PROVIDENCE — An award-winning meadow at the downtown train station was recently mowed down by the city’s Department of Public Works because of a 311 complaint.

The city received a single call “from a constituent reporting overgrowth at this location at the back entrance of the train station on Railroad Street,” according to Josh Estrella, the city’s director of communications.

The DPW then proceeded to obliterate, at various levels of intensity, 12 native plant gardens surrounded in concrete curbing above the station’s underground parking garage. Last week the DPW cut back and removed about 90% of the 14,600-square-foot meadow, according to a social media post by a city employee that has since been deleted. The post noted many of the plants that were destroyed “were Rhode Island ecotypes whose generations are endemic to the region.”

The plants came from wild stocks growing on federally protected lands.

The Urban Wildlife Meadow at Providence Station Park is a partnership between the city’s Department of Parks and the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service. Providence is one of 30 Urban Bird Treaty cities in the country, and the installation was specifically intended to create bird and pollinator habitat in a dense urban area.

The project began two years ago. A sign, headlined “Urban Bird Habitat in Providence,” explains the project’s purpose. “We leave the flowers and grasses standing through the autumn and winter so the birds who live in or fly through the city can enjoy the seeds and shelter they provide.”

The meadow wasn’t scheduled to be cut back until spring, as the plants are intended, as the sign notes, to be a shelter and food source for birds and pollinators and a seed bank of selected native Rhode Island species. Since it is peak season for fall flowers, some of the downed plants were in bloom.

Beginning in fall 2022, Department of Parks staff and volunteers planted some 7,000 plugs featuring dozens of Rhode Island ecotypes and sowed about 9 pounds of New England native wildflower and grass seed, including some locally collected wild seed.

The project won a 2023 Merit Award from the Rhode Island chapter of the American Society of Landscape Architects, and was the topic of one of the organization’s Climate Action sessions at the Boston chapter’s Fieldday event in June.

Lindsey Langenburg, a former Department of Parks employee who worked on a similar project in 2019 that didn’t take, spoke with ecoRI News at the site a few days after the plants were whacked.

“What has made this iteration so successful is the donation of plants from Fish & Wildlife Service, so they were able to get a lot more in the ground, which helps avoid weeds taking root,” she said as we sat on one of the concrete curbs. “But they also developed a volunteer program. The designer of this project was out here, like, once a week, with the volunteers … having that kind of maintenance structure is above and beyond what the parks maintenance crews can do.”

The PVD311 system allows residents and businesses to report overgrowth or high grass on private and public property. In this case, the response to this one complaint should have come from the Department of Parks, not the DPW.

“A complaint came in via PVD311 about overgrowth on public property in the right of way. Cases on public property of that nature are assigned to DPW while cases on private property are referred to DIS [Department of Inspection and Standards] for enforcement,” Estrella wrote in an email to ecoRI News. “In this unique case, this property is managed by the parks department and the overgrowth was removed in error. This is an example of a few wild flower urban meadows that are throughout the city and regrowth will be monitored by the parks department. Given the plants at this location, many will grow back next year without replanting.”

While Langenburg noted the plants will grow back, that doesn’t diminish the carelessness of the actions that destroyed this fall and winter’s habitat.

“What’s causing a biodiversity crisis is habitat loss. I think it’s like 94% of New England habitat has been lost, and a big factor in that is habitat fragmentation,” the landscape designer said. “When you’ve got this dense urban area it’s important to create a linkage between bigger habitats. Space like this is really important for keeping nature in cities.”

This isn’t the first time a Providence meadow has been attacked without thought. In spring 2020, a native landscape along the Providence River was mowed down. City officials at the time claimed it was an act of vandalism.