Category: Cities
Ecotone Urbanism: Design at the Intersection of Nature and City
The Power of Overlap Edmonton, my home city, sits in Aspen Parkland—a transitional ecosystem between the great plains to the south and the boreal forest to the north. Not quite prairie, not quite forest, it is a classic ecotone: an area of overlap that is richer and more diverse than either ecosystem alone. Ecologists describe…
Snow Farming—The Winter Gardening Hack You’re Not Using
Using Snow to Water Gardens, Insulate Plants, and Change Your Growing Zone As a gardener, winter presents an ideal opportunity to harvest, move, pile, and store water for the upcoming gardening season. It’s time to talk about snow farming. Snow farming goes beyond storing water. Strategically placed snow can reduce winter damage, increase the survival…
Self-Sufficiency is a Fantasy—Try Radical Interdependence Instead
Self-Sufficiency is Incompatible with Nature Self-sufficient naturalist is an oxymoron, but you wouldn’t know it from the thousands of off-grid influencers and YouTube creators promoting the self-sufficiency lifestyle. As a tree-loving, beard-sporting, plaid-wearing, soil-building white dude, I know I’m squarely in their target audience. But here’s the thing: self-sufficiency is a myth At best, self-sufficiency…
Cultivate McCauley – 6 Ways to Grow 1,000 Community Trees
A Neighbourhood Revitalization Project With the help of residents, businesses, and social agencies, Shrubscriber, with support from a City of Edmonton Revitalization Grant, is working on a project called Cultivate McCauley to grow, distribute, and plant 1,000 trees. This effort will increase the neighbourhood’s tree canopy by 2%, moving it closer to Edmonton’s goal of…
Edmonton Tree Canopy By Neighbourhood
A Twenty Percent Tree Canopy Goal The City of Edmonton’s goal is to have a tree canopy covering 20% of the city. A 20% canopy would hide one-fifth of the city under a tree. Currently, the Edmonton tree canopy is sitting around 13%. Scroll down to see how your neighbourhood stacks up against the City’s…
Cultivate the Millennium!
Growing and Tending Thousand-Year-Old Trees Long Now Foundation, Ignite 2024 In May 2024, I had the fortune of presenting at the Long Now Foundation’s 2024 Ignite Talks in San Francisco about our efforts to grow 1000 thousand-year-old trees throughout Edmonton. You can find all of the Long Now Foundation Ignite Talks on YouTube 2024 Ignite…
Community Supported Forestry (CSF)
Growing Climate-Resilient Neighbourhoods One Tree at a Time If you’ve ever signed up for a vegetable CSA, you already understand the idea behind Community Supported Forestry. You invest in something local, share in the harvest, and become part of something bigger than a transaction. Now imagine doing that with trees. From Vegetables to Forests Community…
The Succession of Cities: Organic Patterns Shaping Urban Growth
Do Cities Grow Like Ecosystems? Until millennia, city building was an organic, bottom-up, incremental process beginning with a handful of people looking for opportunities at the confluence of waterways, trade roots, and resources. Speculating newcomers establish temporary structures, replaced over time with permanent buildings. Enterprising citizens set up shops to supply growing demands, and streets…
How To Grow a 1000-Year-Old Tree
Edmonton Public Library How-To Festival What would it be like to live in a world where people tended 1000-year-old trees? How might planting long-lived trees change our thinking about the future and our role in its creation? The following is a recording and edited transcript of a talk I gave at the Edmonton Public Library’s…
11 Woody Superpowers That Grow Better Cities
Trees have woody superpowers that, when used correctly, can grow better cities. We plant trees in our parks, boulevards, and yards, but for many of us, they’re little more than greenery in the landscape. But noticed or not, trees are silently making our yards, communities, and cities better places to live. Whether shading our homes,…
Researching Edmonton Heritage Trees
Supported by the Edmonton Heritage Council On the edge of downtown Edmonton, on the river valley slopes, grows a wild patch of goji berries, descended from seeds imported and tended by Edmonton’s early Chinese community. A few blocks West, surrounded by asphalt, the chestnut seed Walter Holowach collected in Vienna stands forty feet tall, casting…
What Makes A Heritage Tree? Part 1 -Time
Time, Novelty, and Narrative and the Value of Heritage Trees The 2008 book Heritage Tree of Alberta lists 28 trees in Edmonton that are said to have “heritage value,” but what does that mean? How can we define “heritage tree”? This article attempts to synthesize a definition of a heritage tree by comparing the twenty-eight…