Urban Landscape, Native Landscape: Tanner Springs Park

Friday, July 22, 2011

Tanner Springs Park

Tanner Springs Park May 2011

Tanner Springs Park can be found at the edge of the Pearl District, near the Willamette River, in Portland, Oregon. It covers a full city block, nearly an acre of open space between NW 10th Avenue & NW 11th Avenue. It is one of the most amazing & delightful urban parks I've seen. The hardscape blends perfectly with the surrounding modern buildings. The water literally reflects them, & littorally reflects the Willamette River. The Pearl District was once a wetland & lake. Tanner Creek flowed into Couch Lake in the area surrounding Tanner Springs Park. The lake & wetland were filled, then covered with warehouses & railroad yards. The park now lies 20 feet above the former lake. Planning for the park began in 2003. Atelier Dreiseitl, a German design firm, & GreenWorks, P.C., a local landscape architecture firm, were selected to design the park. Construction began in 2004. The name Tanner Springs was adopted in 2005. Tanner Springs Park is entirely planted with western Oregon native plants.

1 comment:

scottweberpdx said...: I love this park...it's one of the few parks where I feel the hardscaping is wonderfully sympathetic with the flora...there's another park a few blocks to the south that I can't really stand...mostly hardscape with fountains...great for people to splash in...but not very pretty...imho; July 22, 2011 at 2:06 PM

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About This Blog

This blog began in 2008 as Metropolitan Gardens to provide information on gardening in Seattle & places like it. Click on Gardening in Cascadia. The blog expanded to include Parks P-Patches Public Gardens in the US, Canada & Europe. Then Nature was added. (The difference between nature & gardens is intent. Nature happens. Gardens are planned.) Many recent posts are not about Seattle, or even Cascadia. They are Urban Landscape: streetscape & architecture. Cascadia is the region including the Cascade Mountains of Washington & Oregon. If you want to contact the blogger, leave a message in comments. Comments are moderated & private messages will not be posted.

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The city of Seattle rests between 2 bodies of water: Puget Sound & Lake Washington. Puget Sound is a substantial part of the Salish Sea & a very small part of the Pacific Ocean. The Salish Sea is set apart from the Pacific by the Olympic Peninsula in the state of Washington & Vancouver Island in the province of British Columbia. The dense, wet clouds of the Pacific Ocean travel as far as the Cascade Mountains, near the Salish Sea & not very far from the ocean. East of the Cascades lies the desert of the Columbia Basin. The moist, temperate climate of Seattle extends south to northern California & north to southeastern Alaska. The Pacific Northwest Coast from San Francisco Bay to Cook Inlet shares a flora dominated by evergreen coniferous forest. The central portion, west of the Cascade Mountains, is called Cascadia. The climate is cool & wet from fall to spring, warm & dry in summer. The Olympic Mountains block Seattle from much of the Pacific rainfall. Seattle is drier than the Atlantic coast of North America & northern Europe, cooler in summer & warmer in winter. It lies near the latitude of Paris & Quebec City.