Can you see three trees?
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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
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.
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.
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.
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.
Because we had to move to new sites further south every 3-4 weeks on average, we all had camper trailers and just hopped from campground to campground as we went. Towards the end we ended up staying at a campground near Mooresville NC and every day since we left that place I've wanted to go back.
It was so beautiful and quiet with so much history to explore and it left a huge impression on me. Might be time for me to actually pick up and go visit again.
Unrelated but there needs to be a guide given out to southerners visiting Maryland warning them to not call anyone under the age of 100 sir/ma'am... Might have just been bad luck with my encounters but I had a couple of people get very angry for calling them ma'am and it was so hard to undo a lifetime of defaulting to using those terms when talking to people I don't know lol.
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.
But then, as you scale towards higher density (e.g., replacing parking lots with garages), you end up with less space for trees. Unless you put them on top of buildings, ofc.
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.
Personally I have always felt that most Japanese cities are very devoid of urban greenery compared to UK towns and cities.
The City is indeed pretty non green
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.
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.
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'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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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”.
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.
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.
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.
And also, many would grow that big. They are just not allowed. They are cut almost to trunk periodically over there. There are a few trees there which were as high as those 10 floor high rises, but they cut them down or even out, because somehow it’s dangerous there what’s completely fine in Finland.
https://jamiecurle.com/posts/trees-3-30-300
Northumberland, UK.
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.
In other climates, like European ones, this becomes much more complex. Germany struggles even to keep its forests alive with long stretches of missing rain, higher temperatures, and new pests. Single trees in cities constantly die. Spain is in large parts a desert etc.
I really hope we find a solution/adapted plants to keep cities from heating up so much.
Eh, have a look at other tropical cities like Johor Bahru or Jakarta or Kuala Lumpur and you can see that it's very much possible to have way less greenery than Singapore.
The recent trouble with the Borkenkäfer was just a consequence of monoculture. Germany doesn't struggle with keeping forests alive: it's normal at any one time for individual trees in forests to die. Decaying dead wood is important for the ecosystems.
Even worse. It was monoculture of trees that aren't even native to the climate zone. The trees were imported from Scandinavia for their superior lumber quality, and were on edge even without the added stress from droughts and heat waves.
79% of all German trees are sick. Monocultures and beetles play a role but the problem is much bigger than that: https://www.bmleh.de/DE/themen/wald/wald-in-deutschland/wald...
Big cities in Europe are usually surrounded by more rural areas in most of Europe for historical reasons (surrounding farmlands used to feed the city), lessening the need for city parks and greenery since the countryside was surrounding the city. If the city IS the country and even isolated on an island, that's of course not an option.
Another factor is also rooted in history. Like most cities in Europe, Singapore is old, though most of its growth happened in the past 60 years with proper urban planning. Europe's cities on the other hand grew over centuries without any kind of modern urban planning and the pressure of rebuilding quickly after the many devastating wars didn't help either.
Finally there's the issue of money - being one of the richest countries/cities on Earth helps tremendously with building a nice, liveable urban environment compared to some cities struggling to keep basic infrastructure running.
Ailanthus[0] is invasive as heck and Paulownia[1] grows everywhere too.
Yes, it's pretty green here.
Now, if we could ban street parking like Japan did [0], and perhaps take some more inspiration from Dutch traffic planning..
[0] Ideally we'd get the Gahmen out of the car parking business completely.
Something like this has always been a driver of my home search. I've been lucky/glad to find something, but it's always been a stretch.
But as a more realistic policy I would start with homes and with ensuring schools have a play area with plants larger than the kids and too dense to see through.
I think the secondary effects on planning are just as important: urban planning goes awry when it fails to consider livability and beauty. Livability includes walkability, non-car transportation, and parking for car-dependent transportation -- things you need to do most days. Beauty has obvious direct effects, but indirectly it also encourages people to take care of the place, and to avoid being seen e.g., as a litterer.
As policy encouraging changes, it would be good to start with environmental enhancement sections in each permit, and (if possible) to publish them before they are finalized for people to contribute proposals. This expertise is rare in developers so advice would be welcome, and providing the opportunity would probably encourage people to contribute, with ideas and perhaps funding. (There should be no provision for blocking permits, to avoid adverse NIMBY incentives.)
Espoo is much more spread out, and the areas between them are all full of trees and greenery. So I very much agree with you, I've visited Espoo a few times but without a car I wouldn't want to live there.
I agree that the public transport is not particularly great if you don’t live on the metro or train line. It’s usually faster to drive and even with one person cheaper even when paying for gasoline and parking. Public transport is ridiculously overpriced in Finland.
Even Helsinki leaves much to be desired on that front, the coverage is okay but the ticket prices are ridiculous. It’s not feasible to drive in the center though, takes forever to get anywhere.
Having lived in Europe for many years before, this is something that's most striking about Australia. I live in a state with one of the highest population densities and yet it still feels very sparsely populated relatively speaking.
[0] https://www.patternlanguage.com/apl/aplsample/apl159/apl159....
I'm a little lucky to have found a house that borders a large therapeutic horse riding center so looking out my back windows (chain link fence on the back so minimal obstruction) I am looking straight into a small forest. That aside, my own property has 3 trees between 25' - 60` tall out front and out back there's an 80' tall sweet gum tree (it's lucky I value it's existence slightly more than I loathe the 6 billion stupid spike balls out drops for me every year) an 80' (I believe) maple, and a useless 95' Pine tree that the squirrels are slowly De-Branching).
It's a small property in the suburbs so those trees give me well over 30% coverage so I've got 2/3.
Quick check on Google maps and unfortunately I'm 483 meters away from my neighborhood park so I missed the mark there. But I think having 3-4 large parks all connected by 15+miles of hiking trails, a botanical garden, and an arboretum within a 5 mile radius more than makes up for that extra 183 meters.
Having spent the last 3+ years living with this level of access to nature spaces, it's become the bare minimum I expect from wherever I move in the future. And if I'm honest, I'll likely not be happy with anything less than being able to see more nature than society when I step out of the house..
Mind you, wars and sheep did have a pretty devastating effect on the Caledonian woodland cover of the highlands. The current population of the red deer aren't helping with natural regeneration. This is one of the reasons for the case for re-introducing predator species.
But that's a complex topic with no simple answers and easy divisions.
As you have pointed out the solution is to eat more venison, but most local butchers stock hardly any of it because of low demand.
British eating habits have become really narrow over the years. Its hard to find offal (healthier and greener than just eating muscle meat). Rabbit seems to have pretty much disappeared too.
Re offal I actually just did a really nice mutton liver curry the other day, something you won't find in your average "brown spicy glop for white people" takeaway but which you can get in the south side of Glasgow. Absolutely brilliant stuff, even better the second day if you can leave it alone that long. Four quid for about half a kilo of lamb liver out of the reduced section in the supermarket!
Now I am curious if there is a dataset for the location of every tree in every city in the world? https://overpass-turbo.eu?
[0] https://www.london.gov.uk/programmes-and-strategies/environm...
This area was especially rich in coal deposits, leading to massive coal extraction during the industrial revolution. There was air pollution and industrial waste everywhere. The area quickly gained a reputation as the dirtiest, most polluted place on the planet. The colloquial term “Ruhrpott” (Ruhr cauldron) came out of this.
So in the 2000s, the city governments (Essen, Bochum, Duisburg, Dortmund, etc etc) decided on an ambitious project to counteract this perception. This paid off. Essen made the top three “Europe’s greenest city” three years in a row and won in the third (2015–2017).
Sometimes, a history of being known as the worst in something leads to greater enthusiasm to become the best.
Could have been 200 meters or 500 meters or 4 trees or 2 or flowers.
This is the kind of ideology that is ruining public policies instead of being grounded on concrete and scientific facts and goals.
> the 3-30-300 test — a standard that has become the go-to for solving a universal urban problem
> 3-30-300 is a catchy, straightforward test that sets a clear benchmark for measuring equal access to nature.
> I found that my closest park isn't 300 metres away, it's 400 metres. That's close, but a fail.
It's a standard. It's a benchmark. And a park at 400 metres is no good; it must be 300 metres or else it may as well be 4 kilometers away. This isn't treating the test as a useful guidance, but as a hard target. As Goodheart's law states: when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.
When you focus exclusively on satisfying such metrics, you can end up with ineffective policy. Missing the forest for the trees, if you will.
The inner center and hot south can be more dusty and discouraging, but you can still be surprised by a few, not well known, jewels like Cabañeros, Valsain's pine forest, Alto Tajo, or Grazalema and the last relict Mediterranean -humid- forests in Cadiz. Plenty also of lagoons, marshes and aquatic ecosystems to visit, like Doñana or Daimiel. The biosphere reserve Hayedo de Montejo is located in Don Quixote's land.
The middle one seems a lot harder to me than the other two.
Maybe if we buried the power lines and turned the utility easements into open space.
Edit: for canada map since the article ignores the country entirely, check https://www.globalforestwatch.org/map/country/CAN/
I can, however, easily explain the division in Europe: In Italy (for example, in Palermo), the vigorous growth of many species very often leads to significant damage to infrastructure.
Here in Vienna, there’s a directory of trees[1] where you can see, among other things, the species and age.
That's like explaining frost-jacking of a wall in terms of temperature instead of hydrology.
I've seen suburban development that would easily satisfy the three tree test from any window on any property, but they still come off as desolate wastes. The age of the trees seems to be a non trivial factor.
Alas, doesn't work very well outside of britain, but it's a good metric :)
For this reason, I'd prefer to have compact cities with a good amount of high-rise buildings and city parks dotted in between. As opposed to large sprawling suburban zones.
That leaves more space for natural areas outside cities where people are few & far between.
Now we changed to a much smaller house on 5th floor, it's so much older than the previous house, but it has a lake side view full of trees, I can look out and see them from my window.
And now I realize in some extent, how badly the previous house affected me. My cluster-phobic episodes are completely gone, and I don't have those stuck feelings any more. I know I still have it, i feel it coming if the door knob gets slightly stuck, and takes little bit more time, but other then that none of the actions that used to cause it, not causing it anymore.
In our city we build jail cells for house in the name of safety. So all windows of the house are grided with no way to get out of the house in case the front door caught fire. But these trees gives me peace. I don't have to look at them, knowing that they are just by the window, makes me so much relaxed.
I still can't fathom how people can cut them down
Here we go, correlation does not equal causation. Simple as that. Planting 3 trees will not give you a better mental health nor will planting 10 trees. But moving in to an environment where many trees grow in front of your window will probably change a lot more than just putting trees in your view.
Parks are not nature. Parks are a sanitized parody of the natural world. They are a simulation meant to make us humans feel better about ourselves. They are gated grass farms, not wild areas, useful only to a select few animals (nothing bigger than a raccoon). Creating a park inside a urban area diverts land from actual nature. So, rather than build parks inside cities, we should develop that land and make our cities smaller.
We don't have to go all 40k hive world. Rather, if parks are kept at the urban periphery and/or are connected to each other, then they can thrive as actual natural space. We have modern transport technology. We can bring the people to the park rather than construct a park near the people and thereby deprive Bambi and all his friends of yet another acre of true wilderness.
Where if don't have a machete you ain't going nowhere. And while you're pitifully trying to make some way, a bear bites your ass off.
Does every city in America have the rules you mention, or specific ones?
Misleading. American cities have lots of short buildings, but they also have more land to put stuff on, be it trees or buildings.
> The lower density means people are further away from the few parks that do exist too.
In some parts of the US, this is absolutely true. In others, it absolutely is not. Silicon Valley is easily the worst place I've ever lived in this regard. As a Midwesterner, I had never lived more than ~400m from a park, even in the suburbs. In Santa Clara, I'm more than 1.5km from the nearest public park.
Most Midwestern and Eastern cities do not match the "sprawl" archetype that most techies associate with America. Look up "Urbs in Horto."
> American zoning forbids taller ~6 story residential building
You're allowed to build up to 5 stories out of lumber. So a common archetype for American apartments is a first floor of retail space made of concrete, which serves as a base for 5 stick-built floors of apartments. That's where 6 floors comes from.
But the statement on its own is false. You're certainly allowed to build taller, permits permitting (heh), it's just that 5-over-1 is a local maxima for cost efficiency vs. likelihood of getting permits.
There are very few cities with laws on the books that prohibit building taller than 6 floors. The issue is that you have to get approval from the city to build things, and residents get angry when you try to build high-rises. So, permits get rejected.
This is an important distinction because the route to change is wildly different. We need community attitudes to change about dense housing developments, we don't need to change any law that's currently on the books.
Person walks along main roads in London and complains they see no trees. Meanwhile in other news .... :)
London is one of the most tree-ridden cities on this earth, so I dread to think what "main streets" you were walking along.
-- Picard
Vienna cheekily cheats statistics by counting several adjacent forests as "urban green spaces" within city borders. The roads within the city, however, are mostly barren concrete deserts.