Kevin Cox is a serious gardener.
“I’m just an old hippie," he explains. "I can’t help it. I believe in flower power.”
He’s also a retired crossing guard who worries about drivers speeding, so he’s been planting small patches of xenias along three busy streets.
“After the flowers started blooming, I noticed that some drivers would slow down, smile and seemed to appreciate the flowers, and so everybody behind them slowed down as well.”
He offers a few flowers to passers-by and is, frankly, suprised by how grateful they seemed to be. In addition to spreading goodwill, he’s using his little gardens to promote native plants.
“Xenias are native to the western hemisphere, but not to us, so with the xenia beds I try to include some flowering natives with wild bergamot and cardinal flower and milkweed and even wild strawberries in the hope that people will instead of looking at them go, ‘What’s that weed?’ They’ll say, ‘My that’s a beautiful flower. I have to grow some too.’”
Finally, he hopes that by planting flowers near bus stops, he’ll encourage more people to use mass transit.
