(This post was authored by bay-area landscape designer Emily Lubahn. She’s the first of our new guest contributors who will be developing articles for the site, and you can check out some of her work here.)
Do you walk on a sidewalk to get to your front door? Do enjoy plants more than concrete? If you answered “yes” to both of these questions, you are one step closer to becoming a proud sidewalk gardener.
More and more people are removing excess pavement and replacing it with vegetable, pollinator, and native plant gardens. These guerilla-type gardens perform more than aesthetic or edible functions for your enjoyment; they are contributing hidden services as well. Stormwater management, pollinator habitat, and cooling and cleaning of the air are just a few of the hot ecosystem services you will be adding to your streetscape. It is a bit of work to get started, but cities are making it easier for residents to bust out the hardscape (concrete, asphalt, etc.) for softscape (plants, mulch, etc.). Read the rest of this entry »
Every year, around this time in late January, I start to get fidgety. It’s usually around this time that we Portlanders get fooled by a little warm spell. The buds on some of the early blooming trees start to swell, and the crocuses get confused and start to poke up through the soil. I call it the