James Urban, FASLA, noted soil and tree expert, recently gave his talk, You Cannot Fool Mother Nature but You Can Understand Her, at the Arsenal in New York City. Urban is a prolific writer and lecturer on the subject of tree planting and the conditions needed to improve tree performance in urban environments. Urban focused his talk on "eight simple ideas," all basic steps to yield more productive growth in urban trees.
With the emphasis on putting the green in Greenstar and LEED building discourse, information on what it actually takes to have decent large urban trees is sorely needed, James Urban's book was manna to me when I first read it and it's message - "Trees need Soil - not dirt" in the words of Elaine Ingam of Soil Food Web: " Dirt is something you find under your fingernails - soil much more than that" - and trees need lots of it to grow to a decent size and maintain their health over time.
