Seiter and his studio had also warmed to the area’s unkempt feeling and wanted to keep some of that messiness in the design of the party space. They tore out the asphalt but kept some of the honey locust trees that had sprouted through its cracks. There was inspiration in other spontaneous plants that had inserted themselves into the disturbed site; Future Green planted another 30 honey locusts and saved or replanted a number of other species commonly thought of as weeds, including sumacs, gray birch, quaking aspen, goldenrod, and Queen Anne’s lace. Carter says the place has the backyard atmosphere he and Harkin were hoping for, with the informality and blurry edges that you’d expect behind a house next to the train tracks. “It doesn’t feel too done,” Carter says. “They’ve kind of set it up to let nature do what it would do, and maybe pushed the fast forward button on it a little bit.”
Read the full article extracted from the September 2015 issue of landscape architecture magazine.