Ada County, ID Tree Protection: Parkway Planting (2026)

Cartwright Ranch, a planned community within unincorporated Ada County, is carved out of the county's general landscaping chapter: Section 8-13B-8(A) states the development "shall be exempt from the landscaping requirements of this Title" and instead follows the standards written into its own Article. Section 8-13B-8(B)(1)(c)(4) directs that Town Center lots "include traditional street trees in planting strips and medians" alongside front and rear yard gardens, reinforcing the parkway strip as the location for street trees in the commercial and residential core. The operative numeric standard sits in 8-13B-8(B)(2): landscaping within the right-of-way of local, collector and arterial streets must follow the roadway-design and landscape sub-elements of the Cartwright Ranch development plan, and on any street built with curb, gutter and sidewalk, trees must be spaced at a minimum of 50 feet apart.

Where a street is built without curb, gutter and sidewalk, the code drops the fixed spacing and instead requires other plantings suited to the site's topography. Section 8-13B-8(C) backstops the standard procedurally: no final plat may be approved until the applicant submits a landscape plan to Ada County identifying the location, size, species, and mature-growth footprint (shown at 75% maturity) of every proposed tree and shrub, plus measures to protect existing vegetation to be saved during grading. This differs from the county's general Section 8-3-7 landscaping chapter, which governs parking-lot and site landscaping countywide but does not set a fixed street-tree spacing number; Cartwright Ranch's 50-foot rule is a planned-community-specific standard, not a countywide parkway rule.