"The more texture the better."
At the back edge of a backyard, in a dead-end South Florida canal, Arthur Tiedeman is drilling holes into the face of a seawall his marine construction company recently installed.
The seawall is a newer design of reinforced concrete encased in vinyl. It's a smooth, hardened ledge at the intersection of land and sea that's designed to protect property and make the coastline more habitable for people.
The problem, Tiedeman says, is that it makes the coastline not very habitable to anything else. "It's not a natural shoreline like mangroves and sand," he says. "It's just a straight giant wall."
That's why he and his crew are on a bobbing barge outfitted with a crane, installing two first-of-their-kind planters that, when hung, will house two living mangrove trees on the otherwise featureless wall.
Read more at Georgia Public Broadcasting