THE WOODS ARE WARMING

AT THE WASHINGTON NATIONAL CATHEDRAL, ANDROPOGON ASSOCIATES CONFRONTS CLIMATE DISRUPTION IN A SMALL, FRAGILE FOREST.

BRADFORD MCKEE

“The main Woods… are disastrous,” Carol Kelleher wrote in an annual report to her fellow garden volunteers in November 2023. A few months earlier, a brief, intense storm had destroyed more than 30 large trees in Olmsted Woods, a sloping, five-acre forest below the foot of the Washington National Cathedral. Downdrafts felled towering hardwoods, tore major limbs, and sheared whole crowns. Big gaps opened in the deep canopy. Bare, splintered trunks rose into the glare. Tons of timber and slash littered the forest floor around two deep stream ravines. The cleanup, Kelleher says, would cost more than $200,000 and was continuing months later, in May. “What else can possibly happen?” she asked. Kelleher chairs the garden committee of All Hallows Guild, a volunteer group organized in 1916 to care for…

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Landscape Architecture (Digital) - 1 Issue, October 2024

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