At Olmsted Woods in Washington, D.C., Andropogon Associates is trying to revive the fragile landscape.
By Bradford McKee
A trail at the Cathedral Close, the 57 acres surrounding the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C. Photo courtesy Andropogon.
?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 the 57 acres known as the Cathedral Close, ?as a haven of peace in the midst of the Capital City,? according to its mission statement.
The storm hit Northwest Washington neighborhoods for 20 minutes on a steamy July afternoon. The heat index had hit 109 degrees Fahrenheit. In Olmsted Woods, the wreckage piled atop slower-motion casualties that the guild already has found itself managing as the atmosphere warms and the weather turns ...