GANZ Landschaftsarchitekten – landscape theory

A new way of thinking is emerging. It does not seek nature in remote mountain tops, but finds it instead in the midst of our cities and suburbs. It looks at our degraded built landscapes with unjaded eyes, seeing the archipelago of leftover land—suburban yards, utility easements, parking lots, road right of ways, and municipal drainage channels—not as useless remnants, but as territories of vast potential. We pass them every day; their ordinariness is what makes them special. As such, they are embedded in the fabric of lives, shaping our most recurring image of nature. French landscape architect Gilles Clément calls these fragments the Third Landscape, the sum of all the human-disturbed land through which natural processes still occur. For designers, the loss of nature is a starting point. It helps us to look at our cities with fresh eyes, giving us a sort of x-ray vision that cuts through the layers of concrete and asphalt to see new hybrids—of natural and man-made, of horticulture and ecology, of plant roots and computer chips. It allows us to imagine meadows growing on skyscrapers, elevated roads covered with connected forests, and vast constructed wetlands that purify our drinking water. But this future will not be driven by the assumption that what is natural is only that which is separate from human activity. Instead, it begins with the conviction that all naturalism is really humanism. Only when we clear our heads of the rose-tinted idealism of the past can we really embrace the full potential of the future.
To get to that future requires serious work, serious engineering, and serious science. But it does not require our plantings to be so serious. In an era of climate change and species invasions, the only certainty is a whole lot more uncertainty. The high-maintenance lawns and clipped shrubbery of office parks and suburban yards will seem increasingly odd with every large-scale natural disaster or water shortage. Since we will not have absolute control, planting in the future will become more playful. More whimsical. Faced with a landscape of increasing instability, planting no longer has to be so solemn. It can loosen up. Be more frivolous. The uncertainty of the future will provide an incredible gift: it will liberate planting from all those forces that try to tame it—the real estate industry, “good taste,” designers’ egos, eco-evangelism, and the horticultural industry. It frees us to take risks, act foolishly, and embrace failure. After all, no designed planting ever lasts. Its main purpose is not to endure but to enchant.
So what exactly is the planting of the future? Look no farther than just outside your front door. Go find a patch of weeds in your neighborhood. Notice the variety of species and how they interweave to form a dense carpet. Or better yet, take a hike in a nearby natural area. Look closely at how plants grow in a meadow or a forest’s edge. Observe the lack of bare soil and the variety of ways plants adapt to their site. Then when you get back to your neighborhood, compare those wild communities to the plantings in landscape or garden beds. There is a difference between the way plants grow in the wild and the way they grow in our gardens. Understanding this difference is the key to transforming your planting. The good news is that it is entirely possible to design plantings that look and function more like they do in the wild: more robust, more diverse, and more visually harmonious, with less maintenance. The solution lies in understanding plantings as communities of compatible species that cover the ground in interlocking layers.

Thomas Rainer & Claudia West, Planting in a Post-Wild World. Designing Plant Communities for Resilient Landscapes (2015)