flora – mammoth // building nothing out of something

Tag Archives: flora

cryptoforestry in the homogenocene

Wilfried Hou Je Bek, author of the Cryptoforestry blog, has a nice article in the first issue of new journal The State on his particular topic of expertise, defining cryptoforestry, describing the place of cryptoforests within cities, and discussing the pleasure to be found in seeking out and treking through cryptoforests — a pleasure which […]

signs for naturalized areas

[“Signs for Naturalized Areas”, from Windsor, Ontario’s Broken City Lab; the signs were installed in the summer of 2009, after a city workers’ strike left various vacant lots unmowed and teeming with accidental plant communities.  The emergent flora were apparently commonly viewed negatively, as a symbol of the political conflict surrounding the workers’ strike; the […]

“it just makes things different”

[Flushing Airport, one of New York City’s “places humans let be”, via Google Maps] Robert Sullivan’s recent article on the renaissance of urban ecology in New York City, The Concrete Jungle, is so outstanding that I’ve been sitting on it for two weeks, paralyzed by the plethora of great quotes I could pull from it. […]

future forests of the infrastructural city

This is week seven of our reading of The Infrastructural City; if you’re not familiar with the series, you can start here and catch up here.  With our delayed posting of the previous chapter, we didn’t get around to posting an index, but you can read FASLANYC’s contrarian take on the chapter here and Peter […]

pueraria lobata

A couple months ago, The Dirt highlighted an article from the Times about Alabama’s “War on Cogongrass”, in which Alabama’s forestry commission and a hired company of landscape managers, Mobile’s Larson & McGowin, deploy a series of escalating military metaphors (“killer”, “the Perfect Weed”, “war project”, “parallel attacks”, “eradicate”) against that rather aggressive species. Angela […]