Can you see three trees?

https://www.not-ship.com/can-you-see-three-trees/

by Pamar • 1 month ago

323 148 1 month ago

Esbo / Espoo is an odd one out, of those four. The three others look like the olden European cities you'd expect, but you'll have a hard time getting around in Espoo without a car. There are plenty of beautiful neighborhoods in Espoo, but it's basically a large spread of separate suburbs rather than a city in the way the rest are. The actual "Espoo Center" is not very green and flowery either, and it's not really thought of as an actual city center.

stevekemp• 1 month ago

Helsinki has a lot of parks, and also housing companies tend to have trees in their gardens, along with trees alongside many of the bigger roads. But even so it's a reasonably dense city.

Espoo is much more spread out, and the areas between them are all full of trees and greenery. So I very much agree with you, I've visited Espoo a few times but without a car I wouldn't want to live there.

jurgenburgen• 1 month ago

On the other hand it does have a massive central park in the middle which has all kinds of animals, including deer.

I agree that the public transport is not particularly great if you don’t live on the metro or train line. It’s usually faster to drive and even with one person cheaper even when paying for gasoline and parking. Public transport is ridiculously overpriced in Finland.

Even Helsinki leaves much to be desired on that front, the coverage is okay but the ticket prices are ridiculous. It’s not feasible to drive in the center though, takes forever to get anywhere.

mapontosevenths• 1 month ago

‘Beneath the pavement, the beach!’

jamiecurle9• 1 month ago

and three years later, the beech has Ganoderma due to root compaction!

rendaw• 1 month ago

Some photos would be really awesome. What does a view in an area that passes the test look like compared to one that doesn't? 3 trees doesn't sound like a lot, I don't have a good mental concept of this.

isoprophlex• 1 month ago

indeed, i can see more than three trees, but the tree cover is probably... 1%?

jamiecurle9• 1 month ago

Here you go. Hot off the press for you. My house which passes the test.

https://jamiecurle.com/posts/trees-3-30-300

Northumberland, UK.

ErroneousBosh2• 1 month ago

No data for NW Scotland, presumably because 140mph winds for four weeks of the year (in the local language we call that "January") is incompatible with large trees.

jamiecurle9• 1 month ago

For sure, it was one of things that got me about Orkney.

Mind you, wars and sheep did have a pretty devastating effect on the Caledonian woodland cover of the highlands. The current population of the red deer aren't helping with natural regeneration. This is one of the reasons for the case for re-introducing predator species.

But that's a complex topic with no simple answers and easy divisions.

graemep4• 1 month ago

There is already a predator species that eats red deer. Just up our venison consumption!

psychoslave• 1 month ago

Looks great, are they interactive maps showing these data?

luuundonjk3• 1 month ago

I was walking in central London and something felt wrong. I couldn't quite tell what though, but I had this constant feeling of unease.

It took me a few days to understand - there are no trees in central London (the City).

Sure, you have a small/big park here and there, but no random trees on side walks. It's literally a (beautiful) concrete/glass wasteland.

Note: I only walked a few of the main streets, I'm sure I'm exaggerating a bit, but it's quite noticeable compared with other cities after you realize it. And there are random trees in other areas, outside City of London.

mickeyp• 1 month ago

What? London is one of the greenest cities in the world.

luuundonjk3• 1 month ago

I'm talking about trees on sidewalks and streets, not about parks.

ndsipa_pomu• 1 month ago

It technically counts as a forest

drawfloat• 1 month ago

City of London != London, the city

The City is indeed pretty non green

jamiecurle9• 1 month ago

I'm not sure what parts of London you were in, but there's many trees in London on sidewalks. There's even a specific species for it - the London plane (Platanus × hispanica)

If you're in the very new, constantly rebuilt, concrete jungle that is the very small part of the city, then OK, greenery is going to be hard to spot. Particularly as they tend to nearly always choose the wrong species to plant and aftercare is an afterthought. But your assessment is factually incorrect.

See for yourself. Go to Google maps, drop a good few street view randomly around the city and you'll see that more often than not you'll see trees.

Also, I have a networks in arboriculture who work in the city and they're never short on work.

I'm not doubting your experience of unease or a concrete/glass wasteland (that's yours and not mine to question) but the facts don't support the statement of no random trees on pavements (side walks).

I live in the North, but I'm often in London.

luuundonjk3• 1 month ago

open Google maps at Monument station, find a tree in the area. all the streets in that region of London (let's say 1 sq km) are quite narrow, I would guess there just is not enough space for street trees.

thebrid• 1 month ago

I'd echo the gp's thoughts. There are parts of the City and the West End that are basically devoid of trees.

My biggest bugbear in London is the number of developments that have a "token tree" with one lonely tree in one corner, often doing quite poorly, presumably included to check some item on a planning consent checklist.

Of course, London has many green spaces and on the whole has plenty of trees, it's just they're quite unevenly distributed.

TimByte4• 1 month ago

I don't think the point is that London literally lacks pavement trees. As you say, the London plane is almost part of the city's visual identity in many areas. The interesting thing to me is how uneven the experience can be

dcminter• 1 month ago

The City of London, aka "The City", aka "The Square Mile" is not the same thing as Greater London or even what's usually called "Central London." I don't think "Central London" has an agreed exact definition, but it's likely what you thought the parent post meant.

The City is a specific area, more or less covering the same area as the original Roman city. It's the original financial district - though a lot of that moved to Docklands at the tail end of the 1900s.

It's much more built up than even adjacent Westminster ("The City of Westminster") and definitely has far fewer trees.

jamiecurle9• 1 month ago

Maybe we're both right and wrong at the same time.

Here's a map of the canopy data.

https://apps.london.gov.uk/public-realm-trees/explore

garethrowlands2• 1 month ago

That's awesome. Though, it doesn't seem to think Hampstead Heath has any trees. Nor Croydon, not even Thornton Heath. The Wilderness in Richmond Park seems to be a missing spot, as are some of the plantations (maybe Isabella Plantation, my map fu is failing me). Maybe the royal parks keep their own records?

almostkindatech• 1 month ago

Agreed when it comes to the City of London (for anyone not familiar, this means the financial centre). It can feel pretty grim walking there at times.

Elsewhere though, possible to plan continuous walks through greenish spaces. One starting at Victoria: Belgravia back streets, Hyde Park, Grosvenor Square, Marylebone High Street, Regents Park, Primrose Hill, Belsize Park, Hampstead Heath.

graemep4• 1 month ago

I am not sure whether GP means the City or central London in general.

It gets greener as you go further out.

One of the big problems in the UK has been the rise of low maintenance gardens, replacing plants with decking concrete, gravel etc.

TimByte4• 1 month ago

The green space exists, but access to it is often something you have to deliberately route yourself through

radu_floricica• 1 month ago

On the other hand, when I visit Venice - which is as tight a city as can be, small streets with stone in every direction except the sky - they somehow manage to drop trees in stone squares.

Same shock, different direction, much nicer.

jjgreen• 1 month ago

The City is not central London, horrible place, dead at the weekend. (Shudder)

agumonkey• 1 month ago

Different countries / geographies have these very different relationship with nature. I remember coming back from small islands in the caribeans, and there nature is overwhelming, the size and density. Just after landing home (france) I felt suddenly naked from the lack of vegetation, there were trees but one every 400m on large avenues. It felt empty.

lmf4lol• 1 month ago

One thing that I really really like about living in Amsterdam, is that we have trees and plants everwhere. Also, for 2 years now, city stopped cutting most of the plant growth in parks and on the side of roads. Its so beautiful green and colourful now and insects are having a great time. I counted this year already 6 different sorts of humblebees in my garden.

TimByte4• 1 month ago

This is a good reminder that "green" does not have to mean perfectly manicured

RetroTechie2• 1 month ago

Also us Dutchies have this thing called "tegelwippen":

https://www.nk-tegelwippen.nl

It's a competition about which municipality can remove most pavement tiles & replace with greenery.

People do this on their own too - guerilla gardening style. It's not uncommon to ride through a city street, and see a strip of pavement tiles removed & some flowers in there. Or some plants dangling from a pot attached to a street light. As long as postal workers & elderly people with strollers can still pass, most municipalities support this.

_heimdall• 1 month ago

We did this in front of out old house in Scheveningen. The hofje had a very small shared space behind us so we pulled up the first foot of bricks in the street side of the house and planted flowers.

drcongo• 1 month ago

One of the reasons I moved from London to the town I'm in now was how much effort our local council puts in to maintaining the town's greenery. There's dedicated wildflower areas all over the place to encourage insects, which in turn encourages the bird life.

maxldn2• 1 month ago

Haha. Those are things I like about Hackney

gpvos2• 1 month ago

Still, apparently Amsterdam somehow doesn't satisfy the 30% criterion at all. Can anyone find detailed numbers? I live there and my street is lined with large trees.

ricardobeat• 1 month ago

Was thinking the same. There must be some glitch in how this is calculated, as we definitely have >30% tree coverage in every city. Maybe the vast areas of shrub-filled countryside and farmland are skewing the data.

Nnnes• 1 month ago

This is the dataset they used: https://land.copernicus.eu/en/products/high-resolution-layer...

spacedcowboy• 1 month ago

Hah, looking out my window, I can see about 300 trees, and it’d be more if it weren’t for all the trees in the way. The house is next to a park that’s designed for walking in, with lots of twisty pathways between trees and bushes to give you the feeling that you’re not in a manufactured space.

Sharlin• 1 month ago

I just reflected a bit on the fact that there’s essentially nothing but foliage and slivers of sky visible from the windows of the apartment I currently live in, unless you’re right next to a window getting a particularly wide view. Perks of living right at the edge of a neighborhood originally built literally in the middle of forest.

ImaCake• 1 month ago

That first map seems to map quite closely to koppen climate zones across the continent. Its hard to say whether the climate is decisive here because climate is a big influencer of urban design. However, its interesting that in Australia its the two Mediterranean climate cities (Perth and Adelaide) which frequently get labelled as worse for tree cover compared to the sub tropical east coast cities.

taffydavid• 1 month ago

I'm happy to report I can see much more than 3 out every window.

paulmooreparks• 1 month ago

Singapore here, checking all the boxes. 200m from a neighborhood park with many trees, and ~700m from a GARGANTUAN park, Jurong Lake Gardens, over 4 km in length with many times that in pathways through gardens and around a lake.

Jakob2• 1 month ago

Yes, Singapore is great for that. But to be fair with the other cities, it’s very hard _not_ to have abundant vegetation in tropical rainforest climate. Everything grows rapidly and stops at nothing in its way.

In other climates, like European ones, this becomes much more complex. Germany struggles even to keep its forests alive with long stretches of missing rain, higher temperatures, and new pests. Single trees in cities constantly die. Spain is in large parts a desert etc.

I really hope we find a solution/adapted plants to keep cities from heating up so much.

eru2• 1 month ago

Yes, Singapore is great for that. But to be fair with the other cities, it’s very hard _not_ to have abundant vegetation in tropical rainforest climate. Everything grows rapidly and stops at nothing in its way.

Eh, have a look at other tropical cities like Johor Bahru or Jakarta or Kuala Lumpur and you can see that it's very much possible to have way less greenery than Singapore.

The recent trouble with the Borkenkäfer was just a consequence of monoculture. Germany doesn't struggle with keeping forests alive: it's normal at any one time for individual trees in forests to die. Decaying dead wood is important for the ecosystems.

qayxc2• 1 month ago

It's much much more complex than that. Climate is only one factor and by far not the most important one. Prosperity and structure of the city plays a much more important role. Singapore is an outlier because it's a rich country on an island the size of a city.

Big cities in Europe are usually surrounded by more rural areas in most of Europe for historical reasons (surrounding farmlands used to feed the city), lessening the need for city parks and greenery since the countryside was surrounding the city. If the city IS the country and even isolated on an island, that's of course not an option.

Another factor is also rooted in history. Like most cities in Europe, Singapore is old, though most of its growth happened in the past 60 years with proper urban planning. Europe's cities on the other hand grew over centuries without any kind of modern urban planning and the pressure of rebuilding quickly after the many devastating wars didn't help either.

Finally there's the issue of money - being one of the richest countries/cities on Earth helps tremendously with building a nice, liveable urban environment compared to some cities struggling to keep basic infrastructure running.

riffraff2• 1 month ago

FWIW, some fast growing non-native trees now grow trivially in central Europe too.

Ailanthus[0] is invasive as heck and Paulownia[1] grows everywhere too.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ailanthus_altissima

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paulownia_tomentosa

eru2• 1 month ago

I can't see any trees from my window right now. But that's just because I'm in the groundfloor of a shophouse (in Singapore).

Yes, it's pretty green here.

Now, if we could ban street parking like Japan did [0], and perhaps take some more inspiration from Dutch traffic planning..

[0] Ideally we'd get the Gahmen out of the car parking business completely.

zimpenfish2• 1 month ago

London here: can see 12 trees within 30m from the back, 10 from the front; 50m from a neighbourhood park, 300m from Burgess Park (140 acres), probably 700m from Southwark Park (60 acres) (all of these are well tree-d)

jongjong• 1 month ago

I'm in Australia and I have view on a mountain so I see too many trees to count. Proximity to a forest was top priority for me and my wife.

Having lived in Europe for many years before, this is something that's most striking about Australia. I live in a state with one of the highest population densities and yet it still feels very sparsely populated relatively speaking.

ReyX• 1 month ago

ONE

few• 1 month ago

I learned from geoguessr pro, Rainbolt, that every tree and its species is mapped for NYC: https://tree-map.nycgovparks.org/tree-map

Now I am curious if there is a dataset for the location of every tree in every city in the world? https://overpass-turbo.eu?

zimpenfish2• 1 month ago

'pm215 posted [0] earlier which does seem to be individual locations and species for London.

[0] https://www.london.gov.uk/programmes-and-strategies/environm...

ccppurcell• 1 month ago

Tree cover is great but I wish cities would just consider shade a bit more. As the world heats up, it's insane that so many places humans need to be for extended amounts of time have enough shade for a handful of people at best and often nothing. I'm thinking long sidewalks, waiting areas, playgrounds.

lukan2• 1 month ago

Long sidewalks could also be covered with solar roofs for shade, but trees have the advantage that they don't block sunlight in winter without leaves, when sun is nice (in colder climates).

uberex2• 1 month ago

No because I planted a tree very close to the window, blocking view of other trees.

kkarpkkarp• 1 month ago

So somehow it confirms not seeing three threes is an indicator of the wrong plant coverage ;)

red75prime• 1 month ago

I was in the same situation (I didn't plant the tree though), but just a week ago they cut it down (planned tree removals). Now I can see 20 trees.

uberex2• 1 month ago

We can solve this by cutting down all trees, then building a 1000ft skyscraper with 3 oak trees on top.

TimByte4• 1 month ago

What struck me is that the "three trees from your window" part sounds almost trivial until you actually test it

throw310822• 1 month ago

From one window? From all windows? And how far from the window they should be visible, and how far can you look? Can you stick your head out? Can we cheat by planting a few very tall trees that can be seen from very far away? :)

__s• 1 month ago

Half dozen trees directly outside my window, but London Ontario is "the forest city" with an initiative to get 27% tree canopy to 34% by 2065

orbital-decay• 1 month ago

I opened up Google Street for Valencia (claimed to be the worst in the article) and I struggle to find a street that plausibly fails this test.

Abimelex• 1 month ago

People who can see at least three trees from their window have better mental health than those who can't. It seems like the easiest of the three goals to achieve

Here we go, correlation does not equal causation. Simple as that. Planting 3 trees will not give you a better mental health nor will planting 10 trees. But moving in to an environment where many trees grow in front of your window will probably change a lot more than just putting trees in your view.

mcdonje• 1 month ago

I read Don Quixote and thought it might be fun to visit some parts of Spain mentioned in the books. Then after looking at some maps and seeing a stark lack of trees, I decided I wouldn't enjoy the trip.

pvaldes• 1 month ago

We don't have the spectacular red Maple or Ponderosa pine forests that America has, this is true, but if this helps, some places in the North and Center of Spain (and many more in the rest of Europe) still look pretty much like Lothlorien. You just need to know where to go. Check Muniellos (oak), Tejera de Tosande (ancient yews and beech) or Irati forest (beech) for example.

The inner center and hot south can be more dusty and discouraging, but you can still be surprised by a few, not well known, jewels like Cabañeros, Valsain's pine forest, Alto Tajo, or Grazalema and the last relict Mediterranean -humid- forests in Cadiz. Plenty also of lagoons, marshes and aquatic ecosystems to visit, like Doñana or Daimiel. The biosphere reserve Hayedo de Montejo is located in Don Quixote's land.

projektfu2• 1 month ago

It didn't help that the King used them all up in the war with England a couple hundred years after Cervantes. A lot of Europe is trying to reforest now and hopefully that process continues.

jonplackett• 1 month ago

Am I the only one that stared at the photo at the top for 3 minutes trying to see three trees in the photo because I thought it was a post about optical illusions? No, oh ok.

bob1029• 1 month ago

I like to use wildlife as a proxy for the quality of a location. If you can see things like rabbits and squirrels on a regular basis, you are probably doing reasonably ok. I have to put up fences and other barriers or the deer will eat everything in my yard.

I've seen suburban development that would easily satisfy the three tree test from any window on any property, but they still come off as desolate wastes. The age of the trees seems to be a non trivial factor.

riffraff2• 1 month ago

@steerpike on HN coined the "time to sheep" metric, a measure of how long you have to travel before you're surrounded by sheep[0], which correlates reasonably well with quality of living.

Alas, doesn't work very well outside of britain, but it's a good metric :)

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42802744

TurdF3rguson• 1 month ago

Anywhere tropical is pretty far out from sheep, so that metric is clearly broken.

RetroTechie2• 1 month ago

Yeah wildlife & its variety is a good indicator for how much an area is disturbed by humans.

For this reason, I'd prefer to have compact cities with a good amount of high-rise buildings and city parks dotted in between. As opposed to large sprawling suburban zones.

That leaves more space for natural areas outside cities where people are few & far between.

3rdworldhuman• 1 month ago

Montevideo, Uruguay here. I can see 3, 300, and 3.000 for sure. Not sure if 30.000. May well be.

m-schuetz• 1 month ago

The map does not look plausible to me. I live in Vienna and spent quite a bit of time in the Netherlands. There is absolutely no way that Vienna scores better than Dutch cities when it comes to the question "Can you see three trees when you look out the window?".

Vienna cheekily cheats statistics by counting several adjacent forests as "urban green spaces" within city borders. The roads within the city, however, are mostly barren concrete deserts.

greatgib• 1 month ago

Totally random numbers picked up to be a catching name for trying to get celebrity.

Could have been 200 meters or 500 meters or 4 trees or 2 or flowers.

This is the kind of ideology that is ruining public policies instead of being grounded on concrete and scientific facts and goals.

bluebarbet• 1 month ago

An exaggeration. The numbers just function as a rule of thumb intended to inspire and motivate action.

sltkr• 1 month ago

I agree that that's the best way to take these kind of "rules", but that's the opposite of how the blog author presents it:

the 3-30-300 test — a standard that has become the go-to for solving a universal urban problem
3-30-300 is a catchy, straightforward test that sets a clear benchmark for measuring equal access to nature.
I found that my closest park isn't 300 metres away, it's 400 metres. That's close, but a fail.

It's a standard. It's a benchmark. And a park at 400 metres is no good; it must be 300 metres or else it may as well be 4 kilometers away. This isn't treating the test as a useful guidance, but as a hard target. As Goodheart's law states: when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.

When you focus exclusively on satisfying such metrics, you can end up with ineffective policy. Missing the forest for the trees, if you will.

traceroute66• 1 month ago

I only walked a few of the main streets

Person walks along main roads in London and complains they see no trees. Meanwhile in other news .... :)

London is one of the most tree-ridden cities on this earth, so I dread to think what "main streets" you were walking along.

qrios• 1 month ago

Thanks for sharing! I had no idea about the “3-30-300 test,” even though I always pay attention to city trees.

I can, however, easily explain the division in Europe: In Italy (for example, in Palermo), the vigorous growth of many species very often leads to significant damage to infrastructure.

Here in Vienna, there’s a directory of trees[1] where you can see, among other things, the species and age.

[1] https://baumkarte.at/

oasisbob• 1 month ago

As Alex Shigo likes to point out, it's too easy to try and explain infrastructure damage in terms of trees, while giving expansive soils a free pass.

That's like explaining frost-jacking of a wall in terms of temperature instead of hydrology.

xondono• 1 month ago

I think these simplifications end up hurting more than helping.

30% tree cover looks very different depending on the trees your municipality chooses.

For example, Barcelona covers everything with a variety of Platanus, which is easier to keep than other trees, but it’s quite dirty and produces A LOT of pollen. For me, that I’m allergic to it, it just makes the city unavailable for 2-4 weeks every year.

Having smaller plants, with more variety also feels much better than just sprinkling the right amount of massive trees with equal spacing. I’m pretty convinced part of the “we need more green” feeling people get is actually “I need something in my environment to not look like a grid”.

watwut• 1 month ago

Having smaller plants, with more variety also feels much better than just sprinkling the right amount of massive trees with equal spacing.

The thing people want from trees is shading and general cooling of the environment. Small plants provide much less of that and the summers are increasingly hot.

idoubtit• 1 month ago

I also think these are harmful simplifications, for several reasons.

First of all, I'm skeptical about the study that proves that people seeing three trees have better mental health. There are so many factors that it's hard to separate one. A solid study would compare families living in the same building, roughly at the same floor, and with similar parameters (family size, income, education, street noise, etc.). Comparisons from different buildings induce too many side factors. I think that collecting this sample would be very hard. I can't access the full-text behind the paywall, so I don't know their methodology, and their abstract is vague, so I fear the paper is meaningless.

Then do people really watch that much through their windows? I'd be surprised that having a glimpse of a few trees at home once a day could change anyone's life.

Even if trees did has a positive impact on mental health, I suppose inciting people to bike or walk (at least partly) to workplaces and stores would dwarf that impact, for mental and physical health.

Lastly, the 30% of tree cover seems arbitrary. For the same percentage, would covering every street with trees have the same impact as keeping trees inside parks? I think the goal to provide places where people go for a walk requires different solutions than the goal to reduce the heat in a concrete jungle.

qbit42• 1 month ago

I think shade is a big factor here. Trees can really cool down a neighborhood.

tamimio• 1 month ago

Well, I live up high in a penthouse with an amazing river view and hundreds of maple trees that also change colors throughout the seasons. I wish I could share it but I am certain some of you might geolocate it.

Edit: for canada map since the article ignores the country entirely, check https://www.globalforestwatch.org/map/country/CAN/

sudosteph2• 1 month ago

A few years ago, I spent a summer renting a 1 bedroom new build apartment in the south part of Seattle. The only outside light or fresh air came from a sliding door that overlooked an interior parking garage. It always smelled like fumes. Couldn't even see the sky from most angles. I was convinced after that that living conditions without access to fresh air and nature are probably one of the more potent causes of neuroticism in city-dwellers. Lack of AC didn't help either when it was hitting the 90s at multiple points that summer.

This is probably the one area that most cities in North Carolina excel at. We don't have great sidewalks or transit, but we have a ton a trees. Less than we used to though. But from my current apartment, I'm closer to seeing 300 trees than 3. The post-hurricane-Hugo effort to buy out houses in flood prone zones and turn them into greenways was probably the single smartest thing Charlotte and the surrounding towns have done (though I'm glad we got our light rail too - too bad for Raleigh). It's a good pattern - protects the natural watershed, gives wildlife a safe place to live, makes flooding less impactful, and creates pleasant away-from-road paths for walking and biking.

xattt• 1 month ago

The post-hurricane-Hugo effort to buy out houses in flood prone zones …

Toronto completed a similar initiative after Hurricane Hazel in 1954. A number of neighbourhoods in valleys were not rebuilt after devastating flooding, and the city was left with wonderful green space, especially in the Don Valley. For me, it’s a “top 10” biking experience, to cross Toronto by bicycle along the trail system.

As an aside, it took a minute for me to parse the OP as I initially took it to mean some sort of infrastructure resiliency project (buying outhouses vs buying out houses).

(1) https://trca.ca/news/hurricane-hazel-70-years/

chamomeal• 1 month ago

Greenville, South Carolina is also totally covered in trees. I think they have a bunch of laws that new developments have to plant trees, cutting a tree down requires planting multiple others nearby. The whole city is just covered in trees. Even in the suburbs nearby. It’s awesome.

MD has some replace-felled-trees law, but it’s kinda crappy cause trees can be planted somewhere else entirely. So a big development can be treeless.

rigrassm2• 1 month ago

I did a summer working with a traveling survey crew for pipeline work on the East Coast back in the 2010's. We started up north in Maryland and followed the pipeline south down to the North/South Carolina border.

Because we had to move to new sites further south every 3-4 weeks on average, we all had camper trailers and just hopped from campground to campground as we went. Towards the end we ended up staying at a campground near Mooresville NC and every day since we left that place I've wanted to go back.

It was so beautiful and quiet with so much history to explore and it left a huge impression on me. Might be time for me to actually pick up and go visit again.

Unrelated but there needs to be a guide given out to southerners visiting Maryland warning them to not call anyone under the age of 100 sir/ma'am... Might have just been bad luck with my encounters but I had a couple of people get very angry for calling them ma'am and it was so hard to undo a lifetime of defaulting to using those terms when talking to people I don't know lol.

sudosteph2• 1 month ago

Small world. I'm from the town directly south of Mooresville. I'm fond of the area myself. Traffic is pretty awful though.

RajX_dev• 1 month ago

currently where i am right now its like i am living in a forest , yeah but when i was living in the city it feels like that trees dont exist anymore

BenFranklin1003• 1 month ago

American zoning forbids taller ~6 story residential building and trades open green space parks for shorter, 1-2 story buildings. The lower density means people are further away from the few parks that do exist too.

neogodless• 1 month ago

Are zoning laws in the United States at the federal level? Or by township and city?

Does every city in America have the rules you mention, or specific ones?

BenFranklin1003• 1 month ago

At the local level. And yes, these local zoning laws are strikingly similar in their opposition to multi-story residential.

ryukoposting• 1 month ago

and trades open green space parks for shorter, 1-2 story buildings.

Misleading. American cities have lots of short buildings, but they also have more land to put stuff on, be it trees or buildings.

The lower density means people are further away from the few parks that do exist too.

In some parts of the US, this is absolutely true. In others, it absolutely is not. Silicon Valley is easily the worst place I've ever lived in this regard. As a Midwesterner, I had never lived more than ~400m from a park, even in the suburbs. In Santa Clara, I'm more than 1.5km from the nearest public park.

Most Midwestern and Eastern cities do not match the "sprawl" archetype that most techies associate with America. Look up "Urbs in Horto."

American zoning forbids taller ~6 story residential building

You're allowed to build up to 5 stories out of lumber. So a common archetype for American apartments is a first floor of retail space made of concrete, which serves as a base for 5 stick-built floors of apartments. That's where 6 floors comes from.

But the statement on its own is false. You're certainly allowed to build taller, permits permitting (heh), it's just that 5-over-1 is a local maxima for cost efficiency vs. likelihood of getting permits.

There are very few cities with laws on the books that prohibit building taller than 6 floors. The issue is that you have to get approval from the city to build things, and residents get angry when you try to build high-rises. So, permits get rejected.

This is an important distinction because the route to change is wildly different. We need community attitudes to change about dense housing developments, we don't need to change any law that's currently on the books.

projektfu2• 1 month ago

I wonder why they didn't mention Atlanta, which probably meets the criteria except perhaps some parts are a little more than 300m from a park. The canopy here is about 47%.

tetromino_• 1 month ago

The "3 trees out of a window" sounds like an idiotic criterion because it ignores the elevation factor. In the exact same building, it's very likely you will see a couple dozen trees from a 10th floor window, and only one from a ground floor window. But which situation actually puts you closer to the flora?

nsb1• 1 month ago

There! Are! Three! Trees!

-- Picard

ruszki2• 1 month ago

It’s maybe a good rule of thumb, but as I’m just outside of Helsinki for a while now, I’ve just realized what’s the difference between here and everywhere in central and south Europe: the trees are large and old. Even if there are trees in Vienna, Budapest, Brussels etc they are small, and very young compared to here. Even in the greener small Belgian villages, they are not that green than here, just outside of Helsinki’s city center.

And here, somehow, that stupid excuse that they destroy utility cables and pipes didn’t cause to cut them out. It seems that it’s possible to solve this.

And of course, I’m basically in a forest. There are trees everywhere. The “park” here is an at least 100 years old forest. There is one about 30 meters from here, and about 500 meters an even larger one, where I’ve just lost today.

Of course, the city center is different, but even comparing the outskirts of other cities, this is very-very green.

Vivtek2• 1 month ago

Depends on what part of Budapest. One of the reasons people like Zugló (14th district) is the many trees. And farther out it's even better, of course.

But a lot of the trees in Hungary just don't grow that big, maybe the most marked difference when I first saw it after growing up in Indiana. When we lived in the 16th district of Budapest, there was one neighborhood I used to walk the dog in that had these massive old American sycamores. Those things were beautiful.

ruszki2• 1 month ago

Since my current permanent address is exactly in that district, and I lived most of my life near Ors: no, it’s not comparable. Zuglo is nowhere near what’s here.

And also, many would grow that big. They are just not allowed. They are cut almost to trunk periodically over there. There are a few trees there which were as high as those 10 floor high rises, but they cut them down or even out, because somehow it’s dangerous there what’s completely fine in Finland.

roughly• 1 month ago

As they say, the best time to plant a tree was 20 (or 200) years ago…

ChrisMarshallNY• 1 month ago

Christopher Alexander has a pattern: Light From Two Sides[0], that is similar.

[0] https://www.patternlanguage.com/apl/aplsample/apl159/apl159....

mlsu• 1 month ago

I had a moment a few years ago (while on vacation) after a long flight. We set a blanket out under a huge tree and napped in the park all afternoon. I was staring up at a massive tree for probably 3 or 4 hours straight, basically doing nothing else.

It is remarkable how calming it is to just sit there and stare at a tree.

Now everywhere I live has to have a big tree somewhere nearby. There’s one right outside and I spend at least several minutes, sometimes much longer, just staring at it.

Staring at a tree, 10/10

lukan2• 1 month ago

The staring you discovered is actually an old meditation technic. Trees are nice for it, but so can be many other things. A burning candle, the setting sun, a cloud, a river a rock. Important is doing it with intense focus and not get distracted.

phatskat2• 1 month ago

I’ve done this both on and off psychedelics, and both are lovely experiences.

I also dated someone who wasn’t a particularly “crunchy” hippy type, but she did like to randomly hug trees on our walks to show appreciation. I do it now too, there’s something oddly calming and connecting about it - it may look weird, but that’s par for the course for me as it is

thewebguyd• 1 month ago

There's actually some research to back that up. (Forest bathing & the effects of phytoncides https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2793341/)

Nature, physical touch (even with non-human objects), and being near or touching a big stationary natural object triggers our parasympathetic nervous system too, helps reduce stress.

Everyone should go hug a tree! It's not completely woo woo, there are real biological benefits.

weinzierl• 1 month ago

Had a class reunion recently and we got a tour through our old school building. Of course everything had changed beyond recognition during the past 30 years, except for one thing:

The old tree right outside the window was still the same. I know because I must have stared into it for hundreds of hours while being bored to no end during class. It probably prevented me from going insane. Thank you old tree.

tetha• 1 month ago

I've started something similar in my life. Chris Boltendhal (Founder of Grave Digger) has been criticizing how streaming services had turned music into a wallpaper, and others have too. Something that's just there in the background, but not fully appreciated.

So now I've been making room in my week for new albums of bands I enjoy and listen to. Just an hour or two of nothing, but listening to this album, while sitting in a hammock or somewhere else entirely relaxed.

I can only recommend this. For example, Heilung(1) or Wardruna(2) are already great on theri own, but one of their new songs, but I was listening to one of their songs in a park over here, sitting at a tree and suddenly a little noise was nearby. Turns out, there was a squirrel looking at me and then scampering by. Later on a little bird also was exasperated I looked at him as he chased a bug. Very fitting to these bands.

Sometimes balancing the speed of our lives indeed seems like a very good idea.

1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=64CACoHNBEI

2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VEizKmZlUAw

BashiBazouk• 1 month ago

Yes. I live in a "forest community" in the outskirts of Portland, OR. But I got a chuckle thinking what do you define as a "tree"? I have three Douglas firs that are big enough that if you cut them down you could build a small house out of the lumber from each one or a medium sized one from all three. I have a similar number of big leaf maples that are not as tall but have huge canopies. Then a whole bunch that are more "urban" sized trees, magnolias, dog woods, Japanese maples. Tons of tree "plants" that are working their way up but I would not consider trees yet. Then the shrubs that are pretending to be trees, camellias, rhododendrons, et. All on a half acre. Then there are the thousands on the hill side across a small valley...

BearOso• 1 month ago

In our small town, the local compliance officer is colluding with a tree-cutting company that has a contract with the city. They lie and claim trees are "dead" and they're constantly cutting them down unnecessarily at the taxpayer's expense. Pretty soon we're going to look like one of those new suburbs that are just concrete and grass, but with old houses.

bdelmas• 1 month ago

I would have like to see the map of cities that matches this 3-30-300 rule.

colordrops• 1 month ago

I'm in a part of Los Angeles that matches 3-30, but virtually none of the city matches 300, and it's my least favorite thing about LA.

sandworm101• 1 month ago

Alternative approach: Screw parks.

Parks are not nature. Parks are a sanitized parody of the natural world. They are a simulation meant to make us humans feel better about ourselves. They are gated grass farms, not wild areas, useful only to a select few animals (nothing bigger than a raccoon). Creating a park inside a urban area diverts land from actual nature. So, rather than build parks inside cities, we should develop that land and make our cities smaller.

We don't have to go all 40k hive world. Rather, if parks are kept at the urban periphery and/or are connected to each other, then they can thrive as actual natural space. We have modern transport technology. We can bring the people to the park rather than construct a park near the people and thereby deprive Bambi and all his friends of yet another acre of true wilderness.

lstodd2• 1 month ago

Sounds like someone who never tried to walk in a true wild forest.

Where if don't have a machete you ain't going nowhere. And while you're pitifully trying to make some way, a bear bites your ass off.

derektank• 1 month ago

Gated grass farms are great places to exercise and socialize, much more so than truly natural spaces. The small amount of land space within urban areas dedicated to parks is not a serious detriment to nature, certainly not when compared to the vast majority of other current land uses

Vivtek2• 1 month ago

I live in a rain forest, so this post confused me for a minute. I was expecting some kind of on-screen optical illusion, but it turned to be asking about actual physical trees outside my window.

Yeah, I can see trees. I can see about fifty trees without standing up from my desk. I cut down more than three trees a month, probably. The weirdest ones are yagrumo - in about five years they can be fifty feet tall and the wood is so soft you can cut them down with a butter knife, just about. Before moving here, I'd never really considered that the Venn circles of "tree" and "weed" can overlap.

anal_reactor• 1 month ago

What do you think of life there in general? Do you think it's a reasonable idea, or one of those things that sound great on paper but then turns out only very specific types of people will actually enjoy it.

giancarlostoro• 1 month ago

I live next to a greenbelt in Florida, so yes.

zahlman• 1 month ago

Every home, school and office should have a view of at least three trees, be in a neighbourhood with 30% tree cover, and be within 300 metres of a park.

The middle one seems a lot harder to me than the other two.

__MatrixMan__• 1 month ago

Me too. The native trees around here aren't very tall and don't do a lot of covering. I'd love 30% but my neighborhood just isn't rich enough to have each yard contributing to a forest to that degree.

Maybe if we buried the power lines and turned the utility easements into open space.

Kyselica• 1 month ago

If you need help finding trees near you, you can check TreeFinder.net.

w10-1• 1 month ago

Every home, school and office should have a view of at least three trees, be in a neighbourhood with 30% tree cover, and be within 300 metres of a park

Something like this has always been a driver of my home search. I've been lucky/glad to find something, but it's always been a stretch.

But as a more realistic policy I would start with homes and with ensuring schools have a play area with plants larger than the kids and too dense to see through.

I think the secondary effects on planning are just as important: urban planning goes awry when it fails to consider livability and beauty. Livability includes walkability, non-car transportation, and parking for car-dependent transportation -- things you need to do most days. Beauty has obvious direct effects, but indirectly it also encourages people to take care of the place, and to avoid being seen e.g., as a litterer.

As policy encouraging changes, it would be good to start with environmental enhancement sections in each permit, and (if possible) to publish them before they are finalized for people to contribute proposals. This expertise is rare in developers so advice would be welcome, and providing the opportunity would probably encourage people to contribute, with ideas and perhaps funding. (There should be no provision for blocking permits, to avoid adverse NIMBY incentives.)

rigrassm2• 1 month ago

Access to nature was something I sort of subconsciously selected for when I moved a few years back to be closer to the kids. It got me curious how close my situation was to the idealized standard in the post and I have to say, I think they nailed it.

I'm a little lucky to have found a house that borders a large therapeutic horse riding center so looking out my back windows (chain link fence on the back so minimal obstruction) I am looking straight into a small forest. That aside, my own property has 3 trees between 25' - 60` tall out front and out back there's an 80' tall sweet gum tree (it's lucky I value it's existence slightly more than I loathe the 6 billion stupid spike balls out drops for me every year) an 80' (I believe) maple, and a useless 95' Pine tree that the squirrels are slowly De-Branching).

It's a small property in the suburbs so those trees give me well over 30% coverage so I've got 2/3.

Quick check on Google maps and unfortunately I'm 483 meters away from my neighborhood park so I missed the mark there. But I think having 3-4 large parks all connected by 15+miles of hiking trails, a botanical garden, and an arboretum within a 5 mile radius more than makes up for that extra 183 meters.

Having spent the last 3+ years living with this level of access to nature spaces, it's become the bare minimum I expect from wherever I move in the future. And if I'm honest, I'll likely not be happy with anything less than being able to see more nature than society when I step out of the house..

t_mahmood• 1 month ago

My previous house, which was a pretty big "modern" house, on 7th floor, had no tree in view, I didn't realize how it affected me, but everyday I grew more cluster-phobic, days went I was having sudden panic attacks, with sudden imagination of being stuck in a closed box.

Now we changed to a much smaller house on 5th floor, it's so much older than the previous house, but it has a lake side view full of trees, I can look out and see them from my window.

And now I realize in some extent, how badly the previous house affected me. My cluster-phobic episodes are completely gone, and I don't have those stuck feelings any more. I know I still have it, i feel it coming if the door knob gets slightly stuck, and takes little bit more time, but other then that none of the actions that used to cause it, not causing it anymore.

In our city we build jail cells for house in the name of safety. So all windows of the house are grided with no way to get out of the house in case the front door caught fire. But these trees gives me peace. I don't have to look at them, knowing that they are just by the window, makes me so much relaxed.

I still can't fathom how people can cut them down

Timwi• 1 month ago

I'm not surprised the Ruhr area (the cluster of cities in West Germany surrounding Essen) sweeps the “30% greenery” benchmarks.

This area was especially rich in coal deposits, leading to massive coal extraction during the industrial revolution. There was air pollution and industrial waste everywhere. The area quickly gained a reputation as the dirtiest, most polluted place on the planet. The colloquial term “Ruhrpott” (Ruhr cauldron) came out of this.

So in the 2000s, the city governments (Essen, Bochum, Duisburg, Dortmund, etc etc) decided on an ambitious project to counteract this perception. This paid off. Essen made the top three “Europe’s greenest city” three years in a row and won in the third (2015–2017).

Sometimes, a history of being known as the worst in something leads to greater enthusiasm to become the best.

Can you see three trees?

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