Gardeners want a family landscape that can nourish and nurture wild animals. But they also want beauty, space for children to play, privacy, and maybe even a vegetable plot. Of course, this is a difficult task, but The Living Landscape shows how to do it. The following excerpt is from Chapter 5 "Applying Layers to Home Gardens."
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What brings life to the landscape? Gardening is unique in art because its main material is actually living, but is the garden just a beautiful arrangement of living objects? The growing awareness of the wide range of environmental relationships shows that traditional object-oriented garden production methods cannot guide us in designing and caring for truly sustainable landscapes. Inspired by ecological science and cultural research, we have the opportunity to adopt new ethics and outline modern recipes for inclusive habitats: accept the changing dynamics of our world while recognizing the need to protect and preserve important and irreplaceable things Ethics.
We can promote a strong local design approach while understanding global reality and understanding that even our most humble and necessary journey can be guided by the universal language of landscape management. Plants are always the core of horticulture, but we can start with a series of goals, rather than a set of objects, to ensure that the landscape we live in has a clear hierarchy, biodiversity, and a wide range of functions.
Don't be afraid to ask a lot about your garden. With a little thought and proper care, a garden can be many things-things that may even seem incompatible or contradictory. For example, a good garden must be practical. The care it needs should be balanced with our abilities, but it must meet the different basic needs of gardeners: a safe surface for walking, running, sitting or playing; shelter from wind and rain; a cool place in summer and a warm place in winter. . But the same garden can also be a sensual place, bringing all kinds of joys to life: colors, textures, fragrances, outdoor restaurants, birdsong in the morning, and perhaps a group of voyeurs at night.
As David Abram suggested in 1996, "The perceptual world is always local." Much of the sensibility, breadth and beauty of the local landscape stems from the flora and fauna. Long-term evolution of the connection, but also deeply influenced by local and global culture. Fortunately, the gap between the biological landscape and the cultural landscape is narrowing. A garden dedicated to protecting a unique ecosystem does not need to abandon a bit of human history that has survived in it, just like a landscape dedicated to human skills does not need to ignore the important remnants of ecological richness in its range.
Regardless of the size, a well-designed garden can be both private and spacious. It can include private spaces that encourage the appreciation of infinite details, as well as guiding us to think about infinite and expansive spaces. The private space may be as simple as a corner defined by rich layered vegetation. The vast space may be just a cleverly placed bench, and the sky can be clearly seen through the window in the canopy.
Reliability and spontaneity may seem opposite, but they are not necessarily. Inspired design can provide both at the same time. We should be able to count on a garden to do many specific things reliably on time, but every time we return to it, there should be some accidental factors, some pleasant existence or events that we never expected.
The local landscape is the most influential because we spend the most time in it. Because of its proximity, the residential garden is the ultimate local landscape. For these reasons, the two most important qualities of the garden are that it is suitable for walking and viewing. It should provide practical, perceptual and various other ways to get us to where we need to go. At the same time, these paths should inspire us to observe more closely, ask more questions, and think about the dynamic beauty of interdependent processes.
The garden is usually designed to provide us with a refuge: a personal place away from the crowd, providing countless opportunities for personal expression. Personal gardens or landscapes are places where we can tell stories in our own way. Even if we are the only listeners, it can provide comfort and provide new insights. On different days or in different moods, when we invite others to share it with us, the same garden can be most active: react to it, enjoy it, and find new meaning in it. When sharing beyond human existence, gardens help sustain multiple life forms, which in turn help sustain all of us.
No aspect can affect the way we experience the garden more than the quality and layout of the space. Among the endless possibilities, the garden space can be used as an outdoor living room, dining room, playground, bathroom or swimming room, stage, shelter, museum, wildlife habitat, workshop, nursery or food production area. The carefully crafted garden space provides a life experience different from that of an indoor building. As with all buildings, the characteristics of the materials used have a profound impact on the nature of the results, and the relationship between the spaces and the paths connecting them is also an integral part of their success.
Like architectural buildings, landscape architecture usually relies mainly on hard materials to create paths and spaces — mortar bricks and stones, tiles, wood, metal, and glass — often using extensive reclassifications to adapt them to the landscape. This method is expensive and durable, but there is an additional cost to the durability of the hardscape. Hard designs are persistent and static: they do what they do reliably, but have almost no inherent ability to spontaneously.
Perhaps more important is the relative immutability of hard designs. Modifying or adapting to the changing environment of the landscape or important daily life of residents is difficult and expensive. Hard design is sometimes the only practical architectural solution for the desired landscape function; however, in many cases, there is a softer and more imaginative option, which is to rely mainly on literal organic architecture-plants-to create space.
The term organic may refer to materials made primarily of carbon, just like plants. It is also used (for the first time, and perhaps most famously in 1954, Frank Lloyd Wright in "House of Nature") to refer to non-living things, such as to imitate growth forms, Modes and processes of construction or evolution of architectural organisms.
There are many benefits to the space creation of a truly organic building. The space formed by plants is infinitely variable. They and the channels between them can be shaped and transformed in small increments or dramatic gestures, and the cost is only a small part of the hard materials. Spaces made of plants are inherently evolutionary and responsive, because the biological materials that define them constantly respond to changing conditions, events, and seasons. Perhaps most importantly, the reliance on organic architecture means that more gardens will be made of plants. This last point is crucial if the residential landscape is to play an increasing role in maintaining the diversity of flowers and animals.
Although we are happy to observe birds in our family landscape, our goal is to make the landscape provide enough bird food, and we don't need a feeder. However, since our property is relatively tall and dry, with no natural water flowing through, we decided to provide bird drinking and bathing facilities.
Instead of buying ordinary things, I started with a large rock from the local quarry. Putting on the goggles, I used a hardened drill to drill a circle about 2 inches deep. Then use a cold chisel and hammer to dig the circle while creating a pleasing textured surface.
We placed the newly filled bathing and drinking stones in the herb layer. We have previously planted a mixture of cinnamon fern (Osmunda cinnamomea), white wood aster (Aster divaricatus) and woodland wild oats (Chasmanthium latifolium). We rely on these and nearby shrubs and trees to provide adequate cover so that birds feel safe when using stone baths.
The stone was placed strategically on the corner of the path away from the house, but it can be seen from the two favorite rest areas. As long as it is kept full of water, the stone will continue to be used. In early December (top right), a black-capped tit playing in a bathing facility. —RD
Taken from The Living Landscape © Copyright 2014, Rick Darke and Doug Tallamy. Published by Timber Press, Portland, Oregon. Used with permission of the publisher. all rights reserved.
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