The Danish Road Directorate’s Planting Handbook

Based on Schønherr’s several years of experience with infrastructure projects, construction economy, and landscape biodiversity, the office has developed a handbook that provides guidance on planting along roads and road facilities in collaboration with the Danish Road Directorate. The handbook is grounded in an understanding of infrastructure as a cultural landscape imprint and presents planting as a tool that can both enhance biodiversity and address climatic challenges.

Through architectural and aesthetic strategies, the handbook demonstrates how strategic planting can transform road environments into sensory and identity-building landscapes. Planting possesses the potential to highlight geographical features and evolve into spatial landmarks rooted in the character of the place.

The handbook also introduces methods for plant selection that promote species richness while withstanding both cloudbursts and prolonged rainfall. In addition, it addresses the role of planting in relation to traffic safety as well as its potential to restore landscape connections that are often disrupted by road construction.

The handbook serves as a practical tool that integrates functionality, ecology, and aesthetics – contributing to the development of a more coherent and resilient infrastructure, both in the open rural countryside and in peri-urban areas.

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