Landscape Architecture Magazine February 2023

JACK AHERN, FASLA, (“Right Plant, Any Place,” page 92) is a professor emeritus of landscape architecture at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He has published extensively on plants and ecology, including Design with Nature on Cape Cod and the Islands. You can contact him at jfa@umass.edu. “Every landscape architect’s library has a shelf, or so, of valued plant books. The recent book by Brad Davis and David Nichols is a welcome addition.” RICHARD PALLARDY (“Holding the Tree Line,” page 24) is a freelance science writer whose work has appeared in publications such as National Geographic and Science. You can contact him at rtpallardy@gmail.com. “I wish I could have included more about the value of native trees for wildlife, especially microwildlife such as insects.” GOT A STORY? At LAM, we don’t know what we don’t know.…

The opportunity, however brief, to slow down in the winter months is one I await each year, and the winter issues of LAM are favorites for the space they provide to highlight issues and projects that might get lost in the prolific energy of the spring. This February, we lavish attention on Shirley Chisholm State Park, in New York (see “Trash to Treasure,” page 54), and a deep dive with landscape architects in Puerto Rico (see “Storm Warnings,” page 80), who tirelessly advocate for the profession on an island struggling with both repeated climate disasters and long-term political disinvestment from the United States. Though it is only quickly mentioned in the article, Shirley Chisholm’s influence is widely felt today. The first Black woman elected to Congress, she served seven terms and…

When Muntazar Monsur and his wife emigrated to the United States from Bangladesh in 2011, they enrolled their then 18-month-old daughter in childcare for the first time. They were both starting PhD programs at North Carolina State University, and the childcare center his daughter attended was an early demonstration site of the Natural Learning Initiative, established in 2000 at NC State to demonstrate the importance of nature in children’s development and play. “She went to that childcare center for three years, and I was one of the parents who saw how the daily life of my daughter changed,” says Monsur, now an assistant professor of landscape architecture at Texas Tech University. Since then, Monsur’s work has focused on improving the environments in which millions of children younger than five years spend…

The Royal Parks in London comprise 5,000 acres of Crown-owned lands formerly used by the royal family for hunting and recreation. Since at least 2015, the eight parks, which welcome more than 77 million visitors a year, have been striving to improve biodiversity and pollinator habitats through projects such as Mission: Invertebrate. Building on such efforts, Royal Parks launched a new Biodiversity Framework in 2021. “Most recently, the expansion of our meadow management and relaxation of grassland cutting [are] driven by the need to address the climate emergency and biodiversity loss,” says Pete Lawrence, the parks’ biodiversity manager. The relaxed approach is less about zero mowing, although No Mow May initiatives have been deployed in certain lawn areas, Lawrence says. It’s more about strategically timed cutting throughout the year to prevent…

The tree line is creeping northward—one of the many effects of climate change. As the temperature rises, the historic ranges of many tree species contract. New research from the Morton Arboretum in Lisle, Illinois, provides actionable insights that will assist in designing landscapes that can withstand the coming ecological challenges. Botanists at the arboretum have for the first time compiled a comprehensive survey of tree species native to the continental United States. Using the Global Tree Assessment’s definition of what constitutes a tree, they found a total of 881 species, 165 of which are threatened or at risk. “We have no insurance policy for these species,” says Murphy Westwood, the vice president of science and conservation at the Morton Arboretum and the lead author of a paper on data sharing for…

Like many residents of southern Louisiana, the Indigenous residents of Grand Bayou Village, located among the southernmost reaches of Plaquemines Parish in the Mississippi River Delta and accessible only by boat, live with the varied effects of coastal land loss. A critical issue affecting the community’s ability to subsist in its ancestral place—a landscape that once was densely forested but that is now almost entirely covered in saltgrass—is an increasing shortage of dry land for growing food and medicinal plants. To augment what little land is left, this past fall the New Orleans-based Water Collaborative organized the Seeds of Innovation: Resilient Design Competition. A follow-up to its inaugural planter box design challenge in 2021, this year’s competition asked entrants to design a planter box that was buoyant, easily repairable, and resilient…