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A map of the best contemporary landscape architecture projects from around the world.

I really like this as a project, the depth of community engagement - something that is a missing, but post-hoc an deeply require transformation. It's low cost, but clearly deeply impactful.

in vitro hedges, long lines of plastic tubes with the occasional green sprays protruding. It's early days, but it may be centuries before these evolve into the classic English hedgerow []. More than 150,000 miles of these linear woodlands were grubbed out by farmers between the end of the Second World War and the 1970s to make way for the big machines. I've no doubt these new plantings are being created with the best of intentions, to restore the lost miles and contribute to carbon capture. But I find it hard to understand why they're being done in just this way. The starting point are spindly whips, about eighteen inches tall, mostly of just one species, hawthorn. They're enclosed in plastic, either wrapped tightly round or in short opaque tubes which also contain a stake. The con sequence is that most low growth is suppressed and the bushes resemble lollipops, smaller versions of what the great chronicler of landscape ecology and history Oliver Rackham once mocked as 'gateposts with leaves'. A few years on they are flailed every winter, drastically reduc ing their blossom and subsequent fruiting. The resulting hedge is a leggy artefact, a standard boundary unit about two foot wide by four foot deep, mulched by a detritus of plastic and of minimal value for wildlife. Some never get this far. The failure rate is high, a consequence of poor quality nursery grown stock, careless planting, and constriction inside the tubes in some of the large-scale plantings along trunk roads in East Anglia, more than 50 per cent - some hundreds of thousands of young trees - have died.The origins of hedges are mired in myth and pseudo-history. Most of us were taught at school that they were invented during Parliamentary Enclosure and date back no more than a couple of centuries. But the first hedges were created in the Neolithic, as tribal boundary markers or stock-proof barriers. They often originated in strips of woodland retained during deforestation, bulked up or extended by 'dead hedges' of cut or fallen wood. The planting of saplings was a later development, and in the medieval period many hedges were grown from seed. One favoured method was to twist acorns, haws, sloes and holly berries in a rope of old cloth and bury it in a shallow trench no need for any sort of guard as the thorny species protected the rest. New tree and shrub species arrived of their own accord, their seed blown in by the wind or excreted by perching birds. In the 1970s the ecologist Max Hooper developed 'Hooper's Law' which suggested that, as a rule of thumb, one new species arrived per thirty metre stretch every hundred years. So it was possible to give a rough date of origin to hedges. []Wildlife conservation and landscape ornamentation are now probably the chief reasons for retaining or creating hedgerows, which means the new plantings need to be evaluated from that perspective. So why are so many planted with a single species in narrow lines? Why the tubular tree-guards that distort the natural form of the shrubs, and leave a quantity of plastic litter.

Richard Mabey, The Accidental Garden

Flocculated Suspension Load of the Thames, against ebb and flood tides

Prentice, J. E. “Sedimentation in the Inner Estuary of the Thames, and Its Relation to the Regional Subsidence.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series A, Mathematical and Physical Sciences, vol. 272, no. 1221, 1972, pp. 115–19. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/74021. Accessed 11 Apr. 2026.

#hydrology

Interactive 2D Sun-path diagrams.

Sun path analysis

"The aim of this app is to let you dynamically interact with various two dimensional Sun-path diagrams. These diagrams all map the sky dome over either a rectangular chart (orthographic) or circular chart (polar), differing only in the location of the zenith point and the trigonometric relationship of each axis. The position and path of the Sun is then projected onto the diagram at different times of the year and shown as indicative lines."

L'enfance du pli / Sculpture-paysage // Meyrin, Suisse /// 2017 - Landezine International Landscape Award WINNER 2020 - Paysarchitectures

Lieu: Meyrin — Commanditaire: Fonds d’Art Contemporain de la Ville de Meyrin — Commande: Projet Artistique Ecole des Boudines, sculpture pér

#landscape architecture

Purpose-built Thames Estuary litter collector helps tackle marine pollution | Port of London Authority

THE TIDAL THAMES

A virtual journey down the tidal Thames

Sea Serpents…of Kent | Animalfolklore

“Three great fishes called Whirlepools were held and drawn up to Westminster Bridge.” The following is an unpublished article for Bygone Ken

1642 when in the July another this time ‘terrible monster’ was caught by a fishermen near Woolwich and afterwards exhibited at Westminster. It was described as:

” Like a toad, and may be called a toad fish..hath hands like fingers like a man, being neare five foot long and three feet wide, the thickness of an ordinary man.’”

Tanner Springs Park — DREISEITLconsulting

Dreiseitl and water. Here in Portland, but also earlier sculptural works, rain gardens and water catchment projects

Teresa Moller - Punta Pite

https://teresamoller.cl/en/obra/punta-pite/

"The Punta Pite trail is part of a route through the rocks of the coast between Zapallar and Papudo within a private condominium.The site, as its name suggests, is a headland that juts out into the sea. Due to its geometry and position, the idea of generating this path arises with the aim of contemplating the landscape and the waves of the sea in a more comfortable way due to the rocky terrain."

#coastal #landscape architecture

Cloudism was published in Architecture and Naturing Affairs on page 96.

"A quiet cloudist revolution has taken place in the culture of making landscape architecture. This has come with a profound conceptual shift in aesthetic representation brought about by new digital tools and methods pertaining to landscape analysis and design. Projects are now conceived digitally as physical entities in the full topological sense of the word. Various aspects of a terrain can be worked at as a body and put into relation-ship to one another.

#point cloud

Tutorials on visual programming, parametric modeling, and geospatial analysis of landscapes with Grasshopper and GRASS GIS.

#landscape architecture #computational design

"Tangible Landscape is an open source tangible interface for geospatial modeling powered by GRASS GIS. Tangible Landscape couples a physical model with a digital model of a landscape so that you can naturally feel, reshape, and interact with the landscape. This makes geographic information systems (GIS) far more intuitive and accessible for beginners, empowers geospatial experts, and creates new opportunities for developers."

#landscape architecture #gis #3d modelling

Transects

Originated or at least popularised by Richard Long who completed the artwork 1968 Ten Mile Walk, a walk through an arbitrary line through the landscape. Equally by his piece a Line Made by Walking (1967).

Long operates with differences of scale, from that of the ten mile walk, to that of the embodied walk to the one to one scale of objects int he gallery.

A line that spans the gradient of interest on which you locate your sample plots.

Transects explore:

topography

ecologies

infrastructures

etc

Typified by Alexander von Humboldt's transect of the Andes - neither section nor graphical display of data, but a composite representation. They may include different scales, and multiple projections, and more than one medium (meaning drawings, images, diagrams and text).

Transects include observations, measured data and embodied information (i.e. that of the observer, interactions with those on site, and the experience of being in the landscape).

Ian McHarg

Matthew Rangel

A third of glass is not recycled, but downcycled for use in construction

#materials recycling #Instagram

A surprising amount of plants (rather than seaweeds) grow at or around the spring mean high water mark.

That said, few grow below mean neap high water and low water (i.e. mostly submerged)

Today I am looking back at the movie, Oscar and Lucinda. I’m in the mood to watch a movie this weekend. I don’t know how, but I missed thi

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