Native plantings for Chicago urban parkways

Urban parkways: that often neglected strip of greenspace, positioned between street and sidewalk. When I first moved to Chicago I was scolded by a friend “Don’t walk there! That’s the dogs’ toilet!” and he’s not wrong. But a parkway can also be much more than that. A new urban greening movement is bringing attention to parkways, rethinking them from hazzard to benefit — or even to beautiful — through native plant landscaping.

Why native plants? Native plants are resilent and well-adapted to midwestern weather conditions. Once established they thrive without much attention, unlike lawn care that requires fertilizers, mowing, watering, pesticides and worse. Native plants, even in a small parkway, improve our local biodiversity. Have you noticed how hostas, which largely come from Asia, tend to have little to no bug activity around them? Native plants foster insects and pollinators. They also serve as both habitat and food source to local and migrating birds, who can eat the insects or dine on their berries, seeds, and sap. And finally, native plants are quite simply interesting. They represent a clean break from the same old formula of “lawn grass, evergreen hege and packasandra”, with a broad range of bloom colors, heights, leaf structures and winter interest.

There are, of course, challenges. In Chicago, salt and other ice-melting chemicals migrate quickly from road to plow to parkway. And while big snowy winters are increasingly fewer in number, plowed snowdrifts stored on parkways can present real challenges to the landscapes sleeping below ground. Foot traffic, dogs, and plain old theft — sadly yes it happens regularly — are other big challenges. And finally, while unlikely, utility services like water or gas do have the right of way into parkways if they have to fix something underground.

If on the balance you’re still willing to take on these challenges to bring a bit of native garden landscaping to your front stoop, here are some resources and recommendations to get started.

Resources

The Edgewater Environmental Coalition has a Parkways for Pollinator’s program, filled with resources to support the transformation of parkways into spaces for native plants, pollinators, and habitat. They offer native plant seedlings, education, site design planning, and more. See their native plant guide, and their guide on how to start a native garden.

Prairie Friends grows indigenous native plant species directly from seed, sourced from the Upper Midwest and gathered locally for germination. Their plants represent the original species which have co-evolved with prairie insects over the past 12,000 years.

The Morton Arboretum’s online Tree and Plants database has 700 detailed entries on plant and tree information, with easy filtering for local native varieties, season, road salt tolerance, and more. This is especially useful as you consider your parkways’ lighting exposure.

Finally, Charlottee Adelman and Bernard Schwartz’ book The Midwestern Native Garden: Native Alternatives to Nonnative Flowers and Plants is a gem. Given a non-native or invasive ornamental, they make multiple native plant recommendations, suitable for all garden styles with similar cultivation requirements.

The Guide to the Chicago Landscape Ordinance

Aaaaw… it hasn’t been updated since August 2000, and it’s signed by Mayor Daley. At this point it’s both a critical reference as well as an archival document. Read the Guide to the Chicago Landscape Ordinance to get a sense of the city’s vision for parkways. It does offer input on acceptable and unacceptable tree species still in use today — messy female ginkos, conifers, and thorny trees are out.

Groundcover plantings

Many of The Guides groundcover plant recommendations (see page 47) would today be considered invasive or, at least, non native. Here’s what I’ve determined:

Common name	Botanical Name	Native
Goutweed	Aegopodium podagraria	Invasive
Creeping cotonester	Cotoneaster adpressus
Bearberry cotoneaster	Cotoneaster dammeri
Rock spray cotoneaster	Cotoneaster horizontalis	Invasive
Hesse cotoneaster	Cottoneaster horizontalis ‘Hessei’
Purpleleaf wintercreeper	Euronymus fortunei ‘Colorata’	Invasive
Bigleaf wintercreeper	Euonymus fortunei vegetus
English ivy	Hedera helix
Japanese garden juniper	Juniperus chinensis procumbens
Sargent juniper	Juniperus chinensis sargentii
Shore juniper	Juniperus conferta
Creeping juniper	Juniperus horizontalis	NATIVE
Henry honeysuckle	Lonicera henryi
Japanese pachysandra	Pachysandra terminalis
Grow-low sumac	Rhus aromatica ‘Grow-low’	NATIVE
Periwinkle	Vinca minor	Invasive

Alternative groundcover plantings

The Morton Arboretum Illinois makes the following recommendations for native groundcovers, instead:

Common Name	Botanical Name	Habit
Buffalo grass	Buchloe dactyloides	Full sun
Bearberry	Arctostaphylos uva-ursi	Partial sun / shade
Dwarf Crested Iris	Iris cristata	Partial sun / shade
Fragrant sumac	Rhus aromatica	Partial sun / Shade
Moss phlox	Phlox subulata	Partial sun / shade
Trailing juniper	Juniperus horizontalis	Partial sun / shade
Wild geranium	Geranium maculatum	Partial sun / shade
Wild strawberry	Fragaria virginiana	Partial sun / shade
Wild-ginger	Asarum canadense	shade / full shade
Bunchberry	Cornus canadensis	Full shade
Lady fern	Athyrium filix-femina	Full shade
Maidenhair fern	Adiantum pedatum	Full shade

Needless to say, a parkways landscaping project is typically a big one. I’m hoping to break it down into smaller, easier to implement and testable components, to see what works. More to come.