It is remarkable how calming it is to just sit there and stare at a tree.
Now everywhere I live has to have a big tree somewhere nearby. There’s one right outside and I spend at least several minutes, sometimes much longer, just staring at it.
Staring at a tree, 10/10
So now I've been making room in my week for new albums of bands I enjoy and listen to. Just an hour or two of nothing, but listening to this album, while sitting in a hammock or somewhere else entirely relaxed.
I can only recommend this. For example, Heilung(1) or Wardruna(2) are already great on theri own, but one of their new songs, but I was listening to one of their songs in a park over here, sitting at a tree and suddenly a little noise was nearby. Turns out, there was a squirrel looking at me and then scampering by. Later on a little bird also was exasperated I looked at him as he chased a bug. Very fitting to these bands.
Sometimes balancing the speed of our lives indeed seems like a very good idea.
The old tree right outside the window was still the same. I know because I must have stared into it for hundreds of hours while being bored to no end during class. It probably prevented me from going insane. Thank you old tree.
I also dated someone who wasn’t a particularly “crunchy” hippy type, but she did like to randomly hug trees on our walks to show appreciation. I do it now too, there’s something oddly calming and connecting about it - it may look weird, but that’s par for the course for me as it is
Nature, physical touch (even with non-human objects), and being near or touching a big stationary natural object triggers our parasympathetic nervous system too, helps reduce stress.
Everyone should go hug a tree! It's not completely woo woo, there are real biological benefits.
This is probably the one area that most cities in North Carolina excel at. We don't have great sidewalks or transit, but we have a ton a trees. Less than we used to though. But from my current apartment, I'm closer to seeing 300 trees than 3. The post-hurricane-Hugo effort to buy out houses in flood prone zones and turn them into greenways was probably the single smartest thing Charlotte and the surrounding towns have done (though I'm glad we got our light rail too - too bad for Raleigh). It's a good pattern - protects the natural watershed, gives wildlife a safe place to live, makes flooding less impactful, and creates pleasant away-from-road paths for walking and biking.
Toronto completed a similar initiative after Hurricane Hazel in 1954. A number of neighbourhoods in valleys were not rebuilt after devastating flooding, and the city was left with wonderful green space, especially in the Don Valley. For me, it’s a “top 10” biking experience, to cross Toronto by bicycle along the trail system.
As an aside, it took a minute for me to parse the OP as I initially took it to mean some sort of infrastructure resiliency project (buying outhouses vs buying out houses).
MD has some replace-felled-trees law, but it’s kinda crappy cause trees can be planted somewhere else entirely. So a big development can be treeless.
And here, somehow, that stupid excuse that they destroy utility cables and pipes didn’t cause to cut them out. It seems that it’s possible to solve this.
And of course, I’m basically in a forest. There are trees everywhere. The “park” here is an at least 100 years old forest. There is one about 30 meters from here, and about 500 meters an even larger one, where I’ve just lost today.
Of course, the city center is different, but even comparing the outskirts of other cities, this is very-very green.
But a lot of the trees in Hungary just don't grow that big, maybe the most marked difference when I first saw it after growing up in Indiana. When we lived in the 16th district of Budapest, there was one neighborhood I used to walk the dog in that had these massive old American sycamores. Those things were beautiful.
30% tree cover looks very different depending on the trees your municipality chooses.
For example, Barcelona covers everything with a variety of Platanus, which is easier to keep than other trees, but it’s quite dirty and produces A LOT of pollen. For me, that I’m allergic to it, it just makes the city unavailable for 2-4 weeks every year.
Having smaller plants, with more variety also feels much better than just sprinkling the right amount of massive trees with equal spacing. I’m pretty convinced part of the “we need more green” feeling people get is actually “I need something in my environment to not look like a grid”.
First of all, I'm skeptical about the study that proves that people seeing three trees have better mental health. There are so many factors that it's hard to separate one. A solid study would compare families living in the same building, roughly at the same floor, and with similar parameters (family size, income, education, street noise, etc.). Comparisons from different buildings induce too many side factors. I think that collecting this sample would be very hard. I can't access the full-text behind the paywall, so I don't know their methodology, and their abstract is vague, so I fear the paper is meaningless.
Then do people really watch that much through their windows? I'd be surprised that having a glimpse of a few trees at home once a day could change anyone's life.
Even if trees did has a positive impact on mental health, I suppose inciting people to bike or walk (at least partly) to workplaces and stores would dwarf that impact, for mental and physical health.
Lastly, the 30% of tree cover seems arbitrary. For the same percentage, would covering every street with trees have the same impact as keeping trees inside parks? I think the goal to provide places where people go for a walk requires different solutions than the goal to reduce the heat in a concrete jungle.
The thing people want from trees is shading and general cooling of the environment. Small plants provide much less of that and the summers are increasingly hot.
It's a competition about which municipality can remove most pavement tiles & replace with greenery.
People do this on their own too - guerilla gardening style. It's not uncommon to ride through a city street, and see a strip of pavement tiles removed & some flowers in there. Or some plants dangling from a pot attached to a street light. As long as postal workers & elderly people with strollers can still pass, most municipalities support this.
It took me a few days to understand - there are no trees in central London (the City).
Sure, you have a small/big park here and there, but no random trees on side walks. It's literally a (beautiful) concrete/glass wasteland.
Note: I only walked a few of the main streets, I'm sure I'm exaggerating a bit, but it's quite noticeable compared with other cities after you realize it. And there are random trees in other areas, outside City of London.
If you're in the very new, constantly rebuilt, concrete jungle that is the very small part of the city, then OK, greenery is going to be hard to spot. Particularly as they tend to nearly always choose the wrong species to plant and aftercare is an afterthought. But your assessment is factually incorrect.
See for yourself. Go to Google maps, drop a good few street view randomly around the city and you'll see that more often than not you'll see trees.
Also, I have a networks in arboriculture who work in the city and they're never short on work.
I'm not doubting your experience of unease or a concrete/glass wasteland (that's yours and not mine to question) but the facts don't support the statement of no random trees on pavements (side walks).
I live in the North, but I'm often in London.
My biggest bugbear in London is the number of developments that have a "token tree" with one lonely tree in one corner, often doing quite poorly, presumably included to check some item on a planning consent checklist.
Of course, London has many green spaces and on the whole has plenty of trees, it's just they're quite unevenly distributed.
I would say they are pretty well distributed through places where people actually tend to live. I live in a pretty average residential area in zone 3 and not only are there nice parks nearby but there are plenty of trees. London is of course massive so I can't say it's the same everywhere but most residential areas I've visited have been quite green. The City and West End (very much commercial/touristy areas) are the exception in my experience.
I'm nearly always on foot. Perhaps it's just because I'm also an arborist and I'm hard wired to see trees and avoid places that don't have them?
The token tree thing is a problem. Daisy Barrington was part of webinar on the topic as part of the Arboricultural Associations webinar series [0]. Rarely do the species planted get based on local ecology and or have a solid aftercare plan. They're normally chosen for immediate aesthetic look (Paper / Himalayan birch being the most common) rather than how they'd exist over time.
In short birch being a pioneer species is short lived (80 years), grows fast towards light and dislikes being pruned. Where as oaks, norway maple, London planes ( some of which are "climax species") etc live for longer, grow slower and respond to pruning better, support local ecology better and some don't mind the pollution of an urban environment so much.
The City is a specific area, more or less covering the same area as the original Roman city. It's the original financial district - though a lot of that moved to Docklands at the tail end of the 1900s.
It's much more built up than even adjacent Westminster ("The City of Westminster") and definitely has far fewer trees.
My guess would be that the bio-diversity net gain calculations put the ecological investment off-site where it was more practical.
It's a shame though as trees and architecture can happily co-exist with each other. Living walls and well kept green areas are entirely possible.
Clicking once into Canon street towards those trees presents me with the trees. They're now in leaf and look like Sorbus intermedia "swedish whitebeam" and the key id is the margin on the leaf and the green fruits. Photo was taken July/August as prior to that they're in the flowering phase (beautiful to see btw).
When I spin the view down Canon street I see three mature trees in full leaf on pavements / sidewalks.
As I said in another reply, I'm an arborist and I'm hardwired to see trees and perhaps I subconsciously avoid areas that have none, so maybe that's bias on my part.
Here's a map of the canopy data.
Elsewhere though, possible to plan continuous walks through greenish spaces. One starting at Victoria: Belgravia back streets, Hyde Park, Grosvenor Square, Marylebone High Street, Regents Park, Primrose Hill, Belsize Park, Hampstead Heath.
It gets greener as you go further out.
One of the big problems in the UK has been the rise of low maintenance gardens, replacing plants with decking concrete, gravel etc.
It makes me wonder whether they know which bit is actually the City.
later on:
> Sure, you have a small/big park here and there
What big park is there within the City? The whole of the City is smaller than Hyde Park (including Kensington Gardens).
Same shock, different direction, much nicer.
The City is indeed pretty non green
Personally I have always felt that most Japanese cities are very devoid of urban greenery compared to UK towns and cities.
Yeah, I can see trees. I can see about fifty trees without standing up from my desk. I cut down more than three trees a month, probably. The weirdest ones are yagrumo - in about five years they can be fifty feet tall and the wood is so soft you can cut them down with a butter knife, just about. Before moving here, I'd never really considered that the Venn circles of "tree" and "weed" can overlap.
[0] https://www.patternlanguage.com/apl/aplsample/apl159/apl159....