Resources & Blogs Galore

It was time for some reevaluation of the goals and objectives of the site, which should actually begin to take shape. In the interim, this just in... a bevy of recent readings that have required some study to determine if they are worthy... still a dearth of landscape blogs.

1. Rumors have been floating around, so new in Portland, from former Oregonian Architecture and Arts writer Randy Gragg, is Portland Spaces magazine. As a self-professed magazine junky (hello, my name is Jason, and I am a magazine whore...) another magazine with some regional cache is much welcome. There are also some fledgling blogs on the site, to keep tabs on the scene.


:: image via Portland Architecture

While Portland gets some coverage in other magazines, such as Arcade Journal, the local landscape scene is pretty dismal (read: Homes and Gardens supplement in the Oregonian and their newly minted Homes+Gardens Northwest magazine, which is a glossy version of the same crappy Thursday fold-out). Another 'Northwest' oriented magazine - it get's a bit confusing, is Northwest Home, which is better, but Puget-Sound centric. And occasionally, we find something worthwhile in Sunset Magazine, although it's very unlikely. Anyone know of some others I missed?

I am running to get a copy, now.

Thanks to Brian Libby's most excellent and informative Portland blog that doesn't clutter my coffee table at Portland Architecture for the heads up on this one.

2. A short listing good ones that I have stumbled upon recently (to be added in the sidebar)...
Terrain.org has a blog with some regular content.
Aesthetic Grounds offers a glimpse of public spaces from an arts lens.
My Urband Garden Deco Guide more dwell exteriors than landscape urbanism, but they had me with the feature page on decorative pots, specifically photos of a line from Ego2.

Local Urban Agriculture

I've been reading Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma, as well as continuing my work with a great and inspiring group called Verde, and it has put ephemeral site use and urban agriculture on the brain in some interesting new forms. Verde is a non-profit dedicated to [improving] "...the economic health of disadvantaged communities by creating environmental job training, employment, and entrepreneurial opportunities, fostering the connection between economic vitality and environmental protection and restoration."

The third leg of sustainability, social equity, often is neglected, and pairing job training with sustainable stormwater just makes so much sense that you gotta support the idea. I got hooked up with Verde and the executive director Alan Hipolito after working on a number of affordable housing projects through Hacienda CDC, mostly in Northeast Portland. The following is an example of some of the sustainable stormwater projects that have been completed recently, creating demonstration rain gardens at local sites:


::image via Verde

The long and short of it is that Verde now has the rights to establish a short-term production nursery operation on a former landfill property located in NE Portland. One of many surplus properties owned by the City of Portland, the Cully Park site as it is known, is slated for use as a future neighborhood park and ballfields, and a master planning process has begun to shape this future use. The goal for the site now is to temporarily use the site for production of stormwater plant materials and as a site for job-skills training. Recently, the idea has expanded to include potential strategies for urban gardening to use these sites.

Surveys of vacant and blighted land, which contributes little the community, reveals many acres of potential land that can be co-opted for alternative uses. While the idea of using vacant and underutilized land for agriculture is not new... but perhaps requires some additional revisitation pf other examples. Last December in various sources, including BLDGBLOG, was a story regarding Farmadelphia, which envisions wide areas of vacant lands in Philadelphia transformed to areas of urban agriculture:

:: images via BLDGBLOG

There has long been a shortage of community gardening spaces in Portland, and i'm guessing, wherever we live in urban areas where yards are either too shady or too small to provide a good growing environment. We are slow to add community gardens, both due to land costs, infrastructure, and just plain will - and thus we are constantly underserved with access to garden space. Rather than add any significant amounts of new gardens, there was the controversial removal of the Reed Community Garden (in which I had a plot for a year, and was mesmerized by gardens and gardeners on a daily basis there).

Another somewhat related option, Orion magazine featured an article 'Food Less Traveled', which some innovative Portland gardeners who run Your Backyard Farmer, a service that 'create sustainable organic farms' in people's backyards, sharing a CSA portion with the homeowner. With a message of 'We do the Work, you enjoy the healthy harvest', YBF is aimed at those either too busy or with excess urban land that would like to enjoy fresh vegetables without getting their hands dirty.

The Carbon Question

The Carbon Question is on everyone's mind these days, due in no small part to Al Gore an the shockingly good An Inconvenient Truth and a steadily growing acknowledgement of the problems associated with global warming and it's causes. This has been addressed as well in the architectural press, and the role that building occupies in the overall. Architects and advocates have responded with more green building in general, as well as more robust guidelines such as Architecture 2030 which continue to address the root cause (primarily energy use and materials production) and don't significantly address landscape issues.


:: logo via Architecture 2030

Recently Slate featured a column titled The Greenest Tree (Jan 8. 2008), which asks the question, 'Which tree species will do the most sequestering carbon?' Or simply, which species aid us in doing our part to limit global warming in the landscape. While there are some simple recommendations, such as planting trees that are large, and deciduous, and focusing on those fast growing species (because they sequester more carbon more quickly due to size). The winner, due to a 2002 survey by NY Oasis, is the Tulip Tree (Liriodendron tulipifera) and the European Beech (Fagus sylvatica). The study delved into ecosystem valuation as well, by assessing a variety of factors such as size and type to provide a weighted compensatory value based on the tree.


::Liriodendron image via Floridata

Inevitably, the ability for plants to sequester carbon is fleeting, as they will release this carbon into the atmosphere when they die and begin to break down: From the same article in Slate:

"Yet even the hardiest native trees are doomed to die someday, and in doing so, spew their carbon back into the atmosphere. (That's particularly bad news when the trees are killed as part of a timber company's clear-cutting efforts, since no young trees are left behind to help mitigate the losses.) If you're around to witness your trees' twilight years, consider keeping the carbon in place by turning them into furniture or building lumber, rather than letting them go gently into that good night."


::sustainable furnishings via The Joinery

At the very least, planting MORE of any type of trees have multiple benefits to the public, of which carbon sequestration is just one. A more focussed study from a landscape perspective, would be to provide additional date on how much more carbon sequestration is actually provided via the soil biomass. While planting trees and building, this reinforces the need for making soil conservation and erosion control measures to maintain soils during construction and farming operations paramount.