A ‘kissing canopy’ is getting harder to find on Twin Cities streets

Fly over the Twin Cities in the summer and you’ll see a thicket of greenery beneath which, somehow, lies a metro area of nearly 3.7 million people. From the ground, though, the canopy coverage of trees is more dappled. The number of streets where you feel truly enclosed, as if a green roof lives overhead, is small enough that I can list them. Near me in St. Paul: Minneheha Avenue between Dale Street and Victoria Avenue, and the divided part of Summit Avenue, and sporadic blocks like Sherburne Avenue to the east of my house. 

For the most part, however, Twin Cities’ trees are too small and our streets too big. Finding a spot with a branching crown overhead is the exception rather than the rule. 

It turns out there’s a word for this concept that I remembered again when a friend, Zack Mensinger, shared a photo from South Minneapolis:

&l...