The long and short of it
Natural garden an oasis for bees, but city cites safety concerns
City wants nature loving couple to cut back bees’ paradise
It’s the classic David versus Goliath showdown, but at press time, it looks like Goliath has the upper hand.
On one side, a nature-loving Kitchener couple who decided to take the city’s new boulevard beautification bylaw to heart and invested several thousand dollars on natural plants to attract bees and wildlife to their Forest Heights front lawn.
On the other, Kitchener bylaw officers who say the plants’ height creates a safety hazard and will have to be cut down to size, even if that means shearing off the flowers that collect rainwater and have four kinds of bees buzzing with joy in this sodheavy Kitchener suburb.
Given two weeks to remedy the problem or have the city do it and send them the bill, homeowners Michael Sudnick and Stephanie Wilson are crying foul, claiming the city’s left hand doesn’t know what its right hand is doing.
“On one hand, they put out all this PR with councillors saying they want natural plants to attract pollinators,” Wilson notes, referring to the bylaw that encourages homeowners to replace boring old grass with natural plants and flowers on city boulevards.
“We’ve had people stopping by to tell us how much they like it. We were nominated by a neighbour for a Kitchener In Bloom award.
“Then bylaw enforcement comes out and just wants everything to be chopped down. The boulevard beautification bylaw has nothing to do with beautification.”
Not so, says Steve Vrentzos, Kitchener’s supervisor of enforcement, who points out there are strict rules regarding heights, with plants allowed to grow to 30 inches on the part of the lawn separating the sidewalk from the curb and up to 3.2 feet in the “driveway visibility triangle” on the bottom half of the upper lawn.
“It’s a safety concern and that’s why we have these bylaws in place,” he notes, pointing out that the enforcement process is complaint driven and the city doesn’t go cruising for scofflaws.
“If someone were to be walking on the sidewalk while they were backing out of their driveway, they would not be able to see the vehicle and the vehicle couldn’t see the child.”
While cognizant of the concerns, Wilson and Sudnick say the plants aren’t dense enough to pose a problem, and certainly not as dense as the tree on the boulevard portion of their lawn that receives an automatic exemption from the city.
“It’s ridiculous that ‘visibility’ is judged purely based on height and not density,” Sudnick says. “And that something completely obscuring like a tree is allowed.
“The law doesn't make sense. And it is quite unfortunate for the bees that we’ll have to cut the flowers off the top of the plants to comply with the bylaw order.”
But a tree is not wide enough to pose an issue, Vrentzos argues — “you can’t hide an entire person behind a tree.”
The bottom line, he says, is “we’re not telling them they can’t have a garden. They just have to maintain it at the height the bylaw says it needs to be at.
“If we were to let them maintain it the way it is, it would be a complete liability for the city for not dealing with the safety situation if someone were to get hurt.”
The real culprit, Wilson says, is this summer’s rainfall, the unique pattern of which coaxed the plants from their normally law-abiding height into bylawcrushing delinquents towering in the four-to-six-foot range.
“The city says it wants to be known as a ‘Bee City,’ but then they come to a utopia for bees and, because there’s been a lot of rain and heat and the plants have grown higher than usual, they say ‘Chop it down!’”
Hoping for an exemption that Vrentzos told the Record will not be issued will leave her and Sudnick with only one option.
“We’ll trim it down in the most sensible way that can be done without taking a Weed Wacker to it,” Wilson says.
“But it will be sad. We just care about the environment — everybody has to do their part.”