[CANUFNET] Medians

[Shirley Mckell]

Medians....planners love them;  maintenance people hate them for all the
reasons that you mentioned.  There are so many limitations to finding
plants that work well there, especially if you have height restrictions.
We recently did a median and we looked all over the lower mainland at
other municipalities trials.  And all of the plantings here probably do
not have the same salt content that you might in Kelowna.  But what
seems to work pretty well with infill plantings are lots of the
spiareas, mugo pines (may get too tall) ornamental grasses and still
some use various lower growing laurels.  I find that mulched shrub beds
are still less maintenance than "groundcovers" as inevitably, they get
invaded by dandelions and other tough weeds and depending on what
groundcover you use, it may not be easy for weeders to get to the roots
of the weeds.  Not sure of the zone of this plant, but we do use
lonicera pileata as a shrub-like groundcover that really fills in well,
but needs space and smothers weeds well.  Pin Oaks worked well here for
trees, but again, not a ton of salt as our medians are close to water
where less snow and ice (except for this year!)  My last advice would be
to stay away from prickly or thorny shrubs, if you use shrubs at all, as
garbage sticks to them like cement.  Hope this helps a bit.  
Shirley McKell
Horticulture Supervisor
District of West Vancouver Parks
604-925-7112
smckell at westvancouver.ca
www.westvancouver.ca <http://www.westvancouver.ca/> 
 

________________________________

From: canufnet-bounces at list.web.net
[mailto:canufnet-bounces at list.web.net] On Behalf Of Ian Wilson
Sent: March 23, 2009 1:48 PM
To: canufnet at list.web.net; urbNRnet at LIST.TREELINK.ORG
Subject: [CANUFNET] Medians


I'm looking for information on low-maintenance plant materials and
landscaping designs for road or highway medians that have "stood the
test of time".  I just got a copy of the new "Planning the Urban Forest"
book and saw a photo of an interesting median planting in Urbana,
Illinois utilizing native plants, which got me thinking about what other
cities might be using for medians.
 
The City of Kelowna has been developing more medians in recent years.
We've tried a variety of different designs and plant materials.  Medians
seem to be among the most difficult growing sites in terms of
maintenance and plant health.  Here's some of the challenges that we
have had:
 
1)  Getting enough soil volume for trees and plants, particularly in
narrower medians
2)  Salt spray due to winter road maintenance in our climate.  Some
trees suffer bud dieback due to salt spray.  Others might suffer soil
toxicity once the salts get too high.  One of the best trees we've found
so far seems to be red oak.
3)  Sand accumulations in the planting bed.  Even if you have a nicely
mulched bed, after a year or two it all ends up looking like a bed of
sand.
4)  Worker safety in order to maintain median plant materials and remove
garbage and maintain irrigation etc.
5)  Landscaping medians on highways with higher speeds - the additional
wind and salt spray etc seems to be particularly hard on plants when the
traffic speeds are higher.
 
We have several different designs that we have tried, depending on
situation.  We're starting to move towards a couple of different
designs, one is more of a xeriscape design with trees in a large
planting bed and xeriscape plant ground covers (where we have the
space).  Where speeds are higher and sand and salt accumulation is an
issue we're trying more hardscape with trees in "pits" and hard
surfacing, but unless we use Silva cells or something similar we run
into the challenge of limited soil volumes.
 
Anybody have some good designs or ideas that they'd like to share?
 
thanks, Ian
 
Ian Wilson, RPF, Certified Arborist
Park Services Manager
City of Kelowna
Park Services
Civic Operations
1359 KLO road,
Kelowna, BC  V1W 3N8
iwilson at kelowna.ca
Phone: (250) 469-8842
Fax:  (250) 862-3335
 
 
 
 
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://list.web.net/pipermail/canufnet/attachments/20090326/88d159ba/attachment.htm>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: image/jpeg
Size: 7908 bytes
Desc: BestBlooming.jpg
URL: <http://list.web.net/pipermail/canufnet/attachments/20090326/88d159ba/attachment.jpeg>