BY TIMOTHY A. SCHULER

In Chicago, an urban farm muscles in on an award-winning landscape.
From the May 2016 issue of Landscape Architecture Magazine.
Not long after the landscape went in, the farm began encroaching. The black-eyed Susans were replaced by herbs. The shining sumac and Indiangrass were dug up to make way for chickens. And a copse of Skyrocket oaks, which screened the residential building?s parking lot from a traffic-choked section of Chicago?s Ogden Avenue, was next on the chopping block.
Mimi McKay, ASLA, the landscape architect for the project, known as Harvest Commons, got a call from Dave Snyder, the staff gardener. ?Dave said that he was gonna build a chicken run and that he was gonna remove the oak trees to do it, and I had an absolute cow,? McKay recalls. ?I said, ?You absolutely cannot remove them?and you don?t have to remove them.?? McKay, the principal at McKay Landscape Architects in Chicago, saved the oaks, but other landscape elements?elements that played a significant role in making the Harvest Commons courtyard inviting and beautiful, even during the bleak Chicago winter?have been lost, victims of an urban agriculture program that?s just too popular.
According to Nadia Underhill, the director of real estate development for Heartland Housing, which owns the property, the 3,500-square-foot garden produced nearly 1,000 pounds of fruit and vegetables in its second summer, with more than a third of residents actively participating in the garden at...