SILVER LININGS

A RECORD-BREAKING DERECHO IS A CHANCE FOR AN IOWA LANDMARK TO PREPARE FOR A STORMIER FUTURE.

ZACH MORTICE

On August 10, 2020, a derechoripped across the Midwest with winds up to 140 miles an hour, causing $11 billion in damages, the most expensive thunderstorm in the United States to date. In the path of the wall of wind and thunderstorms was Cedar Rapids, Iowa, which lost 65 percent of its tree canopy. Brucemore, a late Victorian country estate with a landscape designed in the early 20th century by ASLA cofounder O. C. Simonds, lost two-thirds of its tree canopy—300 mature trees. The $3 million repair bill put Brucemore in increasingly common company: a historic landscape devastated by climate change–accelerated natural disasters. Prior to the storm, Brucemore’s tree canopy, and many other elements of Simonds’s design, had been in steady decline. In 2020, only 15 percent of the original…

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Landscape Architecture (Digital) - 1 Issue, November 2024

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