Tanner Springs Park

I’m stuck inside with a cold today and have been all weekend, so I haven’t been able to take any new pictures.

However, I found these photos of Tanner Springs Park in Portland, Oregon, which I took in 2008.  I thought I would share them because I was thinking about Fiona Stephenson’s chalk stream show garden and about how a landscape type (in this case, wetlands) can be interpreted effectively in a garden design (in this case, a .92 acre urban public park).

Also, the children in the photos are having such a nice time fooling around in the grass and water, and, while I look at them, I reflect that it’s going to be 95° here in Washington, D.C., today and only 70° in Portland.

The Tanner Springs Park opened in 2006 in the Pearl District, which is a neighborhood partly made up of old warehouses that are now turned into apartments and shops.  Before the warehouses, there was Tanner Creek, which fed streams, wetlands, and a lake and ended at the Willamette River close by.  In the late 19th century, Tanner Creek was rerouted into an underground system of pipes.

The park is not a restoration of the original environment but is meant to imitate and function somewhat like a wetland.

The concept for the park was provided by Peter Walker & Partners.  The design was by Atelier Dreiseitl and Green Works, P.C.

Click the link for an article about the park by George Hazelrigg in the April 2006 issue of  Landscape Architecture Magazine.

Click on any thumbnail in the gallery below to scroll through all the enlarged photos.

Addendum:  For more recent (May 2011) photos of the park, check out the blog Metropolitan Gardens.

A summer camp visit to Tanner Springs Park in Portland, Oregon.