In 1893, Katharine Lee Bates, a professor at Wellesley College in Massachusetts, went to Colorado Springs to teach a summer class about Chaucer. Her cross-country travels took her through the heartland in the Midwest and the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. The exploration didn’t stop once she arrived in Colorado. Bates took a wagon more than 14,000 feet up to nearby Pikes Peak. At the summit, she found the inspiration to write her famed poem, America the Beautiful:
“O beautiful for spacious skies,
For amber waves of grain,
For purple mountain majesties
Above the fruited plain!”
What Katharine did not see from the top of Pikes Peak was the broad manicured lawns that are ubiquitous in Colorado today. How did we get from “amber waves of grain” to endless fields of water-hungry, non-native grasses that are out of place in the Front Range?
Here in Colorado and the rest of the arid West, we need to let go of outdated notions of what the ideal landscape looks like. It’s time to embrace a new aesthetic for the Western landscape that reflects Bates’ iconic introduction, embraces the indigenous beauty of the West, and preserves water for future generations.
We can thank the British for giving the world the lawn. The style that became known as the English garden was invented by landscape designers that were working for wealthy patrons on large estates. It usually included a lake and sweeps of gently rolling lawns set against groves of trees designed to recreate an idyllic pastoral landscape. Today, in most cities around the world, 50-70% of public green space is mown grass.
Tree lawns became prominent in Colorado when Denver Mayor Robert Speer introduced the City Beautiful movement in 1904. City Beautiful ideas had grown from the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago and extolled the virtues of uplifting communities through public architecture and expansive parks. Speer was determined to transform Denver from a dusty western city to a “Paris on the Platte.” The resulting parks, tree-lined boulevards, public buildings, and monuments, which still comprise much of the city’s urban landscape today, are widely considered among the best examples of the City Beautiful movement in the United States.
Unfortunately, the movement embedded an aesthetic in the American consciousness built around appearances alone. There was little thought about landscape and the urban forest as a critical component of urban infrastructure, environment, and sustainability.
Less than a month ago, Governor Polis signed Senate Bill 24-005 into law, effectively initiating a new era for the landscape of Colorado. This new legislation outlaws the use of nonfunctional turf on certain construction projects in the state. No longer can we expect a landscape from a bygone era, transplanted from an environment a thousand miles or more away. The age-old design adage that “form follows function” needs to drive the look of the new Western landscape.
Not everything about the influence of the English Garden style and the subsequent City Beautiful movement has been detrimental to Colorado. Adding trees to the urban environment is good; however, we need trees for more than their aesthetic benefit. We need them to shade us, provide critical animal habitats, improve the quality of the air we breathe and the water we drink. We need broad open spaces within the urban condition to reduce the visual impact of density, create wildlife corridors/habitats, and, more importantly, have places for recreation and free public assembly, a hallmark of our great experiment in democracy.
“New Urban” design doesn’t mean “pave it.” A truly “new urban” landscape should be focused on reducing impervious surfaces and not being compelled to cover the landscape with pavement from the center of the street to the building façade. This “old urban” approach overheats our cities, accelerates run-off and evaporation, degrades water quality, and kills trees.
By planting trees in suffocating tree grates and providing little intervention or care, cities are planting trees destined to die simply to meet code requirements that lack long-term vision. In a healthy urban ecosystem, the ability of trees to thrive is contingent on human intervention because they are an essential part of urban infrastructure. Urban trees and landscapes are among the most powerful tools designers can use to help communities mitigate and adapt to climate change. Trees are like outdoor swamp coolers that operate as carbon sinks. The ecosystem services provided to us by the urban forest are wide and varied. The cooling impact of a single healthy tree from evaporation and absorbing sunlight “is equivalent to ten room-size air conditioners operating 24 hours a day,” according to the US Department of Agriculture.
Many of our European neighbors from across the pond are already practicing some great ideas that we can emulate here in the States:
In the Netherlands, a national “tile whipping” competition has the goal of helping reach environmental targets by removing garden paving. ‘Tegelwippen’ is a lighthearted competition where municipalities compete to eliminate the most paved infrastructure.
In Scotland, human deforestation has reduced their wild pine forests by 98% since the last ice age. Today, the “Rewilding” of Scotland is underway on multiple fronts as they seek to restore the indigenous landscape. They have committed 30% of public land to rewilding by 2030, reintroducing keystone species, reducing non-natural landscapes, and allowing indigenous ecosystems to recover.
Many other countries are making similar progress as well. These examples should instill confidence in Coloradoans. We can create a new western landscape that is functional and regenerative. One that protects our most vital resources, air and water, all while reintegrating the natural beauty and environmental benefit of the indigenous landscape into the urban condition. We must re-wire our brains to see our environment as Katharine Lee Bates once did from the top of Pikes Peak. It’s time to embrace the Western landscape she engrained in our national identity so long ago.