Making Pretty Things
For years I’ve been doing this. I was hooked on nature by the time I was a little boy. I have been going on trails and hiking since I was a teenager. I’ve gotten lost on trails. I’ve found cool things in nature. I’ve seen flowers. I’ve seen trees. I’ve seen animals across the entire country. I’ve been fortunate enough to visit gardens in other countries, meet my mentors, and go to amazing gardens.
And the whole time, my brain continued to wonder: Why don’t I see more gardens?
In the last two years, I have had to thrust myself into my career even further because of some personal work changes. What that has resulted in is me having to interact with a lot of different people. Amazing folks, some amazing clients who want really specific gardens and come to me with intention and a desire to see more butterflies, see more bees, and have better roses.
I think one of my clients said it best: “He makes pretty things.”
And ultimately, that is all I want to do: make pretty things.
There is an answer to why we don’t see more gardens. And I have had to discover the answer painfully and professionally along the way.
Two Different Paths
The orderliness of engineering, the orderliness of home building, and the order of maintenance all require basic, fact-, number-driven approaches. They rely upon that intentionality to guide how they interact with new home design and how they deal with locations and sites. And there are so many examples where that kind of work is of true value and is providing nothing but benefits to communities and individual homeowners.
But there is another path to this.
There’s the path of thinking of erosion control as something where you put erosion fabric netting down, and then there’s the path of thinking you put down sedge, grasses, and plants that themselves create a fibrous mat of roots, accomplishing the same thing, but through two different means: one, a structural engineering solution; another, a plant solution.
Both are options. Both are choices.
You Have to Look at the Roots
The natural world has always been complicated to study. It moves slowly. Its results, its process, are impacted and influenced by nature. And to really study it means a full lifetime commitment.
It’s a job where you have to look and stare at roots. You have to avoid staring at the sexier part of the plant, the flower, because the flower is inconsequential to the professional side of it.
Will those roots live in that soil? Will those roots thrive in that climate? What will those roots do in that place?
These are really the questions that I ask myself.
I have found myself professionally in a very small community of people. And I’ve always prided myself on trying not to make this an us-versus-them conversation.
I remember having Kelly Norris on our podcast years ago, and as Kelly and I were speaking, whose work I respect immensely, there was a conversation where there was a this-or-that going on. He and I both equally agreed: It’s not this or that.
And in these approaches to solutions for how we steward land, I still believe that.
It’s not a this or that.
What Plants Are Already Doing
But what I am sometimes painfully reminded of is that the people on the other side of the world from me have very little knowledge of what I do: staring at the roots of Amsonia, considering how, at the same time, they’re deeply vascular and also somehow deeply fibrous. Looking at how Baptisia have roots that look like an octopus, with these small nitrogen nodes that attach to them to feed other plants, actually. How varying sedges have varying root systems, but what many of them share in combination is that they’re fibrous, similar to what an erosion control mat would be. That many species of Silphium have deep, extensive taproots that are infiltrating more water than practically any French drain could ever dream of.
These differences—how do we bioengineer plants as infrastructure versus how do we use engineering as infrastructure—are two different schools, essentially. Neither right, neither wrong, but different schools.
I’m not as studied on the engineering as a professional who works at that level, but they’re also not as studied when it comes to plants and horticulture as I am at my level of design.
Somewhere in there, you have two professionals who both have an opinion, who both approach place and circumstance differently.
The Reason There Aren’t More Gardens
And that is the reason there aren’t more gardens.
The reason there aren’t more is because the architect, the engineer, doesn’t consider the fact that more plants actually equal less maintenance. That choosing the right plant the first time infiltrates water, attracts pollinators, and has a net beneficial gain for the local ecology and overall sustainability of the project.
And both of us have failures.
There have been plenty of planting projects that I’ve been involved with throughout my career where we’ve seen plants fail and not do what we wanted them to. I’ve also been on plenty of projects where I’ve seen engineering and construction solutions fail and not do what we wanted them to.
Again, I don’t think this is a this-or-that conversation.
But where there certainly is a very, very large divide is in the knowledge of plants.
When Plants Are Seen as a Liability
When home builders, contractors, and engineers see plants, they often get scared. They don’t see them as infrastructure solutions. They see them as things that have to be taken care of, have to be installed, and have to be maintained.
When they look at a concrete-reinforced Sonotube with rebar that’s been constructed to hold load-bearing joints of a home, they just believe it’ll work.
The same way when I put in sedge, I believe they’ll work.
We’ve both had our experiences where we see them succeed. We’ve both had our experiences where we see them fail.
But there is, without question, an alarming and overwhelming amount of engineering and construction that is choosing the course of how homes and projects are built and designed. It’s not in this softer way of using plants as bioengineering. It’s not in this way that has all of the other net sustainability benefits.
And really, that’s what this article is about.
One Job Versus Many Jobs
As we continue to choose engineering and construction practices over bioengineering and plant infrastructure solutions, we continue to lose all of the other added benefits that that plant choice brings.
The Sonotube, however well-designed and well-engineered it may be, may last a lifetime. It may last several lifetimes. But it will certainly never attract any pollinators. It will certainly not infiltrate or capture any stormwater. It will do a singular job.
And many of the choices in traditional construction and engineering, that is, in fact, what they do: singular jobs.
What planting design does beautifully is many jobs: infiltrate water, prevent erosion off of a bank, and also provide lunch for a butterfly, a house for a bee, a place for a child to wonder.
That’s the difference.
Where Are We Now?
The history of this is long and painful, and something I’ve been studying for years: how we got here.
But I think it’s less important to have a conversation about how we got here and more important to have a conversation about where we are. What are our choices now?
Unfortunately, the business side of this is vastly impacted by it.
I’ve been working at this professionally for nearly 20 years and continue to have to work excessively hard: seven-day weeks, barely any time for anything but some basic family time and work. Work follows me everywhere I go, 24/7.
And if we just did a simple calculation on an abacus, engineering and construction are quite ahead of bioengineering and planting design on the abacus.
A Better Understanding of Both
My hope for this in the future, for myself and for everyone across the world, is that there’s more collaboration between the two, a better understanding by both.
I have deep respect for the people who work in construction and engineering. I believe that their skills and real-world experience are highly valuable.
What I also believe is that they need to step back from their world and see that these plants are doing much of the same job.
Go out into nature. Evaluate it differently. Evaluate it with the same engineering eye.
Look at a bank on the Cumberland River. Look at a slope on the Duck River. Look at a depression near a wetland, and see how there are plants providing infrastructure that we can see, that nature provides.
Every hillside in Tennessee would collapse and erode if it weren’t for nature continually planting without our intervention. Beaches across the world are eroding because the plants have been removed.
There are plenty of real-world examples to go around, visit, and see where plants as infrastructure have been going on well before we knew what the word “infrastructure” was, or anyone uttered it through their lips.
If There Are Ever Going to Be More Gardens
If there are ever going to be more gardens, it’s going to come from this space.
It’s going to come from a softening of the engineers and, most importantly, from you, the community.
The people who live in it, who get to decide what they’d like to look at.