Highway beauty: major roadways all over the state of Illinois are getting a much-needed facelift.(COMMUNITIES)

We don't often consider how much time we spend staring down the highways, perhaps because we don't wish to remember it. Highways are functional but ugly, miles of blank asphalt threading the landscape. But what can be done? These days, most of us spend a fair portion of our lives commuting to and from work, visiting friends and relatives who live ever more distant, or meeting the basic needs of a suburban lifestyle. The average American spends over an hour in the car each day. The stark ugliness of highways is an unfortunate cost of modern mobility.

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But just as cities and trees aren't mutually exclusive--just ask your local urban forester--neither are trees and highways. Maybe you've never noticed the strips of trees lining certain portions of highway, or dismissed them with a disdainful "that isn't real nature." And it's true, of course, that driving among those trees is not like being enveloped in the stillness of a forest, where one of the attractions is the distance from such things as trucks, cars, and highways. But highway-side trees should not be dismissed so easily. They are a reminder that, beyond the concrete and asphalt, the lush green of the natural world still exists, something that can be forgotten in lives full of synthetic goods…