Don't Top The Crapemyrtles

My blog needs a picture and I would like to get on my soapbox for a moment and state my position on the great crapemurder debate of the last few decades. This is a photo of some crapemyrtles at my Studio 3 design project site, the E.E. Cooley Cotton Mill grounds and environs. This is what happens when you leave crapemyrtles alone. Would you not rather look at this all winter than the stubs that remain where people have topped crapemyrtles all over town, all over the south? I had a neighbor in Chapel Hill who had some nice 30 foot crapemyrtles that she, one afternoon in February, cut back by fifteen feet or so. I asked her (politely) why she did this and she could only come up with the reason that this is what you are supposed to do, you need to cut them back before the ACC tournament.

I have pruned hundreds of these in my career as a landscaper. All this tree needs is about a half hours worth of thinning. Remove branches that are dead, dying or crossing, and remove some of the inward growing branches to improve air circulation (reducing risk of sooty mold). That's it. Topping the trees causes buds to break from below the bark, resulting in vigorous, suckering type growth which is too weak to support the blooms. These weak branches then bend over or snap, which doesn't matter really because they are just going to be cut off at the end of the season anyway. A good example in Starkville are the ones along the entrance to McDonald's behind Strange Brew. It seems to me that those who prune crapemyrtles this way view the tree as strictly a producer of color. The thinning technique that I describe results in a tree that looks good year round. Or, as the photo proves, you can do nothing at all to the tree and it still looks pretty darned good. The visual interest comes from a pattern created by gradients: multiple thick trunks at bottom give way to multiples of multiple thin twigs at the top, a steady visual rhythm of coarse to thin texture. Put a bird feeder in it and you have a middle ground, a stage for dynamic movement through which one can view the background in the distance. If you lop off the crown in the misguided assumption that it will produce more bloom next summer you loose all that dynamic potential.

This is at a smaller scale than is generally discussed in Studio 3, but I saw the tree on my site and wanted to share these thoughts with everybody.

Mo Rocca on The Future of Traffic

This post and the previous are from the journal project for the Community-Based Planning Seminar most of my Studio colleagues are also taking. I am sharing them here because a blog is no good if it is not updated regularly and I thought my classmates might be interested. I just watched a piece by Mo Rocca on CBS News Sunday Morning about the Future of Traffic. The piece isn't online yet, but here is a link to Mo Rocca's "Tomorrow Show" where it will be posted eventually.

Mo Rocca rides around in cars and talks to an old guy (I didn't catch who he was) about paying attention while driving. The old guy says that road signs are actually distracting. Reading a sign that warns of children playing might cause you not to notice the actual children playing. Drivers rely too much on signs, he says, to the degree that they feel they don’t need to be alert to other visual cues and they pay less attention to what is happening in the street. This leads to Mo Rocca’s introduction of the “Naked Streets” campaign that is taking hold in Europe. He travels to Holland and records a piece about a four-way intersection where the stoplight was removed and a roundabout installed with no signs. The mayor of the city explains that the problem with traffic lights is that they make everybody feel safe, but one driver running a red light can cause a deadly accident. The roundabout forces drivers to use visual cues from their surroundings and to communicate with each other. There are even bike lanes (designated by alternate paving surface and color) that wind through the roundabout. Mo Rocca rides his bike through the intersection on the bike lane and a car yields to him and he calls out “thank you!” in Dutch. The mayor says that when the intersection had a stoplight there were four accidents a year (or was it four fatalaties? I don’t recall). Since the removal of lights and the installation of the roundabout there have been none.

Could Americans, who are notorious for texting, shaving, eating breakfast and surfing the web while driving, ever be able to design and use such a system? Mo Rocca then goes back to the states to report on the development of cars that drive themselves using remote sensing technology. One of the designers of one of the cars says that this kind of automation is working well for the airline industry and is the future of driving in America. It was pretty scary. Exactly the wrong solution to the problem, instead of trying to get people more engaged with the street, with what is going on around them, these designers want to turn to technology to allow people to become even further removed from their physical surroundings. So that they can concentrate on what? I wonder.

Local Farmland Viewed as Possible Industrial Site

The current issue of the Columbus Dispatch online has an article about the Oktibbeha County Board of Supervisors giving their official support to a proposed industrial aerospace park on 2,500 acres west of the Golden Triangle Regional airport. It sounds like a good industry to develop, MSU has an aerospace engineering program, Columbus has an air force base and Eurocopter has a manufacturing presence near the airport. The plans will be presented at East Mississippi Community College on October 18th. My biggest concern is that it replaces farmland. All three cities in the Golden Triangle have industrial areas that could benefit from this development. It seems that instead of getting into a drawn-out battle over which city gets it, the organizers used a 1980s-era solution and decided to stick it into a rural area that is a ten-minute drive from everybody. What if we took a big picture approach? Give it to the town that needs it most. That would be West Point. I come from a "Triangle" myself: THE triangle of Raleigh, Durham and Chapel Hill. We put a research park in the midpoint of our three cities in the 1950s and enjoyed a half-century of prosperity in the age of the automobile. With no mass transit system in place, however, some hard choices are going to be confronted by the denizens in the next half century. I say build the Global Industrial Aerospace Park in West Point, give that town a boost, and save the farmland.