ON THE COVER: The slender, cattail-like inflorescence of Hayden’s sedge (Carex haydenii). Image courtesy Mt. Cuba Center.

Featured Story: “The Sedge Insurgency,” by Bradford McKee. Versatile, hardy, and increasingly available, the 2,000 species of the genus Carex are enjoying a moment in the sun. Fans of the humble sedge praise its drought tolerance and adaptability to climate flux, declaring that there truly is one (at least) for most every landscape.

Also in the issue:

▪ Feature: “Listen and Unlearn,” by Zach Mortice. The Navajo Nation stretches across four state lines and thousands of years of environmental history, but in Round Rock, Arizona, those numbers don’t add up to basic services or a local grocery store. Working with the Indigenous Design + Planning Institute, University of New Mexico graduate students take tentative steps toward a planning process that rewrites landscape architecture practice.

▪ Now: Money for Utah’s dwindling Great Salt Lake (online May 4); glass plus urban greenery can spell doom for birds; Arcosanti’s experimental legacy extends into the landscape; the main reason midcareer women leave design firms (online May 25), and more.

▪ Climate: “The Breakup,” by Carol Becker. Carbon capture looks different on a historic farm estate, where the Scottish National Trust is slicing through human-made earthworks to uncheck the natural wetlands and involving local farmers in the transformation. 

▪ Goods: “Wet and Wild,” Kristen Mastroianni, Editor. Design elements to send water where you want. 

▪ The Back: “The Age of the Mega-Eco Project,” by Robert Levinthal and Richard Weller. While the era of ever-larger hard infrastructure solutions grinds on, a new typology has begun to emerge. Mega-eco projects attack multiple challenges with landscape-based strategies and offer enormous opportunities—if they avoid the cost run-ups and policy missteps of traditional infrastructure projects (online May 18).

▪ Book Review: “The Rule Book,” by Gale Fulton, ASLA. A review of 250 Things a Landscape Architect Should Know, edited by B. Cannon Ivers (online May 11).

▪ Backstory: Prop Roots Design Studio’s oversized topiary is a balancing act in Surat, India.