Today’s Friday Film features a green roof in Islington, London designed by Bere Architects, Kim Wilkie and Dusty Gedge. It’s been a great success in attracting wildlife including goldfinches, house sparrows, butterflies and a variety of bees. The video features photos of a variety of plants from the roof and many of the insects which make [...]
Magnuson Park is located in Seattle along Lake Washington, north of the University of Washington. The park has a long history of dramatic land use change and part of it has now come back full circle. In the days of early settlers the area was a wetlands, alder grove, and Douglas fir forest with trees [...]
The 2nd annual backyard habitat tour in Shoreline, an area just north of Seattle, was dubbed ‘Where Our Wild Things Are‘ and presented six, certified yards. Shoreline is a Certified Community Wildlife Habitat through the National Wildlife Federation. The gardens ranged from just begun to established and featured highlights such as urban farming, accessibility and integrated family [...]
The Olympic Sculpture Park in Seattle is a beautiful place. The 8.5 acre park sits alongside Elliott Bay, overlooking the Puget Sound, islands and the Olympic Mountains to the west, downtown Seattle to the south and the Space Needle to the east. The site is divided by a major street, railroad tracks and a bike [...]
Located in the Little Quarter in Prague, the Wallenstein Palace (Valdštejnský Palác) Gardens are beautiful, interesting and full of unintentional habitat. Wallenstein Palace is grand, consisting of twenty-three houses, three gardens and five courtyards. The gardens are completely enclosed by the buildings and walls and only accessible by two entries. Commissioned by, and named after Habsburg general Albrecht z [...]
News Stalled on the Bloomingdale Trail:: From Chicago Reader comes this article about the trials and problems creating a new open space in Chicago using an old rail line, similar to the High Line in New York. Once in motion, this could provide a great deal of habitat through the city. Finalists named for Vail Pass [...]
The City of Vancouver, in British Columbia, has a successful Green Streets program where residents adopt a corner bulge or traffic circle. The gardener then designs, plants and maintains their adopted garden for as long as they like which can be a single month or multiple years. I found this to be a fascinating project, [...]
The history of Bradner Gardens Park goes back to 1971 when the 1.6 acre lot was purchased by the City of Seattle along with 19 other lots in the city to be used for parks. For many years however it was leased out, first to the school district and then social services. In 1987 a [...]
This past weekend I attended the Puget Sound Bird Fest in Edmonds, Washington. Part of the schedule was a wildlife habitat demonstration garden as well as a tour of five backyard habitats. The demonstration garden was the first stop and has it’s own story which I will post separately about soon. This post will focus [...]
This was mentioned in a recent Foragings post, but it has such great design implications that I wanted to feature it in more detail. Over several years a landowner has turned previous agriculture land into a wetland habitat. Natural England helped with this transformation through their Higher Level Stewardship program which “aims to deliver significant [...]
Seattle University sits on 48 acres in the middle of Seattle, a five minute walk east from the middle of downtown. It’s in between the First Hill and Capitol Hill neighborhoods and is surrounded by hospitals, medical centers, stores, restaurants and housing. The campus has had a long commitment to sustainability dating back to the [...]
These two courtyards are in my neighborhood in Seattle and present dramatically different landscapes. One is in the center of a U-shaped, tall building and faces north while the other is a short building with an L-shaped courtyard and opens NW. The first one has minimal trees, only small ones in the courtyard and entrance [...]