Posted in ASLA, ECOLOGY, ENVIRONMENT, FEATURES, GARDENS, PLANNING, PLANTS, RESEARCH, RESILIENCE, SOIL, SPECIES, WATER, WILDLIFE, tagged Andropogon, ASLA Honor Award, ASLA Landscape Architecture Firm Award, Avalon Park & Preserve, BioBlitz, birds, business, Carol Franklin, Center for Sustainable Landscapes, Chestnut Hill, climate change, Colin Franklin, Darren Damone, David Barnett, Design Workshop, Drexel University, ECOLOGY, Emily McCoy, Green Roof, habitat, Ian McHarg, Integrative Research Division, INVASIVE SPECIES, José Almiñana, Journal of Green Building, Katharine Griffiths, Korman Quad, landscape architect, Landscape Architecture, landscape design, Lauren Mandel, Laurie Olin, Leslie Sauer, marsh, Metropolitan Paradise: The Struggle for Nature in the City, native plants, New York, Paul Simons, Paul Simons Foundation, Perelman Plaza, Philadelphia, Phipps Conservatory and Botanical Gardens, PRACTICE, Research, Richard Piacentini, Rolf Sauer, SEEDdesign, Shoemaker Green, SITES v2 Rating System, soil, sound mapping, Stony Brook, stormwater, SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry, Tom Amoroso, University of Pennsylvania, wetland, Yaki Miodovnik on September 26, 2019|
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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.
BY JARED BREY / PHOTOGRAPHY BY SAHAR COSTON-HARDY, AFFILIATE ASLA
Darren Damone, ASLA, and Katharine Griffiths were standing on a boardwalk at Avalon Park & Preserve, in Stony Brook, New York, looking across the pond at a gang of cormorants loitering in the branches of a beech tree.
“They used to nest over here, and it was a disaster zone,” said Griffiths, the director of the preserve. “It used to smell like a bluefish factory. It was nasty. They did a lot of damage to the trees in this area.… That’s what happens. They strip the leaves to put in their nest, and then their guano is so acidic that it just burns everything. They’re kind of sloppy birds.”
It was a May morning, and the squealing songs of cardinals spilled out of the woods behind us. We took a curving path up a hill to a smaller pond, fed by what looked like an underground stream, and I asked, credulously, where the headwaters were.
“This is just recirculating,” Damone said, looking amused. “This is completely created.”
In 1996, before the preserve existed, Paul Simons, a local nature lover who liked to ride his bike on a path through the property, was struck by a car on Long Island and killed. In his honor, the Simons family created the Paul Simons Foundation, and bought the eight-acre property that would later become Avalon Park & Preserve. Griffiths was a friend of the Simons family and had just finished college in Ontario, studying political science and horticulture, and she moved to Stony Brook to lead the preserve. Creating the preserve was a way for the Simons family to grieve, she said, and it was meant to be a place that Paul would have wanted to be. Beyond that, she told me later, “We didn’t have a vision, really.”
So it turned to Andropogon, the Philadelphia-based landscape architecture firm, to create (more…)
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