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Showing posts from January, 2011

Tour of Schoolhouse Creek Common

I visited Schoolhouse Creek Common in West Berkeley in 2007.  Here is a description of the community park from the Bringing Back the Natives Garden Tour 2008: In 1856 an elementary school was built on this site; a lovely grassy meadow on a low rise near gurgling spring-fed Schoolhouse Creek. Fast-forward to 2005, when the asphalt that had covered the meadow for decades was demolished, the site graded by the Berkeley Unified School District, and neighbors gathered to begin planting what would become Schoolhouse Creek Common, a child-friendly community garden and park. This attractive public space contains a wide diversity of natives that will do well in the flats, as well as an orchard, lawn, and an assortment of drought-tolerant Mediterranean plants. Bring your children, who will love both the tire swing, and the East Bay’s most beautiful sandbox—surrounded by bunchgrass, California lilac, manzanita, tree stumps, and sea-shell studded boulders.

Update on Lost photos of the Portland Classical Chinese Garden (Lan Su Chinese Garden)

Original Post December 23, 2010: Don't you h*** it when you delete a photograph you think you don't need and then you realize that you need it.  The baby of the house found a "Garden Lover's Guide to the Pacific N.W." brochure I collected while visiting Seattle in 2007. The brochure recommends visiting gardens in Lakewood, Washington (Lakewold Gardens); in Puget Sound, Washington (Kruckeberg Botanic Garden, Dunn Gardens, Bellevue Botanical Garden, Volunteer Park Conservancy, The Bloedel Reserve, Elandan Gardens, W.W. Seymour Botanical Conservancy, Powells Wood, The Chase Garden, and Fairie Gardens); and in Portland, Oregon (Portland Classical Chinese Garden and Leach Botanical Garden). In 2006, during a self-guided walking tour of Portland's Pearl District, I walked around the exterior of the Classical Chinese Garden (Lan Su Chinese Garden) but did not enter the garden.  There were crowds.  I was able to photograph some of the interior spaces through the

Arboles de Madrid

Several years ago I purchased Rafael Moro's Arboles de Madrid (2007) in a Madrid bookstore.  Since then I have meant to share with you partial entries from the book. Today I will begin to do so as part of an occasional series titled after the book. Today's tree is Aligustre del Japon also known as Ligustrum lucidum or glossy privet. Image: Ligustrum lucidum by Wiki user Fanghong ( source ) Moro wrote of this tree, En el jardín del palacio de Linares (plaza de la Cibeles), hay tres aligustres, uno de ellos de 0,45 m de cuerda y 7 m de altura, sombreados por una sólida sófora....El jugo pardo rojizo de los frutos sirve para teñir y es usado a veces para modificar el color de los vinos, haciéndolos tomar apariencia de más añejos.* * The fruit of the glossy privet is used to create reddish-brown dyes and is used to change the color of wines, making them appear more mature.

Early bird catches the worm

Or in our case, several of Sunset magazine's Hot List ("the top 100 ideas, people, places and things that are making life in the West better right now") have been featured on this blog. In Bicycle, bicycle, bicycle, part 2 , we looked at hauling people and goods via bicycle.  Numbers 36-38 on Sunset's list were car-free festivals, bicycle boulevards, and bike sharing and numbers 39-41 were three "two-wheeled businesses."  Has anyone eaten a Bike Basket Pies pie? We've written about a 2008 PARK(ing) Day in Berkeley.  With Berkeley Partners for Parks, we designed  BOND(ing) PARK(ing) , a pop-up park.  Also, view our Facebook album of a recent visit to OpenHouse Gallery's pop-up indoor park.  Three pop-up parks made it on the Sunset list: San Francisco's Pavement to Parks program, Portland's Re-thinking the Right-of-Way, and Seattle's Substation Park. Image: Chicken Crib, photo courtesy of ChickenCribs ( source ) Finally, last

Fire alarm box

Could this be a cast-iron, Art Nouveau, 1920s/1930s fire alarm box stripped of its "cool front doors and insides [and] replaced with modern and efficient communication equipment"? Check out a New York City Fire Department call box restored by Vintage Vending.  The call box pictured here is located on Bleecker Street between LaGuardia Place and Mercer Street.  The box has two call buttons -- one for fire and the other for police. A Wikipedia entry provides more information about the modernization of New York City fire alarm boxes: The second most common method is by means of F.D.N.Y. fire alarm boxes in the street and in certain public buildings such as schools and hospitals as well as highways, bridges, etc. These consist of the following primarily two types. The first is mechanical boxes, also commonly called pull-boxes or telegraph boxes in which a spring-wound mechanism alternately opens and closes an electrical circuit thereby rendering a coded number linked to t

Urban Green by Peter Harnik

Urban Green: Innovative Parks for Resurgent Cities is Peter Harnik's third book about city parks.  His first was Inside City Parks (2000) followed by The Excellent Park System: What Makes it Great and How to Get There (2006). Image: Schenley Plaza, Pittsburgh (removing parking) I think a better title for Urban Green might have been Innovative Strategies for Creating Parkland in U.S. Cities. The 16 strategies presented by Harnik are the main contribution of the book and comprise the largest section (Part II: Finding Park Space in the City) of the book. In Part I: Of Cities and Parks, Harnik describes the standards of park provision. The conclusion is too short; I would have liked to read a comparative discussion of the approaches outlined earlier in the book. Image: Rose Kennedy Greenway (under construction), Boston (decking highways) The most compelling chapters in Part I of Urban Green are the first two: How Much Parkland Should a City Have? and The Different

Not that Mimosa

On its website, Origins lists the four main ingredients in its new collection, Starting Over as Horse Chestnut Extract, Green Algae, Argan Leaf, and Mimosa tenuiflora .  However, in its print ads (see above), the latter ingredient is listed only as Mimosa.  Some of you, like me, might think that Origins was using Albizia julibrissin Durazz., commonly known as mimosa, silktree, or silky acacia, in its new moisturizer line.  A designated "weed of the week" by the Forest Service in 2004 given new life as an "age-eraser" in 2011.  This is not the case. Image: Albizia julibrissin by Fanghong ( source ) In 2009, the National Park Service Plant Conservation Alliance's (NPS PCA) Alien Plant Working Group described A. julibrissin 's ecological impacts as follows: Because silk tree can grow in a variety of soils, produce large seed crops, and resprout when damaged, it is a strong competitor to native trees and shrubs in open areas or forest edge

Top 15 posts of 2010

All of our top posts* of 2010 were written in the last quarter of the year.  These fifteen posts covered a range of topics such as trees (the American chestnut, Stuyvesant's pear tree, American sweetgums not planted at the 9/11 Memorial Plaza, and cherry trees in bloom and in fall color); the urban cemetery (as habitat and as new park space); design competitions (Sukkah City and urbancanvas); gardens (Portland Classical Chinese Garden); books (on ethnobotany and Peter Harnik's Urban Green ); sustainable design (New York's Greenstreets Program and green roofs on bird houses); and more. What was your favorite post of 2010? (*This list was generated by readers clicks and collected by lijit.com.  The post was edited on Nov. 8, 2011.) Curating the Urban Cemetery as Bird Habitat 10/05/2010 American chestnut (soup) poised for a comeback 11/09/2010 American sweetgums removed from the landscape design of the 9/11 Memorial Plaza 12/14/2010  Call for books:

Trees in winter

Searching for text to illustrate the photographs below I found mention of  Trees in Winter: Their Study, Planting, Care and Identification  written by Albert Francis Blakeslee and Chester Deacon Jarvis, first published in 1913 by Macmillan, and reissued in 2010 by Nabu Press ( selections from the first edition  available on Google Books). "Evergreens are often injured by the accumulation of soft snow on their branches. Valuable specimens should be closely watched and relieved of their heavy burdens during snow storms"  (Blakeslee and Jarvis 1913, 132).  Note: the shrubs (see second photograph) have been covered with mesh. "On narrow roads it is advisable to set the trees very near the fence but on roads that are forty feet or more in width they may better be set about six or eight feet from the highway limits.  This will allow for a sidewalk on the outer side of the rows of trees.  If the farmer is planting the trees at his own expense it is usually advisable to