CELPIP Listening Part 6 Practice Test: Meadows Instead of Lawns

NARRATOR: Few sights say Canadian park quite like a broad expanse of freshly mown grass. Yet that familiar green carpet is increasingly under scrutiny. Across the country, municipalities are being urged to convert portions of their manicured lawns into meadows of native wildflowers and grasses, and a handful have begun experimenting. Supporters see an overdue ecological correction; skeptics see weeds with a press release.

NARRATOR: Botanist Ruth Okafor, who has advised several prairie cities, argues that conventional turf is essentially a green desert. It offers next to nothing to pollinators, demands relentless mowing, and in many cities is watered with treated drinking water through the driest weeks of summer. Native species, by contrast, evolved for local conditions; once established, their deep roots survive drought unaided and soak up stormwater that would otherwise overwhelm city sewers. Okafor is quick to add that she isn't proposing to plough up a single sports field. Her target is the forgotten turf: boulevards, steep slopes and the edges of parks that nobody sets foot on, yet that crews dutifully mow every ten days regardless.

NARRATOR: Dave Lindqvist, who coordinates a recreational soccer league in Winnipeg, is unconvinced, though not for the reasons one might expect. He has no quarrel with bees. His worry is that unused is in the eye of the beholder. That supposedly idle patch behind the playground, he points out, is where toddlers learn to kick a ball, where families spread a picnic blanket, where teenagers improvise a game of frisbee. A meadow, however attractive, invites admiration rather than participation. Lindqvist is equally skeptical of the promised savings. Native plantings, he notes, require years of painstaking weeding before they can fend for themselves, and if budgets tighten, a neglected meadow quickly becomes an unruly tangle that residents complain about and councils eventually mow down anyway. Nor, he adds, does a row of signs ordering people to keep off the wildflowers make a neighbourhood park feel especially welcoming.

NARRATOR: Okafor concedes that the early years are labour-intensive, and that a half-grown meadow can look, to the untrained eye, like simple neglect. She recommends that cities begin modestly, with small trial plots tended by neighbourhood volunteers. Lindqvist welcomes that, provided residents are actually asked which spaces they use before a single seed goes in. On that point, at least, the two are closer than their reputations suggest. The real question, then, may not be whether meadows are better than lawns, but whether cities are prepared to invest the patience, and the conversation, that replacing either one requires.