Category Archives: Plants

Close Encounters

Students in Spain bring the biodiversity of the tree canopy down to the ground.

By Zach Mortice

Designed and built by IAAC students, the observatory is sited to maximize exposure to different tree species.
Designed and built by IAAC students, the observatory is sited to maximize exposure to different tree species. Image by Forest Lab for Observational Research and Analysis (FLORA) © IAAC.

In 2022, a group of 18 students at the Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia (IAAC) had the rare experience of designing and building their own school’s research facility. Rising 30 feet above a hillside site amid the dense forest canopy of Barcelona’s Collserola Natural Park, the Forest Lab for Observational Research and Analysis (FLORA) is a mass timber observation tower that will allow students to observe and catalog the park’s biodiversity, specifically the organisms that make their home in the forest canopy. Continue reading Close Encounters

A Star on the Horizon

Indigenous landscape designer Tim Lehman helps move a master plan and a mission forward.

By Lisa Owens Viani

Lush, Green Vegetation Around Ponds
Volunteers replanted the areas around three large ponds with
native and Indigenous food plants. Photo by Tim Lehman.

After Native Americans occupied Fort Lawton—today part of Seattle’s Discovery Park—in a peaceful protest in the early 1970s, the city negotiated a long-term leaseback of 20 acres of the 534-acre site with the United Indians of All Tribes Foundation. “The land was supposed to be given back to the local tribe from which it was taken, but that didn’t really happen,” says Meghan Jernigan, a traditional medicine program director with United Indians, which led the protest. “There wasn’t a lot of political support, but a growing, cross-cultural coalition made this space thrive and allowed for development of the Daybreak Star Cultural Center.” Continue reading A Star on the Horizon

Home Grown

Refugia  converts homeowners into native plant advocates, one lawn at a time.

By Jared Brey

A well-grown natural habitat lawn
Refugia specializes in transforming lawns into pollinator-friendly habitats. Photo by Kayla Fell for Refugia.

Jeff Lorenz stood under the mid-June sun at FDR Park, monitoring the final touches on his company’s exhibit for the Philadelphia Flower Show. The exhibit space, ordinarily an asphalt parking lot, had been covered in mulch and lined with displays, all in the final moments of construction. Continue reading Home Grown

Explorers at Home

Plant-hunting is always in season at the Leach Botanical Garden in Portland, Oregon, the storybook base of the botanist Lilla Leach, where Land Morphology has begun a next-century upgrade to the grounds.

By Bradford McKee / Photography by Sahar Coston-Hardy, Affiliate ASLA

Man standing with his back to the camera on a trail through the garden.
A path leads through a grove of camellias in the Woodland Garden, down to the Leach House next to Johnson Creek.

“We wanted that project so badly,” a friend told me when I mentioned my upcoming visit in May to the Leach Botanical Garden in Portland, Oregon. The Leach Garden is a former private property, about 90 years old as a garden and about 40 years old as a Portland public park.

Continue reading Explorers at Home

Seeding a Wilder Future

A new gorilla conservation campus by MASS Design Group and TEN x TEN is a laboratory for reforestation.

By Timothy A. Schuler

Aerial photo of Fossey Center showing landscape and low-lying buildings with green roofs.
The experimental landscape at the new Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund headquarters features plant communities that are critical to mountain gorillas’ survival. Photo by Iwan Baan.

The plan was ambitious, even by MASS Design Group standards. For the headquarters of the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund, the world’s foremost mountain gorilla conservation organization, the designers envisioned a series of lily pad-like buildings nestled into a landscape made up of plant communities drawn almost exclusively from the gorillas’ native habitat in Rwanda’s Volcanoes National Park.

Continue reading Seeding a Wilder Future

Book Review: Gone Feral

A review of Natura Urbana: Ecological Constellations in Urban Space by Matthew Gandy.

By Anjulie Rao

Cover of the book Natura Urbana, showing a wild plant on an urban lot.

There are more than 30,000 vacant lots in the city of Chicago—remnants of urban renewal’s disastrous execution and disinvestment. Where buildings once stood, acres of new life have emerged. Many of those empty lots have become overgrown—small prairies where remnants of building foundations peek out from plots of seeding grasses; thick, tender lamb’s-quarter; and purple flowering chicory. The lots are home to rats, skunks, raccoons, and the occasional possum. Chicago, like many postindustrial cities, grapples with how to develop these spaces, calling them wastelands. Continue reading Book Review: Gone Feral

Weed Whackers

For habitat restoration and invasives control on sensitive sites, goats are a natural.

By Katharine Logan

Three hundred goats help Caltrans restore habitat at the foot of Big Sur. Photo by Katherine Brown.

How often does it happen that when a landscape maintenance crew starts mowing brush or clearing weeds, office workers leave their desks and head outside to watch, grandparents make an outing of it with their grandkids, neighbors sit out on their front porches where they can see, or people driving down a highway stop to find out more? If you said “never,” you don’t know goats. Continue reading Weed Whackers