A monthly roundup of the news, dispatches, and marginalia that caught our eye.

In this dispatch of the Queue, the staff steps gingerly over the four million Earth Day press releases and the Frederick Law Olmsted birthday doodles to read about urban drawing, urban light, and soil science.

FIELD STUDIES

• Sandy Isenstadt’s piece in Places on urban light is so good it made us want to do a whole issue about light and landscape.
  
• Landscape architects weigh in with thoughts on drawing badly, thoughts on drawing well, and how it all works out either way.
  
• A new soils blog from the Soil Science Society of America answers questions from the public about all things dirt.
  
• Chicagoans got a kick out of watching the 100-year-old Ashland Bridge get moved and repurposed as part of the city’s new multimodal Bloomingdale Trail development.

OUT AND ABOUT

• Dumbarton Oaks hosts the 2014 Garden and Landscape Symposium, Sound and Scent in the Garden, May 9–10, 2014.
•  The Architectural League of New York and Columbia University’s GSAPP will host The Five Thousand Pound Life: The Energy Issue, a symposium on energy and architecture, on Saturday, May 10, 2014, at 2:00 p.m.
• The exhibition on the architect Lebbeus Woods, which has already developed a cult following after stops in San Francisco and Michigan, alights briefly at New York’s Drawing Center for a stay from April 17 to June 15, 2014.

DISTRACT ME FROM MY DEADLINE DEPT.

• The treehouse you always dreamed about as a kid, on steroids.
• A little something for your tree fetish.