Greener Pastures

Clients place higher priority on beautiful landscapes

From outdoor amenity spaces to showpiece rain gardens to a city park celebrating jazz legends, creating extraordinary green space is a priority in many construction projects.

In Baltimore City, the Nathaniel J. McFadden Learn and Play Park is a key element in the transformative Somerset Homes redevelopment. Although the site is just one acre, it includes play and exercise equipment, a pavilion, an amphitheater, grassy areas, walkways and lines of trees.

Extensive communication with area residents helped the developers and design team shape the park to reflect community needs and local culture.

“It’s a pretty exceptional space,” said Kristen Gedeon, Senior Associate at MK Consulting Engineers. MK provided site/civil engineering, planning and project coordination services. “The park honors great jazz musicians from Baltimore, so we incorporated a lot of artwork into the design. We worked with artists from MICA (the Maryland Institute College of Art) to create a mural and three metal sculpture silhouettes. We also have the Jazz Walk – a sidewalk that has a mural painted on it to show different jazz icons.”

In total, the project budget included more than $1 million for art acquisitions.

The park was designed around universal access principles “so it works for people under seven and over 70,” Gedeon said.

It also included CPTED (Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design) measures and created an ecological asset on the previously developed site by completing urban soil restoration, a reforesting plan and other measures that improved stormwater management.

Spectacular parks on tight sites

Constructing the park presented some challenges.

“The park is right in the middle of a number of big buildings and it had a ton of elements on it. There were brick pavers, special soils, sod, playground equipment, benches and trees all the way up and down the streets,” said Michael Martin, President of Live Green Landscape Associates.

In addition to working on a tight site, crews had to contend with complex underground conditions while excavating and remediating soil.

“There were abandoned steam tunnels and utilities in the ground – gas lines, electric lines, fiber optic and telephone lines, stormwater management and water lines,” Martin said. “It’s ungodly what’s in the ground.”

Heightened efforts to create new green spaces within the city has presented other project teams with ambitious goals and challenging conditions.

At the edge of the harbor, a team lead by Plano-Coudon Construction is currently building Phase II of the reimaged Rash Field. The design for the five-acre site includes beach volleyball courts, pickleball courts, a field fitness area with exercise equipment, a multi-use lawn, gardens and walkways.

“It also features a pre-manufactured shade structure system which is coming from a manufacturer in the Netherlands,” said Ben Banbury, Senior Project Manager. “It has interlaced components that will come out over a large amphitheater and it will have integrated lighting and conduit pathways.”

In addition to tackling that complex construction, crews are dealing with grading challenges. “Key Highway is at a pretty high elevation and you are working all the way from there down to the harbor,” said Colin Sutch, Project Engineer. “We will be creating land terraces with granite benches and completing pretty intricate grading.”

Crews are also working 20 feet from the harbor which makes the installation of new stormwater management structures especially difficult.

“But any time you can create a multi-use green space in a city like Baltimore, that’s a really rewarding project,” Banbury said. “It’s obviously a very egalitarian space and you know that generations of people will enjoy this space long after we build it.”

Green amenities and lush plantings

Attractive green spaces have also become a priority on most multi-family developments and some institutional projects.

“Multi-family projects are extremely prevalent, and these communities have a tremendous amount of amenities,” Martin said.

That market desire has reshaped landscaping requirements in several ways.

“Synthetic turf is a huge trend. I can’t think of a project in quite a while where we haven’t used synthetic turf,” he said.

The material is used in rooftop gardens, dog parks and around community pools. In some multi-family and mixed-use developments, high-end synthetic turf is also used to create lawns in common areas. For example, Live Green recently installed 6,000 square feet of synthetic turf at the center of Hunt Valley Towne Centre to create a durable and perpetually attractive surface for summer concerts, the Christmas tree lighting and other community events.

Other trends are channeling more focus and project dollars into beautiful and expansive plantings.

More clients, Martin said, have started requesting improved soil mixes in planters and planting beds after realizing those soils produce more vigorous and attractive vegetation.

Meanwhile, the trend in stormwater management has moved away from large SWM facilities to numerous micro bioretention ponds. This has greatly expanded the number of plants installed on some projects.

“Big projects will have 40 micro bio-ponds. They’re big versions of rain gardens,” he said. “They will have special soil mixes and every pond gets special planting, and they’re beautiful. We could put 50,000 plants – all kinds of flowering perennials – into the bio-ponds in just one development.”

Some multi-family projects, such as Boulden at Southfields in Elkton, use those lushly planted bioretention ponds to create the highlights of their community’s landscaping.

To enable residents to get out and enjoy these enhanced green spaces, clients are also budgeting more for site furniture, such as Adirondack chairs, benches, grilling stations, tables and trash receptacles.

“We do a tremendous amount of site furniture on all these jobs now,” Martin said. “We’re doing a job right now at the University of Maryland Leonardtown. It’s student housing but there are massive courtyards with special soils and brick pavers. And the site furniture package alone for that project is $500,000. It’s going to be a tremendous space.”

Thank you to the BC&E member companies that contributed to this story: MK Consulting Engineers, Live Green Landscape Associates and Plano-Coudon Construction.