ECOLOGY | GRIEF
Nature Lessons in a Hospital Parking Lot
Displaced out West, I learn from landscaping instead of landscape
We each process grief in our own way. Me, I like to wander acres of hot pavement seeking unfamiliar vegetation.
Here I was at this Utah hospital, attending the final days of a loved one. The hospital room’s perfect picture window framed the Wasatch Mountains and piercing Western blue sky. I longed to escape the stale air and painful suffering for a walk in nature.
If you looked straight down from this window, you’d see what I was really destined for: wide swaths of parking lot. I couldn’t do much more than ten minutes of threading through the shiny cars and unfortunate landscaping choices toward a street strip full of native plants, on the main road the hospital stands on.
I packed up my phone with its inadequate camera, and slipped out for the only nature walk I’d have this week.
Natives along the road
I’ll start with the best that I saw. Growing along the main road, abutting the hospital, is a xeroscaped rock garden of rugged natives, including White Sagebrush (Artemesia ludoviciana) and Banana Yucca (Yucca baccata). Like all yucca plants, the Banana Yucca has a…
