Learning from failure: Evaluating plant performance in urban landscapes

Abstract

Plants in urban landscapes are generally the result of design process that encompasses some level of plant selection. Typically this includes plants selected to meet specific outcomes, based around the overall design objectives for a project. However, while the landscape design process is generally well described in the literature, plant selection is not. There are few examples of analytical approaches to link specific criteria against plant choice and fewer studies evaluating plant performance in the landscape over time, particularly against original design use. This provides challenges to improving future design development and plant selection decision-making. We discuss two cases studies ..