ANALYSIS AND PLANNING AWARD OF HONOR Clearings, Clusters, and Cloisters: A Garden of Trees for Two Rivers Park, Little Rock, AR University of Arkansas CDC, Fayetteville, AR

	"Strong reliance on formal and compositional traditions, but really revises them through layered and complex plantings. . .emergent. . . considers seasonality, all encompassing. . . management process shapes how it will be experienced." — 2005 Professional Awards Jury Comments

A 140-acre section of the 1000-acre Two Rivers island park will be planted as a Garden of Trees. Two Rivers Park is being developed as a regional urban park, accommodating pedestrian, bicycle, boat, and vehicular networks. The Garden’s planting design will highlight indigenous tree species, keeping in mind that most people—as our client observes—often “fail to see the trees from the forest." Identifiable arboreal spatial arrangements like allées, bosques, hammocks, and groves will form outdoor rooms to create a living educational center along the Little Rock Recreation Corridor. Slightly different from reforestation programs that attempt to recreate a natural condition, the Two Rivers Garden of Trees will be a composed gallery of specimen trees. Similar to paintings in an art museum or specimens in a natural history museum, trees are curated to deepen appreciation for their ecological work.

Trees are didactically organized to form outdoor rooms of different scales. In the tradition of museological composition—paintings in a museum—curators display objects through thematic narratives to facilitate memory of those objects and to dramatize an object’s affects. Akin to the spatial sequence in constructed memory systems, allées, bosques, lawns, and groves in the Garden of Trees present an exhibition of trees for our memory. The project proposes that planning might begin with the tree as an irreducible landscape unit to create large-scale measures of order.

The material palette for the Garden is limited to trees and ground cover. The site for the Garden of Trees lies within a riparian flood zone regulated by the US Army Corps of Engineers. Neither alterations of the ground plane nor introduction of architectural structures to the Garden site will be permitted. The 21 trees selected for inclusion are indigenous to the area’s riparian ecology and capable of withstanding the periodic inundations to which the site is subjected. Trees are selected for their aesthetic qualities related to proportion, color, fragrance, texture, and scale, and are arranged according to their changing seasonal features, or successional dynamic. The local experiences of participating horticultural and forestry consultants determined plant sociology and nutrient management. Cloistered rooms are defined by singular and dramatic interior affects, while exterior edges informally merge with the surrounding Forested Clusters.

In a process known as Emergence, tree arrangements morph from managed patterns featuring a singular dramatic effect produced by one species to self-organizing species clusters that merge formal rooms with the more diverse Forested Cluster. Akin to a pixilated landscape, the Garden of Trees is an emergent system characterized by planting algorithms applicable at all scales. As a catalyst for future growth, the Garden suggests an early stage urbanism without buildings.

Because the Garden’s fundamental logic is defined more by algorithmic protocols (cellular automata and Fibonacci proportions) than a set of fixed forms, room configurations can change without compromising the Garden’s integrity. Indeed, planning relies on the generation of new patterns with greater complexity by successional development.

The State Forestry Commission is sponsoring the Garden of Trees as a demonstration project of urban forestry—the notion that trees provide both urban and ecological services. The Garden is a design-build collaboration between the disciplines of landscape architecture, architecture, planning, and horticulture in a University Community Design Center, the State Forestry Commission, and the Pulaski County Public Works Administration. Since construction will be phased as funding is secured from private sources, the plan works like a kit-of-parts to accommodate flexibility in project development. There is no one preferred development sequence determining room construction. Fibonacci-proportioned plats with various grid typologies streamline surveying and construction layout of trees, while harmonizing relationships among parts. The planting plan manifests varying orders of precision, recognizing that community volunteer groups will incrementally plant large areas of the Garden with seedlings and/or saplings donated by the State Forestry Commission.

The Forestry Commission will provide early-stage management assistance with thinning, white-tail deer and other nuisance species control, nutrient, and irrigation programs. In addition to construction of all ground surfaces (Summer 2005), Pulaski County and the City of Little Rock public works staffs will partner to plant and maintain the formal allées with mature trees (Fall 2005 and Spring 2006). The Garden of Trees will be an important social anchor and rest stop along the county’s 31-mile bicycle trail, and a catalyst for the extension of its arboreal patterns throughout the river valley recreation corridor.

The Pulaski County administration is assembling an independent 501(c)3, or non-profit, organization—Friends of the Garden of Trees—to sponsor and administer the Garden once the first phase of planting and construction is completed. Such organizations allow visionary projects developed within local government administrations to persist beyond a founding personality regardless of future governing administrations. Discussions are under way with the State’s flagship University to establish a horticultural development and learning lab, sharing project stewardship with Friends of the Garden of Trees. Donors are currently being solicited for funding of various Garden Rooms and trails.