Seeing The Forest AND The Trees

The Mister and I were giving a tour of Morrison Ranch to one of my college roommates and her husband yesterday and she kept commenting that things looked so clean and tidy. When The Mister was talking about our desire to symbolize groves by putting our trees in straight lines, evenly spaced, she exclaimed, "That's it! That's why it looks so orderly! It's the trees."

So when I saw this article this morning in the East Valley Tribune, I had to share it:

The new owner of a Tempe shopping center kicked off a renovation project by demolishing a dense row of trees to boost the strip mall’s profile. The center instantly became more visible — just not exactly in the way the owner hoped for.

Neighbors of the McClintock Fountains have complained the owner destroyed the center’s best feature — lots of big trees — to expose the bland architecture of the buildings.

Tempe forced the owner to stop after getting complaints and discovering the owner had cut down more trees than outlined in a plan the city had approved. Now the owner is having to rework some elements of the renovation and try to mend fences with the very neighbors it’s trying to attract.

Pam Rupprecht said she’d prefer to have a tree in front of her store even if it means her sign isn’t as easy to read. It’s not the signs that draw people to the center at the northeast corner of McClintock Drive and Warner Road, she said.

“People come here for the trees,” said Rupprecht, who owns the Reading Clinic.
The trees were taken out because some tenants complained the public couldn’t see stores behind a wall of trees, said Stephen Mariani, vice president with West Valley Properties.

Well, well, well. We have fought this battle from the very beginning of Morrison Ranch. Store owners do indeed have a tendency to dislike trees in front of their signage, because they feel like folks from the street can't see them. I have always felt, as one who collects shade when she shops, that most consumers know where the stores are, and in fact might CHOOSE a store where one can park in the shade. I don't know anything about this McClintock center except what I am reading, but the comments ring true. This produced another chuckle:

A tree company took out more than it was supposed to, Mariani said, through a miscommunication.

But some neighbors doubt that.

The company’s Valley operations are run at an office in the center, so Mariani should have had a better idea what the landscape crew was doing, said Darryl Jacobson-Barnes.

“With his office right on the property, there’s no way he didn’t know what was going on,” Jacobson-Barnes said.

Mariani said the trees came down too fast and that it’s not reasonable to have a company employee watch as every plant is removed.

The Mister's response was to agree. "They should do it the way we do it, and have TWO employees watch as every tree/plant is planted or removed." He made the comment to our guests yesterday that if a tree and a light were battling for the same spot through some miscommunication somewhere, that the tree would win, much to the surprise of the person trying to put a light or something there. But the spacing of trees throughout Morrison Ranch is important, and the result may be undefined, but obvious.

Clean and tidy.