All posts by Elsa Johnson

Are Trees Sentient Beings?

BEAUTY, GENERAL INTEREST, PRESERVATION

by Elsa Johnson

In an interview for Yale Environment 360, German forester Peter Wohlleben answers “Certainly”. And no, he doesn’t look like an Ent. Wohlleben argues that trees are wonderful beings with innate adaptability, intelligence, and the capacity to communicate with, and heal, other trees. How did he come to this Enti-ish belief?

As a forester, he says, he was trained to look at trees as economic commodities (I cannot resist an aside here: to wit — our culture does not value things unless they are commodities), but after joining an agency for a community beech forest in Hummel, Germany, he became disillusioned. He began to see the use of traditional commodity forestry – clear cutting, and chemical use, for example – as putting short term profits ahead of sustainability. Now he manages the forest completely differently. Distressed by these traditional forest management practices, he re-thought his position because he was someone who wanted to protect nature, and he was being asked to destroy it.

Gradually he learned that the individuals of a species actually work together and cooperate with one another. In his book The Secret Life of Trees, Wohlleben writes about how trees are sophisticated organisms that live in families. He uses the term “mother tree” to describe a tree that is at the center of an interconnected web of roots, that can distinguish whether the root it encounters is its own root, the root of another species, or the roots of its own species (this is crudely verified on our local level by our experience with the same species trees in Forest Hill Park succumbing to disease while different species trees close by survive it ). Wohlleben describes how trees pass electrical signals through the bark and into the roots, and from there into the fungi networks in the soil, and thus alert nearby trees to dangers such as insects, or disease. Trees can also learn he says, citing the example of trees that in the year after a drought took up less water in the spring so that more remained available in the soil later in the season.

Sometimes accused of anthropomorphizing trees, Wohlleben says “We humans are emotional animals. We feel things. We don’t just know the world intellectually. So I use words of emotion to connect with people’s experience.” And: “We have been viewing nature like a machine. This is a pity because trees are badly misunderstood.” And: “Nobody thinks about the inner life of trees, the feelings of these wonderful living beings.” And: “Plants process information just as animals do, but for the most part they do this much more slowly. Is life in the slow lane worth less than life on the fast track?”

Wohlleben offers the evidence that trees growing in undisturbed natural forest can beneficially affect climate change by reducing temperatures and helping the soil retain moisture under their vast canopy. Conversely, climate change adversely affects trees less densely planted, as in common practice in tree plantations. The extra CO2 in the air today is making young trees grow about 30%  faster than they did decades ago. The faster growth exhausts trees and makes them less healthy. Trees growing in undisturbed natural forest fare better, says Peter Wohlleben. They grow more closely together, causing humidity to rise, cooling the forest and helping soil retain moisture.

Ah, he loves his trees so much — maybe he is an Ent after all.

If you would like to read more of the interview with Peter Wohlleben, go to YALE ENVIRONMENT 360. The issue is 16 November, 2016. Yale 360 is an online magazine offering opinion, analysis, reporting, and debate on global environmental issues, written by scientists, journalists, environmentalists, academics, and policy makers (etc.). It is published by the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies. The view and opinions expressed are those of the authors and not the school. 

   

  

Of Plants, Trees, and Soil: for Gardeners

Uncategorized

by Elsa Johnson

What is soil  (dirt!)  (earth!) – you know, that stuff plants (most of them) grow in — and how important is it, anyway?  

I’ll answer the second question first. Very important. At its simplest, soil is the stuff that feeds the green plants that create the atmosphere of our blue-green planet.  Soil is a creation, a product, the end result of a process.

We humans have a ‘thing’ for order and neatness. It is one of the ways we distinguish between the tended (hence, civilized; hence, reassuring) and the untamed (hence, wild; hence, threatening). It is the drive that compels us to pull up every unwanted plant, to prefer bare soil to – god forbid — a ‘mess’, to throw every bit of organic debris into a recycling bag for the city to come and fetch and take away.

Plants pull nutrients from the soil – and plants also create nutrients through their growth process. This is what we see above the soil – the growing plant and the soil around it. When the organic plant dies and decays in place, those nutrients go back to the soil, both above and below ground. With the help of insects and worms that take from the plant what they need for their own survival as they break down the plant’s fiber, this natural process builds a loose layer of topsoil. Soil is creation. We can help or hinder that. We all know that. But in the garden we have a hard time resisting our human need for order, for that look-of-civilization –and so, far too often, we take away all that good organic stuff that, if left, would enrich and rebuild our soils (for free) without doing any harm.  

In the forest the process works slightly differently. Tree leaves are fibrous and tough (if they weren’t we would be eating them). They don’t break down as easily or as quickly as soft-fiber garden debris. They decompose slowly, over a long time, resulting in a deeply layered forest floor of leaves in varying stages of decay, resulting in a deep, loose, dark duff under a natural leaf mulch that holds moisture and insulates the forest floor.

And this is just above ground.

Below ground soil is truly amazing, for in both the garden and the forest within that uninteresting looking ubiquitous soil exists a universe of diverse microorganisms, fungus, and bacteria with important jobs to do bringing nutrients, minerals, oxygen, and water to the roots of plants and trees. And a world of necessary microscopic predation goes on there too (for this is always the price life pays for life). That is healthy soil, sustained by and supporting the intricate, exquisite interrelationships of this complex, rich system. Intact, undamaged, these systems are self-sustaining. However, many of our common practices damage the soil.

All plants sequester carbon, as does oil, but exposing bare soil to air allows the soil to lose carbon into the atmosphere. Soil should be either planted or mulched.

Heavy equipment regularly and repeatedly rolling over the ground compresses soil, reducing its ability to absorb and hold oxygen and water, and also kills microscopic organisms that plants and trees need for health. Try to keep the use of heavy equipment to a minimum.  

Breaking up the soil by plowing or spading also loses carbon from the soil, and perhaps more importantly, breaks up soil structure, disrupting mycorrhizal structures and microscopic animals, and severing root connections and root interrelationships necessary for plant health.

Last — chemical fertilizers kill beneficial organisms, thus destroying soil health, and making plants dependent on repeat applications. Build soil health through composting and returning organic material to the garden.             

 

Reprise – Citizen Science in Forest Hill Park

GENERAL INTEREST, PRESERVATION

by Elsa Johnson

Last summer Gardenopolis Cleveland wrote about a project in Forest Hill Park undertaken by the Great Meadow Task Force for the East Cleveland Parks Association. The task force inventoried all the old growth trees (about 70 trees) in the park’s most iconic space, the Great Meadow, and with the help of Dr. David Roberts, a tree pathologist from Michigan University, arrived at the conclusion that the trees in the meadow are largely healthy and in good shape. However, as the summer wore on, it became clear that a group of 5 chestnut oaks about midway along the south perimeter access trail were showing signs of distress, with one clearly past saving.

How quickly this happened! It was shocking. The task force decided to invite Dr. Roberts back for a look at these trees, and at the trees in the area called the Meadow Vista, north across Forest Hill Boulevard. 

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Chestnut oak is an oak in the white oak group, native to the eastern United States, and an important ridgetop tree of the Appalachian mountain range chain, with a sparser outlier population in our northeastern Ohio foothills. Since most of us have never seen a chestnut leaf it will help to tell you that a single individual leaf somewhat resembles a beech leaf, but with small lobes, rather than fine dentations, and these gather together in a cluster.

Peeling back the bark on the dead chestnut oak tree revealed the grubs of two-lined chestnut-borers at about chest height.

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The borer starts its damage to the tree’s vascular system at the top of the tree, and works its way down. If only a few branches are affected presumably the tree could be saved, but when one finds the grubs at the base, the tree is definitely not salvageable. It is dead and should be removed and chipped (which kills the larvae). This borer is a serious insect pest of chestnut, white, black, red, scarlet, and bur oaks. Preventative treatment is possible, but treatment after a tree shows clear signs of decline is unlikely to save it.

Alas, this does not bode well for the park’s mostly oak forest. To prevent spread of this opportunistic insect in the Great Meadow (were there the funds to do so) these trees need to be gotten out of there.

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Then we all regrouped in the Meadow Vista, which has been suffering tree loss for a longer period of time than the Great Meadow; here many trees are diseased and dying. Examination of more recently dead trees here revealed chestnut borers in every affected tree. However, what Dr. Roberts was looking for was evidence of fungal pressure pads under the bark of dead and dying trees. He strongly suspected oak wilt here, based on the infection pattern he was seeing, with dead and diseased trees spreading in an ever widening ring from a center. And although we never did find pressure pads, but found lots of two-lined chestnut borer larvae, he remained concerned that oak wilt was also an issue here.

Oak wilt is an equally (or more) devastating diagnosis for our trees in the Meadow Vista. Where it might be manageable in the Great Meadow (were there the funds for treatment) in the more closely knit environment of the Meadow Vista and surrounding woods, management quickly becomes impossible as individual trees give way to densely packed forest… for oak wilt travels through the soil via the interconnected roots of same-species trees (i.e., red oak to red oak), and kills the vascular systems of trees through the soil, from the soil up. In an oak opening or savannah with some considerable distance between trees, one can cut trenches, severing the root systems, thus preventing spread. But where trees grow close together and the disease is manifesting in several locations, severing interconnected root systems is almost impossible.

The only good thing about oak wilt, and this is a very, very small thing, is that the white oak group succumb less often and less quickly than red oaks – and, indeed in Meadow Vista, all the affected trees are red oaks. Again, infected trees should be removed, chipped, and then covered for the year it takes to make sure the fungus is no longer viable.

What is the cause of so much disease? As I meet and talk with people in Cleveland Heights I discover other areas where oak trees have been lost to disease, or where there is failure to thrive. Is it stressed biological environments? How does a summer like the one we had in 2016 contribute to diseases like these? How do we plan a forest for the future? Another article will look at these questions.    

Thou

POETRY

by Elsa Johnson

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Thou —

                               are the granite                                               and         the cloud —

                               the eagle       and         the fly hatching in the flesh of the kill —

                               

                               the lily                                  and the dung in which it sprouted —

      

                               the ache in the crotch of the tree where the bough ripped off

          

                               and                                               the hot rushed flower of spring

           

                               You are the sun scion                    blinding the day-dark stars —

                               

                               both war-call and whisper

When the sky is turned on itself        When one lies over a barreled bench        like a sacrifice

on the face of the curved earth         with the sky found          in the bottom          of the bowl

under the grassed dome of heaven       —       You are the world made right         then wrong

then right again :   Life                       and the life it feeds                     and the life that feeds it

         

germ at the seed’s core                  the last shock of birth                      fresh love’s first stroke

the wound’s whimper                                                                                        a great glad belling        

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Note:

There is a bench in Forest Hill Park that is shaped like a barrel. If you sit on it and then lie back so that you are draped over it on your back, looking up at the sky with your head in an up-side-down position, looking down the length of the Great Meadow, a curious phenomena occurs: The world becomes a bowl. It is like being inside a snow globe, with the grass that was at your feet now overhead, and the trees reaching into the sky, but the sky now the bottom of a large bowl. The way the ground has directional slope disappears, homogenized by the strength of this bowl perception. I’ve asked various eye doctors why this perception of space as bowl – no one can give me an answer. It any of you, dear readers, have a clue why this might be, please tell us. 

At any rate I’ve tried to write poetry about this phenomena in the past, without success, but recently while writing a poem, I found the barrel bench and its effect creeping in. One of my poet friends calls it a psalm.

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Children’s Learning Gardens in Cleveland

GENERAL INTEREST

by Elsa Johnson

Are we officially in winter yet? The Acanthus mollis in my garden has yet to wilt, telling me we have not yet had a freeze hard enough to kill back it or its cousin Acanthus spinosa.

At any rate, back a month or so ago when it was officially and gloriously fall – Gardenopolis co-editors Tom Gibson and I joined a bus tour given by the Cleveland Association of Young Children. The tour would take us to four locations where we would be looking at both indoor and outdoor learning environments for young children. Firm believers in exposing children to nature at a very young age, we are interested in children’s outdoor learning environments. We wanted to see what is out there.

The tour started at the Music School Settlement, that impressive powerhouse educational resource located in University Circle, that lies cheek to jowl with Case Western Reserve University. The Music School Settlement, founded in 1912, is one of the oldest community music schools in the country, providing music education and arts-related programs to students of all ages regardless of their ability to pay. We were touring specifically the Center for Early Childhood’s classrooms and its outdoor learning environments : an Outdoor Classroom, and a Learning Garden.

When the children visit the outdoor classroom they are split into groups that rotate around 3 to 7 areas, participating in facilitator-led experiments at each of the areas. The areas include a water pump; stepping stones or tree stumps, a dirt pile, a sand pile, a paved track, a grassy hill, and planters. Nothing is very elaborate. The number of areas visited and experiments conducted depend on the interest and engagement of the students. An example of a planned activity is the water faucet where the children operate the pump to fill various size containers with water, count the number and sizes of various containers and cooperate to empty smaller containers into larger containers.

1112160913bStudents are also allowed time to freely explore the environment. There is an art ledge which the children may paint with colored water.

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There is nothing in this outdoor classroom that a group of enthusiastic volunteers could not build, with the exception of the circular paved pathway that connects all the learning stations.

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The outdoor Learning Garden, located on the footprint of a Victory Garden has numerous small beds for learning about and growing both annuals and perennial plants like Jerusalem artichoke. There is an herb spiral. There is a composter.

Our next stop was the Nature Center at Cleveland Metroparks Rocky River Reservation – South. Here, of course, the entire outdoors is a classroom and an adventure, so there is less constructed outdoors specifically for early childhood education. There are indoor classrooms, and extensive nature learning programing. What is new – just installed – is a new food forest located at the front of the building in its stunning location below a high escarpment, right alongside the Rocky river.

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 Our next stop was Parma Preschool. The outdoor space here seemed to combine some aspects of a playground (the moving bridge) and many of the aspects we saw at the Music School Settlement (water play/exploration area, planting beds, a place to paint), all of it condensed into a relatively small space. There was a certain appeal to that density. 

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Our last stop was the campus and school of the Urban Community School. Unfortunately, by the time we got there my battery had expired, so I have no pictures to share with you. I can only tell you that this inner city, near west side school run by Catholic nuns is a very nice place indeed. Their learning garden, wherein one finds many of the elements found at the Music School Settlement, is by far the most glamorous, and obviously professionally designed and executed.  There is a willow withe tunnel to surpass all other withe tunnels, an amphitheater, a hoop house (like a greenhouse but enclosed by plastic), and raised beds. It is beautiful. There is also a tall fence all the way around it and you need a key to get in.        

       

The Peripatetic Gardener Discovers Lake Erie Bluffs Park

GENERAL INTEREST, PERIPATETIC

by Elsa Johnson

Thirty years ago, back in the day when I was studying landscape architecture at the Ohio State University, I had the good luck to be hired one summer as an intern for ODNR, tasked with driving the Lake Erie shoreline from the Pennsylvania border to downtown Cleveland, looking for access to the lake. What a great job for someone who likes to wander off the purposeful route just to see what’s there! For pay I got to drive down every north facing paved and unpaved byway leading toward the lake….and what I found was that while access to the lake was very limited, there were several areas where sizable swaths of undeveloped land remained. I could imagine all kinds of things to do with them, but mostly I imagined parks.   

So it was with (unchanged) curiosity that I set out with my husband recently to explore the brand new lookout tower in Lake County’s 600 acre Lake Erie Bluffs park, which, itself, is quite new.

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Lake Erie Bluffs park is located a little east of Fairport Harbor, and a little west of the Perry Nuclear Power Plant, and offers the visitor access to almost two miles of undeveloped Lake Erie shoreline. It was a misty moisty morning – one of those days when all edges seem blurred and softened, as if the thinnest, finest pale veil had been thrown over everything. Soft weather.

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We parked at the Lane Road entrance, took a look at the trail map, and headed east along a nicely level crushed stone path in search of the tower.

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At 50 feet high, this tower is 70 feet shorter than the Emergent Tower at Holden Arboretum, but because it is set on a bluff that is itself about 50 feet above lake level, the end viewing effect is much the same – one looks out over the tops of (here) mostly young growth trees, and, to the north, to the platinum colored lake with it’s waves unendingly washing ashore.

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We hoped to spot a bald eagle’s nest from the tower but did not, although we did see eagles, and, of course, gulls (and a titmouse and a chickadee). In the spring and fall the southern shore of Lake Erie provides an important stopover for migratory birds, but alas, we did not see any. I found myself wondering how close we were to the nuclear power plant, but looking east, I could see nothing but a grey fog veil.

On the return trip we chose to walk the beach trail, right along the water’s edge, which was marked ‘easy’. While everything in this park is pretty level – there are no serious or dangerous challenges – the beach trail is not really ‘easy’. The beach, mostly made up of stones of varying sizes interrupted by driftwood of varying size, provides an unstable walking surface with plenty of obstacles. For someone who has had two hip replacements in the past 8 months and is still a little unsteady on her feet, this half mile beach walk was difficult. But looking back to the east after one near tumble, suddenly, there it was – Perry Nuclear Power Plant, the two towers rising above the trees, and not too distant.

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In the other direction one could just make out the lighthouse at Fairport Harbor, a tiny bump poking out into the lake.

Our exploration covered the eastern half of the park’s trail system, a total of about two miles. There is an equal amount of trail in the area of the park lying west of Lane Road, which we did not explore. 

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If you go: We took 90 to the Vrooman Road exit, then north on Vrooman, over the bridge (closed to semi-trucks but not to cars), a hard right at the top of the hill, then left on Lane Road. Stay on Lane to reach Lake Erie Bluffs. Another park of interest in this area is Indian Point, access to which is just before the Vrooman Road Bridge. Indian Point overlooks the juncture of the Grand River and Paine Creek.        

Demon Lover

POETRY

by Elsa Johnson

When my demon lover comes to bed           he drapes

his black furred body across the pillow                above   

my head        He has issues around intimacy            No

matter how hard he tries               he cannot get close

enough           pushes his head into my head            o-

ver         and over           trying to make of us one head   

one breath        while I gently push him away       over

and over until  —  exasperation!                     I pitch his

body down to the far end of the bed         …ah sweet

sleep          Hours later my husband wakes to find my

demon lover between us         hunkered down on my

right shoulder                Head tucked close to my neck

fore-leg stretched across my  chest    he seems to say

Possession  —   nine tenths of the law   :     She’s mine

Prayer to the Green Tara

BEAUTY, POETRY

by Elsa Johnson

green tara image

Small rose     rosette    

rosetta of greening  on grey stone

celadon   jade    acid

green    apple   greening

frost fuzzed    felt adorned    

white furred    greening

Rose Of The Seed World     

little sunflower      seed side

down    green side up

aglow on grey stone.   

Not centered  but  placed 

precisely    inside a circle    

paler than the grey stone

on which it lies

signified thus :

Cornucopia of Seed Heaven

Who prays to you

Rosetta of Mice

and in what language?

Who offered you

Sacred Object of Chipmunks

Prayer Wheel of Squirrels

and in what manner?

Harvest of Birds         

who caws you?    Green Lotus

Celadon    jade    acid 

green     apple    greening    

on grey stone —

Who worships you ?

little sunflower     little rose

little green lotus     seed side

down            green side up

Reforesting the Forest City – Planning for Climate Change

PERTINENT

 By Elsa Johnson

Here I am, sitting on my front porch on a sunny mid-September day, watching the Monarchs drift from buddleia blossom to blossom while listening to a Davey Tree Company crew two doors down the street cutting down and removing 3 huge old black locust trees that all lost their heads in that microburst/possible small tornado mid-summer. This is an older neighborhood, with most houses almost one hundred years old, which means there are an unusual number of unusually old and unusually tall black locusts which that storm unusually affected (one wonders, why did the black locusts, in particular, suffer so much breakage?).

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But it must be observed that, of the trees in my neighborhood, which borders a small park, the black locusts (those that didn’t get damaged) are looking good – fresh green, and healthy – despite a difficult summer of heat and drought. The same cannot be said of many of the other trees on this street, which are mostly ash and maple, with a couple horse chestnut trees at either end. The ash, of course, are succumbing to Emerald Ash Borer – and the horse chestnuts always tend to look a bit sorry by summer’s end, but to what are the maples succumbing? On my very short street (7 houses on one side of the street, 7 on the other, for a total of 14 houses) one maple was uprooted by the storm, but half of it was dead already, and of the three maples directly across the street from my house, two of them have many dead or dying branches in their upper canopy – with a bit more dying each year, for the past several years.

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In another Cleveland Heights Neighborhood a friend has pointed out an area where many large, old oaks have recently died and been removed, and where others are looking not so good. Then there are the dead and dying large old oaks in certain areas of Forest Hill Park (and now a specimen beech, too).

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What’s going on?

So I was particularly interested in Louis Iverson’s presentation on the U.S. Forest Service’s Climate Change Tree Atlas, when he spoke recently at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History’s 2016 symposium Nature on the Edge. And what a useful tool this is! Using computer modeling, projections have been made for individual tree species’ survival and ability to cope or thrive in best cast and worse case scenarios under climate change by 2100.

This tool is useful in two ways. The first, by helping us to diagnose and understand what is going on around us now – and the second, by helping us make wise decisions in both the public and private spheres concerning tree choices that will survive and adapt to a changed and ever changing climate here in northeast Ohio.

Climate change will not be leisurely, as measured by a tree’s life, with lots of time for tree species to adapt, so maybe what we are seeing now, already, are the first signs of lack of adaptability of certain tree species. And while it may be heresy to some, perhaps instead of seeking to restore species traditional to northeastern Ohio’s forested ecosystems, we should be introducing trees that currently thrive in climatological habitats several climate zones further south. For what the worst case climate change scenario forecasts for us in 2100 is a summer much like the one we just went through, with fierce storms, extreme downpours, and prolonged periods of heat and drought – only all of it, in the worst case scenario, even more so.   

It would be nice if we had time to explore, via research, the possible negative ramifications of such introductions, including the possibility of hitchhiking pests; a tree’s invasiveness potential; and possible disruption to synecological relationships (yeah – I had to look that one up, too), from fungi, to pollinators, to dispersal agents, but in the life of an ecosystem, or most northeast Ohio hardwood trees, 100 years is a short time, where, for us, it is more than a lifetime. Once those old tree are gone and there is no one left to remember them, it will be as if they never existed – things we would try to imagine, like passenger pigeons darkening the sky in vast numbers. There is no turning the clock back.

So what can we learn from the Climate Change Tree Atlas for NE Ohio? The chart lists 70 trees that currently grow in NE Ohio and examines each species for vulnerability and/or adaptability to change, then predicts which trees should show increase, decrease or no change, according to the model. Thus, by 2100, the chart says we can expect to see a decrease in black cherry, white ash, American basswood, swamp white oak, eastern hemlock, eastern white pine, and black ash (there are a few more – I selected those with which we are most familiar). These tree all are rated as having VERY POOR POTENTIAL  to survive and thrive under worse scenario climate change.  Listed as having POOR POTENTIAL are sugar maple, American elm, pin oak, and black maple.  Gee – that’s a lot of the trees we commonly find around here.

And what present tree species can we expect to have good potential? Osage orange, black oak, honeylocust, burr oak, butternut hickory, scarlet oak, and hackberry all have VERY GOOD POTENTIAL to survive and thrive. Also with GOOD POTENTIAL are black walnut, sassafras, eastern cottonwood, shagbark hickory, sycamore, cucumber tree, and shingle oak. These trees are already present here, and would be expected to cope with climate change and increase their numbers/habitat.

Some other existing species numbers in 2100 are predicted to REMAIN ABOUT THE SAME, according to the chart. This group includes red maple, northern red oak, slippery elm, eastern hop hornbeam, pignut hickory, black locust, black willow, Ohio buckeye, and serviceberry.

The chart also includes a list of trees that do not presently grow here but which are adaptable to what this climate will likely be in 2100, and these are on a list on the chart labeled NEW HABITAT.  These are the trees that one might consider introducing: chestnut oak, Eastern redbud, Eastern red cedar, Northern white cedar, chinkapin oak, black hickory, blackjack oak, common persimmon, post oak, shortleaf pine, shumard oak, southern red oak, sugarberry, sweetgum, and winged elm. 

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Common Persimmon  

sugarberry-hackberry150                                                         sweetgum

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Short leaf pine

thuga

Thuga

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Post Oak

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Swamp Chestnut Oak

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Black Hickory

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Blackjack Oak

Interestingly, most of the pictures I found for these trees came from a data base from Texas. Most of these tree are common to Texas, which tells you what worst case climate change may look like here in northeast Ohio in 100 years. And here I leave you – with a lot to think about.

The Brand New Ralph Perkins Wildlife Center and Woods Garden at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History

GENERAL INTEREST

by Elsa Johnson

Photos by Laura Dempsey and Elsa Johnson

Congratulations to CMNH for daring to build this project on this extremely challenging site. I believe it’s going to grow up to be tall dark, and handsome (though at the moment it’s still a bit on the adolescent raw side). perkins_woodsgarden_adultFrom my perspective as a landscape architect/designer, this is a great moment to go, goggle at, and begin to appreciate how difficult and challenging this site is, and how hugely complex and interesting the design response has been. It’s quite exciting.

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The site chosen was a previously unused hillside lying just to the southwest of the existing CMNH main building. It had a mature mixed hardwood climax forest growing on it, including several large stately American Beech trees; these were saved (though one looks just a bit iffy). Of the trees that were, of necessity, cut down during this project and in the building of the new parking garage, as many as possible were recycled and used in the building of new nature center structures.

The trees that remain are the botanic backbone of the site and of the ecosystem of which they are representative: the Lake Erie Allegheny Plateau watershed. perkins_ribboncutting_12While other unique native-to-northern Ohio bioms are on exhibit here — such as the otter pond — they are crafted artificial insertions into the fabric of the site. perkins_otter_family_1The pre-existing landscape is the skeleton and the glue that holds the whole conceptually together.   Additional native plants, all appropriate to Lake Erie Allegheny Plateau bioms, were still being added on the day my friend and I visited…

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but it will take a while for the new plants to settle in, and it will take a while for the old plants to recover from the assault on their root systems and on their soil structures.  Which is a way of saying trees and plants are not presently at their best — but in time will get better — much better.

Did I mention the site was unused because it was steep? Note: The site is steep. perkins_walkway_3This created problems during construction and post-construction, the biggest one of which has got to be drainage: during a heavy storm there is going to be a whole hell of a lot of water coming down that hillside, much of which is presently pretty damn bare. There must be catch basins in strategic places (saw some), and underground pipes connecting the catch basins to a storm drain system, which must, in the end, send excess water out to the restructured and replanted Doan Brook rain garden/wetland (which one can see looping along Martin Luther King Boulevard just southwest of this exhibit). I have to trust that these systems will work adequately, otherwise that hillside is surely going to erode.  One truly good thing is that by cantilevering so much of the walkway through 3 dimensional space (rather than keeping them at ground level as impervious pathway), much more of the site remains permeable. This is a very good thing. When there are more established plants, much more of the hillside will absorb water.

The amount of infrastructure that had to be inserted into this difficult site and installed here!  Wow! — electricity, water, retaining walls, drainage, the exhibits, the cantilevered walkways and all the construction elements supporting the cantilevered walkways and the materials and building of the walkways themselves – it boggles the mind…

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Perhaps you know the saying “the problem is the solution” — That was the opportunity here. On much of the site the animals are at ground level while the people are on transportation walkways that float through the air, sometimes level with the animals, sometimes above them, sometimes below them. These ramped walks have an easy degree of slope making the site totally handicap accessible… which I appreciated, as I am presently recovering from a hip replacement, and loath steps.

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That could have been enough, but instead – indeed, the best part — the animals get their own transportation pathways, existing both on the hillside and out in space, doing the same sort of thing. The two inter-penetrating systems look like an aesthetically pleasing, beautifully crafted giant erector-set toy, with the wooden pathways for people ramping out from the hillside, looping past, over, around and under the transparent animal transportation pathways which ramp up from the hillside and climb, pass under or over (mostly over) the human transportation pathways, allowing the animals far greater freedom of movement than they previously have experienced – far more than an all-on-one-plane design allowed (which is what they had before).

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The design is executed so that, typically, an animal – coyote, lynx, fox, raccoon – climbs up some structure to enter through a door into a totally see-through-able mesh tunnel  which the animal can circumambulate, looking down on us humans, before eventually arriving back at its starting place. I wondered for a while how these would be opened and closed, but then I realized there is a pulley system, so the answer is via manual operation. The puzzler for me with these overhead shared mesh tunnels is the issue of animal cooperation. What if a given animal doesn’t want to come down on cue? (oops?) It will be interesting for all involved, working the kinks out, which, I imagine, will take a while. It almost made me want to be a beast at this facility.  It would be really cool to experience the animal’s paths, their views. I’m sure every five year old will feel exactly like that.

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A reminder, these animals and birds are creatures that due to injury or familiarity of handling (or both) would not be able to survive in the wild on their own resources and abilities.  This new environment allows a greater number of them some opportunity to return to some species specific behaviors – exploring, prowling, observing. 

All in all – this is a great addition to the University circle cultural mix. Congratulations Cleveland Museum of Natural History — off to a good start.

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