Park(ing) Day is Friday, September 15. The focus of this year’s Park(ing) Day, which is now in its 17th year, is pollinators.
Birds, bats, bees, butterflies, and other insects need our help more than ever. Use your Park(ing) Day space to educate the public. Show them how landscape architects create healthy places for an important pollinator in your community.
You can use your space to:
- Provide educational materials about a pollinator in your community that is at risk
- Show native plants the pollinator relies on
- Create an interactive game or demonstration that teaches how to design habitat
Post images of your Park(ing) Day installation to your social (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram). Use the hashtag #ParkingDay and tag us (@Nationalasla)
Make sure you have permission or signed release forms from anyone you photograph.
ASLA will highlight the best posts from students, firms, and chapters across our social platforms!
Ideas for How to Highlight Pollinators
In 2019, MKSK partnered with the Washington, D.C. Department of Energy and Environment (DOEE) and the US National Arboretum for Park(ing) Day. The team transformed two parking spots in downtown Washington, D.C. into a native “Pollinator Gallery” that educated the public about the importance of pollinators and the role landscape architects play in protecting them.
Landscape architects showed the world from a bee’s perspective. “We show how color perception, habitat requirements, and food source change throughout the seasons and are vital to understanding how to create functional ecosystems in designed landscapes,” MKSK explains.
Their Park(ing) Day installation included a meadow of potted native perennials and grasses, and a field of pinwheels, ranging from violet to yellow. “They were painted to represent patterns of ultra-violet light that bees see on flower petals.” The pinwheels were also “fixed at varying heights to indicate the yearly summer peak of insect biomass and its overall decline in recent decades.”
Two bee box brackets “mimic the nesting tunnels created in the ground by solitary, native bees.” The brackets also became an “unexpected, impromptu photo booth for enthusiastic Park(ing) Day visitors.”
