “That has real potential I think, and it sort of dovetails with the mission of PCA.”