Ground Truth: Substack series with Vineland Research and Innovation Centre

I write this series to close a gap that's bothered me for years: the distance between what we know about urban nature and what actually changes on the ground. Cities plant trees, lose half of them, tweak the protocol, and start again — while forty kilometres away another city runs the exact same experiment, learns the exact same lessons, and pays the exact same costs.

Ground Truth takes research coming out of the Greening the Landscape Research Consortium at Vineland — a pre-competitive network of 28 organisations spanning municipalities, nurseries, contractors, and conservation authorities, all working from a shared research agenda set by the members themselves — and translates it for a wider audience. Each issue follows a piece of that research and tests it against the messy reality of cities: what's being tried, what's surprising the researchers, what isn't working yet.

The series launched in May 2026 and publishes roughly monthly.