Portland Weed Festival (no, not that kind)

Portland can't even keep the crown jewel of its parks, the International Rose Test Garden in Washington Park, in decent shape, as KGW reports here.

“It just makes me sick to see this gorgeous garden plummet like it has,” said Harry Landers. “You shouldn't see weeds in the beds … these roses are hungry, the lawn is starving.” Landers spent nearly 30 years as the International Rose Test Garden’s botanic specialist and curator....

The rose bed edges, once clean and straight, are now blurred with wayward grass. In many rose beds, tufts of grass and weeds grow between rose bushes. The once manicured boxwood shrubs in the Shakespeare Garden are now riddled with blight. Thistle and other weeds which Landers said were once never allowed to thrive in the garden are now part of its landscape.

It wouldn't make one quite so grouchy if we didn't pass a big, fat annual property tax levy for the parks a year and a half ago. Where the heck are all those tens of millions going? Don't ask.

So who's to blame? The current parks commissioner, Carmen "Chainsaw" Rubio, would seem to be prominently culpable. And before her, the bureau was run by Amanda Fritz and then the late Nick Fish, who was Rubio's boss. They brought in somebody from New York City named Adena Long in early 2019 to run the parks in Portland. I believe she's still around. Maybe she could earn some of her $215,000 a year pulling some weeds.