The things our art director, Chris McGee, hated to leave out of the current issue of LAM.
Photos by Jeff Hou, ASLA, left; and Elizabeth Golden, right.
From “Wash at Will” in the July 2020 issue by Haniya Rae, about handwashing stations serving Seattle’s homeless population that recycle graywater into planters.
In the middle of March, I join a friend for a trip to Tbilisi National Park, one of Georgia’s 15 national parks, and a dense and parallactic forest of mossy Fagus orientalis, Ilex colchica, and Taxus baccata. We search the red-brown carpet for spring flowers: purple Primula vulgaris, chartreuse Helleborus caucasicus, and Petasites albus. We drive through rain showers to the town of Tianeti; we observe highway workers gather under marshrutka (bus) shelters for birzha, the ritual sharing of strong spirits and snacks.
“That does not look like social distancing,” I tell my friend.
We stop at the café in Tianeti village. “Can we get dambal khacho?” I ask. It’s a local mountain blue cheese, served warm on hot bread with ghee. “Shansi ara, axali kanoni!” (No chance, new law!) She brings takeaway instant coffee and cream puffs to the sidewalk.
As we descend the congested Georgian Military Highway in the Aragvi valley toward Tbilisi, hundreds of trucks straddle the verge and pavement, idled cargoes of produce and mineral water from Turkey, Armenia, and Georgia. Drivers sleep, piss, pace, and make repairs; the normal delays at the alpine Georgian–Russian border, now exacerbated by the crisis. I dodge the oncoming cars and curse. On this highway, there’s no margin of error, no guardrails; driving is all wit, no wisdom.
“Don’t go out unless absolutely necessary. If you have a high fever and cough, consult a doctor. We wish you health!” reads an SMS from Mtavroba (the Georgian government). The streets are already empty of cars; only the buzz of mopeds prevails.
In Tbilisi, it is Gizhi Marti (crazy March); the lion and the lamb are fighting every day. Cold Caucasus winds slice the plateaus at night. I wake to silence and snow. Had the city cooled in the slowdown? With fewer cars and a decrease in air pollution, is there now new space in the atmosphere for precipitation? On the news, bearded monks in black Ford F-350s and Toyota Land Cruiser Prados circle Republic Square, scattering holy water in the slush to combat the virus; the first salvo in a split-screen battle over containment and cure, between faith and science, the church and the state. Continue Reading »
The things our art director, Chris McGee, hated to leave out of the current issue of LAM.
Photo by Sahar Coston-Hardy, Affiliate ASLA.
From “All Ours” in the July 2020 issue by Thaïsa Way, FASLA, about the critical and threatened public realm surrounding the White House, and its conversion in June to Black Lives Matter Plaza.
Law in the Land (Interview) The author and legal scholar Jedediah Purdy’s new book, This Land Is Our Land, sifts through
contradictory assumptions about our ties to the environment.
Midas’s Touch (Planning) Conservationists strike an uneasy alliance with a mining company that wants to clean up
and restore habitat near an old gold mine—so it can restart mining operations.
FEATURES
All Ours
A photographic essay of Washington, D.C.’s First Amendment spaces under threat
by the government.
After Extraordinary Conditions With a small landscape architecture practice and a gimlet eye, the author makes her way
around the city of Tbilisi, Georgia, during the coronavirus lockdown.
The full table of contents for July can be found here.
As always, you can buy this issue of Landscape Architecture Magazine at more than 250 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 posting July articles as the month rolls out.
Credits: “All Ours,” Sahar Coston-Hardy, Affiliate ASLA; “After Extraordinary Conditions,” Dina Oganova; “Law in the Land,” courtesy Laura Britton; “Midas’s Touch,” courtesy Midas Gold.
As part of an ongoing effort to make content more accessible, LAM will be making select stories available to readers in Spanish. For a full list of translated articles, please click here.
Phoebe Lickwar, ASLA, and Roxi Thoren, ASLA, have just published an excellent new book, Farmscape: The Design of Productive Landscapes (Routledge, 2020), which should consolidate many stirrings of the past decade in landscape architecture to reclaim a serious purchase on food production after generations of the two realms’ drifting apart. The book speaks into the gaps among where food is made, where it’s needed, and where it’s eaten. The examples pull from history through to recent practice, with the ornamented farm of early 1700s Britain; Frederick Law Olmsted’s Moraine Farm; the urban gardens of Leberecht Migge and Leopold Fischer in Dessau, Germany; and works by Martha Schwartz Partners, Mithun, and Nelson Byrd Woltz.
Just as the book came out, the pandemic began, quickly raising questions about food supplies. There were numerous reports of stalled and wasted produce, dairy, and eggs. Meatpacking plants were struck by outbreaks of COVID-19. LAM asked Lickwar and Thoren to trade notes by e-mail for a week in April about their reactions to the kinds of disruptions emerging, and how more intentional, landscape-driven approaches to food production might avert other disruptions down the line.
The American Gardens stamps. Image courtesy the U.S. Postal Service.
A new series of stamps celebrates the diversity of public gardens.
Showcasing the diversity of American landscapes, past legacies of cultural stewardship, and the skills of generations of landscape architects, the U.S. Postal Service recently released the “American Gardens” stamp series, commemorating 10 landmark gardens across the nation. The gardens, many of them created by historically significant designers and makers, raise the visibility of landscape design in the American cultural realm by putting them into our hands and mailboxes every day, everywhere. The stamps were designed by Ethel Kessler and feature photos by Allen Rokach, a former director of photography at the New York Botanical Garden.
The stamps are a reminder of the vital role the outdoors offers during the COVID-19 quarantine, says U.S. Postal Service Director of Stamp Services Bill Gicker. “Time spent in nature, especially a beautiful and cared for garden landscape, can be very uplifting and rejuvenating—just what many people can use at this time,” he says. Continue Reading »
Ten years ago, this landscape was mowed turf. Photo by Larry Weaner, Affiliate ASLA.
A long-running workshop on native landscapes will move online for the first time.
Foraging for wild ramps to sauté, collecting and sprinkling seeds over a fallow field, watching how annual nurse plants and slower-growing perennials advance and retreat as a native meadow matures. They’re all ideal landscape experiences for the COVID-19 era: remote, contemplative, and socially distant. They’re also squarely in the wheelhouse of Larry Weaner, Affiliate ASLA, and the organization he started 30 years ago, New Directions in the American Landscape (NDAL). Weaner is a highly sought-after meadow designer, and NDAL is an education and ecological design nonprofit that emphasizes native landscapes and minimal maintenance practices. This spring and summer, NDAL will be bringing its long-running workshops online for the first time.
Weaner views designed landscapes and meadows as continually evolving layers of proliferation and withdrawal among native species, where maintenance can be kept to a minimum. These online seminars, which NDAL typically holds twice a year, are rough translations of the “very intensive native design workshops that go into all aspects of integrating ecological restoration into garden design,” Weaner says. But with the need for social distancing and the move online, Weaner elected to host shorter presentations for landscape professionals, and has programmed separate sessions for general audiences. Continue Reading »
