With the recent posting of the Lawrence Halprin oral history module, the latest in TCLF’s ongoing Pioneers of American Landscape Design series, we have received several interesting unsolicited submissions that are “under the radar” in the context of Halprin’s most celebrated works of landscape architecture.

The relevance of TCLF’s Every Tree Tells a Story, this year’s Landslide theme, really hit home as back-to-back blizzards this past week in Washington, D.C., destroyed and disfigured trees and shrubs throughout the region. Front page Washington Post coverage catalogued types of trees downed, some locations and damage they inflicted on homes, cars and power lines. No mention was made of how these losses affect the character of a neighborhood, or the region.

Christopher Marcinkoski, a senior associate with James Corner Field Operations in New York City, recently gave me an overview of several of the firm’s projects.

On December 30, William McDonald’s, In Remembrance: Vivid Personalities of the Decade ran in The New York Times. The essay placed a spotlight on this first decade of the 21st century, while noting those individuals that helped to define the 20th. McDonald, notes that, “they led nations, produced masterpieces, pushed the boundaries of science and entertained. . . In life we called them famous, renowned, celebrated, their deaths we call notable, because their names register. They people our collective memory. Some — those who destroy rather than build — we would like to forget. But most make us pause and think of the past and take account of what the world has lost.”