Gotta love it when communities require green spaces and trees in the development plans... but have absolutely nothing in the ordinances/statutes to require them to maintain the green space to concrete ratio. Around here, it's not just the pathetic ignorance of trees by the contracted landscapers and lawn services, who make it a habit to kill them off with string trimmers and lawn mowers, but the fact that so many of them look like hell after a couple of winters. They just call up Big Al the Lawn Pimp and have him whack them down, tear up the turf in the green space islands, and call a concrete guy. Pretty soon, the green space is all concrete and trash dumpsters.
Not around here. The attitude is usually the same... it's either a tree and standing upright, or it's laying on somebody's car... nothing in between. The first is just a nuisance, and the latter is a bigger nuisance. I've done one green space restoration where the owners were very interested in every aspect of the job, and spent much time with me discussing options, ideas, plant selection and minimizing maintanence without neglecting the plants and trees. All the rest were of the "yeah, whatever, just keep it cheap" variety. I have found that professionals like doctors, dentists, lawyers, etc. were much more inclined to want the landscaping kept up and looking nice. The better educated the client, the more they were likely to care about the trees and the easier it was to discuss solutions to their problem that didn't involve cutting everything down and ordering a lot of gravel and river rock.
I did a removal at one of those Buy Here, Pay Here car lots. They had utterly destroyed a tree, using it to winch a broken down dump truck out of a stall. On the windshield of the dump truck, which was still sitting in the middle of the lot, it said, "Low Miles, Runs Great!"
