ABOUT THIS SITE - Click for Background information about this site and its author.
Agroforestry in Seattle – article
Article extracted from www.takepart.com
It’s Not a Fairytale: Seattle to Build Nation’s First Food Forest
By Clare Leschin-Hoar
Link to original article
Forget meadows. The city’s new park will be filled with edible plants, and everything from pears to herbs will be free for the taking.
Seattle’s vision of an urban food oasis is going forward. A seven-acre plot of land in the city’s Beacon Hill neighborhood will be planted with hundreds of different kinds of edibles: walnut and chestnut trees; blueberry and raspberry bushes; fruit trees, including apples and pears; exotics like pineapple, yuzu citrus, guava, persimmons, honeyberries, and lingonberries; herbs; and more. All will be available for public plucking to anyone who wanders into the city’s first food forest.
“This is totally innovative, and has never been done before in a public park,” Margarett Harrison, lead landscape architect for the Beacon Food Forest project, tells TakePart. Harrison is working on construction and permit drawings now and expects to break ground this summer.
The concept of a food forest certainly pushes the envelope on urban agriculture and is grounded in the concept of permaculture, which means it will be perennial and self-sustaining, like a forest is in the wild. Not only is this forest Seattle’s first large-scale permaculture project, but it’s also believed to be the first of its kind in the nation.
“The concept means we consider the soils, companion plants, insects, bugs—everything will be mutually beneficial to each other,” says Harrison.
That the plan came together at all is remarkable on its own. What started as a group project for a permaculture design course ended up as a textbook example of community outreach gone right.
“Friends of the Food Forest undertook heroic outreach efforts to secure neighborhood support. The team mailed over 6,000 postcards in five different languages, tabled at events and fairs, and posted fliers,” writes Robert Mellinger for Crosscut.
Neighborhood input was so valued by the organizers, they even used translators to help Chinese residents have a voice in the planning.
So just who gets to harvest all that low-hanging fruit when the time comes?
“Anyone and everyone,” says Harrison. “There was major discussion about it. People worried, ‘What if someone comes and takes all the blueberries?’ That could very well happen, but maybe someone needed those blueberries. We look at it this way—if we have none at the end of blueberry season, then it means we’re successful.”
Sixth European Botanic Gardens Congress – May 28th – June 2nd, Chios Island, Greece
The Sixth European Botanic Gardens Congress (EuroGard VI) will be held on Chios Island, Greece from 28 May – 2 June 2012. The theme of the Congress is ‘European Botanic Gardens in a Changing World’. The Congress will cover a wide range of topics relevant to the work of botanic gardens in the 21st century, including sessions on plant conservation, networking and examining the role of plants in myth, history, art, science and culture. For more information, visit the Congress website: http://www.eurogardvi.gr/
From the Congress website:
“The aim of EUROGARD VI is to bring together best practices and theory in order to:
• Promote effective action by botanic gardens for plant conservation.
• Strengthen the links between botanic gardens, research institutes, conservation networks and other stakeholders.
• Enhance botanic gardens as centres for sustainability, human well-being, environmental awareness and protection.
The United Nations has declared this decade, 2011-2020, the United Nations Decade on Biodiversity. This Congress will provide an opportunity for botanic gardens to demonstrate their contributions to this important international initiative. A key then of the congress will be incorporating theory into practice and presentations will show case approaches, tools and research that help us to confront the challenges of biodiversity loss in a changing world. Mitigation methods concerning in situ and ex situ conservation actions will be presented, as well as, effective networking practices that allow us to respond efficiently to the challenging targets of the European and Global Strategies for Plant Conservation.
The Congress will also aim to highlight the important relationships that exist between people and plants, and through this, link the work of botanic gardens to the achievement of the all important Millennium Development Goals.”
Family entertainment… Wonderful butchery – near Malindi, Kenya
Where I am now: Cairo, Egypt
Layover…
The Sahara from a plane…
Late winter wildflower – Kefalonia, Greece
This is a common one, ranges in color from light pink to this deeper pink/purple. I can’t find any ID for it online and don’t have my Mediterranean plant book with me… I enhanced the contrast to make the flower more visible. Click photos to enlarge.
Late winter clouds – Kefalonia, Greece
Taken from the road to Atheras, looking back towards Lixouri…
Global distribution of Botanic Gardens mapping applet…
From the Botanic Gardens Conservation International(BCGI) website…
“BGCI launches advanced search facility for GardenSearch. Unique online access to data on more than 3,000 botanical institutions worldwide is now available through BGCI’s new advanced GardenSearch function, demonstrating the collective conservation and research resources available within the global botanic garden community.”
With this easy-to-use mapping tool (click link) you can search the world by country for Botanic Gardens. More information here.
Olympiacos smoke screen – Athens, Greece
This slideshow requires JavaScript.
Torched cinema, post-riot – Athens, Greece
This is a photo of a famous neoclassical cinema that was set ablaze the night of the recent Athens riots. I took this photo the morning after. Unfortunately I didn’t have my camera that night. The building was still smoldering. The air smelled of burning plastic and teargas fumes lingered in the air. Most unprotected buildings had their windows smashed and adorned with graffiti. Streets were dotted with burned piles of miscellaneous combustible objects and thousands of chunks of marble and concrete were strew over most flat surfaces, having been broken off of buildings and sidewalks and used as projectiles by the rioting masses. Something in the vicinity of forty-five buildings were set on fire throughout the city although, as far as I could tell, Banks and Government buildings stood unscathed. I was especially dismayed to observe the number of potted plants and planter boxes that had been smashed and disassembled. It seems the general objective of the rioting was lost in the midst of the chaos, historical buildings and public infrastructure took the brunt of the wrath… Here’s some good photo-documentation of the evening’s event.
