In 1978, James Urban had a chance meeting with a man named Tom Perry that forever changed the course of his career. Tom was a microbiologist with a PhD from Harvard. He was working for the Forest Service and was assigned to the urban forest department because, to hear Jim tell it, Tom didn’t fit… More
In October, I wrote about some of our concerns with Philadelphia’s highly-lauded green infrastructure plan, now codified in their Green Streets Design Manual. This plan has received more praise and recognition than any other citywide green infrastructure policy that I’m aware of (here are a few examples). I’m thrilled to see a major green infrastructure… More
The World Forestry Center is a nonprofit educational institution that was founded in Portland, Oregon in 1964. Their mission is to educate and inform people about the world’s forests, trees, and environmental sustainability and to increase public awareness of the benefits of sustainable forestry management – environmental, social and economic. Rick Zenn is the Senior… More
Trees and Design Action Group (TDAG) is an not-for profit, open collaborative facilitating cross-sector and cross-disciplinary dialogue and projects promoting the role of the urban forest throughout the United Kingdom. I am the convenor of the group. We share the collective vision that the location of trees, and all the benefits they bring, can be… More
Quick – name three important types of urban open spaces…public parks, community gardens, umm…roof gardens…how about cemeteries? While making space for the living invariably involves destruction of open space, the space we make for the dead can be a uniquely important part of the urban forest. We owe our historical cemeteries a great deal in… More
Urban environments depend on maintenance. In intensely used urban settings, the concept of low maintenance is not a practical reality. During the design process, landscape architects must identify the source and capability of that maintenance, and be sure that the maintenance team is informed of specialized requirements and system designs to support the success of… More
Last year, Jim Urban wrote a post for this blog entitled Against Mulch. The principle reasons he cited for his position were: 1) Mulch floats and can clog drains and releases “lots of phosphorus” as it breaks down, and 2) work by Gilman et al. that suggest that mulch does not reduce evapo-transpiration. We discussed… More
Long-term planning has got to be one of the biggest challenges to the way we conceive of, design, and live in the world – that is also completely essential to our survival. Why is long-term thinking such a hard sell? And is there anything we can do to be better at it? According to a… More
While on a recent visit to northern California, I had the opportunity to interview an energetic young woman who is at the forefront of a pioneering effort to educate fellow arborists on wildlife protection. Megan Morris is a Sacramento native who, after earning a degree in biological aspects of conservation at the University of Wisconsin-Madison,… More
How do the stormwater benefits of Silva Cell suspended pavement tree/soil systems compare to the stormwater benefits of traditional bioretention systems? Since the mechanisms by which the tree and soil provide the stormwater benefits in these systems are the same as those in traditional bioretention, we expected the benefits to be comparable as well. The… More
There is a lot of misinformation in the landscape architecture community about whether or not trees roots will grow in gravels, structural stone soils, and clear stone. Our experience indicates that roots will adventitiously grow in any medium given the right set of circumstances. Quantifying and predicting what set of circumstances produce that growth response… More
For the last two weeks in December I’m be re-posting some of my favorite blog posts from this year. Today’s shares some of the most exciting news we got in 2013, when the Washington State Department of Ecology recognized the Silva Cell as being functionally equivalent to a rain garden. Scroll all the way to the… More
Soil. Stormwater. Sustainable Infrastructure.
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