seeds of architecture, the environment and the american landscape from Washington DC

In 1900 it was estimated that over 3 billion Chestnut trees (Castanea dentata) blanketed the American landscape.

The American Chestnut blight was first noticed on trees in the Bronx Zoo in 1904.

Seven years later it was conservatively estimated to have done $25,000,000 worth of damage.

There are currently fewer than 100 American Chestnut trees over 24″ in diameter in its former native range.

3 billion trees. gone.

Strange how things can fade out so quickly. As the Starbucks, Countrywides, Bear Stearns, and other American institutions crumble I propose we infill them with Chestnut Parks. Slivers of land with an f.a.r. of 1. One layer of native plants reaching crookedly parallel to glass curtain walls, up concrete retaining walls, and inside the decommissioned dirt of failed commerce; places to watch the sun traipse between the cities sight lines and spill pieces of shade on unadvertised surfaces.

When the Chestnut tree comes back it will come back recomposed. When plants come back to the city, they will come back recomposed.

I have been to Chestnut Park in Philadelphia twice and once it was closed. I know nothing about it except what I have read on the plaque and seen on those two occasions. I nonetheless find it to be one of the more elusively beautiful places I have ever been and wish that everyone in every city had a place like this to read, eat, watch, daydream, listen, write, do nothing in.

A grass gripping breeze has, for the moment, triumphed the DC summer… if only one could take over the TV. I am so annoyed with the number of inane commercials I am forced to watch every few minutes during the olympics that I thought I would post one that reminds me that in very rare occasions, advertising is not the devil.

Want to save the world?

Let the Sun grow some sweet corn and peppers; eat them for dinner; store some energy; hop on an old Schwinn; make some pedal power and forget about burning ancient algae at 5 clams a gallon..

I have been recently fascinated with Schwinn bicycles, particularly those made in Chicago in the 1960’s and 1970’s. Since the bikes were mass produced there are many to be found, and the variability of forms and functions, names and numbers, and parts and pieces makes collecting them very appealing.

The fleet is currently counted at 6

Among my favorites is a 1980 Schwinn Twinn in Cardinal Red. Weighing in at 64 pounds, this beast is a force on the mean streets of DC, but nonetheless a stylish and amusingly ridiculous way to get around town with that special someone (poor Kate).

The most recent addition is a 1964 Schwinn Typhoon in Flamboyant Red. A bit sun burned but all original and in cruising condition this bike is nothing but a beautiful floating whale of a ride.

If you’ve got something from the Schwinn Bicycle Company collecting dust is your basement you’ve got a couple options… you can give it to me, or you can fix it up and quit crying about your blazing massive carbon footprint. If you want to turn that Schwinn around here a few tips…

1. unearth the ride.

2. Take the monster apart.

3. electrolysis (1) and coke (2)

(1) electrolysis is very effective at removing rust from steel; google the term and you will find some clear directions

(2) coke and aluminum foil is the best chrome rust remover; just polish the piece with the foil and a little bit of coke

4. sparkle

use a good de-greaser on the rest of the parts and let them sit overnight

6. Put it back together and pray that you don’t have any left over pieces.

If you want to know what you’ve got go here…

If you need to fix something go here…

If you want to learn more about bikes go here…

and if you want to see a serious Schwinn collection go here

On the National Park Service website Purple Loosestrife makes the list of the Least Wanted Plants and is classified as an Alien Plant Invader of Natural Areas. Next time you consider buying this plant, English Ivy, or any other weed at Home Depot… please don’t. Please take a moment to consider the above list. The problem is that aggressive non-native plants like Purple Loosestrife thrive in disturbed sites like Kingman Island and disrupt the native ecosystem…basically a wrench in an intricate system that fails to provide anything of value to birds, bugs and other creatures of the area.

Of course there are other plants on Heritage and Kingman Islands (just east of RFK stadium shown below) and on the day that Josh, Lisa and I were there we came across plenty of Poison Ivy Toxicodendron radicans, Silver Maple Acer saccharinum, and Josh’s favorite invasive exotic, Porcelainberry Ampelopsis brevipendunculata (which admittedly does have one of the most beautiful berries I have ever seen).

Since the US Army Corps of Engineers created the islands in 1916 they have been a collection point for the destitute and the dumped. Left to grow largely wild, the result, now open to the public (I think) is a thicket of 100 year old weeds. Perhaps even more impressive and beautiful is the re-establishment of many wetland species along the coasts. The last time I had explored the islands, the mud and geese looked like they might overcome the efforts at regenerating the wetlands. However, beyond my surprise that the islands were open was the view from the footbridge across the Anacostia…

the plants seem to be doing quite well and are reclaiming a fair percentage of land.

Unfortunately the archaic is captured in the opposite view and we are quickly reminded of the very visible hand of destruction. Five fingers, nails stained black from the making of progress.

It is both strange and beautiful to watch a building disappear. Anne Archbold Hall, originally known as Gallinger Hospital Nurses Residence, is fading. The building is part of the now largely abaondoned DC General Hospital in Southeast Washington, and although designated a Historic Landmark in 2006, it is all but forgotten.

The Colonial Revival neoclassical design was constructed in 1932 and added on to in the 1940’s. Anne Archbold Hall was engraved into the limestone entablature in 1952 to honor the benefactor, “an important, local, female philanthopist, a benefactor and compassionate critic of Gallinger Hospital and a contributor to nursing programs and to the nurses’ residence itself.” The Historic Preservation Landmark Designation goes on to note, “Anne Archbold Hall is a site of important to women’s history, as it is very significant as representing the occupation of nursing, one of the few professions widely available to women in the early 20th century and one comprised of nearly all women at the time”

If one goes to look for the building it is there… sometimes. It simply depends on how one searches. On the ground on a sunny summer day it looks like this…

In an aerial photograph it looks like this (highlighted in yellow)…

and on a map it looks like this…

see the big gray area south of RFK stadium and west of the Anacostia. Thats DC General Hospital. It’s roads, entrances, and buildings are missing from the google map.

Walking around the site, unsure of being fenced in or fenced out, trespassing or welcomed feels like something from Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. However, the buildings beauty and strength is undeniable, perhaps highlighted by its overall disrepair and lack of recent human interaction. I want to save this building and find it hard to imagine building new ones when something this beautiful exists.

Kings to come…next stop Kingman Island

exploring the Anacostia 1 here

bumble bees be buzzing around. strolling through the gardens of the boss on a conservative afternoon in the middle of a strange political future. and it seems to me that butter doesn’t fly but certainly enjoys a drink of mountain mint now and again. and the younger of us head to the club where they put leaves in our cocktails (and now its me thats looking backward to Ms. Sullivan drinking leafy concoctions in Venezia).  squint your eyes. Strange how it is snow in the middle of summer. The bees and butterflies love Pycanthemum muticum. Please do touch the leaves… come to our house in Washington DC and crush them between your fingers. Leave more than footsteps and take more than pictures. Pictures are worth only a thousand words, and mountain mint tea is certainly worth more. It will grow in full sun or light shade and especially enjoys the edges of our dwindling woodlands. There is a purity to the green and an ancient to the silver. The plant seems to be at once just born and a century old. The wisdom of my garden is but 3 weeks, but it is rumored that this minty addition will repel mosquitos. Drinks for me and none for them.

On a recent trip to the Morton Arboretum I had the chance to walk through the Schulenberg Prairie. Despite the many visitors on this particular Saturday, Kate and I were the only two in the prairie and had the landscape to ourselves (and the billions of bugs, insects, birds, and few cacophonous cars).

I felt very at home in that set of plants and critters and it made me think of the cultural geographer Yi Fu Tuan and his description of comfort in the American southwest. And while the beauty of the prairie is in plants such as Purple Coneflower Echinacea purpurea, the power of the prairie is up to twelve feet deep where roots are storing water, carbon and nutrients necessary for survival. Hence, of course, the fertility of midwest soil and the ongoing growth of corn for cars and cattle.

The unfortunate reality of our historical cultivation is that we released more carbon expunging expanses of prairie than we will ever release from all the cars in United States combined. According to the Nature Conservancy, less than 4% of the original tallgrass prairie remains.

We have crossed a cliff where conservation will not be enough. Conservationists cannot do enough. It is time for regenerationists. Regenerationists will have to recognize that humans are part of the current ecology (and will be for the foreseeable future, but if not…) and must intertwine human action with ecological balance. Prairie museums will not be enough. Prairies are going to have to take over front lawns, rooftops, building facades, and highway medians. Their regeneration must be aggressive and stealth; beautiful and functional.

Morus rubra

In my dreams I was picking ripe persimmons and bowling ball size pommegranites from trees along a shaded street. The persimmons were somehow more orange and tasted like sunrise. In my day life, I have been lunching on mulberries Morus rubra and serviceberries Amelanchier arborea, both now ripe in and around the dc area. The looks I get as I pick fruit from trees and pop them in my mouth are those of confusion and disbelief. It seems that we have grown accepting of pesticide bathed, individually wrapped, laboratory grown and cross-continent shipped fruits and vegetables but aghast by the thought that these thing once grew on a tree or in the ground. Under fluorescent lights, with a *SALE* nametag we notice and respect these things but beneath the cover of green they fail to catch our eye.

ChemLawn and the movement of beauty

While I was eating mulberries from the tree in the photograph above I was thinking about ChemLawn. Imagine a company being called ChemLawn; that’s what was plastered on the trucks and yard stakes that would decorate the street and lawn I grew up on. I was remembering that logo and thinking about beauty and how fluid it is. Of course, great efforts are still made in the pursuit of monocultural lawns of neon grass, but cultural eyes seem to be awakening to the toxicity of the pursuit. The word chemical is in a dive. As beauty is re-defined it will be interesting to note its dripline. Will well placed weeds and edible berries overtake chemical fertilizers and relentless lawns under the protection landscape logic and ethical aesthetics? Without a sure answer, I continue spending my days Influencing the flow of beauty towards something less ridiculous…

TruGreen ChemLawn is now TruGreen, because one word is all you need for a great lawn. We have shortened our name to make it easier for you to remember that we are the experts of lawn care. While we are known as “TruGreen”, the name ChemLawn will always be a part of our Company. The two companies merged in 1992 and we kept both names for the last 15 years because ChemLawn was a respected and trusted name in lawn care.

Recently, we have refocused our company to be much more customer oriented. Enhanced service levels, the introduction of Lawn Quality Audits (LQAs), EASYPAY and the customer benefits of the new TruGreen.com are just a few examples of the many customer initiatives here at TruGreen.

This name change is symbolic of these fundamental customer improvements. The “new” TruGreen is dedicated to Superior Service and Visible Results by proving to you, our valued customers, that to us, Your Lawn Means More. (http://lawn-care.trugreen.com)

?fr_story=1baabf00c8d038531f7ec5da5111f8ba14adcbac

Connected by a coastal thread two hours south of Cancun Mexico is a town of 14,000 people called Tulum. Translated from Mayan, the name Tulum means wall or fence. The title references the ruins of a walled Mayan community built and inhabited between 1200 and 1450. The site was formerly known as Zama, meaning City of Dawn.

Sun burned, standing 40 feet above an impossible blue ocean and squinting into the southeastern sky it becomes quite clear why ancient Tulum was named the City of Dawn and why all bedroom windows should face SE.

The orientation is empowering, humbling and logically selected.

Once the site was chosen, the forest was cleared and the future city was walled on three sides with the ocean cliff providing protection on the fourth. Temples, palaces, homes and castles inhabit the site, all orthogonally positioned to the Caribbean coast and organized to worship such wonderful things as Venus and the Wind.

The ruinous landscape is intensely powerful in its topographic siting and continuing decay; an ongoing testament to the control of the sun, the planets, the wind and the waves. Landscape and architecture moving slowly into another at the hands of salt and ultraviolet leaving residual axes and green grass to revel in culturally protected moments of shade.

In 2020 Washington DC should hold a World’s Fair.

But it should be a different kind of World’s Fair.

Instead of spiraling people and culture to a particular geographic place, this event would spiral out. Digital information from each participating country or region would be collected, organized and re-presented to the world. Although all the data would be stored in Washington DC, the fair would be accessible from anywhere. A giant l.e.d. world would be displayed on the National Mall mapping the weave of connections between access and destination points. The weave would of course be constantly changing; different locations on the globe aglow at different times of day and during significant geographic and political events.

tracing inspiration; on looking through the Columbian World’s Fair Atlas…

The Columbian Exposition (1893 Chicago World’s Fair) opened on May 1, 1893 and continued until October 30, 1893. During the 6 months it was open nearly 30 million people traveled to Chicago to see the fair. While many other Expositions have been held since, few were of the scope, organization and duration orchestrated to build the White City (exposition list from the Bureau International des Expositions).

A sanctioned exposition is scheduled to occur in 2020, and American cities such as Houston, Energy and Exploration: A Vision for the Future, New York, Showcasing the World, and San Francisco Interculture: Celebrating the World’s Cultures while Creating New Ones through Interaction and Exchange are already vying to host the expo.

Instead of creating a destination, I think Washington DC could become a conductor through which information could be charged; the copper of next World’s Fair. The wiring is already in place. The political network centered in DC could provide a conduit of submission to be supplemented with less formal strings and loops. The creation of the fair would create technologically advanced jobs in DC and across the world with each country / region working to showcase their future. And of course as part of the future we would reflect on century old visions.

If you are in Washington DC and have some free time this week or this upcoming weekend, go see the Azaleas in bloom at the National Arboretum. Although the Rhododendron genus is certainly not my favorite collection of species, and Azaleas are not in my view the most interesting of plants, I must admit that their display and collection of color is fantastic (in a sort of F. Scott Fitzgerald way). Not because of any one species or even as a collection of flowering azaleas but more because of the composition and experience as a whole. Moving from the Capital Columns set in the meadow to the Azalea collection set beneath a canopy cover helps contain their song and let light in and out of the path. I found them most striking when they were able to contrast a structure of brick paths and boxwood edges. It was great to see so many people at the Arboretum and I encourage anyone to get there within the next couple weeks to see the blooms.

If i was a bird I think I would eat red berries. I think my favorite would be serviceberries. I wonder what else I would think about? Surely I would travel in search of hedgerows along century old American farmlands and seek winter warmth in coniferous hearts.

What if I was to design a landscape entirely from the perspective of a bird? Would humans appreciate it? Would they applaud its variance from other parks and plazas? Could I design a house for a human that birds would like to fly over, land on and sleep around? Could the walls of my house be houses for birds… singing the sun under the western horizon.

As a bird, would I like music? How about Bob Dylan? What is the best size wire to land on? Are my feet shaped this way to stand in a particular tree? Are my colors suited to the changing landscape. As the leaves, berries and blue skies disintegrate into a culture of consumption will my feathers match the strip mall? Will it matter anymore?

My bird’s eye view still looks for serviceberries and serviceberries are coming soon. Amelanchier sp., common name Serviceberry or Juneberry, is an understory tree that flowers in early spring (now) then produces small (1/2″) red/purple berries that are prized by 40+ species of birds and some astute humans. The fruits likely won’t be out around these parts until late June or July but the flowers that are blooming now are paving a sweet road to summer…between the white flowers, the delicious fruit and lantern fall color, the serviceberry is surely top 5.

With gas prices continuing to go up, up, up, we are undoubtedly going to be inundated with politiking over who is to blame. The Republicans blame Nancy Pelosi for raising gas prices and just about everything else wrong with our economy. The Democrats will blame Big Oil and the friend in the White House. On top of the blame game, presidential candidates McCain and Clinton are proposing lifting the federal gas tax. Obama is courageously refusing to support this short term fix which will have no long term effect on gas prices.

Unfortunately not everyone lives in a metro happy city like DC or can sell their car and buy a bike like me. So what are we to do as we near $4 a gallon? Tom Friedman’s excellent column in today’s NY Times gets it right - if we are going to help people survive in world of higher gas prices, we have got to start investing in alternatives.

“But here’s what’s scary: our problem is so much worse than you think. We have no energy strategy. If you are going to use tax policy to shape energy strategy then you want to raise taxes on the things you want to discourage — gasoline consumption and gas-guzzling cars — and you want to lower taxes on the things you want to encourage — new, renewable energy technologies. We are doing just the opposite.

Are you sitting down?

Few Americans know it, but for almost a year now, Congress has been bickering over whether and how to renew the investment tax credit to stimulate investment in solar energy and the production tax credit to encourage investment in wind energy. The bickering has been so poisonous that when Congress passed the 2007 energy bill last December, it failed to extend any stimulus for wind and solar energy production. Oil and gas kept all their credits, but those for wind and solar have been left to expire this December. I am not making this up. At a time when we should be throwing everything into clean power innovation, we are squabbling over pennies.

These credits are critical because they ensure that if oil prices slip back down again — which often happens — investments in wind and solar would still be profitable. That’s how you launch a new energy technology and help it achieve scale, so it can compete without subsidies.”

on planting trees…

I spent Earth Day (Wednesday the 22 of April, 2008) planting trees. However, these carbon consuming machines were not your garden variety stick the shovel in the backyard and toss in a stick with some branches on it trees.  They were big plants; house sized trees that cost more than most cars and alter local weather. We’re talking trees that deserve a crane to plant them…

The root ball of the tree shown  is a 20 feet diameter laced artwork. Although I don’t know the age of the tree I would guess it to be at least 15 years old. And so this becomes a question of buying time.  Affecting the landscape with such size certainly provides a satisfaction of immediacy, but isn’t there something about measuring the struggling seed; about marking the kitchen wall against the marks of your sister? Since younger trees, particularly ones that haven’t been shocked by transplanting, grow much faster than larger and older trees I wonder if were not missing something by allowing ourselves to wait and watch something grow. 

Or maybe this is an inspiring testament to the resiliency of trees and a parallel perspective on our ability to uproot and re-establish in a new American soil… sending new feeder roots through channels supported by a culture of scientific solutions and a mix of proper medicines.

Behind either perspective is the simplicity of digging up the dirt and letting something grow inside it.  New and old laces drinking up an alphabet of elements and releasing something good to breathe.