The French left Shanghai with the former French Concession streets lined with plane trees. Many more trees were planted across the city in the 1950s and they continue to provide shade and coolth today. Streets like the one below are attractive and also very welcome on hot days. We now know that the bark and […]
This post appears as the article For The Birds in the publication Monument to Habitat Compensation Island, available on GoogleBooks. Habitat Compenation Island is a tiny sand construction in the Arabian Gulf that is easily missed, with the exception of a bleached billboard on its shore. A subtle addition to the Emirati culture of island-building, […]
At least The Futurists were honest about it. Nature sucked for being too natural, too simple and too uncontrived. And, worst of all, because they hadn’t designed it – a situation they quickly remedied. Nature’s making a comeback – not in its abhors-a-vacuum sense but the more sinister sense of being an object of design once again. This time though, […]
And so, as Japan’s 2015 cherry blossom viewing (花見) season draws to a close , it’s time to reflect upon what these flowers have come to mean to us. A cherry blossom is the flower of any of several trees of genus Prunus, particularly the Japanese Cherry, Prunus serrulata, which is called sakura after the Japanese (桜; さくら). Currently it is […]
