Shrouded in Light: Naturalistic Planting Inspired by Wild Shrublands by Kevin Philip Williams and Michael Guidi
London: Filbert Press, 2024; 240 pages, $55.
Reviewed by Danielle VonLehe
The garden designer’s relationship to shrubs is moderately troubled. In the 1980s, the New Perennial movement rejected the rigid ubiquity of sculpted shrubs (typical of the early 20th-century British garden) in favor of prairie-style meadow plantings of matrix-based stands of grasses and perennials. The authors of Shrouded in Light: Naturalistic Planting Inspired by Wild Shrublands, gardener Kevin Philip Williams and ecologist and horticultural researcher Michael Guidi, make a persuasive case for returning the shrub to the field of contemporary planting design to inspire a more ecologically responsible, botanically respectful, and conceptually “new wild” garden.
An ambitious forest restoration project in Ashland, Oregon, aims to reduce the risk that wildfire poses to residents—and their water supply.
By Timothy A. Schuler
Burns are timed to limit the effect on municipal air quality, though it is impossible to prevent all air pollution. Photo courtesy Lomakatsi Restoration Project.
Though the warning signs had been present for months, the bad news officially came in March 2018, when forecasters at the Northwest Interagency Coordination Center (NWCC) in Portland, Oregon, released their long-range forecast of the upcoming fire season. Though it varied from state to state, in Oregon, light snowpack and higher-than-average temperatures combined to create a highly combustible landscape. “I’m worried about the 2018 fire season,” John Saltenberger, the fire weather program manager at the NWCC, told a Portland television station.
A map showing the extent of federal disaster declarations in a 12-year period. Map by Rebuild by Design.
Between 2011 and 2023, more than 90 percent of the nation’s congressional districts had at least one county receive a federal disaster declaration because of extreme weather. Some states, including California, Tennessee, and Oklahoma, have received dozens. The real number of congressional districts that have faced extreme weather could be even higher, says Amy Chester, the managing director for Rebuild by Design. The organization’s new publication, Atlas of Accountability, shows how climate disasters are occurring across the country, regardless of an area’s population density or geography.
“A lot of those districts [that didn’t receive a federal disaster declaration] have had high heat deaths and major heat waves,” she says. But “the federal government doesn’t give federal disaster declarations” for heat waves, so those events can’t be accounted for in the same way in the organization’s reports, such as its previous Atlas of Disaster. The data visualized by the map, which can be accessed on Rebuild by Design’s website, makes a nonpartisan case for more federal funding to adapt communities before a disaster, not just to build back what was destroyed. With additional funding, Chester says, designers and planners could “be a lot more creative in the way they want to respond.”
Effecting Change to Avoid Disaster: Communicating Effective Wildfire Planning Strategies, by Design Workshop, Professional Communications Honor Award.
Prepared by Design Workshop, Inc., for CPAW.
“We were in need of a suite of graphics to effectively communicate to decision makers how the choices they make can help their communities mitigate the risks of wildfire. We wanted our audience to learn about different mitigation techniques to reduce wildfire risk to the structure and surrounding landscape.” Continue reading Awards Focus: Talking to Communities about Wildfire→
A look at 2024’s landscape architecture products with style.
Edited by Kristen Mastroianni
Every month, LAM’sGoods column features new products of interest to landscape architects, selected by the Goods editor. Sleek benches, fire pits, water features, lighting, and play equipment are some of the product category standouts. This year, the editors rounded up 2024’s most striking products, including a Snøhetta-designed paving system, play equipment, and an appealing outdoor lounger.
January: Public Furnishings
Courtesy Hartman Benzon Media.
520VS SERIES: This new and versatile seating surface from DuMor features laser-cut bent steel straps. The method allows for a uniform gap between each strap, creating a clean and continuous look. The series will also include standard benches, tables, seat islands, and wall-mount benches. For more information, visit www.dumor.com.Continue reading 2024: The Year in Goods→
Historic Brucemore joined increasingly common company: an important landscape destroyed by climate change-accelerated natural disasters.
By Zach Mortice
Trees with dense canopies, including maples and bur oaks, were most vulnerable to the violent gusts of wind from the 2020 derecho. Courtesy Brucemore Inc.
On August 10, 2020, a derecho ripped across the Midwest with winds up to 140 miles an hour, causing $11 billion in damages, the most expensive thunderstorm in the United States to date. In the path of the wall of wind and thunderstorms was Cedar Rapids, Iowa, which lost 65 percent of its tree canopy. Brucemore, a late Victorian country estate with a landscape designed in the early 20th century by ASLA cofounder O. C. Simonds, lost two-thirds of its tree canopy—300 mature trees. The $3 million repair bill put Brucemore in increasingly common company: a historic landscape devastated by climate change–accelerated natural disasters.
Overlooked and underrated, failed design concepts find new audiences in a multimedia project created by two landscape architects.
By Maggie Hansen and Jennifer Birkeland
Via Instagram.
As designers and as academics, we have developed a working relationship with rejection and failure. We believe this deserves more discussion.
In September 2023, we offered an open call to landscape architects to share their unselected projects in a zine. As we waded into the project, we learned there’s a tremendous interest in uncovering stories of how we navigate risk and refocus on the projects that got away. We compiled a small archive of unrealized projects on social media, and this month we are releasing the first issue of a zine titled Ditched Schemes along with a series of podcast interviews. Ditched Schemes is a platform for highlighting the relationship we have with our work, while uncovering ideas that have not yet found their audience. For us, this project brings up pressing questions about what landscape architecture considers success.
Our archive research began with general curiosity: What ideas and design approaches left unrealized in the past might be worth revisiting? How have proposals from designers at the start of their careers evolved over time? But compiling our archive raised other questions as well: Who can fail publicly, and how do identity and positionality affect the risks we are each able to take?
As students, we learned about some notorious failed schemes: OMA’s entry for the 1982 Parc de la Villette competition in Paris, the 1999 competition short list for Downsview Park in Toronto, or the incomplete implementation of the 1851 Andrew Jackson Downing plan for the National Mall in Washington, D.C. These projects may not exist as concrete forms and growing vegetation, but they live on in articles, course lectures, and conversations that still capture the imagination of what might have been. In class discussions, they illustrated critical turning points in landscape architecture history. It is inspiring to imagine the many alternative proposals to projects that we know well as built work. Through Ditched Schemes, we are daylighting those alternatives for reconsideration. Continue reading In Ditched Schemes, Designs That Didn’t Make the Cut Get a Second Look→
The Magazine of the American Society of Landscape Architects
