Best Examples of Landscaped Sidewalk Buffers & Street Medians (downtown, park, area)

[MantaRay]

I just posted in another thread how different people view different aesthetic qualities as beautiful, not all people have the same perspective. In that thread, I happened to note that my personal perspective is that I find streetscapes with green/landscaped sidewalk buffers and green/landscaped street medians dividing flow of traffic to be IMMENSELY more beautiful than streetscapes with just gray buildings against gray sidewalks agains gray street pavement.

So I started wondering, what locations in what cities can people cite as having these (beautiful) landscaped streets. Examples in smaller cities are certainly welcome, but I'm really interested in examples in big cities (1 million +), which tend to get innundated with a lot of gray concrete moreso than a smaller city might.

Give some of your best examples of green/landscaped sidewalk buffers and green/landscaped street medians. I don't STRICTLY hold to "green" if some desert/arid cities have these buffers but with native vegitation (which is generally not green). The landscaping of the buffer is the important aspect.

[darkeconomist]

The LA Downtown Design Guide is for you.

[HollyhockGarden]

Here is a nice place in Chicago:
File:West Jackson Boulevard District A Chicago IL.jpg - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

A nice walking/bike path along the Chicago River:
Stealth River Route III: Diversey to Montrose | Grid Chicago

Sidewalk planting in Colorado:
Street Strip Planting

[darkeconomist]

Credit to MVtriangleblog

Forgot about the "big" part, but, still, a nicely done setup,

[MantaRay]

Stapleton in Denver, CO is one really good example:

Streetscape 1

Streetscape 2

Nashville, TN's Korean Veterans Blvd currently has green sidewalk landscaping and a green median as you enter downtown from the bridge, but the city is currently developing/extending this feel as it extends the blvd past the Music City Center that is nearing completion. Once finished, there will be landscaping on either side of the street as well as a landscaped roundabout, all right in the heart of downtown.

In a smaller city's downtown, Augusta GA's Broad St is very nicely landscaped. Another shot of Broad St.

[xeric]

This is a bit of sore spot with me. 15 years ago, Fort Collins passed standards for these parkways in which they banned plants over three feet high and any sort of shrub. It was obvious to me that the preference was for irrigated turf-grass (all of their examples of "good" parkways were 100% grass) even though we average 15 inches of precip. per year and any gardener will tell you that the hot microclimate of a planting strip is the worst place to grow plants adapted to wetter climates.

I checked the city docs. recently and they still have the three foot rule but have allowed for shrub groundcovers (such as creeping juniper). This is good. But they still recommend irrigated turf for those areas (although at least they mention xeriscape as an alternative even if they limit the palette of what you can use).

This completed my disillusionment with living in the older residential areas of the city. Conserving water (it seems) was good but not if it made our city look less like Mayberry. Now I live in a neighborhood with no planting strips at all, and I'm perfectly happy with it. I don't think they serve much of a purpose on quiet residential streets and are something of a pain for the homeowner to maintain. On bigger streets, I like having that buffer between the sidewalk and four lanes of auto traffic, but they should all be landscaped with low maintenance, and low or no water-requiring materials. Also, the city owns this land. If they want to dictate what is done with that area then they should also be willing to do the maintenance.