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 entryway and "windows" in the exterior walls.  At some point, I deleted these photographs from my computer; searches of my hard drive and online folders yielded no results.  I should have toured the garden that day in 2007.  Here is an excerpt from the garden's description in the afore-mentioned brochure:

Experience what might have greeted visitors during the Ming Dynasty in China (1364 - 1688 CE).  The Portland Classical Chinese Garden was created to inspire, engage and educate all who visit.  Designers and artisans from Suzhou, China worked with Americans to fuse ancient construction methods with modern construction codes....In winter, retreat into the soothing sound of rain dripping on a banana leaf, the fragrance of wintersweet or the feel of a footstep on hand-laid mosaic stone pathways.  "Truly in the midst of a city, there can be mountain and forest."  An experience that is never twice the same.

Wow!  Here is a public domain photograph of the Garden's entrance.

Entrance to the Portland Classical Chinese Garden in Portland, Oregon (source)

The Garden is located at 239 NW Everett Street in Portland, 97209.

Update January 28, 2011: I found three photographs of the Portland  Classical Chinese Garden taken in July 2007.

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 year we wrote about the Chicken Crib designed by UC-Berkeley trained landscape architects Rusty Lamer and Andreas Stavropoulos which we first spotted in the January 2010 issue of Sunset magazine!  Number 74 on Sunset's Hot List is the chicken coop.

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 the specific location of the box. Until the advent of the STARFIRE Computer-Assisted Dispatch System (CAD), dispatchers had to physically count the taps from mechanical boxes when they were received in the central offices. Today, a "Box Alarm Readout System" (B.A.R.S.) display handles that aspect of the job. The second type is the "Emergency Reporting System" (E.R.S.) boxes that are equipped with buttons to notify either FDNY or NYPD, allowing either department's dispatcher to have direct voice communication with a reporting party. E.R.S. boxes began to replace mechanical boxes in many areas of the City beginning in the 1970s.

Moses Farmer, an engineer, and Dr. William Channing, a physician, invented "the world's first municipal fire-alarm system" which was installed in Boston in 1851.  During his tenure as New York City's mayor, Rudolph Giuliani's attempted to remove the city's alarm boxes but his effort was thwarted when a court ruled, according to the Boston Globe and Forgotten NY, that doing so would violate the rights of the deaf community.  Moreover, the alarm box system is operable during power outages and is unaffected by problems with telephone or radio transmission.  During a two hour 911 system crash in New York in March 2004, a serious fire in Brooklyn was called in on a fire alarm box.  Thank you to a 150 year old technology. Does your city still maintain its street-side fire alarm boxes?

Related posts
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NYC drinking water sampling station

Review of Peter Harnik's new book, Urban Green: Innovative Parks for Resurgent Cities

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 Kinds of Parks and Their Uses. In the former, Harnik questions the standard acres of parks to people standard using the following quote from Robert Moses:

"There is no such thing as a fixed percentage of park to population....Sensible, practical people know that [it] depends upon the actual problems of the city in question."

These "actual problems of the city" are, Harnik elaborates, geographical constraints, politics, culture, and economics. Population density is another confounding factor when trying to apply general standards to the diversity of cities in the U.S. Harnik advocates a weighted standard; comparing parkland in cities with similar density types.

Image: Ohlone Greenway, Berkeley (rail trails)

Asking how much parkland a city should have begs for a typology of parkland.  Harnik highlights a new classification system by planners in Portland, Oregon (of course!) that define parks along a continuum from "extreme sociability" to "extreme ecological purity" which results in three types of park spaces: people-to-people, people-to-nature, and nature-to-nature.  This is an experiential system Harnik notes.

Image: Cesar Chavez Park, Berkeley (old landfills)

I think the Portland system is an interesting proposition.  My neighborhood has, what I considered to be, a good amount of parkland.  When I look at it through the lens of the Portland classification, however, it has few people-to-nature spaces and even fewer nature-nature spaces.  I would be willing to pay for dedicated nature-to-nature spaces in my neighborhood.  How restorative to view these types of spaces!  On to Part II.

Image: Bradner Gardens Park, Seattle (community gardens)

Each strategy receives its own chapter in which Harnik describes the issue and provides process, funding, and programming details via actual projects.  The 16 approaches to expanding city park systems are

• Buying It, 
• Utilizing Urban Redevelopment, 
• Community Gardens, 
• Old Landfills, 
• Wetlands and Stormwater Storage Ponds, 
• Rail Trails, 
• Rooftops, 
• Sharing Schoolyards, 
• Covering Reservoirs, 
• River and Stream Corridors, 
• Cemeteries, 
• Boulevards and Parkways, 
• Decking Highways, 
• Closing Streets and Roads, 
• Removing Parking, and 
• Adding Hours Rather than Acres.
  

Image: High Line Park, New York City (rail trails -- overhead/trestle trail)

The approaches are straightforward but Harnik's stories do address the challenges presented by each one.  Sharing schoolyards, rail trails, landfill conversion, and (proactive planning of) community gardens are among the most difficult to implement.  I have seen many of these approaches implemented with the exception of covered reservoirs and stormwater storage ponds designed as park space.

Image: Strawberry Creek Park, Berkeley (river and stream corridors)

One suggestion for the next edition is to illustrate the examples presented in Part II with photographs or provide a web-based appendix of such photographs.  Otherwise, I enjoyed reading Urban Green and thank Peter Harnik and Island Press for my review copy.   The book is an excellent case study of expanding a city's parkland providing strategies across several scales such as type of city, cost, degree of intervention.  In addition to the approaches themselves, Harnik's cases provide accessible narratives of park planning in a wide range of U.S. cities.

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 edges.  Dense stands of mimosa severely reduce the sunlight and nutrients available for other plants.

The plant, native to East Asia (China), was introduced to the United States in 1745 and now is naturalized from New Jersey to Louisiana and in California.  Despite its status as a "least wanted alien plant," this mimosa "continues to be a popular ornamental because of its fragrant and showy flowers," according to NPS.  Surprisingly, Albizia julibrissin is listed as an approved street tree species by the City of Los Angeles and Seattle (with reservations)!  (It was described as "one of the most desirable ornamental trees which we have for parking, narrow streets, or for alternating with standard shade trees [and] for lawns or for small avenues..." by William Willard Ashe in Shade Trees for North Carolina published in 1908.)

The NPS PCA Alien Plant Working Group recommended several alternatives to A. julibrissin such as serviceberry (Amelanchier arborea), redbud (Cercis canadensis), flowering dogwood (Cornus florida), river birch (Betula nigra), fringe tree (Chionanthus virginicus), American holly (Ilex opaca), sweetgum (Liquidambar styraciflua). 

Serviceberry

Redbud

Birch

Sweetgum

I was surprised by the inclusion of river birch, American holly, and sweetgum as none of these trees have showy flowers.  Technically, neither does the dogwood.  The bracts that surround the dogwood's true inconspicuous flowers are often mistaken for the tree's flowers.  The birch, holly, sweetgum, and dogwood do have other characteristics that make them excellent alternatives to A. julibrissin.  River birch bark stands out in the winter and sweetgum has spectacular fall color ranging from yellow to red to purple.  The fruit (drupe) of both American holly and flowering dogwood are wildlife food sources.  The Forest Service's Silvics Manual reported that the fruit of the flowering dogwood has "been recorded as food eaten by at least 36 species of birds, including ruffed grouse, bob-white quail, and wild turkey. Chipmunks, foxes, skunks, rabbits, deer, beaver, black bears, and squirrels, in addition to other mammals, also eat dogwood fruits." 

Going back to Origins, the company decided to use Mimosa tenuiflora in its new product line because of the plant's historic use in treating burns and wounds in its native range of Central Mexico to parts of South America.  The company claims that M. tenuiflora acts as "a potent stimulator of natural collagen."  More about M. tenuiflora's ethnobotany can be read here.

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: Ethnobotany of trees & forests 11/12/2010 
• Lost photos of the Portland Classical Chinese Garden (Lan Su Chinese Garden) 12/23/2010

• Peter Stuyvesant's pear tree 11/29/2010  
• Finding Park Space in the City 12/08/2010

• Sukkah City in Union Square Park 09/22/2010  
• Managing stormwater with Greenstreets 10/01/2010  
• Tree care tools 12/02/2010
• New Bowery Cemetery of the Spanish and Portuguese Synagogue 09/28/2010 
• Then & Now: Bleecker Street Cherry Trees 11/22/2010   



Image: Bluebird House by Sustainable Pet Design (courtesy of Stephanie Rubin)

• Green-roofed bird houses 12/24/2010 
• urbancanvas Design Competition, or beautifying temporary protective structures 09/20/2010
• Wordless Wednesday: Pumpkins in the city 11/24/2010

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 set them on his own land probably four or five feet from the fence except where the road is very wide" (Ibid., 69).

"We can watch the changes in the tree itself, can note in winter its type of branching and the fine penciling of its twigs against the sky, in spring the opening of its buds and the rapid growth of flower and leaf, in summer the full foliage, in autumn the rich leaf coloring and the fall of leaf and fruit" (Ibid., 17).