Lichtenstein in the Square & Carnegie Mellon's garden-sculpture-garden

Brushstroke Group (Roy Lichtenstein), West side of 17th North of Chestnut, Philadelphia, Penn.

I did not realize I had seen a Roy Lichtenstein until I went web searching for the name of this piece. Struck by the whimsy and colors, I photographed the sculpture during a personal trip to Philadelphia several years ago. Read more about the sculpture and the Rittenhouse Square Tour here.

Kraus Campo (Mel Bochner and landscape architect Michael Van Valkenburgh), Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Penn.

Here, again, I was struck by bold colors. The garden-sculpture-garden is tucked out of sight; I visited it in on a walk with family familiar with the campus. I was surprised to learn that the landscape architect is Michael Van Valkenburgh who I associate with more "naturalized" landscape design. For example, Teardrop Park in NYC, Wellesley College Master Plan, and Allegheny Riverfront Park in Pittsburgh. However, as I write this, I realize that the Kraus Campo is similar to the restored Boston Children's Museum landscape, especially from an aerial perspective. Read Marty Carlock's article in the Dec. 2008 Landscape Architecture magazine - "Playful, But Not a Playground: Boston Children’s Museum brings learning outside."

Bird Watch: Hummingbird update

Empty nest: I checked the hummingbird nest on Wednesday, Feburary 25, 2009, around 6 p.m. It's been empty for a few days but I confirmed it on Feb. 25. The exterior of the nest was lined with lichen as shown below. Also, note the seamless integration of the nest with the fork between the branches.

Contested waters at America's swimming pools

Image: Armour Square Pool, Chicago, 1909, Journal of Planning Education and Research, 21(4), 2002

A web search of this Chicago pool yielded a link to Jeff Wiltse's book "Contested Waters: A Social History of Swimming Pools in America" (a limited preview is available at Google Book Search).

Like urban park and playground movements of the nineteenth century, pools were seen to have a positive moral effect on immigrants and other urban poor:

By promoting the "bathing habit" among the urban poor and instilling them with middle-class values, reformers and public officials assumed that municipal pools would help counteract the rising rates disease, crime, and pauperism that accompanied urban growth during the mid- to late nineteenth century (2007, 9).

Not surprisingly, I guess, these *public* pools were segregated. Wiltse makes two distinctions: in more southern cities, pools were formally segregated while in northern cities, white swimmers "enforce" segregation through intimidation and violence. In the book, there is an illustration, a 1940 "WPA Learn to Swim" poster from the NYC Department of Parks that clearly shows white children learning separately from black children. In Chicago, pools were not located in the city's black neighborhoods, known as the "black belt" (63).

Pools were also separated by sex and class. In fact, sex and race overlapped in interesting ways. For example, as women's swimsuits became smaller, i.e. more revealing, there was greater concern about black men swimming with white women. When pools were officially desegregated, whites largely abandoned public pools. (See Professor Kevin M. Kruse's article "The Politics of Race and Public Space" about the abandonment - "political, social, and financial" - of public pools by whites post-war and post-desegregation in Atlanta, Georgia.)

Unfortunately, Google's limited preview does not include Wiltse's conclusion so at this time, I cannot share this with you. Read the book summary provided by UNC Press. Read reviews here (Legal History Blog), here (NYT Sunday Book Review; also read the book's first chapter here), and listen to Wiltse on NPR.

Science reading meme

Waiting on my boolean query to run on 20 plus years of newsletters from a Bay Area urban forestry nonprofit, I compiled a science reading list. I was tagged reading bootstrap analysis's meme.

Instructions:

Imagine: YOU are asked to assign a half-dozen-or-so books as required reading for ALL science majors at a college as part of their 4-year degree; NOT technical or text books, but other works, old or new, touching upon the nature of science, philosophy, thought, or methodology in a way that a practicing scientist might gain from.

The List:

• Drawing a Tree - Bruno Munari
• Ways of Seeing - John Berger
• Anything by John McPhee
• Books by David Quammen (I like "The Flight of the Iguana")
• Stephen Jay Gould is a well known science philosopher

Public Art: Cesar Chavez Park, Berkeley, Calif.

Sky Window (Kati Casida), Cesar Chavez Park, Berkeley, Calif.

Read more about the restoration of Sky Window here.

Leisure World: Grow your own and play golf

Community garden and golf course at Leisure World, a retirement community in Laguna Hills, California. Photograph courtesy of D. Ruggeri.

Since the taking of the photograph, Leisure World (Laguna Hills) has changed its name to Laguna Woods Village. The community garden in the photograph is one of two Garden Centers in which residents can grow flowers, food, or trees.

Bird Watch: Nesting adult hummingbird with chicks

An exposed nesting site: in the crotch of a spindly plum tree on a neighborhood street that intersects with a major road in Berkeley. Luckily, the ground floor of the adjacent building is unoccupied. Also, the tree is located in the set-back planting strip of said building. It also helps that the nest is disguised; it does not look like a "typical" nest of twigs, feathers, grass, &c.

I've been watching this nest and its inhabitants for a few weeks. I've seen the adult and the chicks. How do they all fit into such a tiny house?! I cannot identify the species - Anna's or Allen's? But the nest is called a cup (not house) and is described by Roger Tory Peterson as "a tiny lichen-covered cup in bush, tree" (A Field Guide to Western Birds 1961, 133). This nest description is applied to Anna's, Allen's and several other species. By contrast, the Blue-throated Hummingbird's nest is "a feltlike cup fastened to slender (vertical) support along stream, under bridge, etc. Old nests built higher each year" and the nest of the Violet-crowned Hummingbird is "a lichen-thatched cup in sycamore." Sycamore - how specific; quite like a butterfly.

The chicks are very cute. I know it's a faux pas to anthropomorphize non-human species. Anyway, the usual clutch size for hummingbirds is two eggs and the chicks are "naked and helpless" at hatching. For more information about hummingbirds, search All About Birds - Bird Guide at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology.

Back to the location of the nest. It is literally on the edge - of the sidewalk/ street. In a study of edge sensitivity, Anna's Hummingbird among other species were found to be "edge exploiters," report Jules Evans and Ian Tait in "Introduction to California Birdlife (2005). Edge exploiters, Evans and Tait write "are attracted to these habitat boundaries or occur only where several habitat types intersect" (15). Okay, the edge of the sidewalk/ street is not the type of edge being referred to in the study or the Evans-Tait book. Nevertheless, it was a useful way to introduce this bit of information about the Anna's Hummingbird (if indeed it is an Anna's in the above photograph).

On storms

Ten minutes after it began on Friday, the heavy hail stopped. Ten minutes later, there were only a few stones left on the ground. Coincidentally, not long after, I received an email from the U.S. Forest Service, Northern Research Station's Urban Natural Resources Institute (UNRI) about a webcast on ice storms. "Trees and Ice Storms: Developing Ice Storm Resistant Urban Tree Populations" is scheduled for Wednesday, February 18 at 11 a.m. EST. The webcast:

Richard Hauer, Ph.D., from the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point, who will introduce the issue of making urban forests less susceptible to the damage from ice storms and winter weather events. Along with fires and wind, ice storms are a frequent and major natural disturbance factor in many areas of the country. Likewise ice storms are responsible for deaths and injuries of people and cause dramatic damage and tree loss to urban forests. Ice storms annually result in millions of dollars in loss, and potentially billions of dollars in losses for extreme and widespread ice storms. Damage to electric distribution systems, blocked roadways, and property damage from fallen trees and limbs pose safety concerns and disrupt normal community functions. This timely topic will be discussed by one of the foremost experts in this area, and this webcast will help to bring you up to date on the latest research findings and outline resource materials that will help you prepare for the next catastrophic event.

For an engaging story of the recent ice storms in Kentucky, read Allen Bush's "Powerless in Kentucky" at Human Flower Project.

Hail to Berkeley

At approximately 10:05 a.m. PST there was hail in Berkeley:

Parking lots to parks and permeable paving

My first experience with a known parking lot to park conversion was Halcyon Commons here in Berkeley. The community-initiated park was designed over the course of four years and was led by the Halcyon Neighborhood Association. City funding, sweat equity, and contributions from local businesses transformed the 28-space parking lot into a 0.2-acre municipal park (with stewardship by the neighborhood association) with "a tire swing, a community bulletin board, a community herb and flower garden, a wisteria-covered arbor, a grass field, and many trees and flowering bushes." Check out the the new gate.

Image: Schenley Plaza across from Schenley Park circa 1920s

Across the country, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Schenley Plaza was recently restored from a parking lot to its former status as a 5-acre public park. The restoration was spearheaded by the Pittsburgh Park Conservancy, a nonprofit conservancy that manages Pittsburgh's four large parks: Schenley, Frick, Highland, and Riverview. Schenley Plaza follows the design and management precedent set by Bryant Park in New York City: moveable chairs and tables, a generous lawn area (1 acre in the case of Schenley), programmed activities, and a restaurant, among other things.

Image: Schenley Plaza lawn in 2007

Other "unpaving the city surface" (Marcus Farr, Cite, Winter 2006) designs include Discovery Green in Houston, Grant and Millennium Parks in Chicago, Boston Common and Post Office Square in Boston. The latter park, according to Farr, was constructed when a five-story garage was undergrounded and created "1.7 acres of accessible and well-used downtown greenspace." Farr observes that the integration of infrastructure (parking) and greenspace can limit heat islands and satisfy "aesthetic needs."

Image: Wellman Courtyard, UC Berkeley, Blue-Green Building

Parking area redesign is not limited to reducing urban heat islands. The use of permeable paving has great watershed benefits: stormwater is intercepted, reducing the volume of runoff into the storm-sewer system as well as filtering pollutants as rainfall percolates through the soil beneath the pavers. Local examples, like the Wellman Courtyard on the UC Berkeley campus, have been documented by Blue-Green Building:

Above, in a courtyard among Beaux Arts buildings, pavers set in a sand base let rain soak in. Some pollutants are filtered out, and some water soaks into the native clay soil beneath. A perforated-pipe underdrain takes heavy flows to the storm drain, preventing floods.

Tree Walk: Curious things we do to trees

Among the curious things people to do trees is improper crown reduction resulting in a crown that looks like a lion's tail. It is terribly heart breaking to see a tree, like the sweetgum above, that is not growing like a sweetgum (the difference between sidewalk and lawn habitat?). Also, this sweetgum has been raised improperly. The Forest Service recommends maintaining "live branches on at least two-thirds of a tree's total height" (USDA Forest Service publication NA-FR-01-95).

The sweetgum's crown can be is described as follows:

Young sweetgum have a strong excurrent growth habit and long, conical crowns that usually prune themselves readily under forest conditions. There is a wide range in branch angle from acute to almost 90' in young trees. Depending on site quality, and at a definite stage in development, sweetgum. becomes decurrent as the trees mature, and the crown becomes rounded and wide spreading. The tops of overmature trees are usually broken or stag headed.

The horticulture program at the University of Florida describes the sweetgum's crown as follows: "symmetrical canopy with a regular (or smooth) outline, and individuals have more or less identical crown forms [and the] crown shape [is] oval; pyramidal."

Here is another example of lion tail pruning on the left with fuller crowns on the right side of the street without overhead wires. The trees on the left right resemble begin to look like palms.

One solution to a tree whose trunk is broken: repair with wood and nails.

A common urban design element is the tree grate (more popular on the East Coast than in the SF Bay Area?). Surely it is time to remove this grate? (Disclosure: the photograph was taken in 2003.) Read a related post about infrastructure - street tree conflicts.

Photo du jour: Eating from the other Julia's garden

Julia Morgan-designed house on Parker Street, Berkeley, Calif., with front yard veggies

Photo du jour: John Woolley House

John Woolley House, built in 1876, now owned by UC Berkeley

Local ecology articles in Organic Gardening

This week, Gayla of You Grow Girl blogged about the free back issues (Dec. 2005 - Nov. 2008) of Organic Gardening available at Google Book Search. The magazine has great local ecology articles and here are some of my favorites.

• The Bee Crisis
• Rain Check or how to create a beautiful, watershed friendly rain garden (read the Fresh Dirt article about rain garden designer Kristien Forness)
• America's Greenest Cities - cities that might make the list next time are Los Angeles, Detroit, Houston, and Las Vegas
• Grow Where You Are Planted (Gayla's article)
• Southern Revival or a Mississippi garden post-Katrina
• Cold Comfort or creating a "delightful" winter garden (check out the Therapeutic Landscapes Database Blog)

"Great public cemeteries" of the Fatal Design exhibit, part 1

Update 02/13/09: Unfortunately, there will not be a part 2 to this post. Lesson learned: do not label a post "part 1" unless you have real information, i.e. notes, for "part 2."

Image: Nantucket Cemetery, Charles Sumner Greene Collection, Environmental Design Archives

The Environmental Design Library at UC Berkeley is a wonderful resource for designers and laypeople alike. The library's current exhibit, Fatal Design, chronicles the cemetery landscape, or "monumental landscapes, playgrounds for the picturesque, where the growing middle classes both buried their dead and took refuge from the rapidly industrializing cities." The curators are Andrew Shanken, Assistant Professor, Department of Architecture and Waverly Lowell, Curator, Environmental Design Archives and the exhibit ends on January 16, 2009. I've had glimpses of the exhibit and in part 2, I will offer images and observations.

Happening locally: Public art, Geocaching, Chinese urbanism, & Dorothea Lange

One of the great things about living in the San Francisco East Bay is the wealth of events and activities offered on a daily basis. Of the long list of events I know of, here are four that piqued my interest.

Image: Zipper Guy covers traffic signal box, Seyed Alavi Signs of the Times

Emeryville Public Art with Berkeley Path Wanderers Association February 4 , 2009 Description: "Discover the wealth of public art in Emeryville, sponsored by city’s Art in Public Places program. This walk will be flat and the pace moderate." *** Check the Path Wanderers website in the future for complete notes and the route.

Geocaching on the Paths with Berkeley Path Wanderers Association February 7 , 2009 Description: "If you haven’t tried your hand at geocaching — essentially treasure hunting with a GPS unit — here’s your chance. We will share GPS units and hunt for caches on and around the paths."

"Opening the Gates: A Critical Appraisal of China’s Urban Development Practices" sponsored by Center for Chinese Studies, Institute of East Asian Studies, Berkeley China Initiative, and others February 6 - 7, 2009 Description:

By almost any measure, for the last quarter century China has undertaken the largest, most rapid, urban development transformation in human history. How has China been able to build the physical equivalent of one United States in less than a generation? What is the process and what are the physical planning and design models which have enabled this extraordinary construction feat? What have been the economic incentives and drivers?

"Daring To Look: Dorothea Lange’s Photographs And Reports From The Field" by Anne Whiston Spirn: March 2, 2009 Description:

Photography for Anne Whiston Spirn is a way to test ideas. Places are primary sources, and photographs and field journals with written and drawn notes are primary data. Her new book, Daring to Look, presents unpublished texts and photographs by the great photographer Dorothea Lange, who employed images and words, together, not merely to record people and landscapes, but also to discover and to explore ideas. “No country has ever closely scrutinized itself visually,” Dorothea Lange said at the end of her life, “I know what we could make of it if people only thought we could dare look at ourselves.”

Press: San Francisco Chronicle & Good Magazine

Changing how we live and eat, one fig at a time

Emma Brown, Special to The Chronicle

...Berkeley graduate student Georgia Seamans stumbled on Forage Oakland when she was surfing the Internet, looking for a recipe for nocino, an Italian liqueur made from walnuts. She left a comment: "There's a walnut tree on my block. Hopefully the squirrels will let me share in this year's bounty." Wadud wrote back offering walnuts, and in return Seamans gave her garden herbs. "We've been trading ever since. Our last trade, I gave her some end-of-season tomatoes and I got some hachiya persimmons."

Read the entire article at SFgate.com.

Project 010: Nature Make Your Yard

Words By GOOD magazine

For Project 010 we asked you to propose a GOOD Project. Georgia Seamans sent in this contribution. She would challenge people to create a landscape design that works with nature, rather than against it. She writes: I propose "Nature Make Your Yard" (or balcony or community garden or sidewalk strip). The project can be a physical design (of any scale) or a fine art representation of a nature made place. What is nature making? The intentional design of a landscape to produce ecosystem services like storing carbon; intercepting rainfall and slowing runoff; cleaning the air; cooling the air, infrastructure, and buildings; and, providing habitat for small, highly mobile species (like butterflies, bees, birds, and yes, bats) and native plants. It sounds like a challenge, but a fun one. Using runnels to channel rainwater into a simple, low-tech irrigation system (pictured above) is just one way a landscape designer can capitalize on the surrounding ecosystem. There's more on "nature making" at Georgia's site, localecology.org.

Read the article at Good Magazine.

Happy Groundhog Day

Presenting a floral twist on Chocolate & Zucchini's food-inspired monthly calendar - local ecologist's monthly calendar for your computer's desktop or your bulletin board. The camellia is the floral character of this month's calendar. Learn about camellias at the American Camellia Society website. Download the calendar as a pdf.

Festival of the Trees 33 - Call for Submissions

The February Festival of the Trees (AKA the "monthly carnival for all things arboreal") will be hosted here at local ecologist. Please send your submissions for Festival 33 to info (at) localecology (dot) org, or use the online submission form. The submission deadline is February 27, 2009. Thank you in advance for your participation. Also, see the sidebar for more details. Festival 32 is live at Ash's blog, treeblog - the blog about trees.