Results tagged “trees”

It's those pesky tree roots throwing the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers off their levee fixin' game. Before the engineers can begin flood repairs--all by the federal rule book, of course--King County will have to chop down 150 potentially problematic trees along seven levees. Select trees will be removed from alongside the Green, Snoqualmie, and Raging rivers to strengthen the levees. King County plans to replant 600 trees elsewhere, in the wake of the fallen trees.

We're a bit surprised to find out the city's Urban Forestry people want to "spruce up" (get it?) Third Avenue, when other streets in Belltown, like parts of First, could certainly use the attention. But what makes a good urban tree, anyway? More to the point, what makes a bad one? Partly, we suppose, it's got to do with the kind of tree but frankly, they all look kind of scraggly. ("Woodman, spare that tree!" you say? No, not this one, that one.) At any rate, "hybrid elms" are on the way, a cross between the American and the Siberian varieties, fast-growing, long-lasting and disease-resistant. If you're not a hybrid elm, you're coming down within the week.

    

Pounding the pavement like a cop on the beat, waving at shopkeepers, petting a dog, helping an old lady, munching a donut, strolling the sidewalk, protecting the neighborhood...in some Hollywood Shangri-La, maybe, but not in 21st-century urban America, where the cops rarely leave the security of their patrol cars. Kids may play hopscotch on the sidewalks of Madrona or Wedgewood, but not in Belltown, where the sidewalks, for better or worse, have become a full-scale laboratory for transportation engineers and urban planners. Art projects, bus shelters, sidewalk cafés, bike racks, garbage cans, newspaper vending machines, and trees of various ages and diverse species populate the right-of-way, buckling the four-inch concrete and turning the simple business of walking down the block into a hazardous obstacle course.

It may look like the Redwoods, but it's really Volunteer Park. *blissed out sigh * We love this town. And we love our Seattlest Flickr Pool, join the love-in, why don't you?

Someone is intentionally killing trees along the Burke Gilman Trail. The Seattle Parks and Recreation Department says that someone has killed seven 70-foot-tall trees along the BG Trail near 77th Avenue. This person, while also having nefarious intentions for local greenery, apparently is obsessed with the number seven. The parks department believes the Tree Assassin is killing the trees by injecting herbicide into holes that have been drilled into the trunks. The trees that have been harmed are all over 30 years old and each worth between $40,000-$60,000.

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CHARITABLE INDULGENCES: If you're not too hungover from tonight's couture cocktails with Jack Mackenroth at Product Runway, something beautiful involving imported beer and fine Scotch is happening in Fremont both tonight and tomorrow: the HopScotch Spring Beer and Scotch Festival. The festival's a benefit for NW Folklife, so think of your purchase of extra tequila tastings as an act of springtime charity.