BY TIMOTHY A. SCHULER

In Chicago, an urban farm muscles in on an award-winning landscape.

From the May 2016 issue of Landscape Architecture Magazine.

Not long after the landscape went in, the farm began encroaching. The black-eyed Susans were replaced by herbs. The shining sumac and Indiangrass were dug up to make way for chickens. And a copse of Skyrocket oaks, which screened the residential building’s parking lot from a traffic-choked section of Chicago’s Ogden Avenue, was next on the chopping block.

Mimi McKay, ASLA, the landscape architect for the project, known as Harvest Commons, got a call from Dave Snyder, the staff gardener. “Dave said that he was gonna build a chicken run and that he was gonna remove the oak trees to do it, and I had an absolute cow,” McKay recalls. “I said, ‘You absolutely cannot remove them—and you don’t have to remove them.’”

McKay, the principal at McKay Landscape Architects in Chicago, saved the oaks, but other landscape elements—elements that played a significant role in making the Harvest Commons courtyard inviting and beautiful, even during the bleak Chicago winter—have been lost, victims of an urban agriculture program that’s just too popular.

According to Nadia Underhill, the director of real estate development for Heartland Housing, which owns the property, the 3,500-square-foot garden produced nearly 1,000 pounds of fruit and vegetables in its second summer, with more than a third of residents actively participating in the garden at some point throughout the year. The farm’s success has been a feather in the cap of the housing project, which, led by Landon Bone Baker Architects, involved the conversion of a landmarked 1930s hotel on the city’s Near West Side into apartments for formerly homeless people.

Much of McKay’s original landscape, which won an Honor Award from the Illinois Chapter of ASLA in 2015, remains intact. But some of the changes will alter occupants’ experience of the space. Taller plantings near the building had helped mitigate the abrupt change in height from the courtyard to the six-story former hotel, and grasses and evergreens had provided visual interest all year. The net effect of the changes is a landscape that is more piecemeal than originally designed and, at least in the winter, somewhat more barren.

McKay had also envisioned a linkage between the landscape’s pollinator-friendly plants and the urban farm, but fewer perennials means fewer pollinators. “I think that is something that needs to be weighed,” McKay says. “You are removing flowers and things that attract bees and butterflies. The vegetables aren’t necessarily attracting them.”

Given the success of the agricultural program, McKay says making a fuss over the removal of a few plants could seem trifling. But how to properly plan for the divergent needs of productive and other types of landscapes is increasingly relevant as housing developers, school districts, and others experiment with edible landscapes.

April Philips, FASLA, a principal at April Philips Design Works, says a number of developers in the San Francisco Bay Area have begun to integrate community gardens into their projects. Most, however, are unaware of the amount and complexity of maintenance required, and Philips has talked some clients out of the idea. “We’ve got a lot of people latching onto it in a faddish way, instead of in a realistic way,” says Philips, the author of 2013’s Designing Urban Agriculture. “Those are the ones that will fail.”

Harvest Commons faces the opposite problem, with demand exceeding available space. A similar situation has played out at Bud Clark Commons (see “Off the Street,” LAM, February 2014), an ASLA award-winning supportive-services building in Portland, Oregon. “They were saying that the herb and horticulture part of it actually could have been bigger,” says Carol Mayer-Reed, FASLA, a principal at Mayer/Reed, which designed the landscape. “They’ve pretty much filled out the space that we allocated—and added some portable planters.”

Although the edible landscape at Bud Clark Commons is separate from its entry courtyard, and limited to a second-floor terrace, Mayer-Reed knows well the benefits a landscape can offer the sorts of people served by projects such as Bud Clark Commons, whose courtyard features fragrant, seasonal plantings to provide occupants with a sense of calm. Like McKay, Mayer-Reed has insisted on staying involved with the project. “We’re saying, we care about [this space] as much as you do,” she says. “Please involve us. Even if it’s a small detail.”

The Detroit-area landscape architect Kenneth Weikal, ASLA—whose lauded urban garden project, Lafayette Greens, which won an ASLA Honor Award in 2012 for General Design, also has suffered somewhat over the years, owing, in part, to a transition from a corporate sponsor to a nonprofit partner—says designers need to stay involved with projects because they are “the keepers of the big idea. We know all the different ingredients in the soup. And when somebody comes in and says, ‘I think it needs more salt, and I’m gonna add some cheese, and I’m gonna put some Ruffles potato chips in here,’ we can be like, no, no, no, no, no.”

But sometimes changes are necessary, as was the case at Harvest Commons, Underhill says. “We thought that we had enough space in the chicken coop, and that didn’t turn out to be true,” she says of the chicken run, adding that the chicken coop itself was a late addition to the project and that many of the lessons learned at Harvest Commons have helped guide a current project in Madison, Wisconsin, which features a less intensive edible landscape.

Despite ongoing challenges, which include a rift between the maintenance regimes of the farm and the rest of the landscape, both Underhill and McKay seem to view the project as a true model: both a paragon whose ambitions are worth emulating and a prototype whose execution offers opportunities for reflection. “Do I wish they hadn’t torn this stuff out? Yes, I do,” McKay says. “But if you weigh the pros and cons, I would say it’s a remarkable, and remarkably successful, program, so it seems like a small loss.”

Timothy A. Schuler is the editor of Now. He can be reached at timothyaschuler@gmail.com. Follow him on Twitter @Timothy_Schuler.