Street trees live shortened lives. They will never achieve their full potential. When they sicken or are damaged they have no community support, no family, no neighbours, no friends to help nurture them back to health. They live lonely lives in a hostile environment.
Blythe Hill
Hilly Fields
Ladywell Fields
Dungeness
Isle of Sheppey
The landscape of New York City fascinates me. It is a city surrounded by rivers and the ocean, you are never far from the water. As a city it is extremely vulnerable to storms and to sea level rises. Redhook is a particularly low lying area that feels quite separate from the rest of the city. It is a marginal place, like an island. It is a landscape that was once marshland, then industrial and is now in a state of change again. It is becoming something other.
I found it hard to orientate myself in New York, to get a sense of place. I have a Northern Europeans understanding of landscape and this was so different. I went looking for the outer limits of the city to see if I could find where the urban met the landscape beyond. Could I glimpse the ‘original’ landscape, the land before the city existed?
The Rhoda Street Garden is a small plot in the densely urban environment of Shoreditch, East London. It has been created from a neglected, brownfield site that hasn’t seen soil for a good couple of hundred years. It has been thoughtfully gardened to create a tiny self-willed piece of land that is now providing varied habitats for many species and is expanding out beyond its own boundaries.
