Category: plants
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Principles of Ecological Landscape Design
I’ve been busy reading through the new book ‘Principles of Ecological Landscape Design‘, an interesting addition to the growing literature blending science and design in a practical sense. Author Travis Beck is a landscape architect and currently the Landscape and Gardens Project Manager at the New York Botanical Garden, and he has used his horticultural…
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(RE)Building Coastal Dunes
The goal to stabilize coastal dunes impacted by development is not a new endeavor, but has been made visible recently with the recent impact of Superstorm Sandy on the Eastern Seaboard. The dunes are vital to the overall integrity of coastal zones, elimination of vegetation is often the result of development and other disturbances, and…
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Field Trip: Cal. Academy of Sciences Green Roof
As mentioned previously, got a couple of shots on the road trip last year for the California Academy of Sciences Living Roof, across the street from the DeYoung Museum. A few shots of it from afar (as we missed getting inside by a few minutes). Oh well, maybe next time.
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Cycles of Nature
An interesting post from Robert Krulwich at NPR that discusses the concept of an innate/ingrained cycle of life and death that governs many living creatures. The post ‘Nature Has A Formula That Tells Us When It’s Time To Die‘ discusses the work of physicist Geoffrey West: Everything alive will eventually die, we know that, but…
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Europe Journal – Green Wall Art
Sep. 17: On a rainy day next to Trafalgar Square we discovered a somewhat odd installation of a living wall adjacent to the National Gallery which I of course had to sprint over to check out. Closer inspection shows it to be a living representation of Van Gogh’s ‘A Wheatfield with Cypresses’ painted in 1889…
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The Digital Canopy (Expanded)
It’s intriguing that Google Earth 6 has started populating the virtual ‘planet’ with 3-Dimensional trees, which together with buildings and terrain offer the opportunity for some reasonable representation of exterior sites. Right now, only a few cities have been added in selected cities and natural areas: “I think we can all agree that our planet…
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Bio-luminescent Trees: WTF?
Bad idea of the week? The Inhabitat story “Gold Nanoparticles Could Transform Trees Into Street Lights” mentions new research: “A group of scientists in Taiwan recently discovered that placing gold nanoparticles within the leaves of trees, causes them to give off a luminous reddish glow. The idea of using trees to replace street lights is an…
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Feral Green Streets (Tamed)
It was bound to happen, but a nice walk for some coffee showed the new ‘orderly frames’ for the previously unruly green street planters along Burnside Street. Some updated images displaying what is quickly becoming ‘stock’ in the local green street planting arsenal – (c) Jason King | Landscape+Urbanism. I’m really intrigued by the planters…
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Botanical Neurobiology
A TED Talk on Plant Intelligence by Italian botanist Stefano Mancuso will leave you on the edge of your seat and asking all sorts of questions of both your house-plants and about the wide-ranging implications for landscapes. Mancuso operates the International Laboratory of Plant Neurobiology in Italy. A brief synopsis of the talk: “Does the Boston…
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Feral Green Streets
On E. Burnside Street in Portland, the construction of the Burnside-Couch Couplet, a project aimed at ‘humanizing’ the wide arterial that slices through Portland and provides the dividing line between North and South. Construction is ongoing, and as part of the design, the streets on both sides of the couplet have a number of green…