The Allee

Chad Dorsey

One of our favorite landscape features…the allee.

In landscaping, an avenue, or allée, is traditionally a straight path or road with a line of trees or large shrubs running along each side, which is used, as its French source venir (“to come”) indicates, to emphasize the “coming to,” or arrival at a landscape or architectural feature. In most cases, the trees planted in an avenue will be all of the same species or cultivar, so as to give uniform appearance along the full length of the avenue. The French term allée is used for avenues planted in parks and landscape gardens, as well as boulevards such as the Grande Allée in Quebec City, Canada, Bologna Alley in Zagreb and Karl-Marx-Allee in Berlin.