Back in January we posted about a project in Shoreline, WA, where the Silva Cells were being used to extend a sidewalk rain garden underneath paving. This stretch of the project is finally completed! It looks amazing, and we’ve got a case study to tell you all about it.
Kaid Benfield’s recent blog post about seeing cities as environmental solutions rather than environmental problems is really, truly excellent. He argues that to save the natural landscape we need to work on keeping people in “people habitat” by creating compact urban areas that are efficient and desirable places to live, work, and play.
Suspended pavement trenches with adequate amounts of soil are a great solution for growing healthy, mature street trees — downtown Charlotte and the Christian Science Center in Boston are just two examples of how fantastic the results can be. These two systems are 25 and 43 years old, respectively, and the trees look incredible. Still,… More
The Christian Science Center, on Huntington Ave between Mass Ave and Belvidere Street in Boston, is the oldest suspended pavement installation that we know of in the United States. These trees were planted in 1968, making them 43 years old.
A few weeks ago I was in a meeting with the chief of staff for a San Francisco supervisor. She mentioned that there are entire areas of the city — those that are predominantly Chinese and Chinese-American — where city tree planting is very limited due to cultural beliefs in feng shui. I’d heard the… More
Earlier this year I was able to provide you with some resources to help you model Silva Cells using HydroCAD, which is geared toward modeling the single storm event. Now I’d like to be able to do the same with US EPA SWMM, which is a continuous storm water model.
There is an interesting online discussion happening in the Urban Forestry group on LinkedIn right now about the future of urban forestry. I think about this question a lot, and the discussion was a good excuse to put some of my thoughts down on paper.
Getting funding for tree planting isn’t always easy. Still, it’s a piece of cake compared to getting funding for tree maintenance. Look at San Francisco, which is on the cusp of turning over the responsibility of their street trees to property owners.
Philly’s awesome green infrastructure plan now has an accompanying Big Green Map from the Philadelphia Water Department.
The Castro Valley Boulevard project went in a couple of weeks ago in Hayward, CA. The installation occurred along this major thoroughfare between Nunes Avenue and Wilbeam Avenue. As you can see from the photos, this site has a fairly intricate stormwater component throughout the system. Permeable pavers will cover the parking bays to direct… More
San Francisco has already badly missed the point on trees once, and now it looks like they may be doing it again. According to a Bay Citizen article, Mayor Ed Lee recently proposed heavy budget cuts that include transferring the responsibility for the care and maintenance of 24,000 street trees to property owners.
There is a lot of discussion going around about the benefits of creating shared soil volumes for urban trees — in other words, connecting the rooting areas of two or more trees. Do they benefit? Do they not? In my mind, a shared soil volume is kind of like living in an apartment with a… More
Soil. Stormwater. Sustainable Infrastructure.
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