In Sunday’s Toronto Star, Kenneth Kidd has a great piece about the urban forest in suburbia:
…The houses duly go up, some of that topsoil gets put back for the lawns, and in come the happy new homeowners dreaming of a green and leafy suburb to be. There’s just one snag: It may be decades before the place will begin to support the kind of trees the homeowners want.”It’s really not the first generation of trees that’s going to be this spectacular canopy that you see in those old neighbourhoods of any town or city,” says Richard Ubbens, chief of urban forestry for Toronto. “It’s going to be the second generation that starts to form that canopy.” In other words, it could take more than a century — and generations of homeowners — before that subdivision starts looking like verdant Riverdale. The problem: The kind of soil that trees need and the way they actually grow both happen to run counter to a lot of popular misconceptions, and headfirst into modern building techniques.
Todd Irvine, Spacing‘s Green Space columnist and one of the magazine’s founders, is a major source in the story.
photo by Sam Javanrouh
