The things our art director, Chris McGee, hated to leave out of the current issue of LAM.

One of the many plantings at Oudolf’s home near Hummelo, the Netherlands. Credit: Piet Oudolf.

From “The Oudolf Way” by Katarina Katsma, ASLA, in the May 2015 issue, featuring Hummelo: A Journey Through a Plantsman’s Life, written by Noel Kingsbury in commemoration of Oudolf’s 70th birthday.

“Everything that Oudolf creates is mesmerizing. His palette has incredible depth and texture.”

—Chris McGee, LAM Art Director

As always, you can buy this issue of Landscape Architecture Magazine at more than 200 bookstores, including many university stores and independents, as well as at Barnes & Noble. You can also buy single digital issues for only $5.25 at Zinio or order single copies of the print issue from ASLA. Annual subscriptions for LAM are a thrifty $59 for print and $44.25 for digital. Our subscription page has more information on subscription options.

BY CAROL E. BECKER

Building the supply chain for native landscapes.

From the May 2015 issue of Landscape Architecture Magazine.

The oak is our national tree for a reason. Oaks are endemic to our native landscapes in all regions of the United States, easily identified by their leaf shape and gnarly branches. The size of the mature white oak (Quercus alba), spreading up to 120 feet, is one reason we associate oaks with strength, along with the density of the wood and an oak fire’s burning hot and long in the woodstove. Native oaks fall into two taxonomic groups, white and red, and their landscape uses vary depending on soil moisture. But most important today, as Douglas Tallamy, a professor of entomology and wildlife ecology at the University of Delaware, points out, oaks are the “quintessential wildlife plants.” They provide food to more than 500 species of caterpillars and other insects. In this fact lies the oaks’ value to the entire food chain, from the birds that eat insects to the humans who rest in the trees’ shade.

We need more oaks in our landscapes, mostly for the food benefits they provide. But instead of being sought-after plants, oaks are underused, undermarketed, undercultivated, and therefore in short supply. Landscape architects don’t often use them, clients don’t ask for them, and thus growers don’t grow them. A reverse scenario also holds true. Few nurseries grow Quercus species, particularly Q. macrocarpa, Q. muehlenbergii, and Q. alba, because they are hard to grow and suffer significant transplant death. So clients don’t see them and don’t ask for them and, in turn, landscape architects don’t specify them. Whatever the reason and wherever you start, it’s a circle of mutually reinforcing supply and demand.

The oaks are but one example of the larger problem for design professionals working to create sustainable landscapes with hardy plants in a given region. The interest in doing so—the imperative of doing so—is unequaled by the supply of appropriate species. This shortage also helps perpetuate clients’ expectations of plant specimens they do in fact see at the retail level, plants that are well-shaped, blooming, varied, and maybe even a bit exotic. The landscape architecture profession has taught them to value this aesthetic at least since the mid-19th century, when Andrew Jackson Downing codified ornamental landscaping in A Treatise on the Theory and Practice of Landscape Gardening. Now, we find ourselves in a world where, in just the past 40 years, half the songbird species in the United States and more than 90 percent of the monarch butterflies have disappeared. Honeybees and bumblebees have fallen to a mysterious virus, a cataclysmic problem that threatens the entire food chain. We do know how to reverse these trends and preserve biodiversity in landscapes, but we can’t get it done because clients still want constantly blooming and well-shaped plants with no bugs.

The solutions begin with changing or at least adapting this aesthetic, which requires new awareness. Clients who understand and value sustainable landscapes and landscape practices will create demand, which drives supply curves of all kinds: for plants, for new training of practitioners, and for reformed public policies. To stay in business until this newly enlightened client emerges, the landscape architecture profession and the nursery industry must design and sell what clients value now. At the same time, the industry needs to create a new kind of product and a new way of working. “What we create now will determine the future of the landscape industry,” says Geoff Deigan, the founder and president of WRD Environmental, a company in Chicago that advocates for, designs, and installs only sustainable projects.

Tallamy argues for specifying more straight-species native plants, because they are scientifically documented to support the life cycle of insects at the bottom of the food chain. Some cultivars may, too, but research has not shown which ones. Consider Hydrangea arborescens, the smooth or wild hydrangea. Its cultivar ‘Annabelle’ is well-known and widely used in garden design, because its stems are stronger than the species and it has rounder, more compact flower heads. Plant H. arborescens and it will support five species of caterpillars that birds depend on and will be visited by many species of butterflies and pollinating bees, whereas ‘Annabelle’ is not known to support caterpillars and remains relatively undisturbed by pollinators. If you multiply this effect many times over, the value of the oak species emerges. Tallamy says that native oak trees support more insect life than any other plant he has studied. They are structurally the most important plant in a sustainable environment, considering the benefits to the food chain.

Tallamy explains in seductive ways how “the ecosystem supports us, too.” No one can come away from one of his lectures without being captivated by the beauty of nature. But his message is stark: “No insects, no birds, no human life.” The consumer market, though, is unlikely to grow on the strength of public concern about species preservation alone. Right now, client motivation is more self-interested. It includes fears about health (eating whole, unprocessed foods), safety (keeping kids away from a pesticide-treated lawn), or economy (saving money on maintenance). Public policy can help build awareness, as it did in 2014 when the Obama administration issued a directive to all federal agencies to begin planning for pollinator conservation on lands they manage, as part of a larger plan to increase pollinator populations.

Over the past 10 years, Jim Kleinwachter, a land preservation specialist at the Conservation Foundation in suburban Chicago, has been working to build public awareness with a program called Conservation@Home, a point system to encourage homeowners to practice sustainability at the residential level. The program is now active in seven counties in northern Illinois and helps connect residential property to the larger established wildlife corridors that Tallamy insists are the crucial means to support species preservation. This year, Kleinwachter is launching Pollinator Meadow, a collaboration among three competing growers to market and install a short-grass product to replace turf. Pollinator Meadow will be marketed primarily to institutional and corporate campuses, which are numerous in Chicago’s suburbs. The product itself is not new, but the name is, and the marketing strategy is unique in the industry. And it is directly aimed at the problem of too much turf, which covers 45.6 million acres in the United States, by Tallamy’s estimate. The Conservation Foundation is responsible for marketing the product. Currently, the market for sustainable landscaping is primarily in land restoration or habitat development projects for parks, community spaces, schools, homeowner associations, corporate or retail properties, public land supervised by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, highways, and utility corridors.

“To market this product widely, the Conservation Foundation, as a nonprofit, could not offer only one company to potential buyers,” Kleinwachter said, so he enlisted three native plant seed producers that serve the greater Chicago region—Pizzo Native Plant Nursery, owned by the Pizzo Group in Leland, Illinois; Cardno Native Plant Nursery in Walkerton, Indiana, a division of Cardno, a worldwide company in sustainability consulting; and Applied Ecological Services, a company based in the Midwest with its nursery in Brodhead, Wisconsin. Each company already has a short meadow mix, and each has long experience installing and maintaining it. They agreed to the collaboration because each recognizes the huge problem of too much turf. And of course the map shows a big market. The question is, does the potential client want it?

As customer awareness grows, so should the industry’s readiness to respond. What plants will be needed? Who will grow them? Research will answer the first question. Tallamy’s team at the University of Delaware has ranked every plant genus in the mid-Atlantic region in terms of its ability to support lepidopteran caterpillars as a surrogate of other insects “because that’s what most of the birds are eating most of the time, particularly when they are feeding their young.” Even a quick look at his website (bringingnaturehome.net) indicates the depth of his research and how difficult it is to conduct for scientifically valid results. To determine how many insects a given plant supports, the researcher must observe carefully over time to determine only what insects feed on that plant. Landing on the plant or even making a chrysalis on the plant does not count, unless the insect actually eats that plant. On this distinction, Tallamy says, it’s easy to make mistakes unless observations are exacting. Based on that research, Tallamy has developed a short list of plants to use in his region, and his team is now under contract with the U.S. Forest Service to create lists for every county in every state, due to be published on the National Wildlife Federation’s website in January 2016. Just having these more definitive lists will help growers know what plants are most important to grow. They can’t grow everything when the market is soft.

Simple observation is a quicker if less scientific way to do this if you know your plants. The starting question is, “What’s hardy because it evolved here?” says Jack Pizzo, ASLA, the president of the Pizzo Group, whose four companies grow, design, and build for the sustainable market. In Chicago, where the Cook County Forest Preserve provides a greenbelt throughout the city and suburbs, Pizzo says, a knowledgeable person can look at what grows there and learn what’s hardy in the area and what works well to address environmental challenges of the forest.

As the market grows, the industry also needs to settle some differences about “which plants.” Although straight-species native plants are critical to the food chain, they’re not the only ones appropriate for a sustainable design. In the aesthetic of ornamental landscape, plants must fit, be beautiful, and behave as they grow. In a sustainable design, they must meet a conservation objective as well—support the food web, maintain pollinator diversity, sequester carbon, and help manage the watershed. “We need to look at conditions on the ground and consider what our conservation objective is, then ask: What’s the right plant for that?” says Deigan of WRD.

Buttonbush (Cephalanthus occidentalis) illustrates this point well. Its benefit to the ecosystem is significant in supporting nearly 20 different types of caterpillars. It’s also beautiful and unusual, with glossy reddish green leaves and fragrant white flowers that look like round pincushions and become round red fruit in fall. C. occidentalis is a large shrub, growing up to 12 feet high and wide. It’s an excellent choice for a very wet, sunny spot, where it will eagerly soak up standing water. But in many a residential setting, it’s too big. The recent introduction of the cultivar C. occidentalis ‘Sugar Shack,’ which grows only one-third as big as the straight species, provides an alternative. This cultivar has not been proven scientifically to support the food chain, but it does attract some pollinators. Many sustainability-minded plant experts argue that it is appropriate for a sustainable site even though it is not a straight-species native.

At a time when we know scientifically how important native plants are to the ecosystem and we don’t yet have a broad market, growers are in a tough spot. Those who sell primarily to contractors must produce “landscape-ready plants,” says Christa Orum-Keller, ASLA, the owner and vice president of Midwest Groundcovers, based in St. Charles, Illinois. Midwest, one of the biggest growers in the region, markets its products based on quality, not price. With a small but growing demand for straight-species woody shrubs, the company has launched a line of its own. To meet its usual quality standard, Midwest must market branched, pruned, attractive shrubs that will work in a built environment, and that increases labor costs significantly, she says. It would be fine if Midwest could project sales of 80 percent to 90 percent of its stock, but the market is not there as it is with, say, nonnative hydrangeas, which are so popular that Midwest knows it will sell all it can grow. Once demand is there, Midwest can build a production, delivery, and logistics system for profitability. “But when half or even a third of what we grow does not sell, we cannot make the business case,” Orum-Keller says.

For now, Midwest Groundcovers limits its selection of woody native plants to what landscape contractors will perceive to be ornamental. It also promotes a line called Natural Garden Natives to the ornamental landscape market. These premium plants are grown from seed collected by partners within a range of 90 miles to ensure ecotype integrity. To cut costs and be more competitive in the restoration market, where low cost is a priority, Midwest offers a more extensive product line of wildflower plugs grown from seed gathered throughout the region.

Where straight-species woody shrubs and trees are the primary product, the strategy is different. One of the established native plant growers in the region, Possibility Place Nursery, specializes in woody plants, grown from seeds it collects within 75 to 150 miles of its nursery, which lies roughly midway between Chicago and Kankakee, Illinois. The company’s inventory includes several varieties of oak grown from seed in root-pruning containers and transplanted only in fall to improve the success for a species that typically experiences a high rate of transplant death. Possibility Place has grown slowly for nearly 40 years and is known for the quality and sure provenance of its plants. The business relies on a customer base that knows and needs its products because few other sources have been available. The founder, Connor Shaw, keeps a close eye on the market, and the business has grown incrementally as the market has emerged. “Our plants are ecotypes,” Shaw says. “They are stronger plants overall because they have evolved here.” As Tallamy points out, these are the types of plants that support the life cycle of insects—4,500 caterpillars in one 28-day period that fed one chickadee family. The staff at Possibility Place counted.

Yet another business strategy is to grow for the market that’s there now. Pizzo Native Plant Nursery relies on massive contract growing for 70 percent of its business to serve the ecological restoration market: power line corridors of native plantings, prairie restoration, corporate site conversions, or parkland development, for example. Most large-scale jobs for restoration projects specify a combination of seed and plugs, says the sales and marketing manager, Grace Koehler, because growing and installing plugs alone for installations that cover many acres would cost too much time and money. Business in this sector is brisk, and Koehler predicts that the next glitch in the supply chain for ecological restoration will be seed shortages. The seed market is becoming quite competitive. Agrecol, a company in Wisconsin that grows wildflowers as row crops for the purpose of seed harvesting, is ramping up its production this year to offset the shortage.

Pizzo has recently grown 100,000 plugs in 60 different species for the new Maggie Daley Park in Chicago and this spring will also contribute 100,000 plugs and more than 6,000 quart-container wildflowers to the new Bloomingdale Trail, the first multiuse linear park in Chicago, where planting is under way. Growing a wildflower, from seed collection to sale-ready plugs, can take as little as three months and as long as several years, depending on how hard it is to germinate and grow. Asclepias viridis, commonly known as green antelopehorn, is a good example of a wildflower beneficial to pollinators that is common in pastures in Texas and Kansas but quite hard to germinate and grow in a nursery.

When the market emerges, and when the products the market needs for sustainable landscaping are ready, the landscape architecture profession should be ready to go, specifying different techniques for soil management, knowing the plants better, and working more closely with growers. Landscape architects will also need to manage the expectations of clients regarding the time it takes for a sustainable landscape to mature, and develop maintenance plans alongside their specifications to ensure proper care during the first three years, which are critical. It’s a new industry out there, a potentially big one. Tallamy sees the signs in his work. “Everywhere I go, people ask me, ‘Who can I hire to do this?’ And everyplace I go, I have to say to them, ‘I do not know.’”

A landscape designer certified by the National Wildlife Federation to create wildlife gardens, Carol E. Becker is the owner of Sage Advice Landscape Design, a published author, and was the executive director of the Chicago-based Midwest Ecological Landscape Alliance from 2009 to 2013.

As always, you can buy this issue of Landscape Architecture Magazine at more than 200 bookstores, including many university stores and independents, as well as at Barnes & Noble. You can also buy single digital issues for only $5.25 at Zinio or order single copies of the print issue from ASLA. Annual subscriptions for LAM are a thrifty $59 for print and $44.25 for digital. Our subscription page has more information on subscription options.

After 10 years of evolution, the green roof of the American Society of Landscape Architects is producing a new and varied crop.

We recently came across this piece by Brittany Patterson at E&E Publishing on green roofs in the nation’s capital and their enormous (and necessary) benefits, which was originally published behind E&E’s paywall. E&E, which does excellent daily reporting on climate change and energy issues, has kindly allowed us to repost the article in full.

NATION’S CAPITAL BECOMES GREEN ROOF CAPITAL TO FIGHT EXTREME HEAT, HEAVY STORMS

BRITTANY PATTERSON, E&E PUBLISHING, LLC, JUNE 9, 2015

Nestled on Eye Street in downtown Washington, D.C., near the heart of the bustling city lies the headquarters of the American Society of Landscape Architects (ASLA).

From the front, the brick building looks like any other in the neighborhood, but take the elevator and a flight of stairs to the roof and you’ll find yourself surrounded by rows of green Sedum, blooming prickly pear cactus, and patches of lush butterfly milkweed and hare’s-foot clover. It’s almost possible to imagine you are sitting in the tranquil countryside, not just on the roof of a building covered in foliage.

As relaxing as they can be, green roofs are more than just easy on the eyes.

“Green roofs deliver multiple benefits for both combating heat and in the retention of stormwater,” said Kate Johnson, a program analyst with the District Department of the Environment (DDOE). “Both are issues we think are going to continue to be important in light of climate change. It’s projected to get hotter, and it’s projected we’ll have more extreme rain events.”

ASLA’s green roof captured 75 percent of the 29 inches of rain between July and May of 2007.

Now in its 10th growing season, ASLA’s green roof has weathered it all and has provided an immense amount of data on the environmental impacts of a leafy building canopy.

The data—the roof caught nearly 75 percent of 29 inches of rain that fell between July and May of 2007 and was as much as 32 degrees cooler than black roofs in the neighborhood—is consistent with benefits observed around the world.

As cities search for climate change mitigation strategies, green roofs have emerged as a way to chill an urban area’s core temperature, collect stormwater, clean up local air pollution, and reduce a building’s energy needs for a relatively small cost.

Stormwater regulations help spur boom

Last month, a survey released by the group Green Roofs for Healthy Cities found that the nation’s capital leads North America in green roof installations, with 1.2 million square feet installed in 2014.

In the early 2000s, through partnerships with a number of nonprofits and community groups, the district began offering subsidies for the cost of green roof installations through a program called RiverSmart Rooftops. The 2014–2015 program, which is being administered by the Maryland-based Anacostia Watershed Society, is offering $10 per square foot on properties of any kind, including residential, commercial, and institutional ones, and of all sizes. In some areas, up to $15 per square foot is an option.

The current program is set to run for three years. Based on past demand, DDOE allocated $100,000 in grant money per year, but program manager Stephen Reiling said the program isn’t even through the first year, and already money is being added to the budget.

“The demand’s been much higher,” he said.

The flurry of activity can partly be attributed to new stormwater regulations passed by the district in 2013, under which all new buildings constructed in the downtown area must retain the first 1.2 inches of rainwater.

“Especially downtown with dense development, it can be hard for developers to meet that,” he said. “Green roofs have become one of the best ways given the limited space.”

But aside from new regulations, Reiling said it appears there is an increasing interest in green roofs. DDOE doesn’t typically give rebate dollars to new developers in the downtown area that fall under these new restrictions. Instead, it’s targeting those who are retrofitting. The traditional roof has a life span between 20 and 30 years, and the idea is to “catch people in that sweet spot where they want to install a new roof,” he said. As an added bonus, studies have found green roofs have a life span closer to 40 years.

RiverSmart Rooftops is administered through DDOE’s Watershed Protection Division, which means the program’s mission is to help to reduce stormwater runoff, a problem that D.C. and many other older cities battle. As cities expand, more surface area is covered in impervious materials like roads, parking lots, or buildings that prevent water from being absorbed into the ground. In the parts of the district where the pipes are designed to carry both stormwater and sewage to the treatment plant, the overflow pours into Rock Creek and the Potomac and Anacostia rivers.

Most storms in the D.C. region unleash between 1 and 2 inches of rain, and 4-inch green roofs, the most commonly constructed thickness, are designed to catch just that amount.

“On our end, in the branch where I’m at, we’re looking at green roofs for stormwater control, volume reductions, and water quality,” Reiling said. “There are habitat and urban heat island effect benefits, as well.”

Offsetting the need for power plants

Cities are an appropriate target for green roofs partly because of the urban heat island effect, which can threaten lives during hot periods. The effect occurs when dark areas like black asphalt prevalent in cities absorb large amounts of heat.

According to a recent study commissioned by DDOE assessing the health impacts of different urban heat island reduction strategies, a 10 percent increase in vegetative cover can reduce mortality during heat events by 7 percent. Between 1948 and 2011, an average of 285 people died of heat-related causes in Washington, D.C. More vegetative cover could save approximately 20 lives per decade, the study found.

Green roofs also trap particulate matter, which can have a positive effect on regional air pollution levels. But the easiest way to sell green roofs to building owners and developers may be to cite their energy cost savings. Local climate dictates how big the cost savings will be, but in general, when green roofs are wet, they absorb and store large amounts of heat. When dry, green roof layers act as an insulator, decreasing the flow of heat through the roof, thereby reducing the amount of air-conditioning needed to keep the inside cool.

One study in central Florida measured year-round energy savings from a green roof on a 3,300-square-foot building. By the roof’s second summer, the average rate of heat absorbed through the green roof was more than 40 percent less than for an adjacent building’s light-colored roof. That reduction was estimated to lower summertime energy use by approximately 2 kilowatt-hours per day. Under winter heating conditions, the amount of heat transferred into the building was almost 50 percent less for the green roof than for the conventional roof.

“By saving energy, green roofs can help reduce emissions by offsetting the need for power plants, one of the biggest sources of particulates,” Johnson said.

Seeing greenbacks in green roofs

Green roofs also are having an economic ripple effect. Emory Knoll Farms owner Ed Snodgrass, for example, has farmed many different commodities over the course of his lifetime, from dairy cows to corn to soybeans. Nothing has done so well for him as what he cultivates now at his Maryland business—plants specifically designed for green roofs.

Today, Snodgrass has 10 employees on the payroll, and over 15 years, he has facilitated the installation of more than 1,400 green roofs covering more than 7.6 million square feet.

He said the general acceptance for green roofs has increased, in part due to increased stormwater regulations. Surprisingly, the very people who were once skeptical are one of the driving forces.

“In the beginning, I had roofers saying, ‘I spent my career getting water off of roofs; now you want me to keep it on,'” Snodgrass said. “Now, they’re the biggest advocates.”

The easiest candidates for the installation of green roofs are new buildings belonging to institutions that intend to occupy the space for an extended period of time, like schools, government buildings, and hotels.

The process for installing a green roof is fairly simple. Once a roof is structurally sound enough to carry the extra weight from the soil and plants of a green roof, it’s insulated and waterproofed, and a layer of water-absorbing material is added. That is followed by drainage and filtering mechanisms and soil and plants.

In addition to installing green roofs, the nursery stocks more than 100 varieties of green roof plants including Sedum, ground covers, herbaceous perennials, and grasses, specially designed to thrive in shallow and water-extreme conditions.

“These plants have to be real survivors,” he said.

The whole roof works together as a system, Snodgrass said, and as a result, its benefits come in aggregate, not from a single aspect of the roof.

“They catch stormwater, reduce energy costs of the building, extend the life of the roof’s waterproofing membrane because they protect it from sunlight, they’re nice to look at and an ecosystem for pollinators,” he said.

Not every roof can go green, however. The standard 4-inch green roof adds between 25 and 30 pounds of weight per square foot, and some roofs cannot be engineered to handle the stress.

They’re also expensive, costing anywhere between $10 and $30 a foot to install, as opposed to between $5 and $7 for the typical shingle roof.

Reiling at the DDOE said he thinks the price will fall once more people adopt green roofs.

“At some point, it’s going to become standard practice, and we’ll stop incentivizing it,” he said.

Copyright 2015, E&E Publishing, LLC. This article was reprinted from ClimateWire with permission of E&E Publishing, LLC, www.eenews.net.

With new plant varieties hitting the market each year, someone has to make sure everyone plays by the rules.

From the August 2015 issue of Landscape Architecture Magazine.

The people behind Plant Watch want the name alone to strike fear into anyone illegally propagating plants that are under patent protection. Plant Watch began in 2005 as the U.S. arm of the Canadian Ornamental Plant Foundation (COPF), a nonprofit group that deals with royalty administration and monitoring for illegally propagated plants by growers who skip out on paying the required royalties for growing protected plant varieties. COPF started as “a gentleman’s agreement to grow plants and remit royalties to each other,” says Sylvia Mosterman, the executive director of Plant Watch and COPF. However, “people aren’t as gentlemanly as they used to be,” so COPF grew in response to monitor patented and trademarked plants from illegal propagation.

Plant patents, or plant breeders’ rights, as they are referred to outside the United States, are granted to “an inventor who has invented or discovered and asexually reproduced a distinct and new variety of plant,” according to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) website. Patenting a new variety of plant protects only against the unauthorized reproduction of a plant; as an extra layer of protection, a plant can be given a trademarked name, such as Hydrangea macrophylla Endless Summer, for easy identification by consumers. Breeders are the originators of these new plant varieties, and there are companies such as Bailey Nurseries or Monrovia that actively search for new plants from a variety of breeders to add to their corporate brand offerings. These companies usually have brand compliance rules in addition to patents and trademark names, such as the familiar olive-green pots and tags that easily identify a plant as a Monrovia product. Under the names of these companies that consumers have come to know well, these new plants are marketed on a nationwide scale that individual breeders may not be able to achieve.

It’s a competitive business, and a large company can easily hold hundreds of patented plant varieties in its portfolio, says Natalia Hamill, the brand and business development manager at Bailey Nurseries, in St. Paul, Minnesota. Tracking down people who are growing patented plants without permission may seem daunting, especially given the many growers, such as nurseries and greenhouses, nationwide that pay royalties to companies for the rights to grow their patented plants for sale to consumers.

Long before you find that perfect hydrangea at a hardware store, it must first be researched and put through trials by a breeder hoping to discover new plants. “A lot of what’s done is classic breeding,” such as cross-pollination, Mosterman says, “which takes time and selecting…or innovative classic breeding, which includes things such as embryo transfer—basically ensuring the cross you made actually survives.” Some breeders are looking for ornamental qualities, such as new color varieties or plant heights; others look for more practical qualities such as disease resistance or cold hardiness. If and when that golden plant is found—and sometimes breeders can go a lifetime without finding the one, Mosterman notes—it must go through several growing seasons of trials before it is marketed to growers and then feverishly multiplied by the licensed growers who are willing to pay the royalties to grow the new product for release. From breeder to store, the process can take on average 10 years, says Jeremy Deppe, the general manager at Spring Meadow Nursery, a provider of woody plants that oversees the Color Choice Flowering Shrubs collection for the popular Proven Winners retail line.

Throughout the long trial process for new plant varieties, a breeder may not see a dime until the plants are considered market ready, sales are made, and royalties from licensed growers start coming through. Royalties can range anywhere from a thousandth of a cent by weight of seeds produced, such as violets may be, to a few dollars plus a percentage of the crop per year based on tonnage, in the case of fruit-bearing trees, Mosterman says. As Jonathan Pedersen, the vice president of business development at Monrovia, explains, these new plant varieties are the livelihoods of the breeders and enable them to continue the work of developing new plant varieties.

Plant patents in the United States last for 20 years, after which a plant becomes public domain. Deppe says that Proven Winners accounts for 80 percent of Spring Meadow Nursery’s business; the remaining 20 percent “are other unpatented varieties that have been in the trade for some time.” But the trademark name on a plant can continue to be renewed, helping protect the variety after the expiration of its patent. A lot of marketing goes into introducing a new plant, and through this marketing, companies in possession of the plant patent hope the trademark name becomes synonymous with the plant, Pedersen says. So although you’ll be able to propagate Hydrangea macrophylla Endless Summer after its patent expires, it would have to be sold as Hydrangea macrophylla ‘Bailmer,’ its relatively unknown cultivar name.

Plant patent infringement usually involves an unlicensed grower who is aiming to cut into the market at a lower price by avoiding royalties. But there are times when even licensed growers might violate the patent on a plant for which they are paying royalties, which is why searches are conducted on all types of growers nationwide, Mosterman says. Hamill says a violation of a plant patent by a licensed grower is sometimes accidental, as the grower may not understand the rules. Violators “tend to be smaller growers,” Hamill says, “and they don’t understand about patent plants, brands, what is or is not legal. And so it’s a matter of informing them.” Bailey Nurseries is interested in working with its growers, Hamill says, so rather than pursuing swift punishments, “we try to make sure that people who are at fault fully understand what the rules are and give them a chance to make it right.”

Other growers who are in clear violation of a plant patent are a bit harder to track down. A licensed grower is likely an easy inspection, but it can be more difficult to get a grower in blatant violation to cooperate. But there are ways of finding out if they are in fact illegally propagating patented plants. “With all our patented and trademark plants, I have a Google Alert set up on the name, and so anytime it’s mentioned on the web, Google sends me an e-mail,” Pedersen says. “And that’s when you start doing a little digging.”

One of the biggest policers of plant patent infringers are the licensed growers, who see their product outpriced on the market and send in an anonymous tip, which can lead to an investigation. Traveling sales representatives for the companies that hold plant patents may catch infringements as well, such as when the product is planted in the wrong pot or when the quality is not up to the company’s standards. It may even be a quick trip to the local hardware store to see if the plants sold there are compliant with the standards outlined in the grower’s agreement. If not, then the company works backward to see where it came from. Once the infringer is found, a cease-and-desist letter is normally issued. If they do not stop even after the letter, legal action may be pursued, followed by the levying of fines and the destruction of the illegally propagated crop.

Some companies, like Monrovia, take on the responsibility of finding these illegal propagators themselves. Others work through companies specifically set up for the task: Plant Watch is one such company, and since its American debut, it has brought patented varieties from big-name clients under its wing, such as Bailey Nurseries, Spring Meadow Nursery, Conard-Pyle, and Plant Development Services.

Royalty Administration International (RAI) is another company in the United States looking for plant patent infringement. Based in Amsterdam, the company permeates almost every level of the breeding process. In addition to policing patent rights, RAI helps to set up licensing agreements, advises on how much to charge for royalties, and collects royalties. RAI is also a member of the nonprofit International Community of Breeders of Asexually Reproduced Ornamental and Fruit Varieties (CIOPORA), an international organization for the improvement of legislation for exportation of protected vegetatively propagated crops worldwide. Plants, as Sam Rizzi, the manager of RAI USA, says, are an international business, and the access CIOPORA provides helps prevent international violations. Rizzi recalls an incident where a protected plant that RAI represented “was being grown illegally in a Latin American country,” he says, “which was fine, as it was not protected in that country. However, that plant was protected under USPTO law, and once it landed at the Miami airport, it was in violation of the USPTO, and we were able to have that cargo confiscated.”

Although it’s hard to tell how rampant an issue plant patent infringement is—Mosterman jokes that you can hardly call up illegal propagators and ask them if they’re up to no good—Hamill believes there has been a marked drop in infractions. “I think when [Plant Watch] first started, they found more infractions than they’re finding now, because word has gotten out,” she says. And with the harsh punishments for illegally growing patented plants, some growers think twice when they know someone is out there watching.

But some carry on their illegal practices regardless, even if they’ve been found guilty of infringing on plant patents in the past. “If someone is illegally propagating, we’ll catch them. There are ways. We’ve even gone back…the next year after someone has been fined and find they’re still doing it,” Mosterman says, adding that almost nothing surprises her anymore. It may seem reckless to continue committing an offense you’ve been previously found guilty of, but some people view plant patents as an overzealous human practice. “There are some people out there who believe that plants were created by Mother Nature,” Pedersen says, “and who are we to say that this one is protected?” There are also holdouts from the days when growers simply shared new varieties openly. But the biggest troublemakers, Mosterman says, are just “bad people in the world who try to take advantage.”

As always, you can buy this issue of Landscape Architecture Magazine at more than 200 bookstores, including many university stores and independents, as well as at Barnes & Noble. You can also buy single digital issues for only $5.25 at Zinio or order single copies of the print issue from ASLA. Annual subscriptions for LAM are a thrifty $59 for print and $44.25 for digital. Our subscription page has more information on subscription options.

The things our art director, Chris McGee, hated to leave out of the current issue of LAM.

Wrought iron step and brick facade overcome by time. Credit: Future Green Studio.

From “In the Weeds” by Nate Berg, in the September 2015 issue, featuring Future Green Studio’s love for designing with weeds.

“The juxtaposition of new growth against old structure creates a nice tension, and the dead leaves and stems on the wrought iron step create a nice bridge.”

—Chris McGee, LAM Art Director

As always, you can buy this issue of Landscape Architecture Magazine at more than 200 bookstores, including many university stores and independents, as well as at Barnes & Noble. You can also buy single digital issues for only $5.25 at Zinio or order single copies of the print issue from ASLA. Annual subscriptions for LAM are a thrifty $59 for print and $44.25 for digital. Our subscription page has more information on subscription options.

A new film focuses on Jens Jensen.

From the April 2015 issue of Landscape Architecture Magazine.

Jens Jensen didn’t care much for the White City. According to the new documentary Jens Jensen: The Living Green, he, along with the architects Frank Lloyd Wright and Louis Sullivan, rejected the European influence of the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago and embraced the prairie and its ecology as the American landscape idiom. Today, many of his pioneering ideas about the use of native plants and landscape conservation have new currency. Jensen, who was born in Denmark but is closely associated with Chicago’s urban parks and midwestern landscape preservation, will be the subject of an Earth Day observance at the New York Botanical Garden. A screening of the documentary will be followed by a panel discussion with Darrel Morrison, FASLA; Robert Grese, ASLA; the filmmaker Carey Lundin; and Jensen’s great-granddaughter, Jensen Wheeler Wolfe.

Jens Jensen: The Living Green Film Screening and Panel Discussion at the National Building Museum, April 14, 2016, 7:00–8:30 p.m.

BY GALE FULTON, ASLA

From the June 2016 issue of Landscape Architecture Magazine.

Several conditions of the contemporary world present serious challenges to traditional or conventional ways of thinking and making in landscape architecture. Some of these, such as the continuing analog versus digital debates, are tiresome, rarely well-argued (by at least one side if not both), and counterproductive to an advance in the cultural efficacy of the discipline. Others are more complex and unwieldy, but also likely have much greater capacity to expand the scale and scope of landscape architecture in the future. In this category I would place the interrelated questions of “planetary urbanization,” “Nature,” and the effects of the Anthropocene among the most perplexing and fecund for the future of the discipline. As Jedediah Purdy writes in After Nature: A Politics for the Anthropocene, “As climate change shifts ecological boundaries, problems like habitat preservation come to resemble landscape architecture. We can’t just pen in animals to save them; we need to secure migration corridors and help species move as their habitats lurch across a changing map.” In effect, we will have to become planetary gardeners.

Obviously, such massive questions exceed the capacities of any one discipline’s knowledge. But this “bigness” should not be an alibi for continued reliance on outmoded ways of thinking such as notions of cities or sites as discrete, bounded conditions that can be operated on without understanding of context or flows. Similarly, and perhaps even more relevant to the day-to-day practices of many landscape architects, ideas (or ideologies) regarding nature, ecology, wild, invasive, and native continue to be treated as simplistic binary conditions that prematurely shut down what could be a vast territory of conceptual and practical exploration. It may also be that landscape architecture is particularly well-suited to engage these territories because of the unique disciplinary potential made possible through the hybridization of typically distinct science/design/humanities epistemologies. With these larger questions in mind, two recent books prove useful in providing not only new conceptual frames to intellectually engage these issues, but also updated tools and techniques necessary for developing concrete practices to physically and practically engage these conditions in ways that move beyond the status quo.

As the title suggests, Planting in a Post-Wild World by Thomas Rainer, ASLA, and Claudia West, International ASLA, draws upon the notion that the earth is now in some way influenced by humanity at a molecular level and therefore “post-wild.” And although students of complexity theory will no doubt dispute this wild = nonhuman characterization, there is still territory for exploration in the postwild thesis. The authors attempt to make a case for their postwild claim in the preface, where they state that the book represents two “different experiences of nature”—one of “nature lost,” the other of “nature regained.” They see in these two versions the “tension in which nature now exists: its continued disappearance in the wild; its expanded potential in urban and suburban areas.”

The book begins with an idyllic recall of the untrammeled wildness that welcomed the first European colonists—a “paradise” of species diversity and natural production that is now “tamed.” But the authors quickly dispel this vision as one that is, if not mythical, then at least nostalgic, ideological and plagued by an “inflated moralism” when applied to discussions of native versus exotic plants. They borrow the vocabulary/terminology of a “Third Landscape” from none other than Gilles Clément, and argue that there is a vast landscape reserve that, rather than being dismissed as degraded, useless, polluted, and ruined, should be reevaluated by designers for its potential to host otherwise suppressed “natural processes” and productively leveraged as the starting point for a new approach to planting design. Designers must jettison “nature” in order to work with nature—not necessarily a new concept, but judging by the majority of the built landscapes in North America, many designers still fail to understand or accept that future landscapes will be mongrel, hybrid, impure, and out of control by traditional standards. No doubt this would be a welcome reprieve from the dull, static approaches to landscaping (or is it mulchscaping?) that are so dominant in cities today.

Designed plant communities are composed of “design layers” that provide the primary aesthetic interest, and “functional layers” that perform essential functions such as erosion control, soil building, and weed suppression.

The remaining chapters of the book are dedicated to educating readers about Rainer and West’s fundamental strategy for postwild planting—the design, installation, and management of designed plant communities. Designing with interlocking layers of behaviorally (not necessarily natively) compatible species that fully cover the ground is the key component in this approach, as it is deemed critical for the planting to achieve any degree of resiliency to invasions by undesirable species. But this principle of ground coverage is also indicative of a certain geographic (or is it stylistic?) bias by the authors, which one might categorize as being somewhat Midwestern or Eastern North American in its focus. The authors argue for the existence of “a collective memory of nature” based on our shared “evolutionary responses to our environment.” This prompts the identification of “archetypal landscapes,” which, despite the vast range of landscape conditions across the planet, will supposedly resonate with clients or consumers of landscapes because they align with underlying broader conceptual categories (archetypes) that are universally understood and appreciated, if not desired. Each archetype’s physical structure is then carefully deconstructed to distill underlying strategies that can be deployed by designers in re-creating such archetypal environments and effects.

Though this approach to design may be too prescriptive, reductive, or deterministic for some, the book’s final chapter, “Creating and Managing a Plant Community,” tackles the perpetually thorny problem of implementing and, perhaps even more important, adaptively managing planting designs that are anything more than turf or isolated plants in an ocean of mulch. This portion of the book is significant in its attempt to more fully and specifically engage the final layer essential to a postwild approach to planting design—time. The authors embrace the fact that all landscapes, when not intensely managed to the contrary (what Gilles Clément would argue is an example of “working against instead of with”), will move. This section of the book is a useful how-to guide for designers interested in retooling their (postdesign) practices toward the successful creation of more complex designed plant communities including site preparation, collaboration with contractors, and the cultivation of clients who better understand that such landscapes require more time than the mow, blow, and go landscapes they are used to.

Where Post-Wild slants toward the prescriptive and technical aspects of a new approach to planting design, Clément’s “The Planetary Garden” and Other Writings is more a work of social critique and commentary, philosophy, and (land) ethics. Part of the Penn Studies in Landscape Architecture series, the book is wide-ranging, if not at times almost rambling, and it seems as if the collection of previously published essays is gathered together as a sort of retroactive manifesto based in Clément’s many years of practice.

The book is broken into three sections, all of which, or at least versions of which, were published in various places between 1999 and 2008. The first section is titled “The Planetary Garden: Reconciling Man and Nature,” and Clément uses a guided tour through the Planetary Garden exhibition at La Villette in 2000 as a vehicle for exploring the concepts of endemism, intermingling, and assemblage. Each of these terms is then used to describe the state of the planet’s ecosystems today.

Clément defines endemism as “diversity through isolation, a diversity of creatures and of ideas.” Post-Pangaea earth proliferated endemism via separation, and heterogeneity on macro- and microscales produced a wide range of adaptation and local specificity. He further develops the idea of endemism by suggesting that beyond biological endemism there is also ideological endemism—“the diversity of ideas”—which are no less reliant on heterogeneity for their emergence nor less susceptible to eradication via the homogenizing forces of globalization.

Clément’s diagram of a “virtual Pangaea” is created by superimposing major climatic zones irrespective of continental geography.

Endemism is continuously being eroded via a process of intermingling in which biological adaptations such as the spread of seed by wind or water (the coconut being exemplary in this regard) allow species to move and interact in novel organizations. But no agent of intermingling has accelerated this process like humans have, and now there is the very real danger that intermingling, “the irrepressible process of evolution, endangers diversity,” Clément writes. “Little movement and peaceful isolation produces strong endemism, maximum diversity. A lot of movement and feverish encounters produces weak endemism, minimal diversity.”

It is in the concept of assemblage, however, where Clément seems to find some degree of hope for the future and renewed agency for the gardener. Is it possible that through the creation of new assemblages, the planetary gardener may be able to create new endemisms? Or, as Clément writes, “New associations, new ecological features, new marriages, testing the biological range inherent in each species.” He continues: “What is appearing takes longer to be revealed than what is disappearing.” He then provides a “typology” of garden experiments currently under way including “welcoming the gardener’s allies, producing without exhausting, and knowing how to manage water.” These experiments range from relatively simple ideas such as “worms to fertilize the earth” to more seemingly radical interventions such as harvesting water from fog in the Andes, and the creation of an “Office of Abandoned Spaces” to more productively manage the vast territory of landscapes found in our cities that contribute relatively little to the ecological health of our cities because of a lack of imagination for how they could be incorporated into a larger design and management strategy.

Clément declares that he is a gardener first and foremost because “the garden is at the forefront of our current understanding of the terrain as a whole, and consequently of the landscapes that creep into the garden.” Gardening is critical to this “humanist ecology” in that gardening has always been a place where humanity is fully present and part of nature as opposed to outside it as in other ontologies. For Clément this approach to ecology “applies to a way of understanding the relationships between living beings according to the precepts of ecology, without ever excluding humans.” Here he refers to his important concept of the “third landscape,” which is the composite of a wide range of “neglected” landscapes such as roadsides, abandoned lots, friches (wastelands)—basically “anywhere where it is difficult to exploit the land with machines.” This landscape territory remains “a precious assembly” latent in many, if not all, of our cities, which is largely overlooked by planners, designers, and citizens, whose vision is occluded by more traditional ways of understanding city, nature, landscape, and garden.

If we are to expand this vision, our new approach to neighborhood, metropolitan, regional, and planetary gardening will first and foremost need to embrace the fact that “All life is dynamic; it is constantly inventive.” At all of these spatial scales, and perhaps more importantly, temporal scales, landscape designers and strategists—gardeners—have to acknowledge the “garden in movement” whether in migrations of nutrient and sediment flows to the Gulf or the migration of a colony of sumac along a roadside. This approach to landscape design—one that is predicated upon an understanding of heterogeneous temporalities, novel assemblages, and adaptive and tactical management approaches—remains unthinkable for many who currently design, implement, and manage the contemporary landscape, which suffers from the “‘green as a golf course’ neurosis” in which stasis is seen as the primary objective. As Clément states it in his final section on “The Wisdom of the Gardener”—now that the garden has gone so far outside its formerly walled enclosure to stretch, for now, to the edges of the biosphere, the job for gardeners is one in which we rethink the “brutality of techniques said to be modern with a form of management that is sensitive, diversified, and truly modern.”

Landscape architects, largely because of a willingness to engage time as a medium just as, or perhaps more important than, space or form, could be uniquely suited for the job of planetary gardener. Rainer, West, and Clément have provided two useful guides for why this new job description is necessary as well as some new tools and techniques for how to get to work.

Gale Fulton, ASLA, is the director of the School of Landscape Architecture at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.

Margie Ruddick and Thomas Rainer talk about their new books on wild landscape design.

From the July 2016 issue of Landscape Architecture Magazine.

In the past several months, Thomas Rainer, ASLA, and Margie Ruddick have each published books centered around notions of designing “wild” landscapes in the public realm to help restore ecological diversity in urban settings. Ruddick’s book is Wild by Design: Strategies for Creating Life-Enhancing Landscapes (Island Press, $45), and Rainer’s is Planting in a Post-Wild World: Designing Plant Communities for Resilient Landscapes (Timber Press, $39.95). We invited the two to ASLA’s offices to talk about the project they have in common. This interview has been edited and condensed.

Why did you each decide to write books on wildness in landscape design?

Margie Ruddick: I didn’t actually think of my work as wild at all until Anne Raver wrote this piece, “In Philadelphia, Going Green or Growing Wild?” [about Ruddick’s home garden, in the New York Times], and then I started to get e-mails from people all around the world, and I realized: This is wild gardening.

Thomas Rainer: It felt like a good place to be, and we [Rainer and his coauthor, Claudia West, International ASLA] are both plant geeks. We had a lot of practical problems to work out in terms of how to do interesting but ecologically diverse horticulture in the public realm. I’d come from Oehme, van Sweden, so I spent almost a decade learning this great plant palette, but, you know, with gardens that have lots and lots of resources. I’m now doing work mostly at a public scale, which is innovative, though in wanting to push ecological work, they just don’t have the resources to keep it up. I needed a new kit of tricks; I needed to have a new education.

You both mention childhood early on in your books.

Ruddick: It’s about really responding to landscapes, I mean, to Central Park, in New York City, but also to the beach where I grew up and really just being in landscape, observing and feeling immersed. I think the immersive part of it is really important. It’s about being in the process and not just being in something that you look at.

Rainer: I was a suburban kid in Alabama, and we had U.S Steel on this enormous tract of land that literally backed up to our backyard. We had this wonderful ability to walk out the back door and walk in any direction as far as we wanted. It was the Central Piedmont forest, which had some great boulder fields and all kinds of really fun stuff for a semiferal teenage boy to wander in. By the time I was in high school, almost all of that was developed because it’s suburbia. I watched some of my favorite childhood play spaces turn into the worst suburban tract houses, and the creek where we caught crawdads is now a pipe underneath the Super Target parking lot. Watching that develop so quickly had a huge impact.

It was really interesting teaming with Claudia West on the book because she’d come from East Germany, with this totally different perspective of a communist bloc country, with just awful mining, and couldn’t hang out laundry without it getting dirty. And once the [Berlin] Wall fell, she watched the economy come back and the taking of these really polluted sites and bringing nature back.

Who are your books written for?

Rainer: We were initially focusing on designers. Designers and adventurous gardeners. Timber Press is a horticultural press, so it’s definitely a horticultural book. For us, it’s a design and horticultural book. I felt that this wouldn’t appeal that much to landscape architects, honestly, because it’s so plant-focused. I think there are a lot of landscape architects who like plants—I know that we all know what that means at this table, but to my mom and people who don’t understand the profession, it’s shocking that landscape architects spend probably less than 10 percent of their time on plants.

Ruddick: Way less.

Rainer: Yeah, maybe way less, exactly.

Ruddick: For me the range is people who just want to know about landscape. A little Landscape 101 to students—ultimately it’s for students in allied fields, architecture or engineering, who don’t know a lot about landscape. It’s introductory in some ways. Also for people in other countries, because so many times I’ve done work in other countries, and they’re just at sea because they have to sort of import American design. The book gives ways of actually making your own path to designs so that you’re not just buying a whole process.

Rainer: I don’t always think that’s a bad thing that so much of our attention is not dedicated to plants. There are other big issues that we are focusing on. But I do think it’s hard to address the challenges of cities without plants in some way. I am concerned, particularly, with seeing young graduates coming out of some programs who aren’t required to have any plant design at all. You get these graduates who can render these plans with such beautiful ecological complexity, but can’t tell you three species. We need to get better at this kind of hybrid ecology and horticulture in terms of really understanding the plants.

Ruddick: You need to know what you can’t do. We’re doing a reforestation project in agricultural soil, and I’m like, I can’t do that. We need a guy who really knows what he’s doing on the science level and even coming up with spacing and everything. Those people are really designers. The fallacy used to be that the designers design everything and they hand it off to either engineers or plant people, and now everybody, including the excavators, are really designers in the process, so that the reforestation guy is doing stuff that then all of a sudden is leaking back into the rest of the projects. It’s very much a collaborative thing.

How would you each describe the reception for your books, and their ideas of wild planting?

Ruddick: I’ve been so happy that friends of mine or people I know have read the stories and they just kind of get absorbed in the stories, and the information gets absorbed that way, and that’s been really gratifying. A good confirmation that it’s a good way to impart information and ideas, so that’s been the fun part of it.

Rainer: The best reception I’ve been getting is from people who have been engaged in this native plant debate in one way or another. Because the book in many ways is very much committed to ecological performance and very much committed to native plants and the whole range of pollinators and following the relationships that that brings, but not being dogmatic about it. Some of the best remarks I think we’ve gotten are from people who feel really relieved by it; they feel permission that if I include an exotic in this mix, the sky will not fall. Also some of the worst we’ve stumbled on are when I give talks at native plant conferences, from people who peg this book as a novel ecosystem book. Which to them feels like compromising, capitulating to the invasiveness, which is not quite what the book is about.

Tell us your thoughts about the larger native plant debate.

Ruddick: Well, the title of my book before it turned into Wild by Design was What Are We Doing Here Anyway? I called it that because you can follow all these checklists and you can do all the native plant stuff, but if something isn’t going to work, or if you really just want a lilac because it really means something to you, what are we doing here? Are we just slavishly following the checklist, or are we actually making places that have resonance and have meaning for people?

Rainer: It’s just such a loaded topic now. I’m in garden chat rooms and on Facebook with a lot of horticulturists, and I see weekly in these raging debates between the advocates and the others that it is becoming as polarized as any American debate out there. Which is a little bit sad to me, because I don’t think these people are really that far off from each other.

What do you have to say to people about maintenance?

Ruddick: I always kind of make a joke for clients who want things that look like they’ve always been there. I say, “If you want this to look like you’re a billionaire, our fee will be $50,000. If you want to make it look like nobody was ever here, the fee will be $200,000.” It’s so much more energy-consuming really to make a landscape look like it’s settled in and look “natural.” The same thing goes for maintenance.

Rainer: A lot of times you’re relying on a contractor through a maintenance contract. It’s the difference between capital and operating budgets that I never had to deal with so much in the private realm, but is a huge issue in the public realm because it’s gifts or it’s onetime allocations or a congressional set-aside for a capital project. If they can shift costs into capital projects, which is having the initial contractor do a maintenance contract for two or three years as part of the warranty or an extended warranty, that seems to be more palatable. I never had to think about that kind of difference in the private realm.

So how are your own gardens going?

Rainer: I have a small garden, [a] ridiculous, midcentury house, which is a shoebox, like Levittown. Which is kind of a fun backdrop, because who cares, right? One half of the property is trying to be this great exterior, highly managed and maintained. It’s about getting as much bloom as possible, that kind of horticultural jockery side. The other side is pretty wild, and I let a lot of self-seeding happen. I have a little area I seeded, which is really interesting to see how that’s evolving.

Margie, you mention yours at length in the book.

Ruddick: What’s interesting is I sold the house and moved [to upstate New York], and I just went back this weekend just to drive by, and they are maintaining it. So now I have another blank slate. I can’t stand it. I’m renting my house, and I have friends who ask, “How are you going to do anything? This place is so sterile.” It must be my karma. Here I am again in this blank place.

BY KYNA RUBIN

Portland scientists tap the bryophyte Orthotrichum lyellii to test urban air quality.

From the October 2016 issue of Landscape Architecture Magazine 

For decades, mosses and lichens have been used to gauge forest health, and in Europe they have been used to measure and map urban pollution across countries. But a recent study of air quality in Portland, Oregon, is said to mark the first time that U.S. scientists have used moss to collect and map fine-grained data on toxic metals in the air of a city. “This kind of high-density sampling on a large area is unique, at least in North America,” says Bruce McCune, a professor of botany and plant pathology at Oregon State University who is not associated with the study. “It allows you to make inferences and find surprises that you wouldn’t otherwise.”

Sometimes those surprises are unpleasant. Earlier this year, harnessing the bryophyte Orthotrichum lyellii to test the air quality of communities throughout Portland, U.S. Forest Service scientists found unexpectedly high levels of cadmium, nickel, lead, and arsenic in neighborhoods surrounding two stained glass plants. The study’s results sparked a local outcry that led to political fallout and enhanced regulatory attention.

Mosses are effective air-quality monitors because they lack roots. Living on trees, rocks, and roofs, they gather nutrients and water from the air alone. Few species grow in soil, leaving them unaffected by soil chemistry. And they are highly absorptive. Natural matter such as conifer needles, tree bark, and soil have long been used as bioindicators of air quality, but moss and lichen “provide clearer, more consistent data,” says Sarah E. Jovan, a research ecologist at the Portland office of the U.S. Forest Service and one of the study’s authors. Not just any moss will do. Many species don’t tolerate pollution and therefore don’t grow in cities. Among the five or six species of moss hosted by Portland’s hardwood trees, Orthotrichum lyellii is the only type widespread enough for use in mapping.

For cash-strapped cities, using moss as a natural air quality monitor makes economic sense. The epiphyte is far cheaper than city air monitors, which also often yield only macrolevel atmospheric readings and cannot flag sources of air pollution such as cadmium that don’t disperse widely from their emission point. The Portland research demonstrates moss’s utility in cheaply gauging pollutants at multiple sites and on a microneighborhood level. “It’s a no-brainer for coastal cities like Seattle or Vancouver with good, naturally occurring moss populations,” McCune says. The researchers are not recommending that moss replace urban air monitors. But moss can be used to determine where cities should place those systems.

This winter, Jovan will begin a new study that will compare measurements taken by moss and by air-quality monitors in several sites across Portland, to see if the two measures track. Results will be available in 2018. Meanwhile, Jovan and her colleagues will be going to Cincinnati to use a lichen to map the city’s sources of metal contamination, prompted by high levels of cadmium and other metals found in the blood samples of children. The hope, Jovan says, “is that the lichen data would be useful for predicting health outcomes.”

This month’s LAM is like no other, as we focus all our attention in the feature section to one spectacular project: Barangaroo Reserve in Sydney, designed by PWP Landscape Architecture with Johnson Pilton Walker of Sydney. The 14-acre headland park, which fans out before Sydney’s central business district, is part of a 54-acre urban project within the lines of what had been a colossal shipping terminal. It involves practically everything that is so risky, wonderful, and artful in landscape architecture today—not least the shaping of a new stepped stone foreshore, built from gigantic slabs of sandstone hewn right from the site. It includes lush gardens along sinuous paths that trace along a dramatic slope up from the water. And the new parkland connects intimately with central Sydney. Even for a dean of the profession like Peter Walker, the chief designer, it is a once-in-a-career project.

Don’t miss all the other great stuff in this issue! There are pieces on designing with decomposed granite at Kenyon College; a rather radical adventure by the military to try therapeutic landscape as an answer to post-traumatic stress disorder among returning battle veterans; a quest to uncover the history of “trail marker” trees on onetime Native American lands; and a review of a wonderful new book on the California designer Ruth Shellhorn. The full table of contents for November can be found here.

As always, you can buy this issue of Landscape Architecture Magazine at more than 700 bookstores, including many university stores and independents, as well as at Barnes & Noble. You can also buy single digital issues for only $5.25 at Zinio or order single copies of the print issue from ASLA. Annual subscriptions for LAM are a thrifty $59 for print and $44.25 for digital. Our subscription page has more information on subscription options.

Keep an eye out here on the blog, on the LAM Facebook page, and on our Twitter feed (@landarchmag), as we’ll be ungating November articles as the month rolls out.

Credits: “Peter Walker’s Point,” Hamilton Lund/Barangaroo Delivery Authority; “Keeping Up Jones,” Rendering by Studio RHLA; “The Road to Evidence,” Lisa Helfert; “Searching for a Sign,” Courtesy Lakes Region Historical Society; “The Right Path,” Neil Budzinski; “Her California,” Photograph by Ruth Shellhorn, Courtesy Kelly Comras

BY JEFF LINK

The military–medical complex is looking at environmental approaches to treating trauma.

From the November 2016 issue of Landscape Architecture Magazine 

This past summer, Fred Foote met me in front of Naval Support Activity Bethesda, the home of Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, in a Maryland suburb of Washington, D.C. We set out for an early look at the Green Road, a half-mile path and a 1.7-acre woodland garden being built along the banks of a stream that winds through the sprawling campus.

Foote is a retired navy neurologist who is an adjunct assistant professor at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences (USUHS). He also has the title of scholar at an outfit in Baltimore called the Institute for Integrative Health. During the 2003 invasion of Iraq, he served as a physician on the hospital ship Comfort. When the military decided in 2005 to move Walter Reed National Military Medical Center onto the naval campus to consolidate hospital operations, navy leadership recruited Foote, off duty at the time, to advise on new hospital construction. Part of the charge, which Foote took on under the banner of what he calls the Epidaurus Project, was to identify the best ways to deliver patient-centered design and care.

The commemorative structure offers clear sight lines. Photo by Lisa Helfert.

The Green Road Project, an initiative of the Institute for Integrative Health, is an attempt to marry holistic, or alternative, medicine with a traditional approach to treat traumatic brain injury, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and other psychological conditions. It signals an opening by the military to environmental therapies, for which hard science can be lacking, to address problems that medical science has shown to be stubborn to treat.

The Green Road, which opened in September, comprises a wooded garden and path meant as places of respite for service members and their families who live in the approximately 400 long-term housing units on the base. Between its two entry portals, the Green Road will trace a trail, accessible by wheelchair, through a woodland. But it is also a site from which researchers plan to gather data on the effects of a natural setting on brain health.

Commemorative structure paving and wall plan. Image courtesy of Jack Sullivan, FASLA.

A longer trail follows Stoney Creek diagonally from the southwest to the northeastern border of the campus, linking residential units at the Fisher Houses and Sanctuary Hall. It is central to the navy’s physical plan for the campus, which aims to improve walkability, make the grounds more accessible for people on the base, and allow Walter Reed National Military Medical Center and the USUHS to consolidate overlapping operations.

At the gatehouse, an armed guard waved us through. We parked at the southwest entrance to the Green Road and went down a modest grade into a canopy of beech, sycamore, hickory, and American holly. Within a few hundred feet, the woods gave way to a sunlit glade looking onto Stoney Creek. Along the shoreline, willow and dogwood saplings rose from coarse jute. Boulders, together with the root systems of the densely gridded plantings, are helping to redraw and stabilize the water’s edge. “There is something about the rocks and water together,” Foote said, as we paused at the shoreline to listen and observe.

A visitor on a bench beside Stoney Creek. Photo by Lisa Helfert.

You can already see the young sprouts of serviceberries, redbuds, American cranberries, and river birches coming up in shadier areas. The built works—a seven-foot-wide paved path, dry-laid stone pavilions, and a wooden bridge—sit humbly within the natural environment.

“We have reason to believe, and have evidence to support, that if you bring a sick or injured person into a natural environment it lowers stress and speeds up healing, and this is especially true of the invisible wounds of war brain injury and PTSD,” Foote said. “This major research project, with advanced math that we have developed, will demonstrate healing effects of nature, mathematically, for probably the first time.”

It’s a bold claim. Studies have found that people who live near parks or green space have lower incidence of psychological illness than do city dwellers with limited access to green space. Yet, for the most part, says Esther Sternberg, the director of research at the Arizona Center for Integrative Medicine (AzCIM) at the University of Arizona College of Medicine (and a co-investigator on the Green Road Project), such research has focused on isolated biomarkers, such as levels of the hormone cortisol in the blood, and favored self-reported subjective assessments over biological, quantitative ones. “Health benefits are generally not determined through hard biological measures. Most is done by surveys,” Sternberg says. “Questionnaires are useful but less accurate and reliable than biological measures; they rely on individuals and memories. Our goal is to measure those, also, but to use quantitative measures of health outcomes.”

Sternberg’s published work focuses on the relationship between sweat biomarkers, such as cortisol and the neurotransmitter Neuropeptide Y, and the status of the immune and stress response systems. The Nano-Bio Manufacturing Consortium, a program of the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory in Dayton, Ohio, recently awarded AzCIM $200,000 for a project to assess different sweat collection methods and integrate these into real-time wearable devices (imagine military-grade Fitbits and Apple Watches) for measuring stress biomarkers. “This kind of work is not easy. It requires enormous teams of engineers and chemists to process big data analytic systems,” Sternberg says.

Stoney Creek bank stabilization sketch. Image courtesy of Jack Sullivan, FASLA.

And biomarker analysis is expensive. A lack of funding has hampered earlier studies of nature’s potential healing effects, Foote says. “If you want to make a new drug, it’s easy to get money for research. If you want to measure the effects of nature, the money that flows into these types of research is much less.”

The projected $4 million cost of the Green Road Project is funded in part by $1.5 million from the private sector and a $1 million award from the TKF Foundation, a nonprofit run by the philanthropists Tom and Kitty Stoner that funds urban green space. The project assembled a research team from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the USUHS, and the University of Arizona. One team member, Patricia Deuster, is the principal investigator and director of the Department of Defense’s Consortium for Health and Military Performance. Deuster says that initial investigations will compare the responses of 50 participants to traveling on two different routes across the military base: one through a high-traffic roadway, and the other along the Green Road.

Herbert Benson, a director emeritus of the Benson-Henry Institute for Mind Body Medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital and Mind Body Medicine Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School, plans to oversee the project’s studies related to gene expression. Benson says that PTSD can alter the “on” or “off” signals of a person’s genes in a way that exposure to nature might correct. “When the relaxation response is elicited, there is a decrease in the inflammatory response, leading to the stabilization of the immune system, stabilization of the energy metabolism of the body, and changes in insulin secretion,” he says.

The effects that natural settings may have on PTSD and traumatic brain injury are not well understood. A brief from the Institute of Medicine titled Treatment for Posttraumatic Stress Disorder in Military and Veteran Populations defines PTSD as “a combination of mental health symptoms—such as reliving a traumatic event, avoiding trauma-associated stimuli, and experiencing mood swings and hyperarousal—that persist for at least 1 month and impair normal functioning.” Traumatic brain injury is also broad in its diagnostic picture, with symptoms including headaches, weakness in extremities, sleep disturbance, memory loss, inability to concentrate, depression, and suicidal thoughts.

The prevalence of PTSD, which affects an estimated 8 percent of current and former service members deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan, according to the Institute of Medicine brief, has increased significantly since the start of the two wars. Though the Department of Defense and the Department of Veterans Affairs invested some $3.3 billion in PTSD care for service members and veterans in 2012, the agencies lack clear standards and evaluation methods, and are only beginning to understand ways to treat it effectively.

An arrangement of stones forms the Council Ring. Photo by Lisa Helfert.

“We need to determine what are the clumps of patients that constitute different biological subgroups for PTSD and traumatic brain injury,” Foote says. “We need big data, a supercomputer that can analyze a big field of data that to a human looks random. Until we know the specific biological subtypes, it will be hard to say if nature helps.”

But that’s a long way off. For now, Foote says, research will focus on providing a whole body assessment of the stress response system using psycho-social-spiritual questionnaires, qualitative interviews, and regression analysis of stress biomarkers, such as hormone levels and autonomic nervous system activity.

The designs, Foote says, will include contributions from Kim Drake, ASLA, a project manager at CDM Smith in Boston; Jack Sullivan, FASLA, an associate professor in the Department of Plant Science and Landscape Architecture at the University of Maryland in College Park; David Kamp, FASLA, the president of the firm Dirtworks in New York; and Paul Alt, a principal at Alt Architecture + Research Associates in Chicago. They intend to leave the space largely rustic and undisturbed.

By contrast, another project, the Warrior and Family Support Center Therapeutic Garden at the Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio, is more active. The 20,000-square-foot garden, designed by Brian Bainnson, ASLA, of Quatrefoil, Inc., in Portland, Oregon, features a parcourse, an amphitheater, a children’s playground, and a butterfly garden. Its constructed elements were created for both therapeutic and recreational purposes.

“The Green Road is deliberately the opposite,” Foote says. “We’re not building this garden to promote any special agenda of medical therapy. The only healing influence is the natural elements themselves. We want to bring pure nature to bear on PTSD, not in a highly constructed landscape of medical treatment, but a deliberately blank canvas.”

The Green Road’s design was developed after planning meetings with wounded veteran focus groups, NIH physicians, and Naval Facilities Engineering Command members. “You want to make sure anyone who enters the space also sees a way out,” Sullivan says. “You don’t want to get the sense that you can’t turn and walk away.”

I got a better sense of what Sullivan meant as I stood on the flat, still-earthen platform of the commemorative structure (which would be paved in precast concrete), looking down at the stream and bridge. The structure was primitive: There were no doors, no enclosures. As Foote observed, running his palms over the stacked stone, there is always “a wall at your back and clear lines of sight.”

The communal pavilion will have restrooms and a table that seats 10 people. The grading of the path carves out gently sloping access routes to the water, laid with crushed stone and chipped wood.

“These guys have been sitting in hospital beds,” Drake says. “I remember, in one of our focus groups, a double amputee with racing gloves and a wheelchair with mountain bike tires, saying, ‘I want to get out and mow the lawn.’ These guys don’t want to be on an accessible path all the time. They want to learn to get back to themselves, not be prisoners to their disabilities.”

The project’s aspiration, to measure scientifically the healing effects of nature on PTSD and traumatic brain injury, faces obstacles. Of the three metrics Foote has identified for research—biomarkers of the stress response, analysis of stories and journals using natural language processing, and advanced genomics—only the first is fully funded. Foote says he is looking for another $1 million for further research.

Then there’s the question of what can be demonstrated from an isolated study. A 2015 Stanford study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, found that people who walked for 90 minutes in a natural area of Stanford’s campus, rather than next to a multilane highway in Palo Alto, had less blood flow to the subgenual prefrontal cortex, a region of the brain associated with depression. But, as one researcher, Gregory Bratman, noted in the Stanford News, the result is far from conclusive. “This finding is exciting because it demonstrates the impact of nature experience on an aspect of emotion regulation—something that may help explain how nature makes us feel better,” Bratman said.

Although data-driven science is at the center of the project, what is striking at the Green Road site is how much the landscape seems to point toward something beyond pure empiricism. And, to Foote at least, intuition is a powerful guide. “When we get veterans into natural environments, they turn happy,” he says. “We bring different volunteer groups out to the woodland garden, clearing brush, taking vines off trees, and the veterans immediately perk up and start to sparkle. They’re having a happy day, and the suffering of PTSD gets put aside.”

Jeff Link is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. His work has appeared in Fast Co.Exist, Keep Growing, Newcity, and other publications.

Correction: This article originally stated that the Green Road Project is an Epidaurus Project initiative. In fact, it is an initiative of the Institute for Integrative Health. The text has been updated.

BY ZACH MORTICE

The Living Filtration System. Illustration by Living Filtration System.

It’s the habitat that most determines the health of any ecosystem, but it’s largely invisible to the naked eye. The soil under your feet, if it’s healthy, is filled with all manner of micro-organisms, bacteria, and fungi that break down organic matter into fresh dirt loaded with nutrients, and nourish the plants growing there. Soil is the building block for all healthy biomes, and a critical concern for all landscape architects. It’s also a finite resource that’s been continually degraded and polluted. But recent Biomimicry Institute design competitions are pitching two products that rehabilitate soil as the best way to strengthen the food cycle. Last month, team BioNurse, representing the Ceres Regional Center for Fruit and Vegetable Innovation in Chile, won the first-ever $100,000 Ray C. Anderson “Ray of Hope Prize” for BioPatch, a disk and dome made of organic material (like corn husks) that provides shelter for seedlings, eventually rehabilitating soil as it decomposes. In September, a team of landscape architecture students and recent grads from the University of Oregon won the $10,000 Living Product Prize for a Living Filtration System, which filters and retains fertilizer nutrients in agricultural fields, preventing them from polluting waterways.

The BioNurse team’s BioPatch mimics the domed geometry of the hardy yareta, common to the Andes. The team engineered a biodegradable, sheltered terrarium with a base and conical cap that protects seedlings from wind and UV radiation, regulates temperature and humidity, and provides nutrients. “The cushion shape permits other plants [to] grow inside the yareta,” says team member Camila Hernandez. “This plant grows slowly so you can find, at the same time, different conditions of life inside. Some parts will start decomposing and others growing, creating the perfect biological situation for other plants that need different conditions.” BioPatch will be ready for commercial sale by 2018, Hernandez says.

A yareta plant and a BioPatch disk. Photo by BioNurse.

Megan Schuknecht, the Biomimicry Institute’s Director of Design Challenges, says their proposal earned top honors because of its flexibility and wide applicability. “Their initial market is looking at Chilean fruit orchards, but the team and the judges also think there’s strong potential for them to enter other markets,” she says, such as viticulture or forest restoration.

The Living Filtration System aims to reduce eutrophication of waterways from fertilizer pollution by preventing runoff upstream in agricultural fields—“a way to cut the problem off at the source before it becomes a big issue,” says team member Wade Hanson, Student ASLA. Meant to replace standard tube drainage systems, the team’s tube filter uses a series of layers to trap and retain fertilizer nutrients. It is loosely based on the geometry of an earthworm’s digestive system. First, a recycled plastic pipe is perforated to increase its surface area, like tiny intestinal villi, to slow the movement of water through it. Layers of filtering fabric then wrap around the inside and outside of a layer of biochar—wood or field waste that’s been burned at a high temperature, like charcoal. This char layer is seeded with a menagerie of microbial life that can help rehabilitate soil degraded by the seasonal onslaught of herbicide- and pesticide-intensive farming: fungi, bacteria, and protozoa, huddled together in a “tiny hotel for microorganisms,” says team member Casey Howard, Student ASLA.

“That layer is the starting point, and they radiate out from there,” says team member Matt Jorgensen, Student ASLA.

The char layer works like a charcoal filter, capturing and sequestering fertilizer nutrients so microorganisms can return them to the plant roots, allowing plants more time to absorb them, instead of washing through and polluting downstream ecosystems. The project was developed in accordance with the Living Product Challenge, the standard for sustainable product development that looks to biomimicry to create products that leave no impact on the Earth’s ecosystems and resources.

From left to right: John Lanier, executive director of the Ray C. Anderson Foundation, Megan Schuknecht, Director of Design Challenges at the Biomimicry Institute, Camila Hernandez and Camila Gratacos of Team BioNurse, and Janine Benyus, co-founder of the Biomimicry Institute. Photo by Hardy Wilson/Bioneers.

Open to students and professionals alike, the Biomimicry Global Design Challenge seeks to raise awareness about the sustainable possibilities of biomimetic design, and to also create a path for more biomimicry products to make their way into market. Each project was chosen after a yearlong accelerator process during which finalists worked to refine the technical details of their plans and learned how to make sure their project could thrive in the marketplace once mass produced. That training taught them “how to set up a business, how to identify their customers, [and] how to identify their market size,” Schuknecht says.

The Living Filtration System team is several years away from a mass-produced prototype. Their next steps will require threading the Living Filtration System through large farm plots. But Hanson says their accelerator training has prepared them well. He learned “how many different hats you have to wear, and how crazy it is being an entrepreneur when you’re trying to push forward and develop your technology, while at the same time getting a crash-course MBA without getting the actual degree. I would have never expected it going in, but I’m more grateful than anything to have gained that experience and have that knowledge.”

Zach Mortice is a Chicago-based architecture and landscape architecture journalist. Listen to his Chicago architecture and design podcast A Lot You Got to Holler, and follow him on Twitter and Instagram. 

BY TIMOTHY A. SCHULER

The battle to document and save old trees that may have once marked native American trails.

 From the November 2016 issue of Landscape Architecture Magazine

Six months before the stock market crash that plunged the country into the Great Depression, Richard Gloede, a landscape architect and the owner of a nursery in Evanston, Illinois, wrote a letter to General Abel Davis, the chair of the Cook County Forest Preserve’s advisory committee. He implored Davis for help in protecting the “old Indian trail trees” along the shores of Lake Michigan. “I have located on the North Shore alone over one hundred and have photographed, measured them according to size, condition, which way they point by compass, etc.,” Gloede wrote in a letter dated March 22, 1929. “It seems to me that these trees should be put in the best of care and kept so.”

The trees in question, often referred to as trail marker trees, would not have been hard to find. Each made two roughly 90-degree bends so that a portion of the trunk grew horizontally, parallel to the ground, forming a shape that can best be described as one half of a field goal post. Today, thousands of trees with this distinctive double bend have been documented in the United States, and there is evidence that at least some of them were manipulated on purpose, shaped by indigenous peoples to provide landmarks where others did not exist.

Like us, North America’s early civilizations needed navigational tools, and in heavily wooded areas like the Southeast or the Great Lakes regions, natural landmarks like mountain peaks were few and far between, and rock cairns, unlike in Utah and Nevada, would have been difficult to make and impossible to see from a great distance. That left trees. A shaped tree could serve as an early road sign, a way to navigate the landscape.

Dennis Downes at a council circle near Charlevoix, Michigan. Unlike some living council circles, these maples appear to have been shaped. Image courtesy of Dennis Downes.

In Gloede’s day, this was, if not common knowledge, mostly undisputed. Trail marker trees appeared in newspapers and scholarly journals and were seen by many ordinary citizens as living landmarks, “reminders of old Indian days,” according to a 1920 article in the Chicago Daily News, which included a photograph of a young woman sitting sidesaddle on the horizontal trunk of a bent tree, reading a magazine. Gloede and other landscape architects believed that Illinois’s trail marker trees had educational value and should be used to teach children about the indigenous peoples of the Great Lakes region. But little ever came of his letter. In 1940, after Gloede’s death, Robert Kingery, a member of the forest preserve’s advisory council, wrote to Davis’s successor, inquiring as to whether or not the matter should be reopened and these trees “properly charted and…given special care.”

There is no indication that the Cook County Forest Preserve ever acquired Gloede’s photographs or mapped the locations of any of the trail marker trees. Time passed. Many of the individuals with knowledge of these trees died or moved away. Most of the trees in Illinois slowly disappeared, but interest in them never fully died out.

In a 1941 article for the Scientific Monthly, for instance, the geologist Raymond Janssen wrote about trail marker trees, asserting that “trees were sometimes bent by the Indians to mark trails through the forest” because they “were the most accessible and most easily adaptable materials at hand.” They could be manipulated to varying levels of conspicuousness and therefore “made ideal guide-posts,” he wrote. The topic was newsworthy enough—and the evidence credible—that Time magazine ran an article inspired by Janssen’s research later that same year.

Half a century later, these trees are no longer fixtures of our cultural imagination. They do not appear in our journals or adorn our maps. The last known trail marker tree in Winnetka, Illinois, a double-trunked white oak known as the Fuller Lane Tree, died and was removed in 1984, along with a bronze plaque stating that “this ancient white oak, one of many originally found on the North Shore, was presumably bent by the Indians about 1700, marking a trail to Lake Michigan.”

A 1947 map depicting life in Wilmette, Illinois, in 1847 includes the location of trail marker trees. Image courtesy of the Wilmette Historical Museum.

The trees that have survived are reaching the end of their natural life span, and many are worried that, without sufficient education, these important and underappreciated artifacts of early North American culture will soon be gone, taking with them a clue into how indigenous peoples navigated their world.

Dennis Downes has picked up where Gloede and Janssen left off. In 2013, more than 80 years after his initial letter, Gloede’s family auctioned off hundreds of the landscape architect’s photographs. They were bought by Downes, a painter and sculptor who grew up on the North Shore, a string of affluent suburbs that includes Evanston, Winnetka, and Highland Park. Over the past 30 years, Downes, who, with a white handlebar mustache and white shirt under a black leather vest, looks plucked from the pages of a history book, has driven hundreds of thousands miles across the United States and Canada to find and photograph these bent trees, visiting some states more than two dozen times and amassing a trove of photos and documents that suggest that some indigenous tribes did, in fact, bend trees for use as trail markers. In the early 1990s, Downes formed the Great Lakes Trail Marker Tree Society and eventually published a book, Native American Trail Marker Trees: Marking Paths Through the Wilderness.

Of course, nature can also bend trees—into Ls and Zs and every shape in between—and this has led to skepticism. Some argue that these trees are not part of some vast navigational network but the result of natural causes, bent by animals, windstorms, or other trees, which could have fallen and pinned the bent tree to the ground as a young sapling. Don Wells, a retired civil engineer and one of the founders of a group called Mountain Stewards, which has built a database of more than 2,000 trail marker trees, has encountered significant resistance, particularly within the academic community. “They say, ‘Look, none of our fellow PhDs wrote anything about this. Therefore it doesn’t exist,’” he says.

Downes and others have continued to gather evidence, searching for any reference to these trees in old newspapers and journal articles. It was shortly after his book was published that Downes acquired Gloede’s photographs. Among the hundreds of old glass slides was something he had only ever dreamt of seeing. It was a fuzzy, black-and-white image that seemed to show a tribal leader standing atop a bent tree, smudging stick in hand, mid-blessing.

“When I held that up to the light, I was extremely happy,” Downes says. The man in the photo, he says, was Chief Evergreen Tree, a tribal leader associated with the Ho-Chunks in Wisconsin. The photograph had been taken at a commemoration hosted in 1928 by the National Society of the Daughters of the American Revolution and attended by all manner of dignitaries, including Anne Ickes, the wife of Harold L. Ickes, who later became the Secretary of the Interior. Downes had written about the event in his book, “but I had no physical evidence” of the chief’s presence, he says. “Now, I have the chief standing on the tree, giving the tree its name, ‘Leading Boy.’”

It’s tempting to see trees as ephemeral, and therefore lousy, landmarks. For one, they’re living things. They have a life span—a beginning and, inevitably, an end. They’re susceptible to storms, wildfires, disease, pests. But before large-scale industry came to North America, before logging and modern development and the introduction of invasive species, hardwoods like oaks and beeches would have seemed practically invincible to indigenous peoples, outliving multiple generations and representing strength and longevity.

We actually still use trees to mark the landscape. In northwest Arkansas, not far from one of the hundreds of trail marker trees that have been documented in the area, is a white oak with a canary yellow sign nailed to its trunk. “Bearing Tree,” the sign reads in big, blocky type, followed by a series of numbers scratched into the metal in a childlike scrawl. Bearing trees, or witness trees, as they’re sometimes called, are used by surveyors to provide the bearing and distance from what’s known as a corner monument, which marks a property corner. If a corner monument has been disturbed or moved, the bearing tree can be used to identify the property boundary. Like road signs—but unlike trail marker trees—they are legally protected. Tampering with a bearing tree is a federal offense.

Our use of bearing trees is an echo of indigenous peoples’ understanding of trees as worthy wayfinding devices, monuments that often outlive man-made markers. But it also was the beginning of the end for indigenous peoples, whose way of life would be forever affected by the acquisition, division, and subsequent sale of lands they once inhabited. The Public Land Survey System, originated by Thomas Jefferson and officially created by the Land Ordinance of 1785, overlaid onto the landscape a grid of 36-square-mile townships and square-mile sections, laying the groundwork for the system of private land ownership we have today.

We can’t do much about actions taken 250 years ago, but Andrew Johnson, a member of the Cherokee Nation and the executive director of Chicago’s American Indian Center from 2013 to 2015, says that renewed interest in trail marker trees has played a significant part in the reclamation of his people’s history and helping to assert a counternarrative. The fact that trail marker trees have been identified throughout the United States, and not just in a particular region, means that tree shaping was a practice of multiple tribes, he says, providing additional evidence for a sophistication and scale in navigation that he believes was denied early North American societies.

The trees also bolster recent studies that put indigenous populations well above earlier estimates, a subject explored in Charles Mann’s 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus. “As science advances, it’s catching up to what the true numbers are,” Johnson says. “The depth of trade and travel, to sustain that on a macro level, is quite remarkable.”

Gloede wasn’t the only landscape architect to recognize the existence of trail marker trees. Jens Jensen, who lived and worked in Highland Park on the North Shore, was fascinated by these living road signs. He wrote about the importance of indigenous marker trees in journals such as American Forestry and spoke at a variety of events, including the dedication of a bronze plaque that was placed near a trail marker tree in Glencoe in 1911.

It’s well documented that Jensen was heavily influenced by tribal practices, specifically the use of council circles, an element that appears in dozens of Jensen’s own projects. “He certainly had a fascination with Native Americans and their history in the landscape, and I think he also was struck by stories of places in the Midwest where there were these council groves,” says Robert Grese, ASLA, a professor of landscape architecture at the University of Michigan and the author of Jens Jensen: Maker of Natural Parks and Gardens. “He felt there was a rich history [there]—that these trees had dated from pre-European settlement periods.”

Grese says there’s also evidence that Jensen wove old Indian trails into landscape projects for clients such as Henry Ford. At Fair Lane, Ford’s estate outside Dearborn, Michigan, Jensen believed the existing road followed a former footpath. “He was very insistent on keeping that as part of the overall landscape,” Grese says. “That was pretty common.” He says Jensen was known to scour historic maps so that he could incorporate indigenous trails as garden paths.

Downes believes Jensen likely knew of the living council circles that once existed throughout the Great Lakes. He shows me photographs of a council circle that still stands, outside a tiny town called Charlevoix near Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. The maple trees, which are evenly spaced and form a nearly perfect circle, look to be hundreds of years old. Their canopies have intertwined, forming a leafy green parapet around a large swath of grass. There’s something else distinct about these trees, something you can’t see in any of the aerial photos: All their trunks are bent.

To determine whether a tree is a historic marker or simply an accident of nature is a complex and messy process. Even now, there is little agreement as to what criteria should be used. The most basic requirement, one that everyone agrees on, is age. “It has to be old enough,” says Steve Houser, an arborist in Dallas and a cofounder of the Texas Historic Tree Coalition, which helps document and preserve potential marker trees as well as other notable specimens. “I have people send me 10-inch trees, and it’s like, no, they have to be at least 144 years old. It’s been 144 years since the last free-roaming Comanche was in the state of Texas.”

The second is shape. Most have the double bend, which, according to several theories, was created by bending a sapling down toward the ground, often pointing toward or parallel to whatever was being marked, and tying the tree with rawhide or cord. Over time, the top of the tree, no longer able to get enough sunlight, would begin to die, and the tree would send up new vertical limbs. The top would rot or be cut off, as would any unwanted sucker branches, leaving the tree with a shape that, once the tree was old enough, could not be altered. In northern regions, the bend often appears higher up the trunk, possibly to ensure visibility even after heavy snows. Houser says trail marker trees show signs of being contorted at an early age, and he looks for other signs, too: “thong marks or scars” from where a tree was tied down.

A bearing tree in northwest Arkansas, a modern use of trees as markers. Photo by Timothy A. Schuler.

But the real key, Houser says—and this is the messy part—is to establish a linkage between the tree and either a known cultural site or a topographic feature that would have been useful to indigenous peoples: a stream crossing, for instance, or a natural shelter that might have been used as a campsite. “I have to find that connection between the Comanches, in my case, and a site at a particular time near the age of the tree,” Houser says, a process he describes as reading the landscape. “I look at early trail maps and their association to the tree: Is it pointing the way of an early trail? We look at topo maps: What was the topography like back then? What would they likely have been pointing toward?”

Indigenous peoples probably used naturally deformed trees as wayfinding devices, too, Houser says, so just because a tree is bent, and is located near a known cultural site, doesn’t mean it was shaped. Conversely, just because a tree wasn’t shaped doesn’t mean it wasn’t used as a marker. Which makes it all the more difficult to decide whether or not a tree should be considered historically or culturally significant.

Opinions also vary on who can make the ultimate designation. Houser believes that only tribal members should be allowed to make the call, and the Texas Historic Tree Coalition won’t recognize a trail marker tree unless it’s verified by the Comanche. But he admits that he’s lucky, living in Texas. “The Comanches are much more open about it,” he says. In other parts of the country, he says, “if the elders still exist with the tribe, the next question is, do they share that information? A lot of them don’t want to, and for good reason.”

Centuries of exploitation have made many tribal elders reluctant to share what they know with outsiders, says Don Wells, of Mountain Stewards, whose group has released a book and a documentary film about trail marker trees. “For a long time, they didn’t want to talk to anybody about [these trees] because people were going and destroying them,” he says. Sometimes the acts were racially motivated, other times by the belief that the trees pointed to buried treasure.

Indigenous knowledge also is fading out. Some nations have no record of shaping trees. Johnson says this could mean that those tribes never did it, or it could just mean that, at some point, the practice was not passed on. “Natives have an oral tradition,” he says. “If you break that tradition by one, two, three generations, then it’s impossible to get [the knowledge] back.”

In areas where tribes can’t or won’t acknowledge these trees, how can a tree’s authenticity be verified? Some have tried scientific methods. A few years ago, Wells collaborated with dendrochronologists from the University of West Georgia to core and date several potential trail marker trees, in order to confirm that they fall within the proper age range. But some felt that this desecrated the tree, and he was asked to stop. Johnson sees little need for conclusive evidence, which he says is a product of Western thinking. “From a native standpoint, we don’t feel that we need a scientific verification,” he says.

The landscape architect Richard Gloede in front of the Fuller Lane Tree in Winnetka, Illinois. Image courtesy of the Winnetka Historical Society.

These two perspectives are slowly aligning. The National Park Service has begun to acknowledge the existence of what it calls “culturally modified trees,” which includes bent trees but also burial trees and arborglyphs, a number of which have been identified at the Florissant Fossil Beds National Monument in Colorado. However, it’s thought that these bent trees may have been ceremonial in nature, rather than navigational. More recently, Houser coauthored Comanche Marker Trees of Texas with the anthropologist Linda Pelon and the Comanche historic preservation officer Jimmy Arterberry. Houser’s book, which was released in September, is the first on trail marker trees to be published by a university press.

Houser says his goal with the book was to preserve, at least on paper, these marker trees, which may be one of the last remaining windows into a culture that has never fully been appreciated. “We can’t preserve what we haven’t taken the time to find and recognize,” he says, adding that it’s now or never for these rapidly decaying landmarks. “We can’t wait 20 years to catch up on this work. We’re losing ’em as fast as we can look at ’em sometimes.”

Timothy A. Schuler writes about design, ecology, and the environment. He lives in Honolulu.

BY KATARINA KATSMA, ASLA

An obsession with epiphytes leads to an ASLA Student Award.

From the December 2016 issue of Landscape Architecture Magazine.

Brandon Cornejo, Student ASLA, wants to use epiphytes—plants that grow on other plants or materials and derive their nutrients from the air—to green the world. His project, “Feasibility Study of the Integration of Epiphytes in Designed Landscapes,” won the Award of Excellence in Research in the 2016 ASLA Student Awards. It measured whether rabbit’s foot fern (Davallia fejeensis), a type of epiphyte, could grow on building materials typical to the urban environment. With just a few cuttings, Cornejo was able to find that this plant group has the potential to cover much of the city if you turn it loose.

Courtesy Brandon Cornejo, Student ASLA.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

You’re currently working at Raymond Jungles, Inc. in Miami. Has your work with epiphytes influenced the work that you’re doing now?

It’s funny because I interviewed and said, “Oh, I’m part of a bromeliad society.” Bromeliads are a huge group of epiphytes. Right now there’s actually a problem in Miami Beach because of Zika and its relationship with mosquitoes and their relationship with bromeliads. A lot of media in South Florida have incorrectly portrayed bromeliads as breeding grounds for Aedes aegypti. Aedes aegypti and Aedes albopictus are the two mosquitoes known for spreading Zika. I’m doing research for Raymond to prove that there are two other native species of mosquitoes that outcompete Aedes. The Miami Beach Botanical Garden actually ripped out all of its bromeliads because of this frenzy and misdirection by the media and by local officials. I recently gave a presentation at the Miami Beach Botanical Garden about the mosquito, Zika, and bromeliad relationship.

People are blaming a single plant species or a single plant genus when really there’s research showing that only 1 percent of all the mosquitoes that breed out of bromeliads are Zika-carrying. There are more issues with managing water here in Miami than flora.

Courtesy Brandon Cornejo, Student ASLA.

What gave you the original idea to look into epiphytes as a possible design medium?

I’ve always been interested in plants, especially plants with very unusual forms. I grew up in Southern California, and I didn’t really travel that much. One way I traveled through high school was vicariously through plants. I really got into epiphytes. I went to school at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. That’s central California, and it had good proximity to Santa Barbara. Every year, Santa Barbara has an orchid show in which people from around the world come to sell, showcase, and share orchids. I was inspired by that. In Southern California there is a nursery called Rainforest Flora that grows air plants. There’s so much diversity in that genre.

How do you see the use of epiphytes in landscape architecture?

I’m annoyed with the idea of green walls.

The idea of having to put soil and engineer ways to put soil where soil really doesn’t naturally occur—I think there are other ways. Just look at how plants grow and where these plants are from—a lot of these plants grow on the sides of mountains where there’s no soil. I think that’s a more natural solution. I’m a big proponent of vines. Vines are actually better for use in urban environments where there is some soil. But a lot more vines grow really fast and cover more quickly than epiphytes.

Do you see this as the more natural approach to greening the vegetative environment?

In certain locations. They rely a lot on water. In places without a lot of water you’re probably not going to see as much greenery. In places like Miami, where epiphytes just naturally grow on the sides of palm trees, this would totally work. We don’t have to spend all this money for extra beefing up beams to hold up all the soil and the water weight that’s associated with soil. We can just grow plants that naturally grow on air.

What about colder climates with less water? Are there alternative plants or methods?

Some epiphytes fill larger habitats, and some are very specific. By looking into which epiphytes do better over greater ranges, I think that’s a way to be expansive where they can be. The habitat of Spanish moss is expanding because of global warming. As places get less cold during the winter, we see occurrences of Spanish moss happening farther north of where they typically would be.

Courtesy Brandon Cornejo, Student ASLA.

What surprised you the most from working on this project?

I didn’t think I was going to be able to see [plant growth] in the short amount of time I had, but it happened. I was pretty shocked. There were other plants that I thought of using, but the germination of some of these things is slow. Just acquiring some of the seeds—you don’t really buy seeds of epiphytes commonly. Obviously the nurseries that grow Tillandsia or air plants aren’t going to give me seeds. This was such a surprise to me when the cutting actually showed leaves. Because instead of just seedling reproduction, which I thought would be the only way, vegetative reproduction is possible too in certain species.

What kind of potential do you think this medium holds for the future?

I think as human developments increase and we are taking away habitats, I think our urban environments can become conservatories for biodiversity.

Where rain forests are being cut down for agriculture, landscape architecture can intervene and create artificial surfaces for epiphytes to grow on, creating canopy habitat for organisms that would otherwise be affected by what we put on the land.

BY ANNE RAVER, PHOTOGRAPHY BY FREDERICK CHARLES

Preserving farmland is not enough if it doesn’t stay in the hands of farmers.

FROM THE DECEMBER 2016 ISSUE OF LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE

A gorgeous October morning in the Hudson Valley and people are out leaf peeping, but not Chris Cashen, a farmer.

Every week, on the outskirts of Hudson, 120 miles north of New York City, Cashen and his crew load about 1,300 pounds of organic vegetables—baby bok choy, salad greens, Japanese turnips, sweet potatoes, Tuscan kale—onto a truck headed for a food pantry hub in Long Island City.

The hot, dry summer meant they had to irrigate from the nearby creek, but the vegetables are beautiful and tasty.

A few miles south, Ken Migliorelli zigzags over the potholed roads between his hilly orchard in Tivoli and the flat sandy fields of his cropland in Red Hook. A Valentine’s Day freeze took out all his stone fruit this year—no peaches, nectarines, or cherries—and a hard frost in May reduced his apple crop by 30 percent.

But Migliorelli, who manages 1,000 acres of vegetables, fruits, hay, and grains (there is a brewery here), and supplies 24 farmers’ markets in the city, knows the power of diversity. Depending on the time of year, 130 different kinds of fruits and vegetables fill the Migliorelli stands, including the same strain of broccoli raab his grandfather, Angelo, brought as seeds from Italy in 1933.

In Copake, at Walt’s Dairy, David Kiernan milks 168 cows—a fraction of the herd of 400 registered Holsteins on this farm. That milk is on the grocery shelf within 36 hours.

These farms and about 400 others have been preserved with the help of land trusts over the past 30 years. Steve Rosenberg, the executive director of Scenic Hudson Land Trust and a registered lobbyist, wants to save 5,000 more. New York loses a farm every three and a half days, according to the American Farmland Trust; in 25 years, it has lost half a million acres. And farmers are an aging population. 

The Kiernans’ easement, at Walt’s Dairy in Copake, protects 357 acres—and the view. Photo by Frederick Charles.

Lindsey Lusher Shute is the director and cofounder of the National Young Farmers Coalition, based in Hudson. “In the next 20 years, 70 percent of the nation’s farmland will change hands,” she says. “And the Hudson Valley is under incredible pressure with second-home buyers looking for land.”

Rosenberg, a former real estate attorney who grew up watching the marshes of southern Florida turn into malls and subdivisions, came to Scenic Hudson Land Trust in 1990 to develop a plan that would preserve clusters of the Hudson Valley’s most valuable farms first, then go after the rest. “A third of the highest-priority farms over 10 years would cost about $250 million,” says Rosenberg. “That means $25 million a year for 10 years.” It would cost about $720 million to preserve nine more clusters of the most productive farms—614 to be precise, totaling 163,673 acres—within 150 miles of New York City.

Just where to get the money, of course, is the big question. And a 2013 report by Scenic Hudson, Securing Fresh, Local Food for New York City and the Hudson Valley: A Foodshed Conservation Plan for the Region, suggests the public and private sources of money that need to be organized under one umbrella. 

The plan presents startling statistics. Although local land trusts and other groups have collectively saved more than 81,000 acres, 89 percent of the region’s farmland remains unprotected. About 4,355 farms totaling 485,286 productive acres could still be sold at any time for development. The plan points out the disconnect: thousands of farmers upstate and the hungry city below. Food policy experts estimate the city’s annual unmet need for fresh local food is close to $1 billion.

Rosenberg didn’t invent the word “foodshed,” of course. It was first introduced by W. P. Hedden, in his 1929 book, How Great Cities Are Fed, when much of Gotham’s food was trundled into the city by rail, and a labor strike loomed. Now, the threats are climate change and terrorism. Rosenberg often draws the parallel between the Hudson Valley as a watershed and a foodshed. “The city has invested for 20 years in securing the land around its reservoirs to conserve clean drinking water,” he says. “If it’s interested in having a secure supply of fresh local food, as the largest stakeholder, it should be securing the farms it comes from.”

The analogy certainly resonates with farmers. “It’s brilliant,” says Cashen, who grows 50 different kinds of vegetables on the 180-acre farm in Claverack that his grandparents bought as a country home in 1948 for $28,000. “The same logic that drives New York to protect the Catskill watershed should drive it to protect the foodshed that feeds the city.”

When Rosenberg first arrived 25 years ago, Scenic Hudson Land Trust was focused on the Hudson River. The group, founded in the 1960s, had defeated General Electric’s plan to build a giant hydroelectric plant at the foot of Storm King Mountain, and its landmark court case launched the modern-day environmental movement. Scenic Hudson had gone on to preserve 25,000 acres of land, mostly along the Hudson River. But Rosenberg widened that view to the region’s farmland, which, after all, is 20 percent of its land base, and the key to its cultural history and growing ecotourism.

Since 1992, Scenic Hudson has protected 100 family farms, or 13,000 acres of productive land, most within 150 miles of New York City. Rosenberg has increasingly immersed himself in the politics of food, as inseparable from preservation not only of farmland, but of farmers struggling to make ends meet. 

Two seminal reports in 2010 posed major questions about New York City’s broken food system. The first came out of the NYC Food & Climate Summit, held in December 2009 at New York University.

Rock stars in food policy, including Anna Lappé, a cofounder of the Small Planet Institute; the nutritionist Marion Nestle; and the Just Food activist Karen Washington, to name a few, examined the elephant in the room, hardly mentioned at the UN Climate Change Conference being held that same week in Copenhagen: the industrial food system, which belches out one-third of the greenhouse gases that warm the planet.

FoodNYC: A Blueprint for a Sustainable Food System, the report that followed in February 2010, from then Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer’s office, noted the city’s dependence on produce flown in from California and China, its food deserts and hungry people, its rates of obesity, diabetes, and asthma. And it looked outside the city, at New York’s seven million acres of farmland, its farmers struggling to find local markets and forced to sell cheap to wholesalers. 

Another report quickly followed: FoodWorks, A Vision to Improve NYC’s Food System, from the office of Christine C. Quinn, then speaker of the New York City Council, pointed out the ludicrous realities. Why do New Yorkers eat apples from Washington State, and drink apple juice from China, for example, when New York State is the nation’s second-largest apple producer? The city boasts more than 120 farmers’ markets and 100 community-supported agriculture programs, or CSAs, but 1.4 million city residents can’t afford to buy nutritious food and three million residents live in food deserts. At the same time, the city’s budget for institutional meals is second only to the U.S. military. 

Jeremias Taquez, with just-picked cauliflower and red cabbage. Photo by Frederick Charles.

For years, distribution has been a major hurdle. Local farmers can’t find a place at the Hunts Point Terminal Market, which sprawls over 100 acres in the Bronx, with an annual $2.4 billion in sales of fruits and vegetables—mostly grown across the country or world. But in two years, those farmers will finally have their own wholesale marketplace in the Bronx. 

In early August, Governor Andrew Cuomo, city officials, and GrowNYC, the nonprofit group that runs the city’s 50-plus greenmarkets, announced plans to build a separate, $20 million Greenmarket Regional Food Hub on a three-acre site near the Hunts Point cooperative. Cuomo has pledged $15 million for the 120,000-square-foot hub, which will include a wholesale farmers’ market, cold-storage capacity, and space for local food businesses. 

The hub will now serve as a pipeline between local farms and the urban table. It also motivates the state and city “to make sure those farms are secure,” says Rosenberg. “So they don’t make all these investments and then turn around and say, ‘Where are the farms?’”

As Rosenberg made his rounds as a lobbyist, he kept coming up against an information gap. “I would go up to Albany and they would ask me these really straightforward questions,” said Rosenberg one fall morning at his office in Poughkeepsie. “‘How many farms are there in this foodshed? How many acres? Where are they located? What’s it going to cost? How would you prioritize them?’ Nobody had the answers.”

In 2012, with a grant from the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, Rosenberg’s staff set out to find the answers. They combed through county tax and land records, and maps of agricultural districts. They verified the possible farms with aerial photos, to make sure they were actually being farmed, or hadn’t turned into golf courses. Using GIS, they mapped the farms already preserved, which revealed contiguous easements, the gaps of unprotected farms among them, and the vast areas where none had protection. The staff also assessed the soils and productivity of each farm, prioritizing which farms should be saved first, and how to rally the forces to do it. 

Other land trusts, including the 30-year-old Columbia Land Conservancy, which has preserved 10,000 acres of agricultural lands (and 16,000 acres of forests, wetlands, and other areas), have focused on the most valuable farms within their particular counties—not the entire valley. And maybe it took Rosenberg, the new kid on the block, to state the obvious.

“The report is useful for raising awareness for people in the city that there’s something called the foodshed and we don’t live on the moon, that there’s a connection between farms that are up here and down there,” says Marissa Codey, the Columbia Land Conservancy’s director of conservation programs. “When you go to Union Square, half the farmers are from up here. If you protect farms in Columbia County, you are protecting people in the city.”

Scenic Hudson has taken “a critical mass approach to farmland protection,” says Rosenberg, who acknowledges the group’s sizable endowment makes that possible. Reader’s Digest money—Scenic Hudson’s 2014 Annual Report cites $161.9 million in its Lila Acheson and DeWitt Wallace Hudson Valley Land Preservation Endowment—funds about $2 million a year in farm protection projects. That capital is used to leverage investments from other key stakeholders, from so-called slow money investors—who invest in small farms and local enterprises based on sustainability and social justice—to city, state, and federal funds.

“They provided a lot of funds for farms that we otherwise wouldn’t have protected,” says Codey, speaking of Scenic Hudson. “They are a great partner.” Previous collaborations between the two land trusts have protected 21 working farms, or 2,600 acres of productive land. Now, Rosenberg says, Scenic Hudson is committing about $2.5 million of its own resources on 15 project proposals, “a number of which are in partnership with other land trusts, which we hope will leverage more than $13 million.”

Rosenberg’s critical mass approach has loosened funds in government coffers. In May, Governor Cuomo announced $20 million in grants to buy easements on 28 farms, totaling 5,600 acres, through the Hudson Valley Agricultural Enhancement Program. His press office noted that “60 percent of that land has been designated by Scenic Hudson as a priority to protect in the Hudson Valley/NYC foodshed.”

The foodshed plan spurred Daniel R. Garodnick, chair of the city’s economic development committee, into action: “They put forth some very thoughtful proposals here, which is why we are taking them so seriously. It didn’t take much for me to recognize that they were clearly right and that they needed a local champion.” 

In April 2015, Garodnick wrote a letter, signed by 14 city council members, to Mayor Bill de Blasio urging the administration to invest at least $5 million a year to “conserve the farmland in its regional foodshed.” The letter was supported by dozens of groups, including Just Food, the city-based social justice group that has lately linked farmers to food pantries and subsidized CSAs; Slow Food NYC; the Regional Plan Association; and chef/restaurant owners Dan Barber, Mario Batali, and David Bouley.

“It would be a precedent-setting enterprise,” said Garodnick more than a year and a half later. “We’ve done similar things for the watershed, but never for the foodshed.”

In September, the mayor’s office was taking a hard look at his proposal to include $5 million for farm preservation in the city’s budget. “It’s a high priority for this year,” Garodnick said. “We’re talking with the de Blasio administration, looking to hammer out the details.”

And Rosenberg’s tireless lobbying has had an effect.

“We’ve learned a lot of this from Scenic Hudson, and had ongoing discussions with them on how to shape this plan,” Garodnick said. “We want to link our regional farms to New Yorkers who severely lack fresh produce.” 

In the meantime, land trusts have broadened their missions from simply preserving farmland to connecting farmers to direct markets, through groups such as Just Food and GrowNYC.

Just Food made the difference for the Cashens, in 2004, when they were having trouble making ends meet. “We were not going into the city,” said Chris Cashen, driving through a field full of dark green kale and row after row of celeriac. “We had a very small CSA at the farm. But essentially, we were wholesaling. Prices that were promised were not honored. It was the typical ebb and flow of a commodity.”

The Cashens leased this 60-acre field and spent three years bringing it to organic standards. A complicated easement has helped them afford to buy the land. Photo by Frederick Charles.

Now, the Cashens sell their produce directly, through Local Produce Link, run jointly by Just Food and United Way. “We’re essentially contracted by United Way and are providing about 40,000 pounds per year of fresh produce to four food pantries in Long Island City,” Cashen says. Just Food also introduced the Cashens to a group in Brooklyn and another in Long Island City that wanted to start CSAs; now they sell about 1,000 CSA shares around the city.

New York City’s Greenmarket essentially lifted the Migliorelli clan out of debt. Ken Migliorelli tells how his father, Rocco, peddled vegetables from a cart, when Pelham Parkway was mostly pig farms. By the time Co-op City was rising over Interstate 95, the family left the Bronx for the Hudson Valley. By 1976, they were growing vegetables again, in Red Hook. But most of their business was wholesale.

“We didn’t make any money,” says Migliorelli. “Then, somebody told us about the farmers’ markets in the city, and we started. June 12, 1982, was our first market in Tompkins Square. At the end of 1982, we ended up in the black for the first time since 1975.”

Land trusts are also using new conservation tools to keep farms in farmers’ hands. Conservation easements, in which landowners sell or donate their development rights to a land trust, generally reduce the value of the property by 40 to 60 percent of its full market value, and restrict its use to agriculture or simply open space. 

The process has worked well for farmers who use the much-needed capital to reduce debt or expand their operation. But lately, second- home buyers flocking to the bucolic Hudson Valley have been buying up these preserved lands and taking them out of production.

Even if they rent part of the land to farmers, the lack of security and the inability to make capital investments make this at best only a temporary solution for those working the land. And young farmers without access to inherited land can’t afford to buy preserved farmland, unless additional easements further reduce the price to what farmers can afford and also restrict the sale of the land to working farmers. Land trusts have begun working together on these affordability options, or preemptive purchase rights, as they are also called, to keep farmland in the hands of farmers, not estate buyers. But it’s not happening fast enough, given the number of farms up for sale, says Lindsey Shute, of the National Young Farmers Coalition, who farms with her husband, Ben.

“The idea of the working farm easement has been very slow to roll out in the Hudson Valley,” she says. “Affordability hasn’t gotten any better for young farmers trying to purchase.”

The coalition’s 2013 national survey of more than 200 land conservation professionals found that a quarter of the farms protected by their programs were out of production— because the easements were sold to nonfarmers.

The Shutes started growing organic vegetables in 2004, on land rented from a dairy farmer, until he died and “the property went for millions,” Shute says. “We rented another property, wonderful soil, but we couldn’t make capital improvements, and there was nothing in Red Hook for under a million.”

Finally, in 2012, the Shutes were lucky enough to buy 70 acres, at agricultural value, from a friend who on the same day sold her development rights to the Scenic Hudson Land Trust. Now their organic operation, Hearty Roots Farm, supports 25 acres of vegetables, 900 laying hens, and 15 pigs. The Shutes supply a CSA in Red Hook, as well as seven CSAs in the city, all with subsidized shares.

Longtime farmers, even those with preserved land, are facing the same steep prices if they need to purchase more land to expand production.

Chris Cashen, one of nine children, was only 15 when his parents donated the development rights to the Farm at Miller’s Crossing. Bound for college, and eventually law school, he found the concept hard to grasp, at first.

“We had this very primitive notion as kids, that land equaled money,” he says. “That we had this farm to sell and some day we would have an inheritance that was worth a lot of money and this would be great.” But discussions around the kitchen table with Chuck Matthei, the founder and then director of Equity Trust, helped them see the land in a different way. “We realized that ‘Gosh, this regenerative thing of a farm being every year a source of livelihood and occupation and income would be much better than a one-time sale.’”

Fast forward to 1999, when Chris wanted to marry a young market gardener, Katie Smith, and they needed land to expand. They eventually bought the family farm “at a very generous price” from his parents, says Cashen. Their success led them to rent 30 more acres from a struggling dairy farmer, and it took them three more years to bring the soil up to organic standards. By the time the farmer sold his land—more than 400 acres to an investment developer—the Cashens were renting 60 acres that were crucial to their operation.

“Suddenly, the threat of development was real to me,” Cashen says. “My farm was safe. But the land that I had come to depend on was under that threat that I didn’t ever feel on my own land.”

Walt Kiernan feeds the “girls,” just a few of his 400 registered Holsteins. Photo by Frederick Charles.

The new owner agreed to rent to the Cashens, until the development broke ground, but when the plans never materialized, he needed a return on his investment. He was willing to discuss alternatives to putting the land on the market, however. So three different land trusts—Columbia Land Conservancy, Scenic Hudson, and Equity Trust—have forged a conservation easement that will allow the Cashens to buy 69 acres at agricultural value, while preserving about 330 acres of the old dairy farm.

A slice of New York State’s recent infusion of $20 million to protect Hudson Valley farmland, as well as matching funds from Scenic Hudson, will purchase the development rights on the property, so the seller will receive market value.

But young farmers are still struggling. New York State’s $20 million for Hudson Valley farmland pays only for the purchase of development rights. “Which is a huge disappointment for us, because if it’s just going to protect land from development, that is not sufficient to keep farmers in the valley,” Shute says.

It’s a bumpy landscape. 

Migliorelli preserved his family’s 132-acre farmstead in 1995. It was one of seven farms in Red Hook, in Dutchess County, that Scenic Hudson preserved all at once, totaling about 1,000 acres, in its first critical mass approach to land protection. “We zeroed in on Red Hook, because that’s where there was the greatest farmer receptivity,” Rosenberg says. But the process took years.

“Some people who were new to this concept didn’t like hearing about it. They didn’t want anything to infringe on their right to develop,” Migliorelli says. “But to me, to preserve these prime farmlands for future generations is a necessity.” Dutchess County adopted its first Agricultural and Farmland Protection Plan in 1998. In 2003, Red Hook approved a $3.5 million bond initiative for the purchase of development rights; in 2007, it passed a Community Preservation Act, which allows the use of a transfer tax on real estate to fund easements. 

By now, Red Hook has protected 60 percent of its farmland. Migliorelli drives around the flat sandy fields where he grows all that food for New York City. “When Hurricane Irene hit and dumped 17 inches of rain in the area, there were farms that lost 100 percent of their crop. I had 80 to 90 percent of a crop, because the soils here have good drainage. That would have been all developed in that real estate boom after 9/11.”  

Anne Raver writes about the environment, including gardening and farming, wildlife habitats, and landscape design.

The things our art director, Chris McGee, hated to leave out of the current issue of LAM.

Photo by Frederick Charles/fcharles.com.

From “A Foodshed Moment” by Anne Raver in the December 2016 issue, the story of the Hudson Valley’s struggle to balance real estate hunger for farmland estates with the need for cropable acres to feed New York City (pictured are Katie and Chris Cashen on their farm).

“Farming is in the family…”

–CHRIS MCGEE, LAM ART DIRECTOR

You can read the full table of contents for December 2016 or pick up a free digital issue of the December LAM here and share it with your clients, colleagues, and friends. As always, you can buy this issue of Landscape Architecture Magazine at more than 700 bookstores, including many university stores and independents, as well as at Barnes & Noble. You can also buy single digital issues for only $5.25 at Zinio or order single copies of the print issue from ASLA. Annual subscriptions for LAM are a thrifty $59 for print and $44.25 for digital. Our subscription page has more information on subscription options. 

BY ZACH MORTICE

All photos by Jose Ahedo.

Over the course of two years, the Spanish architect Jose Ahedo visited livestock farming landscapes in eight countries: Mongolia, China, Paraguay, Germany, India, Bolivia, New Zealand, and the Azores Islands in Portugal. He traveled 90,000 miles by plane, 9,000 miles by car, 23 miles by boat, nine miles by horse and camel, and—most excruciatingly for a vertigo sufferer like Ahedo—56 miles by hot air balloon. Documented through his photography and funded by a $100,000 Harvard Graduate School of Design Wheelwright Prize Fellowship, his travels kept him on the move for 103,000 miles.

Ahedo selected these disparate locations so that he could witness the extreme “asymmetry,” he says, in how cultures in different places with different levels of development produce livestock. “You have people that move on horses, and people that move in helicopters,” he says.

And those are just two of the ways livestock farmers use mobility to make their living. A strong subtheme of his research is the multitude of ways farmers move themselves and their livestock. They establish circulation patterns every bit as attuned to their local ecological economy as the migratory habits of an animal. Each of these mobility patterns has intense landscape ramifications, whether it’s the floating aquaculture villages of southern China that require regular commutes between sea and land, or the movement of traditional Mongolian herders who range over vast distances on horseback and motorbike. In New Zealand farms, nearly every plant and animal was imported from continents away, while in the Azores Islands, tiny mountainous dairy plots make milking a movable feast. Of all this movement, Ahedo says, “It’s something that you need to do in order to survive. It’s very Darwinian. You move or you die.”

Ahedo’s research, presented at Harvard as “Domesticated Grounds: Design and Domesticity Within Animal Farming Systems,” confronts bizarrely opposed, parallel tracks of contemporary agriculture: the increasing depersonalization and mechanization of food production versus the trendy cache of small-scale urban farming. During his Wheelwright presentation, Ahedo detailed plans for mega-scaled Saudi Arabian-owned farms that grow alfalfa in South America that’s then shipped to dairy cow farms in Africa, which produce milk for the Middle East. It’s transnational farming delocated from any local understanding of native ecologies, and it is its own unique species of migratory farming. On the other hand, there’s the cilantro in your taco that came from an ultra-localized small-scale farm (say, a plot of land near a long-stigmatized former public housing project), held up as a morally righteous way to bring the production of food in line with human habitation.

“Domesticated Grounds” largely dismisses contemporary, Western models of urban farming as romanticized, symbolic acts that are more testimonials to evolved taste than practical ways to feed the growing billions. But Ahedo uncovered many ways livestock is integrated with denser human habitation across the world. “In 1903, there [were] 200,000 horses in New York,” says Ahedo. “There were half a million cattle in London. That’s not a [long time] ago.” The expulsion of livestock from cities “eradicated much of what we knew about food,” Ahedo says. And the parallel technological homogenization of farming divorced it from local culture, and not just vernacular traditions. “It’s also building systems, and how you situate yourself in the landscape,” he says. “Within that culture, there’s a lot of landscape architecture, landscape management, and architecture that’s been lost.”

As expressive as his photography is, Ahedo’s research so far has been purely documentary. But his eventual goal is to better integrate animal livestock landscapes with human habitation and cultures, and he’ll be working on a book or exhibition to articulate this ambition. Back in Spain, Ahedo took some time to narrate the movement of people, livestock, and resources that feed the world, as seen through the lens of his camera.

Mongolia: Every yurt has a solar panel, and they charge a mobile phone and a TV. They move three or four times a year, from a summer [area] to a winter [area]. In the summer [area], there might be five or six areas they move to every three weeks. It depends on how much it rains and how quickly the grass grows. They can [pack up] in 45 minutes.

Everyone has these Chinese motorbikes. Most houses have one or two. They consume [very] little gas. It’s a replacement for the horse. They collect [livestock] at night, [traveling] 10 miles to get them to the yurt again to milk them.

Many people still use horses [for herding]. It’s also a national symbol. There’s a whole culture around horse races. They have two types of horses. One is the kind they ride, and there are others they use to milk. They make a lot of products from horse milk. The [races] are very high-stakes. The jockeys are 14- to 15-year-old kids, because they’re super small. Yaks are in the north, because they [deal better] with the temperature. It can be minus 40 degrees Fahrenheit in the winter. In the south there are more camels. All over Mongolia you have sheep, goats, and horses.

Azores Islands: Dairy farming is a new economy for the Azores. They were mainly focused on orange production. But they had a pest, and it killed all the orange trees, so they established dairy farming 100 years ago. That means you have to adapt territory that’s already being used for a productive system to a completely different system. The land has so many slopes that it has been divided into thousands of microplots that are owned by farmers. There’s no way big companies can get to the Azores and establish themselves because they’d have to buy thousands of microplots.

 Thirty to 50 cows is considered an average size farm. They probably have [plots that are] 5 to 10 hectares. One owner owns three or four plots, and they have to move [between] them. Every farmer owns a mobile milking parlor. The cows and milking machines stay in a plot until the cows have eaten all the grass, and then the animals are moved with the milking parlor to another plot. They milk twice a day, and then they take the milk to collection [depots]. You might have 50 farmers going there twice a day to drop the milk [off.] There are pickups going everywhere. Then [the milk] goes to a processing plant. There are three or four on the island. They sell the milk in Portugal and Europe.

 After each milking, all the machines [are] closed as a security measure. They leave the machines closed with a quite aggressive dog to protect them.

China: There are two types of fish farming. The first one is a pond style, where you modify the landscape, put the fish in, and have a pump that moves the water. It’s a very aggressive landscape intervention, because they may change the path of the river to accommodate it. They usually do it in a bay where they’re protected from tides.

 The other type is houses on top of a huge raft. These [houses] don’t move. They have a wooden grid that stabilizes [them.] They use little boats to take to market and sell the fish. [This kind of farming] is declining, and they’re moving inland. [They grow] crab, tilapia, and mussels.

 This is a private company. They have two security cameras on top of the house. These women were feeding clams.

 The more informal, family-based farms sell in markets right on the coast. The pond [farms] are more industrial, and [the houseboats] are more informal family-based operations. [Aquaculture farmers here] used to spend 100 percent of their time [on water], but now it’s maybe 70 percent. It’s becoming more that you go to work, and then go back to live inland, but there [are] a lot of people also living on the water full-time.  

In Hainan, there’s been a lot of tourist development. It’s an island that has very good weather and nice beaches. It’s like Florida-style tourism. Aquaculture used to be the biggest economy, but right now tourism is growing like crazy.

 New Zealand: New Zealand is probably one of the most productive farming places in the world. I focused on a place called Canterbury Plains and Invercargill. I met professor Steve Wratten from Lincoln University. He’s an ecologist and an expert in biological services. He told me that in all of this landscape, there’s only 0.5 percent native species. All the insects, plants, [and] mammals were not in New Zealand 200 years ago. What this means is that this is probably the ultimate domestic landscape, where you build the whole thing from scratch, from bits and pieces brought from all over the world. So in the end this is a 99 percent synthetic, artificial landscape.

The main [industry is] dairy farms. When you get [up into] mountains, there are more sheep operations. They do deer farming to sell [antler] velvet and horns for traditional Asian medicine.

All the tall hedge plants are imported from California. They’re called Monterey pine, and they’re windbreaks. The sheep are from England and Spain. The dairy cows are from Holland and Germany: Holstein cows. They’re also farming with llamas and alpacas.

BY MARK HOUGH, FASLA

Ten Eyck Landscape Architects reimagines the campus at the University of Texas at El Paso.

FROM THE JANUARY 2017 ISSUE OF LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE

Christine Ten Eyck, FASLA, recalls driving across Arizona in the summer of 2012, talking on the phone with one of her clients at the University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP). It was about a dream project: the opportunity to redesign the landscape of a historic university and create a major open space as its ceremonial heart. On the call, she was making the case to Greg McNicol, the school’s associate vice president for facilities management, that her firm, Ten Eyck Landscape Architects, based in Austin, Texas, should lead the project rather than be subconsultant to an architecture firm as had been the plan. Her argument was simple: The scope of the work was almost entirely landscape architecture.

Ten Eyck successfully persuaded administrators to give her firm the job, even though they were skeptical at first that a landscape architect could lead such a complex project. Notable among the people she won over was Diana Natalicio, who had been hired as UTEP’s first female president in 1988. During her tenure, the school had grown dramatically and become a top research university. Because of her leadership, Time magazine named her as one of the “100 Most Influential People” in the world in 2016.

Natalicio was the main champion of the project, which became known as the Campus Transformation. It ultimately cost around $25 million and opened to the public in the spring of 2015. The new landscape provides the UTEP community with beautifully designed and detailed plazas, lawns, water features, pedestrian ways, and plantings, all displaying the regional and ecologically responsive aesthetic for which Ten Eyck’s firm has become known. Getting there, however, was not easy.

Thousands of tons of boulders were excavated from the site and used on slopes and in drainageways. Photo by Adam Barbe, ASLA.

The school was founded in 1914 as the Texas State School of Mines and Metallurgy. It moved to its current site on the side of a slope overlooking downtown El Paso in 1917. The campus evolved as a car-centric place for commuters, with asphalt roads and parking lots as its defining features. New buildings stepped down the slope with seemingly little thought paid to creating open spaces, forming awkward routes for pedestrians and many leftover, unusable spaces. The functional heart of the university was far different from the classic collegiate imagery of the picturesque quadrangle. Natalicio had long believed that the campus environment did not contribute to the quality of the school. “It seemed far less in tune with its environment than it should,” she says.

The project began in late 2011 when the university released a request for qualifications. A recent master plan by Barnes Gromatzky Kosarek Architects had outlined the project, but, McNicol says, “It just wasn’t a bold enough vision.” The new RFQ would cover conceptual design and cost estimation for nine open spaces in the core of the campus. Although the project area accounts for only 18 of the school’s total 366 acres, it contains the academic, social, and administrative heart of the campus. Tying the transformation to the school’s forthcoming centennial celebration was seen as a good way to get it paid for.

From the beginning, Natalicio understood the project needed to be ambitious if it were to succeed. Administrators knew generally how to improve the campus, but, she says, Ten Eyck “was the key in terms of putting the meat on the skeleton of the ideas” they had formed. “She is a remarkable person,” Natalicio says of Ten Eyck, “and is as driven as I am.”

Ten Eyck went to the campus for the first time on a Friday before the interview and spent the weekend sketching design concepts. “A lot of times you really kick yourself for bringing preconceived ideas to an interview,” she says, “but this time we felt like we really had to go for it.” The sketches helped her get the job along with the architecture firm Lake|Flato, with which she had teamed on this and other projects. They also look remarkably similar to what was eventually built.

The heart of the parking-focused campus was transformed into an ecologically rich public space. Image courtesy of Multivista Construction Documentation.

The concept plan was centered on the goals of creating a pedestrian-oriented campus and re-establishing the landscape’s native ecology. Although earlier plans had suggested restricting vehicles in the campus core, Ten Eyck’s proposal went a step further and eliminated them altogether. Broad, tree-lined pedestrian corridors replaced the network of roads with what Ten Eyck describes as “tunnels of shade” running across campus. The signature design element—Centennial Plaza—was envisioned as an approximately two-acre open space dominated by an oval-shaped lawn panel that would create a student-focused activity space while also organizing the disparate arrangement of surrounding buildings.

Ten Eyck also proposed creating a series of arroyos to channel water from the mountains down to the Rio Grande, with smaller swales known as acequias added to collect and direct water from the edges of paths. El Paso averages fewer than 10 inches of rain per year, and when it does rain, it comes down hard and is gone quickly. “Having lived in the desert, I appreciate every little drop we get,” Ten Eyck says. “We wanted to let the water soak in, and to create these special places.” Rebuilding the natural drainage patterns would allow people to become more connected to the landscape and to the water that shapes it.

For Natalicio, adapting this ecologically focused mind-set would help the university “really walk the talk on environmental stewardship.” Nearly 100 years of campus construction had replaced the native desert vegetation with pavement, patches of sloped, unusable turf, and generic nursery plants. Most of the stormwater had been directed off-site through gutters and underground pipes. This project presented the opportunity to correct that. “Christy’s work and her sensitivity to the fragility and resilience of the desert environment made her the ideal person for the project,” she says.

Image courtesy of Ten Eyck Landscape Architects, Inc.

Unlike its Texas counterparts Dallas and Houston, El Paso is not a hub for high-profile design. It has a population of almost 700,000 people and is situated at the far western tip of the state next to Ciudad Juárez—the large city on the Mexico side of the Rio Grande border. For centuries, the two cities were combined as part of the El Paso del Norte (the Pass to the North) region, but were split bi-nationally as part of the 1848 treaty that ended the Mexican–American War. A 15-foot-high border control fence now separates them, but the two municipalities still share deep cultural and economic connections. Thousands of people legally cross back and forth across the border every day.

The landscape of the region is dry and craggy and cast in muted shades of gray and brown. There is hardly anything green, and it can all appear rather bleak to those used to being surrounded by trees. El Paso sits in the Chihuahuan Desert and climbs the lower slopes of the adjacent Franklin Mountains. It is a tough environment—one that likely inspires more poets and novelists than travel writers. At dusk, however, when the setting sun paints the surrounding hills orange and purple, the beauty of the city’s desert context becomes undeniable.

The city itself is not particularly beautiful in any traditional sense. From above it appears as a sprawling mass of strip malls and suburban developments spread across the valley floor. At ground level, there is little in the way of parks or public open space readily found within city limits. The built landscape consists largely of concrete, asphalt, and bland architecture. Many of the city’s most interesting buildings have been built at UTEP, which had spent far more money on the design of its architecture than its landscape. Most of its buildings display the Bhutanese style of architecture. That’s right, Bhutanese.

The school is proud of its architectural heritage. The inspiration for it came from the wife of the school’s first dean and an article on Bhutan she had seen in a 1914 issue of National Geographic Magazine. Although the buildings do appear a bit kitsch and overdone when you first see them, the style, as exemplified by massive battered walls, low-pitched red tile roofs, and narrow punched windows, actually fits well into the desert context. The consistency in scale and materials also establishes a unique and cohesive identity for the campus far more than the designed landscape ever did. Ten Eyck says her impression of the campus on her first visit was that “the last thing they needed was more buildings; they needed landscape architecture.”

After a successful fund-raising campaign, Ten Eyck’s firm was hired to get the project designed and built, but still as subconsultant to Lake|Flato. By this point, the scope of work had been reduced from the nine planned open spaces to five. The architecture was limited to one shade structure, which prompted Ten Eyck to make the call to McNicol. She showed administrators the résumé of her senior project manager, Kent Sundberg, ASLA, who had come to Austin from Philadelphia, where he had previously worked at Wallace Roberts & Todd. “The best thing I ever did was to hire someone like Kent,” she says. His experience managing complex projects assured them the firm could do the work.

Ten Eyck put together a large team of 12 subconsultants. Along with typical firms such as lighting, irrigation, sustainability, and engineering, Biohabitats was hired for its stormwater expertise, and Tom Ryan, FASLA, of the Waltham, Massachusetts, firm Ryan Associates was brought on to provide peer review and offer advice on the set of technically complex construction documents. “When you’re small like we are,” she says, “you draw on resources where you can.”

Site construction began in the spring of 2013 but quickly stalled once engineers realized the scope of utility work had been grossly underestimated. McNicol says many of the campus utilities had been installed in the 1930s and were crumbling. Nearly everything beneath the nearly 12-acre site needed to be replaced—adding a year to the construction schedule. “Those were the dark days,” remembers Ten Eyck. “Every time we dug, we found some new surprise.”

Another shock came when the general contractor requested that someone from Ten Eyck’s office be on site seven days a week through the duration of construction. The contractor had far more experience constructing buildings than landscapes and was not comfortable with the intricacies and precision of the design’s detailing.

Ten Eyck set up a team of four people, led by Sundberg, to oversee construction. They would be at UTEP five days a week, and Lewis Wright, a landscape architect in El Paso, was hired to be on call on weekends. Ten Eyck remained active throughout the whole project and visited the site often, as well. She keeps her firm between 10 and 13 people, and this project significantly stretched its workload. Not only would someone need to be in El Paso every day of the week, but there would be one fewer person in Austin working on all of the other projects.

Sundberg says working days on the site would start with a kickoff meeting at 7:00 a.m. and last until at least 5:00 p.m. After that, they would have to write a report to prepare for the next morning’s meeting. “It was easily 12- to 14-hour days,” he says. “It was not just managing the project in-house but also managing the entire team.” He estimates working more than 60 hours per week on the campus alone for more than two years. The stress on the firm was significant, and there was turnover among the staff.

The design of the site and plantings better integrates the campus with the surrounding natural landscape. Photo by Adam Barbe, ASLA.

Ten Eyck says in hindsight she should have hired two more people. She, however, could not have predicted the amount of time the project would take. On top of that, they were closing their Phoenix office, which added its own level of stress. “It was just crazy,” she says.

The design elements are grounded in the cultural and ecological history of the site and combine to create an intriguing juxtaposition between polish and rusticity. Ten Eyck’s firm took what they learned from the design process and created an extensive set of design guidelines to ensure consistency for future work on campus.

Everything emanates from the oval at the heart of Centennial Plaza, which was pressed into the earth at one end to make it flat enough to accommodate many uses. A series of concrete seat walls with wide grassy treads make up the grade change, creating an amphitheater of sorts. Amphitheaters can often seem like trite and obvious features, but here the monumental scale makes it all work. Everything in the space reinforces the formal geometry, including stand-alone seat walls and beautifully detailed water features.

In contrast to the precision of these elements, roughly laid boulder walls help to transition the deceptively steep slope. Large, local andesite boulders are interspersed with desert plants to visually tie the project to the surrounding mountains. Sundberg estimates that more than 12,000 tons of boulders were excavated from under some four acres of removed asphalt and reused on site. The same demolition process, he says, produced approximately 230 tons of concrete paving that was used to create the pervious surface along many of the paths. Slabs of concrete were placed within fields of decomposed granite to emulate the precedent of stone plazas seen in both Bhutan and Mexico. “It was an excuse to reuse all of this paving that kids had walked on since the 1930s,” Ten Eyck says.

As with many of the firm’s other projects, weathered steel is used to great effect across the site. Particularly good examples are the simple, elegant footbridges placed across the swales and acequias to facilitate the cross circulation of people and water. The guardrails on a larger bridge are detailed as woven rebar to mimic a straw bridge Ten Eyck had seen in a photograph from Bhutan. The steel is also used to create large fire bowls in gathering areas overlooking Centennial Plaza, making the spaces comfortable and popular on cool evenings.

Sketches for the initial interview for the campus project established the project’s concept. Image courtesy of Ten Eyck Landscape Architects, Inc.

Not all of the applications are as successful, however. The 40-foot-high poles used to light the expansive lawn, which Ten Eyck selected because they reminded her of the indigenous ocotillo plant, are interesting as sculptural elements, but because the LED lamps emit such a bright white light, contrasting with the warmer, more ambient lights used elsewhere on site, the lawn feels more like a sports field than a campus space at night.

Light is a big issue during the day, too. Minus a few minutes in the morning and late afternoon, the glare from the sun can be intense. This is exacerbated by the use of light-colored manufactured concrete pavers in many of the walkways. Ten Eyck had wanted to use a richer, darker color, but the lighter pavers were ultimately chosen as a means to reduce the heat island effect.

Shade is an important part of creating comfortable spaces in most hot climates, but it’s particularly critical in the desert. Ten Eyck addressed this problem by planting hundreds of fast-growing native mesquite trees along the walkways that run through campus. They provide relief from the oppressive sun, but also add vibrant ribbons of color that enliven the otherwise muted landscape. The trees support the strategy of planting native and indigenous species to blur the lines between the campus and the surrounding terrain. Ten Eyck said when she started the project, there “was not one plant that looked like it could blow in the breeze.” Now, the diverse plantings add texture and visual interest, while also educating the community on the value of using native species.

Ten Eyck has been thrilled by the positive response she has received from people at UTEP, especially the students. “It means the world to work for a group that is so appreciative,” she says. Of the more than 23,000 students who attend the school, more than 80 percent are Mexican American, and another 5 percent cross the border from Juarez. “It was important to connect them with their culture and the place they’re in,” she says. In 2014, the average annual family income of the graduating class was around $30,000. Providing higher educational opportunities for this population is at the core of UTEP’s mission. The school has been recognized for several years by Washington Monthly magazine as the top school in the country for social mobility—meaning it best succeeds at providing access to college to first-generation and low-income students.

Natalicio says that students use the space “in large numbers day and night, throwing Frisbees, talking to one another, sitting by the water features, in the shade of trees,” and that “families from the surrounding community come in the evening to walk around the oval.” It has become a center of activity for both the campus community and its neighbors. “The campus now has a life that it didn’t have before.”

Mark Hough, FASLA, is the university landscape architect at Duke University. He writes about campuses, cultural landscapes, and professional practice.

BY ALEX ULAM

Nelson Byrd Woltz gets super technical at Hudson Yards.

FROM THE FEBRUARY 2017 ISSUE OF LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE.

Until recently, you wouldn’t have wanted to go strolling at any time of the day near Hudson Yards, the two gigantic superblocks located on the far West Side of Midtown Manhattan. There was little street life there and almost no nature. Barbed-wire fences and concrete walls lined the streets and concealed the large, sooty pits packed with commuter and Amtrak trains. Indeed, everything about the place was man-made, even the hilly landscape surrounding the train yards below. Walking around was disorienting because the walls cut off view corridors and limited access to Midtown Manhattan and the adjacent Hudson River Park.

Now this formerly desolate expanse is being transformed by a $25 billion private real estate development, which the Related Companies, the project’s developer, is touting as the largest private build-out in the United States and the biggest in New York City since Rockefeller Center. In place of two gaping holes in the city’s fabric, there will be a 28-acre neighborhood with offices, apartments, and more than 100 stores and restaurants. In a sense, this development, where a projected 125,000 people will live and work, is being created from scratch. Decks made of concrete and steel suspended over the rail yards are providing platforms for much of the 18 million square feet of commercial and residential space that is being built.

Construction is already well under way on the Eastern Yard, slated for completion in 2018. One looming, shimmering glass tower already is complete, and others are under construction, including 30 Hudson Yards, an office building that will be the second tallest in the city. The buildings are being individually designed by leading architecture firms such as Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates (KPF), Diller Scofidio + Renfro, and the Rockwell Group. This seemingly no-expense-spared development is intended to wow, and it features iconic architecture such as a curved Art Wall designed by James Carpenter Design Associates. There also is an enormous retractable performance structure known as the Shed, which expands out into the plaza on rollers to provide an indoor venue for performances. Tying the disparate grouping together and softening the impact of the vertiginous skyline is five acres of plazas and gardens being designed by Nelson Byrd Woltz Landscape Architects (NBW).

Hudson Yards is touted as the largest private build-out in the United States—and among the biggest in New York since Rockefeller Center. Image courtesy of Michael Moran.

The multilevel landscape designed for the Eastern Yard includes garden terraces, a streetside plaza with a forest of birch trees for one of the entrances to the High Line, and a plaza at the site of a new subway station for the 7 train, which the city paid more than $2 billion to build. The main event is the elevated plaza known as the Public Square, which rests atop the platform that covers the trains. Plans call for 1,650 plantings and 200 mature trees and include wind- and shade-resistant species such as large-canopied black tupelo trees. The signature elements will include a 200-foot-long S-curved fountain sculpted to create a natural current like that of a river. Entwined elliptical bands of granite will counterpoint the hard-angled shapes of the buildings and provide continuity to a landscape that transitions from perennial beds to a more wooded area north of the site. At the center of the crisscrossing ellipses, there will be a $150 million undulating sculpture called Vessel by the London-based designer Thomas Heatherwick. This 600-ton spectacle, which looks wrought by M. C. Escher, consists of a series of staircases 15 stories high.

Public open space is a key selling point for the Hudson Yards. At the public review process in 2007 that preceded the award of the contract for the site to the Related Companies, the five different developers bidding all highlighted elaborate plans by prominent landscape architects in which the public space was emphasized more than the buildings. To comply with city zoning, the current plan calls for about 40 percent of the site to be public space open to the sky and 15 percent to be enclosed space.

But figuring out how to move from glossy concept plans to building an actual landscape atop a platform, which at its center is suspended 30 to 34 feet above the train tracks, has been a surgical undertaking. What makes this site especially distinctive is that the platforms and most of the buildings at the site are in a sense one structure supported by 300 caissons drilled into bedrock between the railroad tracks below. In fact, only one of the buildings rests completely on actual terra firma.

Image courtesy of Nelson Byrd Woltz.

Since winning the contract to develop the site, executives at Related repeatedly changed their minds about what type of landscape design they wanted and which landscape architecture firm they wanted to design it. In fact, Related went through West 8 and Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates before deciding to host an invited competition in 2012, in which NBW, OLIN, and Sasaki were invited to participate.

“Originally, our model was Bryant Park,” says Michael Samuelian, a vice president of the Related Companies, referring to the famous midtown park in back of the main branch of the New York Public Library. But he says that NBW’s design for Citygarden in St. Louis ended up being an inspiration for the Public Square at the Eastern Yard. “We had thought that we were creating a green landscape in the middle of these towers, and what it has turned into is much more European,” he says, noting that aside from Citygarden, “we have actually had a hard time finding precedents in the U.S. for really good urban plazas. [Hudson Yards] can be a precedent for creating a great urban landscape that is not dependent upon grass.”

One reason for the changes was that it soon became apparent that it would not be technically feasible for the platform to support a green, parklike landscape without compromising the connections to the adjacent number 7 train and the High Line. “The platform required so much stuff, and if it were to have become too much of a landscape, we would have had to build up the platform so much higher than it is now,” says Marianne Kwok, a director at KPF, which designed several buildings at the site. “What we really wanted was permeability, and it also seems like, on the Eastern Yard, having something that was parklike was not appropriate.”

Another example of how drastically plans changed along the way is that key elements from NBW’s winning competition entry were scrapped. “We were constructing a landscape where no landscape exists, so one would assume that it is devoid of culture, history, or ecology,” Thomas Woltz, FASLA, a principal of NBW, told me during a visit to his Manhattan office. Woltz, who was wearing a tie and a fitted, white button-down shirt on a boiling August day, had a genteel calm about him that might come from the time he spends at his firm’s other office in Charlottesville, Virginia. As we spoke about his experiences with the project, it became apparent that his patience and intellectual curiosity were key to his success. “A site that didn’t even exist is still a place of history, culture, and ecology,” he told me. “So the basis of our design was one that revealed and honored these stories.”

To better understand the site’s history, Woltz had included on his design team the urban historian Jill Jonnes, the author of Conquering Gotham, A Gilded Age Epic: The Construction of Penn Station and Its Tunnels, and he delved into archives about the  history of the yards. Woltz says that one of the primary inspirations for the original design was the building of the tunnel from the yards to New Jersey underneath the Hudson River for the Pennsylvania Railroad in the 19th century. At the time, the tunnel was considered on par with other engineering achievements such as the Suez Canal and the Transcontinental Railroad. There is no evidence of that approach in the current plans. “Here the design doesn’t really relate to the history,” Woltz says. “It is sort of heartbreaking for me, because it got us so far.”

Image courtesy of Related-Oxford. Based on a graphic by Bryan Christie Design.

However, although the design of the Eastern Yard does not take its cues directly from the tunnel, it honors the memory of the engineering marvel. The plaza at the Eastern Yard may be one of the most complex and high-tech works of landscape ever designed in New York City. To stitch the site into the surrounding street grid, the slab underneath had to be graded and some of the streets elevated. Patrick Cullina, the horticulture consultant for the project, and previously vice president of horticulture and park operations for the High Line, says that the shade, shallow soil, and wind conditions at the Eastern Yard make it one of the most challenging sites that he has ever worked on. “You got the sense that nothing on Earth lives in those conditions,” he says. “With these constructed landscapes, you are looking at tolerances—what plants can adapt to these nontraditional positions.”

Because of the special challenges the site presented, Woltz told the Related Companies that it was imperative that his firm be involved at an earlier stage in the development process and in a more comprehensive way than is typical for landscape architects. He says his design staff members also had to educate themselves about areas outside their immediate expertise, such as engineering, thermodynamics, and physics. “When we started the project, a lot of people said, ‘We won’t need to see you for two or three years,’” he says. “But this was rarely charted territory for landscape architects, and as we began the construction documentation phase, it became evident that we needed to have a coordination role.”

Being involved at an early stage also allowed the designers to prioritize the landscape elements and the pedestrian experience throughout the site. Along with the planting beds and the pathways, NBW was responsible for doglegs of West 31st and West 32nd Streets, which will defy Manhattan’s street grid by curving into the plaza and site from 11th Avenue and emptying out onto West 33rd Street. Because the development is private, it also doesn’t have to abide by city transportation regulations that require curbs, gutters, and standard street widths. Thus, the designers were free to establish a different type of relationship between cars and pedestrians, similar to that of the Piazza del Campidoglio in Rome, by putting the streets at grade with pedestrian pathways that run through the site and demarcating their boundaries with bollards instead of curbs.

A rendering of Hudson Yards looking north. Rendering by Visual House/Hudson Yards (foreground), design by Nelson Byrd Woltz, Hudson Boulevard Park (beyond), design by MVVA.

Unlike the insular tower-in-the-park model of times past, the Public Square also takes into account its surroundings by establishing connections with the other new, high-profile parks on the city’s West Side: the High Line to its south, and Hudson River Boulevard and Park, under construction directly to the north. When it is complete, the plaza at the Eastern Yard will serve as the hub of a walkable green corridor that extends from the base of the High Line in the Meatpacking District up through Hudson Yards to Hudson Boulevard and ending at West 42nd Street. “Civilians are not going to know the difference between Hudson Boulevard and this park,” Related’s Samuelian declares. “It is going to be one landscape experience.”

There was no textbook strategy for designing the type of landscape that the Related Companies and NBW ultimately decided to build at Hudson Yards. Along with the engineering challenges, the development team had goals to build one of the most sustainable landscapes in New York City. The landscape on the plaza will be fertilized with food-service organic waste from the buildings in the development that will be processed with grinders, dehydrators, and bioreactors. The roofs and plazas also are designed to catch every drop of rainwater that falls on them. The rainwater will be stored in a 60,000-gallon cistern within the slab and used for mechanical operations and to irrigate the plant beds. And although the design does feature raised planters in places, most of the trees and plantings will be placed at grade in large beds of sand-based structural soil to ensure longevity. In contrast to a typical New York City street tree, which has fewer than 100 square feet of soil, each large-canopied tree here will have on average 1,500 square feet of soil. And instead of a series of retaining walls, the design provides large columns with substantial voids that allow soil communication between different planting levels so that root growth will not be impeded.

Many of the aboveground landscape design decisions called for tinkering inside the slab. One of the biggest challenges was finding a way to lower the slab’s temperature so that the city’s increasingly frequent heat waves would not kill off the plant life that in many places is literally embedded within the platform. A ventilation system consisting of 15 large fans comparable in size to jet engines is embedded in the platform to remove the heat generated by covering over the trains and also to provide fresh air to the tracks below. But the ventilation system is not enough to cool the platform and the landscape that rests on top of it. Tests show that the top of the slab can reach temperatures of 105 degrees Fahrenheit during a heat wave, and heat generated by the trains below can cause the bottom of the slab to reach 150 degrees. Because of these unusual conditions, the plant roots above the slab would be in danger of baking.

To ensure plant survival, NBW teamed up with Pine & Swallow Environmental Services and developed what in effect is an air-conditioning system for the roots. The relatively novel approach required threading the planted areas with tubes of cooled glycol, a viscous liquid that holds temperature and cools plant beds. Robert Pine, FASLA, the director of environmental planning and engineering at Pine & Swallow, says although the glycol system uses a lot of energy, there was no alternative. “It is a unique situation, largely because of the scale of the heat coming up below and in terms of the actual temperature of the slab,” he says. “As an environmentalist, I care about not wasting energy, but I tried every other technique, and in the end, there was no other system than a cooling system.”

However, it was a challenge to persuade the Related Companies that the glycol system was essential for the success of the plants. “Related, at first, was like, ‘We are not paying for soil cooling. This is ridiculous [that] you cannot find plants that can adapt to this,’” says Mark Strieter, a senior associate at NBW and one of the project managers. “So we went through a rigorous process modeling it, and finally it came down to proving it to the executives through physics, and you cannot argue with physics. The executives, they got that. They understood it.”

Image courtesy of Arup, Nelson Byrd Woltz, Pine and Swallow, Thornton Tomasetti, and KPF.

Available structural soils such as Silva Cell and CU Soil also didn’t address the conditions at Hudson Yards, so the designers needed to custom design their own planting medium to accommodate large trees that would have no more than four feet of soil depth and plants that would have no more than 18 inches. One example is a sand-based soil for the large root zones underneath the paving. The issue that obviated the use of available products was the weight of the paving over soil. “If you used regular structural soil, you would have to compact it to such a degree that you wouldn’t get root penetration,” says Pine, who adds that the sand-based structural soil solved that problem with its ability both to support the weight of the paving and to allow roots to expand.

The landscape architects had to find space for their fancy glycol cooling system in the slab along with the various building systems such as high-voltage electric lines, drainage, sewage pipes, and the enormous cistern for stormwater. As the design advanced, it became apparent that costly changes in the design of the slab were going to be necessary to accommodate the landscape design and to bridge the changes in grade necessary to connect to the streets that border the site and to the High Line. These costly changes involved switching the design in places from a plate girder system to a standard steel framing and from precast concrete to set-in-place concrete and metal deck to allow more flexibility in adjusting the platform’s thickness. “Generally, it would just be plate girders, but that doesn’t allow for the grading,” says Robin Fitzgerald-Green, an associate principal at KPF. Changing the slab’s structure, Fitzgerald-Green adds, “allows us to compress the structural sandwich to a level that we could have the finished grades necessary for paving and planting.”

Perhaps the most striking thing about the design process at the Eastern Yard was the flexibility on the part of the various players. Close collaboration among the many designers, rather than just technical knowledge, was crucial to the project’s success. Early in the design process, there was a forum in which all of the architects working at Eastern Yard met with NBW to discuss the project. “During this conversation, we all decided that Thomas had the hardest job, and that he was kind of the glue that brought this all together,” says Kwok of KPF. “It was so critical for him that the landscape negotiated all these pieces.”

Image courtesy of Related-Oxford. Based on a graphic by Bryan Christie Design.

Diplomacy was critical, too, in dealing with the engineers who worked on the project. “Nobody prevented us from being at the meetings,” Woltz says, “but it was just clarifying that landscape architecture had to be involved in all the decisions in order to make it successful.” Currently, in addition to construction management on the Eastern Yard, NBW is working on the master plan for the Western Yard. Woltz says that being involved at an even earlier stage in the process with the Western Yard should save on unexpected cost overruns.

To Related’s Samuelian, one of the key successes of the landscape at the Eastern Yard lies in what it conceals. “It is not like digging a hole and planting a tree. It is so much more complex than that,” he says. “And this is just one aspect of that—the waterproofing, the stormwater, the soil cooling, the engineering, all of the utilities running in here—there is a phenomenal amount of infrastructure that supports this landscape, but nobody will know that it is there.”

Alex Ulam is a freelance journalist who writes frequently about urban design and landscape architecture.