Green Mexico City

   You read that correctly. Yes, there is exceedingly heavy traffic, though it is orderly. Yes, the air is sometimes polluted, though not as much and as often as it used to be. These are features that are often written about. Not so what I will report here. My topic sentence, as it was called in my high school writing class, is this: Mexico City is the greenest large city I have ever visited—in the US and a sprinkling of countries around the globe.
   Start with trees: they are everywhere, mostly deciduous of species I haven’t tried to identify. That prevalence of trees, most of them mature, should not be surprising, since some years ago the city planted huge numbers of them in their fight against pollution.

   But those trees, while they are the bulkiest green patch on every view, are by no means the only green and not even the most eye catching. There are plantings everywhere you look, both private and public. And what I think to be most remarkable about both categories is the fact that both public and private plantings are groomed, really attended to.

   That means that numberless (literally) bushes and small trees are shaped, that plantings on the edge of most roads are cared for, presumably by their owners when on private land or by the state, if public.

   Most remarkable, in my view, are the many walls—vertical expanses—that are covered with leaves, often even in designed patterns. These expanses, and there are many, require more care than standard horizontal ones, but they all seem to be thriving. 

   Whatever it is, universal practice keeps Mexico City green. Since these bushes, small ornamental trees, and border plantings are both private and public, one can only conclude that the keepers of  these many levels of green are professional gardeners, of course also both private and public.

   My observation: the Mexico City ethos is to treat its soil as a garden, to whomever a piece of land belongs, private citizens or the government alike.

   But the cultivation of all that greenery depends, in turn, on a large class of “working class” gardeners; the class structure makes it unlikely that many home owners themselves tend to the land around them.

   This laudable concern for appearance may in the future, probably fairly near, give way to more laissez faire scrambling. In short, when better jobs become available to those now tending to the city’s greenery, Mexico City may become as disheveled as most major cities of the world.