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Picking up dry leaves from green spaces is not beneficial for trees, because they extract nutrients from plant remains, the chairwoman of the Romanian Landscape Association, Diana Culescu, stated on Wednesday, for AGERPRES.
The habit of some local authorities to "sweep from one end to the other" parks is not found in Western countries. In Versailles, the leaves are raked from the alleys, but between the trees they are left on the ground, she mentioned, agerpres reports.
"There are many types of plantings - some that don't necessarily have grass underneath, but we try to put grass everywhere, because I don't know exactly where we got the idea that grass grows in the forest. A park doesn't have to look similar, from one end to the other," Diana Culescu explained.
According to her, the maintenance of green spaces requires much more specialized activities than collecting leaves. Thus, the correct cutting of the bushes, depending on the needs of the respective species, allows flowering.
"Certain types of shrubs need to be cut depending on the typical architecture under which they grow. We don't know this, we come and cut with a saw from one end to the other in the spring. Therefore, here, the shrubs don't bloom much. This is the reason for that we collect the leaves: that we have no competence for anything else. We collect leaves, we cut the grass - that's it," she said.
In autumn, the deciduous trees, before they lose their leaves, extract part of the nutrients from them. The fall of leaves on the ground, near the trees, allows them to recover the rest of the nutrients.
"These leaves that fall on the ground basically continue to decompose. (...) An adaptation of trees to keep their nutrients nearby. Only we don't really understand this and we put the leaves in bags and throw them in the trash," Culescu claimed.
At the same time, alveoli are needed around the trees, and the practice of pouring various materials right next to the trunk does not allow the circulation of water and air. Diana Culescu said that, many times, the material used by local authorities under the name of "hydromedia" is in reality something else.
"Hydromedia doesn't really work for us. It's a patent that you can get from a single company, which doesn't operate in Romania. We use everything else and call it 'hydromedia', because everyone has heard that hydromedia is permeable. As long as we don't have the technical book of the material, we can say absolutely anything. For example, at one point, I was talking to a city hall in Bucharest and they told me that they paint tree trunks with a special paint for that. And I have asked for the technical notebook and it said that the paint was for wood; that is, it was paint for benches. (...) Abroad, trees, especially in alignment, are planted in green strips, which let water and the air get in. That's how they were used to be planted here as well. Only that here, now the money is made from the pavements," warned the president of the Association of Landscape Architects.
