Botany Buddy

Whenever I start talking about landscaping with nature people start to get all squeamish and think “Oh no…another weedy looking woodland garden.  Don’t get me wrong, I love a good woodland garden.  Real ones hardly even require planting.  What I am talking about is using nature as your guide in design.  I have been designing landscapes for over 20 years now, and the last five I have been blessed to do most of my work in the nature of the Southern Appalachians.  However, before that I spent fifteen years designing several hundred gardens in the heart of the city and the heat and cold of the Midwest.  Even in the most unnatural of places I learned that the more you emulate nature, the more beautiful things will be and the easier they will be to take care of.  After all, nature is beautiful and it does a good job of taking care of itself if we don’t screw it up.

There are some key things that nature does itself that when you look at the greatest of landscapes you will always find.  I could never squeeze everything into one post, but there are some key things that if approached from the outset will make the rest fall in place.  If we take nature’s lead on how it designs and plants its gardens we are bound to succeed and it is bound to be beautiful.  What I will explore are the main aspects of landscapes, how nature creates them and how we can emulate them.

The first thing that nature lays out in a landscape is the flow.  To understand this we have to understand that in nature and in the landscape it is the water that determines flow.  Where the water goes in nature so does the wildlife.  The migratory patterns of the birds and the animals are all tied to the water and their need to get to it.  In the garden it is people that flow, as well as the birds and animals that visit…including our dogs.  I like to make my paths and walking areas follow the drainage in the garden.  In high traffic areas I will make stone paths or place stepping stones inter-planted with “steppable” plants or ground covers.  In open areas, if I have grass at all, I will take water across it as well.  As water creates the valleys and flat areas in nature, doing this in the garden serves the aesthetic need of making the garden look like it was meant to be there.

As for the animals in the landscape people tend to take the easiest possible path, and so does water.  From a practical standpoint, the water won’t washout your beds or puddle and breed mosquitoes.  It will create moisture along the paths were smaller plants that require more water go, and it will dry out other areas for evergreens and shrubs that are more sensitive to water.  Animal migration can also create flow in nature and the garden.  The two most prominent animals in your landscape are dogs and mailmen.  Dogs are like the deer and other animals in the landscape that create migration paths that don’t follow the water.  If  I have a dog in a landscape, I will always leave a little maintenance path behind shrubs along a fence.  This allows them to patrol their landscape and creates airflow behind the shrubs so they don’t die out on one side.  With a privacy fence I also like to leave a small strip of lattice along the bottom to let them see out and increase air flow.  As for mailmen, I can’t remember the last time I did an urban landscape that didn’t have a path for them to go door to door.  Not only does it keep them from trampling the plants, but it gives an excuse to pull down the height of a house with the plantings without adding so many plants it looks unnatural.

Nature has two main types of scenery that you encounter, and so does any good landscape.  Olmstead called these the pastoral and the picturesque.  The pastoral are the wide open sceneries that allow you to get lost in the sunset and your mind to escape.  It brings out the grandness of the landscape.  In urban setting everything is usually boxed in and strictly defined by property lines.  These pastoral scenes don’t often occur naturally so you have to lead the eye to them.  The easiest way to do this is use tall things closer to your gathering areas to screen the neighbors beside you and taper down your heights to the corner where you can see the furthest.  Always make sure that what is in that corner is shorter than what is just behind it outside of your yard and this will lift your eye back up and create that escape.  The tapering of heights to the furthest point will also create a sense of perspective making your space seem larger than it is.

The picturesque are those scenes where your eye gets stuck and you are looking at a space like a framed picture that creates a scene.  In nature this may be a giant boulder you walk up to on a hike.  You get stopped in your tracks then totally engrossed in the lichens, ferns and wild flowers growing from its cracks.  Its becomes like an entirely different world to explore inside of another.  The same can happen in your garden by planting in the cracks of a wall or having a collections of planters or a piece of art on a fence.  Even a planter next to your door where that gutter makes it hard to grow anything else can have the same effect.  One thing to be sure of is to repeat the elements in that planter in the landscape around it.  By splashing a few of the impatiens in the pot on the ground around it, it will tie it into the rest of the landscape.  It will be just like the ferns that grow on that rock that also grow on the ground around it and lead you down the trail and on into the forest.

Plant diversity is crucial to any healthy natural environment and also any good garden or landscape.  Diversity comes in many forms.  What I am going to focus on here is the layers of a landscape and how they are dispersed.  Nature creates this diversity and uses the plants to care for the space and the animals in it.  So should you.  I like to relate the levels of the landscape to music.  Good music has always found its roots in the rhythms of nature and so does any good art, especially a natural one like landscape.

These rhythms come it two forms.  The first rhythm can be found in the layers.  Nature, good gardens and great music all have an upper, middle and lower range.   In nature this is made up of the trees, shrubs, and herbaceous plants.  Neither nature nor a garden is in its complete form without all of these.  The trees provide the canopy and determine the amount of light and moisture hitting the ground, soil type and everything that will grow below it.  The trees create the homes for the animals and the home for everything below it.  Think of them as the ceiling and walls of a room.  Just like nature does, when designing plantings you should always start with the trees because they determine everything else.

The mid range is the shrub layer, and can also include smaller flowering trees.  They provide food for most of the wildlife. They also also create the depth of the landscape, just like midrange creates depth in music.  The shrub layer will do the most to take care of space for you just like it does in nature.  When you come across an thicket of huckleberry in the woods, it always looks perfectly groomed and placed as though it has been meticulously pruned even though man has never touched it.  Besides creating depth in terms of space and layers they also create new spaces to discover behind and around them providing for a sense of discovery and surprise.  This layer is not only rich in space creation.  It is rich in performance as well because these plants provide elaborate flower, berry , fall color and bark shows that create a tapestry of their own.  Not only do they provide the most fodder aesthetically, they also do the most to feed the birds and other wildlife.

The low range is the final layer.  In music it is the base that rolls along, providing the rhythm for everything else and fills the voids of the down times.  In plantings it is the herbaceous layer.  I would hardly consider a tuba or tympani to be similar to a Hosta or Astilbe, but they are.  If played properly they both are a delicate presence in the back ground that emerge and steal the show when everything else is down.  In the garden and nature the perennials quietly hold the ground while the mid range shows off all spring, then they tactfully take their turns showing off their color as the flowers of spring fade away.  Then they roll into a crescendo heading into fall only to step aside for the finale of the trees with fall color.  They are the fabric that holds the ground in place and takes care of the space for you.  Then they give you that little extra right when you need it.

Along with the layers all good music, nature , and gardens have rhythm.   The patterns in all great music, art and gardens can all be traced to those of nature.  The arts and particularly music really exploded in the last century when people stopped trying to create things just for the sake of creating them and started looking for inner meaning.  The rhythms of  jazz embody this and the greatest artistic nod to nature of all has to be syncopation.  When gardeners realize that everything doesn’t have to spaced in 4/4 (formally and perfectly symmetrical) that is when their lives get easier, and much richer.  Trying to make a garden embody a rigid structure is like trying to make a marching band embody dance.  It is next to impossible and everything has to be completely lined up all the time.  It is even worse in a garden because  it is even harder to make a plant do what you want than a teenager.

Plants need to be spaced to move you through the garden like the rhythm in music.  Then they will move you through the garden like music moves your feet.  Syncopate it…Put the weight of plants in one place to provide structure where you need it, but then repeat it tapering off in the direction you want the eye to move.  If you plant five in one place, plant three a little bit over from there and maybe more even a little further over.  This is how nature does it and it will intrinsically add depth to the aesthetics of your garden, and the movement to keep it interesting.

Nature doesn’t plant in intertwining plant sausages so why should be.  Think of the sausage method like the landscape at McDonald’s, it may be showy, but it has about as much depth as the food they are trying to sell.  I would much rather sit down to four hours of French cuisine with depth and rhythm that feeds my soul as well as my body.  Nature doesn’t plant its flowers in blocks of 300 only to be ripped out and replaced three times a year.  It plants them where the weeds would grow to take care of the space so they can dance with one other and the other plants in the forest to provide the richest show possible.  Out of the symbiotic relationships the ecosystem creates to grow emerges an equally complex combination of  outright beauty.

I could go into many other areas where nature is the best guide.  You could use materials that are native to your region.  Be it plant or rocks this always provides a sense of cohesiveness.  There are all kinds of great cues to follow when using water in the garden.  However, what I wanted to do here was help you learn to take your cues from the world around you.  Draw from not only from what makes nature beautiful, but what makes it work, and let it guide you in your own garden or artistic endeavors.  We have to quit creating gardens for the sake for feeding them, and start creating them to feed our souls and the world around us.  Most importantly when nature has created them for us, we need to quit screwing them up.

The Morality of Sustainability

I have to admit I have had this one in the hopper for some time now.  I have been preparing and wanting to write this post for a long time, but it was a commenter on Sustaining Sustainability that finally prompting me to flush it out.  We all hear people talk about what they can do to live sustainably almost every single day.  There are no shortages of arguments and evidence for how it can save us all money, and there are plenty of people learning how to make money at it.  Finding empirical evidence as to the benefits of living sustainably is as easy as finding options in the cereal aisle at the local grocery.  I constantly hear people profess all the ways we can benefit personally from helping the Earth.  What I do not hear are cogent moral arguments for why this is the right thing to do, and why as inhabitants of this earth we have a moral obligation to protect and respect everything that is a part of it.

Unfortunately the only moral arguments I hear about sustainability are actually against it.  Time and again I hear that as part of this planet we (humans) are nature too, and that our consumption of any resource on it is a natural act.  I recently even heard a Senator say that he would not support any climate change legislation until we have used every ounce of coal and drop of oil that “God has given us to use”.  I am not going to make this a discussion about the theology of predetermination vs. systematic theology (living in Christ’s image), but I do find it hard to believe that if God created us in his image he would want us to plunder and destroy the earth.  After all he doesn’t.  Beyond being part of nature as a species we have things inherit in our nature that make environmental responsibility a moral obligation.  Consider what I am about to layout to be “An Ontological Argument for a Morality of Sustainability”

An Ontological Argument For a Morality of Sustainability

Everything on this planet has an inner essence. Even physical “non living” being, such as coal, has an inner essence that allows us to identify it even if it changes form.  I can look at five pieces of coal and know that they are coal.  I can crush that coal to the point that those five pieces are no longer identifiable, but still look at that pile and know that it is coal.  The inner presence of a being is that allows others to identify it for what it is through many phases and forms of its life is the essence.

Every living being on this planet has a soul. Living beings have an essence just like physical ones, but they also have a presence beyond that which exudes their liveliness on other beings even though the physiological actions that carryout this life cannot be seen.  When I see an Oak I know that it is alive.  When I see an Oak that is alive, I can sense its life even though I cannot see the photosynthesis occurring or the transpiration from the leaves.  It exudes something beyond that essence which is its soul.  The soul also projects its presence in various forms of instincts or consciousness that beings carry out in living to ensure their survival.  The final evidence of the soul is the continued presence of essence after the soul has left and life has ceased.  Once that Oak is dead, I still know it as an Oak, and even as a specific Oak, but I can also sense that the life (or soul) is gone, and the evidence of its absence and remaining essence is further proof of the soul’s previous existence.

Everything with a soul has varying levels of consciousness and self-consciousness. Every living being has an awareness of what it has to do to survive and reacts to its surroundings.  This may be instinctual, but also may progress to various levels of will.  In any form it implies a sense of self being.   I do not believe my grass can feel it when I mow, but it does have natural instincts to guide its reaction to my mowing, and has natural instincts to seek out water for its survival.  I believe full well my dogs are capable of feeling remorse, loneliness, fear, pain and love.  I also believe they can sense it in others, particularly myself.  I do not however believe they can empathize it.  However, though my dog can sense my remorse and feel pain itself, it cannot feel my pain.

When a being’s soul progresses from being conscious of itself and surroundings to empathizing with another it develops conscience. We as a species empirically know that we can extend our consciousness to the point of feeling what other people feel, and actively seek to do so.  When the ones that we love hurt, we hurt.  When ones that we do not even know hurt and we see the cause as unjust, we hurt.  This is the ability to empathize.  There has been speculation that other primates may have this ability, but as far as we can know for sure, we are the only species whose soul progresses from the point of consciousness to conscience.

With conscience comes responsibility. As human beings our ability to empathize combined with our free will gives us a moral awareness that requires us to take responsibility for our actions.  We have an inherit sense of right and wrong. We can rationalize our way around it, but in the end right and wrong and our ability to discern it remains.  This is the foundation of morality, and with this ability comes the responsibility act within those parameters.

The morality of sustainability is rooted in our ability to empathize with other beings. Morality is not possible unless you can make that leap into another’s heart.  This ability to empathize gives us a unique ability and responsibility to act in ways that protect and respect the essence and souls of other beings.  Sustainability is rooted not in how to get the most from our resources, but our moral responsibility to protect and respect the essences of every being, their role in our ecosystem, and the ecosystem itself as a living being.  If we can empathize we have responsibility inherit in our ability to sense morality.

As beings of conscience not only do we have the ability to sense and empathize with the essence and souls of other beings, but it also gives us the ability to make decisions that knowingly destroy and harm them and in turn the environment as a whole.  No matter how much we try to rationalize it, this wrong.  Being moral beings we need to be able to own that awareness and take responsibility for it.  As moral beings we have a responsibility to recognize and protect the essence of the earth and its beings in everything that we do.

To make the claim that it part of nature to exploit the Earth and its resources without protecting its essence is morally wrong.  We may have the right in the legal sense within the laws of man.  But it is not right in the moral order of our being.  Our nature as moral beings requires us to make morally responsible decisions not just ones that we can rationalize.  The ability to rationalize allows us to make moral decisions, but it also allows for immoral ones as well for you can not know one without the other.

In the end living sustainably is not about how protecting the earth benefits us as a species, but that it is in our nature as moral beings, and a failure to live this way is not only immoral, but unnatural.