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

In this dispatch of the Queue, we tiptoe through the tweets of May, contemplate a trip to the high desert, and willingly give ourselves over to the United States Geological Service.

CATCHING UP WITH…

• Brian Sawyer, ASLA, is featured on the cover of the June Architectural Digest for Bette Midler’s penthouse.
• The Benjamin Franklin Parkway in Philadelphia, lately featured in our January issue, is getting some attention as a cultural corridor. This slightly dizzying flyover map makes the case for the BFP as a Champs-Elysées meets Pennsylvania Avenue-style grand avenue.
• Multiple ASLA award winner Bayer Landscape Architecture will be working on the Cultural Landscape Report for Frank Lloyd Wright’s Darwin Martin house in Buffalo, New York. The CLR, to be produced in consultation with the Cultural Landscape Foundation, will be the first step in the planned restoration of the grounds.

FIELD STUDIES

• Sweden has dramatically dropped its pedestrian mortality rates to the lowest in the world. Its Vision Zero plan has advocates here who are finally getting their voices heard.
• Dredge meets UNESCO World Heritage site in Groundcondition’s Jacques Abelman’s plan for adapting Venice, Italy, to the coming sea-level rise, via World Landscape Architecture.
• Podcastorians can listen in on the latest episode from the Exploring Environmental History series on “Origins, entanglements, and civic aims of the early forestry movement in the United States.”
• The USGS is really killing it this month. First they released the awesome Soil Mapping Project, and now we have news of a new crowdsourcing app to map the impact of climate change on the coasts, called “iCoast—Did the Coast Change?”

OUT AND ABOUT

• Folks continue to throw roses at West 8’s Governors Island. The 30-acre park opens for business and pleasure this summer.
• The completely wonderful and slightly mysterious art organization, High Desert Test Sites, has a new show/installation opening on May 31 in Pioneertown, California, near Joshua Tree. The project, Gradually / We Became Aware / Of a Hum in the Room by Halsey Rodman is described as a “temporally distributed architectural structure conceived for two locations.”
• The New York Botanical Garden has a new exhibition, titled Groundbreakers: Great American Gardens & The Women Who Designed Them, and a not-to-be-missed symposium planned for June 20, 2014.  Women and the City: From a Landscape Perspective will feature Thaisa Way, Sonja Dümpelmann, Susannah Drake, Mary Woods, and Linda Jewell. 

DISTRACT ME FROM MY DEADLINE DEPT., TWITTER EDITION

Everything goes horribly wrong when the park designer just Googles the guy the city wants to memorialize http://t.co/SP6EsOBHJz #landarch

— Denise Pinto (@denisepinto) May 29, 2014