The Most Ambitious Public Planting Ever

Londons Olympic Park brings together three of the most innovative plantsmen in the world.  Will the results live up to the hype?

Not since the Victorian era--at the height of the British empire--has a park been created with as much ambition or swagger.  The London Olympic Park, a 247-acre "park with venues," is the largest urban park developed in Europe in 150 years. 

Professor Nigel Dunnett standing in one of his annual meadows.

The master plan for the park was developed by American landscape architecture firm Hargreaves and Associates together with British LDA Associates.  Hargreaves Associates is known for their sculptural treatment of large, post-industrial sites--an appropriate choice for this former industrial site at Stratford in east London.  But for once, it is not the architecture of the park that will take center stage, but the planting instead.

The planting was lead by  two of the most innovative, cutting-edge plantsmen in the world: Professors James Hitchmough and Nigel Dunnett of the Department of Landscape, University of Sheffield.  Their research-based approach to planting has produced landscapes that are both ecologically funtional and jaw-droppingly beautiful.  Hitchmough and Dunnett pioneered a unique approach to urban planting, which combines native and non-native plant species in low-input systems based on semi-natural vegetation types, such as meadows, woodlands and wetlands.  This approach has come to be known as `The Sheffield School´ of planting design.  The two men bridge the gap between ecological restoration and horticulture, creating landscapes that address urban ecology and beauty.

A pictorial meadow in South Park developed by Dunnett/Hitchmough.  Photo: Dunnett

Dunnett developed the concept of `Pictorial Meadows,´ a planting strategy that is aesthetically-driven, but which also has the dynamics, biodiversity, and management advantages of meadow systems. The concept is an alternative to traditional herbaceous and perennial planting approaches: directly-sown annuals and perennials that produce dramatic, exciting, and colourful displays in a  wide range of contexts, from small gardens through to extensive areas in urban parks, alongside highways and in housing areas.

Annual meadows comprise a large portion of the south section of London Olympic Park.  The annuals surround the Olympic stadium and are timed to be in peak during the opening ceremonies.  The color theme is "gold."

Annual pictorial meadows with blues and yellows

In addition to the annual meadows, the park has over half a mile of naturalistic perennial plantings.  Not since the Highline in New York or the Lurie Garden in Chicago has so much area of a public site been dedicated to perennial plantings.  The design of the gardens is a collaboration between Hitchmough and Dunnett (who developed the concept and plant lists for the gardens) and landscape architect Sarah Price. 

Sarah Price

Price, fresh off her gold-medal performance for the Telegraph garden at the Chelsea Flower Show, is the horticultural IT-girl of 2012.  After starting her own company in 2006, Price has gradually nabbed some of the most prized landscape commissions in England, including the Whitworth Art Gallery.  Known for her moody, poetic combinations of structural plants, Prices plantings convey a rare combination of delicacy and strength.   For the Olympic Park, Price developed the spatial design and detailed planting plans for the gardens. 

The are four gardens that run in sequence and form a "timeline."  Each garden represents a different region: Western Europe/The Mediterranean/Asia Minor, the Temperate Americas, the Southern Hemisphere (particularly South Africa, Australia, New Zealand), and Temperate Asia (China, Japan, Himalayas).  The gardens are composed of three main elements: clipped formal evergreen hedges that create a permanent structure; monocultural strips of ornamental grasses or structural perennials that frame the main components of the gardens: the field plantings that determine the character of each garden.  

Texture diagram by Sarah Price

The main compositional gesture are strips of planting that weave together the site. While I find "stripes" of planting to be very graphically pleasing on paper, they rarely translate well with plants. Its not that I have an issue with formality and geometry in planting, just not with herbaceous plants. Unless bounded by a clipped hedge or architectural edging, herbaceous plants rarely lend themselves to formal arragements like strips. On a site, the gesture often ends up looking contrived and small; the patterning pulls the eye inward, away from the horizon, thus reducing the impact of the planting. The one photo Ive seen of the strips of perennials felt a bit under-scaled and precocious.

Clipped hedges and rather unconvincing "strips"

While the strips failed to impress, the "fields" of plantings were much more interesting.  The "fields" used a much more innovate approach to laying out herbaceous plants.  Within the fields, there was no planting plan with exact locations for plants. Instead, there is simply a mix of perennials that grow well together.  The fields were laid out randomly, giving each area a feeling of spontenaity, but since the mix was restrained, there would be legibiltiy created through repetition.  This style of interplanting is very similar to the work Michael King has done with his "Perennial Meadows." 

"Field" planting at the Southern Hemisphere garden

The different regions of the world concept struck me initially as a bit trite--a kind of reductionist, Epcot-Center-ride through the plantings of the world.  But the British garden is indeed a compilation of plants from their former empire, so the stylized meadows from around the world will is, in a way, a uniquely British concept.  With a large site, huge ambitions, a rushed schedule, and big cast of designers, there is always the possibility that the execution of the plan lacks the heart and intensity that a single designer could bring to a small site.

The sort-of North American garden with American Coneflower, South African Verbena, and European Allium

That being said, I find the scale of the plantings and the choice of designers to be delightful.  Bravo to the clients for dedicating so much of the parks to experimental planting.  With so much planting experimentation, theres bound to be some wonderful successes that will advance naturalistic perennial design, particularly for public sites.  If these gardens can combine the more cerebral aspirations of the Sheffield School with the more artsy, restrained stylization of Sarah Price, these could be some truly ground-breaking gardens. While the world watches this summers Olympics, Ill be eagerly watching the gardens.

Images from this post were taken from Nigel Dunnetts site.  For more information about the park, visit the site: http://www.nigeldunnett.info/

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Gone are the days

Gone are the days in the City of Toronto when you could simply rip down an existing home and with only the building permits in place, build what ever you wanted!!! It is February of 2007 and my phone is ringing with calls for help!

Someone doing a property flip is faced with a possible stop work order because they failed to adhere to the City of Torontos by-laws set in place by Urban Forestry. Trees over 30 cm in caliper are protected from removal unless a permit application is made for cutting the tree down! This measurement is taken along the trunk of the tree... 4 feet (1.2 m) off the ground... at that height you measure the diameter at the trees thickest point of the trunk.

So why is my phone ringing? Rules are not being followed by people that should know they are in place. I just came from a site visit where a residential construction project using heavy haul equipment is in the works on an older lot in the Scarborough Bluffs area... there are several large trees on the site and the construction is interfering with the root systems of these trees.

All the trees are over the 30 cm diameter and none of them are properly protected according to the citys requirements! Now what??? A 70 foot tall Colorado Blue Spruce has had 1 major anchor root severed and 3 main feeder/anchor roots severed on the south side. I need to make a tree protection plan for the city and the contractor... and I need to make a report on the tree damage...

Again, now what??? That tree will begin to show visible signs of stress in the next year or two... I expect about 10% to 20% of the branch structure on that side will be lost over the next 2 to 3 years and this once majestic looking Spruce tree will not look so hot anymore.

The saving grace...in my honest opinion is that this tree will recover from the damage... but not without scars... it will take about a good solid 3 growing seasons to redirect its root structure for that side...it was the south side damaged and so in those 2 to 3 years... I just hope we do not get a major windstorm that will carry heavy winds off Lake Ontario and blow to the north... that may cause the tree to lean towards 3 neighbouring properties.

Yikes!!!

Anyway, the point of my rant??? Thinking about a property flip? A tear-down and rebuild... all in the City of Toronto boundaries?? If you have mature trees (30 cm or greater in caliper) and also if you live in a ravine protected area......... Call Urban Forestry before you even start work!!! As I was on that particular site today, my phone rang...someone else from another project is in the same situation with the City of Toronto over a tree needing protection during construction.

There is only so much that can be done once construction happens... If nothing was done before construction started... The inspectors for the City will be majorly annoyed! Destruction of trees and ravine property is viewed as criminal action and will be treated accordingly with fines and lawsuits by the City of Toronto.

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Nature in the Future Will Look More Like a Garden

Fifteen years ago I went on this amazing hike through a Hemlock forest in the Shenandoah National Park.  Hemlock groves have a wonderful Gothic quality: dark, angular spires of the trunks are contrasted with the intricate tracery of the needles on bended branch.  Ten years later, I convinced my wife to go with me to re-create the experience.  This time, however, all of the Hemlocks were gone—victim to the wooly adelgid.  Brambles and vines stood in the sunny areas where there were once dark groves.  

Hemlock Forests have been decimated by the wooly adelgid

It is hard for me to talk about my love of native plants without thinking about loss.  The scale of the loss is well documented.  The natural spaces that remain are often riddled with invasive species.  Emma Marris excellent book, Rambunctious Gardens, makes this point quite powerfully.  In 2013 there is almost no pristine wilderness left on the planet.  We have disturbed it all. 

photo by Ernst Schutte

Yet despite this loss, I am an optimist.  I am an optimist because I believe--as Marris points out--that nature is everywhere.  It is the Paulowinia that forces its way through the crack in the city alley; it is the praying mantis in my garden, it is the Burmese pythons in the Everglades, and it is the pockets of rare native orchids in the farmer’s ditch.  Nature is everywhere.  But it is not nature as we once knew it.  It is our nature, our garden, influenced by us.

The problem is that we want nature to be pristine.  The landscape architect Martha Schwartz said that “Americans treat nature like Victorians treated women: as virgins or whores.”  For us, if nature (OUT THERE) is not some pristine wilderness, then it’s not nature.  To focus exclusively on the preserving the last of our “virgin” or “old growth” woods is to lose site of the larger issue right under our noses: the spaces that surround us every day.

This realization was quite empowering to me as a designer.  I recently worked on a master plan for a large-scale ecological restoration. The goal was to use the development of a several thousand acre site to re-create a mosaic of ecosystems that we believed were likely once on the site.  Our plans called for the eradication of invasive species by cutting them down, treating them with herbicides, and planting native species.  After this, the site would have to be weeded for years on end to make sure the invasives were kept in check.  Parts of the site would require managing through mowing or burning.  The more I thought about this process, with all its weeding, mowing, and planting, the more it felt like gardening to me.  And any gardener knows that the process of gardening never ends.  

So my first realization is that pristine nature does not really exist OUT there.  My second realization is that pristine nature cannot really exist apart from massive amounts of tending on our part.  

Tending, yes, this is something I know about.  Ive spent my professional life designing artificial landscapes for people, and then trying to teach them how to tend it.  It’s not a perfect process, but it is a process that can be replicated on all sorts of sites.  Maintenance matters, but smart design matters more.  

I believe in design.  Today is Inauguration day, and despite the goodwill I still have for our elected leaders, I do not count on much.  Now is not the era of the politician.  No, now is the era of the designer.  Design focuses on resolving conflicts by looking at all angles and finding feasible solutions.

Designer ecologies. Deschampsia and Leucanthemum.  Photo and design by Nigel Dunnett for the London Olympic stadium

One example of the kind of smart design I am optimistic about is the work of British landscape architects James Hitchmough and Nigel Dunnett.  Their work is aimed at studying naturalistic herbaceous vegetation for use in urban landscapes and parks.  They use a palette of “semi-natural” plant communities (both native and exotic species) to create visually dramatic ornamental plantings.  I featured a post on their stylized meadows at the London Olympics.  What is most exciting is that their work focuses on creating low cost, low maintenance management strategies such as mowing or burning.  Their projects are not simply ecological restoration, but also beautiful, ornamental plantings.  Without beauty, they write, there would be little public acceptance for the ecology.  Their work is one part garden design, one part ecological restoration, and one part community development.  For me, it represents the best of the future: designed ecologies that feed our souls as much as it feeds the butterflies. 

Future Nature: Entrance Garden at Morton Arboretum

The front lines of the battle for nature are not the Amazon rain forest or the Alaskan wilderness; the front lines are our backyards, medians, parking lots, and elementary schools. The ecological warriors of the future won’t just be scientists, engineers, or even landscape architects.  The ecological warriors of the future will be gardeners, horticulturists, land managers, Department of Transportation staff, elementary school teachers, and community association board members.  Anyone who can influence a small patch of land has the ability to create more nature.  And the future nature will look more and more like a garden.  

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Even Trailer Parks Are Catching the Heat on Fire Pit Bans

I just came across an article from Manitowoc, Wisconsin, where a resident of the Newport West trailer park has been informed that she will no longer be able to use her fire pit.



Fire Chief, Bill Manis, informed residents that a new city ordinance "requires 30 feet of distance between fire pits, which can be no larger than three feet in diameter, and the nearest living quarters."

The resident is upset because after stating, "We are not trailer trash … we respect our homes like everyone else," Holley said. "Sometimes a little fire is a lot of solace. Im not a pyromaniac." She is also frustrated because she can no longer burn the wood she purchased after receiving permission from the former fire department inspector.

Once again, Warming Trends has a solution. CONTROLLABLE NATURAL GAS OR PROPANE BURNING SYSTEMS!

There are less safety and health hazards that come along with gas burning systems in relation to wood burning fire pits. You can control the height of the flame simply by turning a key valve, there is no harmful smoke pouring into the air and neighboring homes, you can turn it on and off with the flip of a switch and no potential fire hazard embers and ash spewing in to the air.

Simple solution right? Yes, yes it is.

To the city officials defense, the claim that safety is paramount and that are not discriminating against residents of trailer parks, rather the fact that trailer parks have so many homes relatively close to one another that outdoor fire pits can pose a safety and health risk to neighbors. Again, gas burning systems eliminate these risks.

So when you are ready to make the switch from wood burning to a natural gas or propane fire pit, let us know and well be happy to help you get started.

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