St. Edmunds Residents Association

Here's an item that connects with our plans for our churchyard 'Park',

you can read the whole article here

Not seeing the city for the trees is good for us, suggests new research: vegetation density is more important than park size

Eric Jaffe, writing in www.theatlanticcities.com, describes a new piece of work from Finland.

Last month, he writes, we explained how parks can restore much of the mental fatigue imposed on our brains by the busy city. The psychological evidence for this concept, known as the "attention restoration theory," is quite clear. What would be great to know, as I noted at the end of that post, is precisely how many trees it takes to recover the cognitive strains of urban life.

Well sometimes the gods of semi-obscure-hybrid-behavior-nature-academic-publications listen to your calls. In an upcoming issue of the journal Landscape and Urban Planning, a group of Finnish researchers describe recent work that just so happens to address our exact curiosity.

They conclude that restoration reaches peak potential when every inch of the city — which they term the "urban matrix" — escapes our vision:

Our results showed that perceived restorativeness in urban forests was strongly affected by closure of view to the urban matrix through the forest vegetation. This means that perceived restorativeness was higher inside the forest with a closed (i.e. no) view to the urban matrix as compared to semi-closed and open views.

For the study, the researchers identified nine patches of boreal forest in greater Helsinki...