Barbara Walker Memorial Park

Portland, OR

​This project is a 5,000 square food forest installation, located deep within a gigantic urban forest park in the southwest hills of Portland, Oregon. It is named in honor of the greatest public space advocate in the history of Portland, Barbara Walker, who worked with Richard Lakeman to help create the park. The design is set within a private “inholding” lot, a privately owned piece of the Earth within the expanse of public land, still in recovery from historic clear cutting, with a recently installed surrounding trail network. The concept is to integrate human pathways, gathering places, and observation stations into a sensitive natural site mostly within a riparian zone. In fact, a stream passes through the entire length of the site, making the small location into a valley. Featuring a diversity of new conifers and deciduous trees, edibles such as Salmonberries, Thimbleberries, and Huckleberries, as well as many flats of Miner’s Lettuce and Sorel, an abundant vertical web of tasty edibles has been woven on this site. There have also been innumerable new native flowers installed, as well as six varieties of edible mushrooms, as part of a loving strategy that will accelerate the rate of recovery on the site