...aesthetics, urbanism, wind, myrmecology, islands, walls, Peppa the Pig, unfinished visions, carbon dioxide, Mad Max, territory, nasi lemak, anthropo-sumthing-or-other, industrial farming, the picturesque, Yuan Yu, the earth rise, atomism, mastodons, ouroboroi, the key-line farming method, Taobao, maps, groves of trees, fables, home, pottery, 1788, drones, impenetrable French philosophy, choreography, entanglement, unkempt suburban grass, the East Asian – Australasian Flyway, fluvial models, killing idols, Correa alba ‘Dusky Bells’, shifting baselines, ecotones, Shaoxing rice wine, landscape urbanism bullshit generators, messy ecosystems, etiology, place, undermining, knowledge, highly processed carbohydrates, George Carlin, global warming, children, PM2.5, entropy, ‘Straya, Lao Tzu, Lawrence Halprin, promenades, smashed glass, borrowing views, dead dingoes, memory, the kapsalon, the ecological apocalypse, nourishing terrains, crimson, Atari, David Cronenberg, shopping mall carparks, Morocco, powdered milk, weeds, the seventh letter of the alphabet, bamboo, ancient Mesopotamia, coal, borders, meadows, low art, Ian McHarg, the arrow of time, cartography, medicine balls, 33EMYBW, country, hair, The Great Australian Dreamtime, edge conditions, 8, meta-meta, Q, the misanthropocene, Jane Jacobs vs Robert Moses, Aleister Crowley, I Ching, Uluru, meditation, relationships, territorialisation, representation, the viridic, management, strange objects, hutongs, governments, familymart, urban agriculture, Rodger Moore, mosaics, French gardens, boundaries, character, Acacias, 4, DMT, the CSIRO, Murray Cod, Treaty, Dikes, the X-Files, termites, cultured meat, bushrangers, powerlines, markets, tofu, the lucky colour red, seismographs, hedges, highways, trees in autumn, networks+flows, realism vs idealism, orderly frames, the southern cross, indigenous micronations, methane, Suzhou gardens, saving the planet…

I’ve been thinking about tending recently and I am curious to why this word keeps re-emerging throughout my daily doings. It’s an innocuous little verb; it's not forceful, nor is it placid. It's active, yet calm and emergent.

We all tend. We tend to our children, our parents, our gardens and our dying loved ones. We also have tendencies, things that we lean toward for better or worse. For example, I tend to have little interest in football, drink one too many and enjoy an early morning walk with my coffee.

To tend is to revisit, to revise, to hone or polish. It is to care, to respect, to nurture or soothe. Tending is inherent for the gardener but for the landscape architect we sometimes forget. We forget that our actions are predominately tending to things. We come back, day after day and revisit and care for the work we have done, and what we plan to do tomorrow.

Gardeners tend liberally. It is a given that to pick up a shovel and move dirt, or trim a branch is to care for something generally named a ‘garden’. But why is it so natural to tend to a garden? Is it the small and iterative actions that moves it in a particular direction? Is it the biological materiality that demands a certain attention? Or is it the inherent maternal characteristics that one must bring, those of love and patience?

If landscape architects are to tend, then what are we tending to? Surely not a garden. Are we tending to projects, clients, teams, or Aconnex? I would like to think that we tend to our designs and that we bring a consistent calm attentiveness. But I can’t deny that we often employ verbs that are a lot more brutish. If we’re not tending then we are doing, executing, delivering, operating, forecasting, strategising, complying, managing or optioneering. This is all industry speak, born from deadlines and profit margins. Is there no room for a curley, meandering verb like ‘tend’ in this world?

If we are to tend to our designs, how do we cultivate that which is calm, emergent, and divergent? Landscape architects talk alot about ‘practice’ more commonly as a noun, less so as a verb. But practice we do, every day, honing a set of productive skills and habits. There is something here, an opportunity to bring the idea of practice and tending closer together. To re-invigorate something lost in the mad scramble of the work day.

If one tends to something regularly enough, these eventually become tendencies. Things we do percolate, settle and eventually become who we are. Our tendencies are our inclinations, what we find natural and agreeable. They are the well worn track of our daily habits. Once again, the gardener finds this intuitive. Their routines are set to the cycle of the seasons and they are in constant conversation with themselves and the biological matter they work with. Plants have tendencies too, personalities even. They want things. It is through a symbiotic set of shared inclinations that the gardener and the plant create the garden.

And the landscape architect? Not so simple. If the tendencies of a craft come from a consistent engagement with a thing our inclinations are not as clear as we are not routinely working with a particular material. We are not a gardener, working with plants, a carpenter with wood, a barista with coffee or an accountant with money. What are we sinking our hands into? Are we beholden to biology, design, cities, drainage, subconsultants or office chairs? We coalesce around the nebulous idea of ‘landscape’, frantically trying to pin our tendencies to an elusive and ultimately intangible medium. We are engaging with something that shapeshifts, a material that dodges simple definition. There is not one thing that we can mould our tendencies around and I am both enamoured and frustrated by this.

I think I will leave it here, with these thoughts half finished and splayed across the table. I hope, in some small way, I will now go about my day, shifting my focus from one preoccupied with just getting shit done, to one that moves with the cycles of life, that is reflective, responsive and once again tends to that thing that is almost but never will be finished.

Here is a concept, born out of experimental epidemiology, that may have profound influence on how we, as landscape architects, appreciate the influence of the environment and the places we design as having perceptible impacts on people’s health.

The Exposome is an emerging term, coined by C. WIld in 2005, that can be described as the environmental equivalent of the genome. The Exposome is everything the body is “exposed” to - cradle to grave - from air, water, toxins, food, relationships, cities, events, etc. It is a fascinating concept, it is vast, incalculable but at the same time arguably the greatest influence on our health and wellbeing we know of.

Historically much emphasis has been placed on biology and genetics when understanding disease and health. With the sequencing of the human genome (finished in 2001), medical science’s attention has been focused on their new ‘toy’; the wealth of information that is our genes. Most research was and still is focused on therapeutics and treatments that target genetic diseases.What a genetic heavy understanding of health leads to is potentially an overemphasis on the individual as an isolated biological entity as if we were looking at someone's health in the confines of a lab.

Instead, when we look at an individual’s health through the lense of not just genetics but also the Exposome we come to understand that health and disease is much more complicated than isolating a particular gene or pathogen. We exist in an infinitely complex world of ‘exposures’, be they Big Macs, clean water, chairs, gym machines, mothers, dogs, salads and fuel exhausts. And though we do have knowledge on how some of these exposures influence our health specifically, the overlaid complexity of these means that we ultimately need to take a holistic approach to understanding health, the world and how we exist within it.

I see a lot of similarities between the theoretical understanding of the Exposome and Object Oriented Ontology (OOO). In general there is an understanding and an embracing of the individual not as sovereign, but one that is awash with the shadows of countless entities all meshing together in what we collectively call ‘existence’. I am attracted to the idea of the Exposome because it once again places the individual back into a rich, pulsing and messy world, we’re we are exchanging information across partially permeable membranes with other organisms and objects. Furthermore an Exposomal understanding of the world is similar to OOO in the way that it is ontologically flat. Much of the work that I’ve read does not presuppose that one particular “exposure” is of more importance than another in understanding the health of an individual. It casts it net wide to include everything that one is exposed to in one’s life be they tangible or intangible. Of course, through the scientific process and on any given experiment, the researchers will eventually get specific on particular exposures, but the general principle stands in the beginning that almost anything can be considered an influence in understanding the health of people.

So how does all this mesh together? How does the individual exist in a world banging into other objects that eventually lead to positive or negative responses in our bodies? My hack-kneed understanding of this is there are three things at play. There is the environment, epigenetics and then genetics.

The environment, or synonymously the Exposome, is understood to be everything beyond the individual. Genetics, obviously, is within the individual and is recognised as the ‘code’ of life. Finally, epigenetics is more difficult to place, is it within the body or beyond it? In a way epigenetics is located in neither, it is a go-between. As epigenetics is understanding of how the environment influences the expression of genes I see it as the fundamental threshold between two ontological entities, the person in question and the environment they inhabit. Epigenetics may be thought of as the medium of exchange from the ‘outside’ to the ‘inside’

This was a lightbulb moment for me. Growing up twenty years ago, my highschool education in science taught me that genetics and pathologies were much more fixed. Off the cuff phrases like “winning the genetic lottery”, inferred that you just get on and live with the genetic hand you were dealt. Genetics seemed solid and unmovable, in part because epigenetics and the Exposome had not filtered down into schooling. Now, with this triple layered understanding of the Exposome, epigenetics and genetics, I can see how we are completely and utterly exposed to the influence of the environment around us. It is not some wishy washy desire to live somewhere ‘nice’ but it is absolutely imperative that we strive for a living in a good environment as we are developing a specific, measurable and scientific understanding on how the exposome affects our health, happiness and genetic development.

If I think for a minute, through the lens of the Exposome, what environments or landscapes would I want to be ‘exposed’ to? If I am but a sieve, exchanging positive or negative information with my environment and it subsequently being encoded in mine and my future offspring’s genes, where should I place myself? I immediately think of places that are more ‘natural’. Places with good dirt, where you can smell entropy and the cycles of life. I also think of the damage I’ve potentially done, living most of my life in crowded, polluted cities, sucking down car exhaust while riding my bike to work.

So then how do landscape architects fit into this puzzle? Well, we are deeply invested in one of the three spheres, the environment. As designers of environments, in particular landscapes and open spaces, the idea that through our projects we are directly affecting the expression of peoples genes and their resiliency or susceptibility to disease is exhilarating! The fact that through what we put down on paper and is eventually built, the exposures we curate in landscape can potentially poison or purify users, be they animals, plants or people. Researchers studying the Exposome not only look at material influences on the body, be they toxins, nutrients, but they also factor in more intangible influences such as relationships, climate, family history and culture. In this way they are similar to landscape architects in their holistic understanding of how people either flourish or perish in their environment. As landscape architects we have great influence over these elements that eventually become our Exposome. We are designing the Exposome not just for it to look pretty, to win awards or to save the planet from the carbon apocalypse but we are also designing it to protect future generations health through the epigenetic dance of people and place.

Img 1 - Graphically representing the three layered interaction between the exposome, the epigenome and the genome.

Img 2- Los Angeles under smog - Courtesy Walter Bibikow

Img 3- The Amazon rainforest - Courtesy pointsandtravel.com

That's right. Aesthetics. That word that landscape architects are always slightly uncomfortable talking about. But I’ve always been perplexed as to why that is.

I was educated in a time of the reverberations of postmodernism. These shocks are arguably still being felt. Though never explicitly stated I was taught a landscape architecture of flows, systems, performance and data all circling in a loose and relativistic philosophy. Because of that, aesthetics were never on the table. At best we were able to discuss them as a result of a process, of some underlying logic that would give form to a particular appearance. Erik Ghenoiu also talks about this when writing on failings of contemporary architecture; “The manipulation of relations has favoured the distraction technique of making the built place seem like the result of forces and considerations over which the designer has no control” (1) In doing so aesthetics are incorrectly perceived as outside of the designer’s ego or taste to become something that is self evident and unarguable. There is something deeply malicious in this seemingly irrefutable logic.

There have been some valiant attempts to reclaim aesthetics within our profession. Most notably Beth Meyer with her Sustaining Beauty manifesto, arguably one of the most important essays written in landscape architecture, a personal favourite Joan Nassauer’s Messy Ecosystems, Orderly Frames, as well as the built work and the elusive book by Julie Bargmann titled Toxic Beauty. Within those titles we can see that there is a clear emphasis on beauty and reclaiming or redefining that within the context of our profession.

This is where I feel the issue lies. That when we talk about aesthetics we conflate it with only being about beauty, ‘looking good’ or taste. This is still the standing definition of aesthetic, as the Merriam Webster says that it is “a particular theory or conception of beauty or art : a particular taste for or approach to what is pleasing to the senses and especially sight”. My assumption is that, considering we are landscape architects and not aestheticians, we have unquestionably inherited an 18th century understanding of aesthetics and combined with a postmodern disdain, we haven’t turned over that rock in a while. Aesthetics is seen as parochial, boring, old-timey, even weird.

The issue that I have with this definition and the unspoken assumption that aesthetics = beauty, is that I find many people outside of the profession talking about aesthetics in much more interesting ways. Look, I’m not a philosopher or an academic, but I do read broadly and I think there is value in us reconsidering the definition of aesthetics and how it can be re-evaluated within our profession’s particularities.

A simple question. Is something that doesn’t look nice still an aesthetic object and/or does it elicit an aesthetic experience? My answer would be yes or as Graham Harman would put it, genuine aesthetic experiences are merely those that do not bore us (2), inferring that aesthetics is beyond that which is visually pleasing and expands the notion of what is considered an aesthetic object or experience.

With this assumption in mind, I would like us to move beyond the idea that aesthetics is beholden to beauty and plumb the depths of how an expanded appreciation of aesthetics would appear in landscape architecture. The ability to explore landscape architecture that is NOT beautiful, good looking, symbiotic, harmonious and so on, is extremely important.

Furthermore I would argue that, in line with Harman’s previous comment, that the only aspiration landscape architecture should aim for is to is not to bore people, i.e. we must create visceral aesthetic objects and experiences, be they harmonious or challenging, that encompass the broadest purview of emotions.

Image 1: Duisburg-Nord, Peter Latz Image 2: The Garden of Australian Dreams. Room 4.1.3 Image 3: Yantai Mountain, Lab D+H

Ref 1 Erik Ghenoiu, ‘The World is not Enough’, pg 6 Ref 2 Graham Harman, ‘Object Oriented Ontology’ pg 83

This is me.

Landscape architect cannot be arsed going to site, is not their role to build thing, or does not own thing.

Landscape architect needs to explain idea to person on site, person building thing or owner.

Landscape architect picks up pen and draws idea. Landscape architect hands drawing and then responsibility over to said person to complete.

It cannot be avoided. What we draw is a direct conduit to what is built. Every landscape architect knows this explicitly or at least implicitly. We do not build things. We draw things that are to be built.

Therefore, I believe it's reasonable to conclude that the picture and these days the render is everything. Without it our profession doesn’t exist. We can layer as many new technologies, internet providers, rendering and documentation software on top of it as you like, but at the end of the day we are still Humphry Repton’s children drawing pretty pictures in our red books, convincing the gentry to drop a mil on a big new lake.

In this way, I’ve always found it glib that we were taught that the Picturesque was finished, obsolete; that we had given up the Elizabethan stranglehold of the representation of nature; that we were done with the idea that nature was a pretty picture to be clean up, edited and re-organised to pander to the colonial gaze.

Like…this is literally what I do every day!

Well, I hope I’m not some full blown colonialist, but I do edit and clean up what you would generally describe as landscapes, for profit. I do this by drawing pictures of what I think landscapes should look like and then working with people to eventually build them. Really, the only difference I see between myself and Repton is changes in terminology and artistic medium. Where Repton used terms like “improvement”, “embellishment” and “plan” I use “restoration”, “activation” and “documentation”. Where Repton would use watercolours and survey string, I use Lumion and Revit.

I like to think that we have merely side-stepped from the Picturesque to the Renderesque, a programmed refinement of the fundamental blockchain that is Landscape Architecture. Where we once drew pictures of landscapes, we now render them. The creation landscape projects still centre around creating images that the landscape must adhere to. The only things that have changed are society and technology.

We have moved on from when the Picturesque was in vogue. We’re not prancing around like it's Downton Abbey anymore. We are now digesting new cultural drivers; globalisation, climate change, a re-emergence of localism and mixing that in with our creative process. But to look at cultural change and then conclude that we’ve moved on from the sentiments of the Picturesque is wrong. What we learnt from that period is that the picture is the go-between that links culture, landscape and people in a creative act of becoming. It's the image that captures the society as it stands, what it holds dear and how it manifests their narratives of nature. We should not shy away from this fact. In this sense, the images that we create today are following in a long lineage that directly connects us back to the beginning of landscape architecture in old Europe. To deny the picture is to deny the whole professional history of landscape architecture.

Image 1-2: Humphrey Repton's famous Red Books pioneered the use of the picture to secure funding for large landscape design projects during 18th century England.

Image 3: A render for Dragon Skin River. A project I was part of during my time at Gossamer. Using the picture to secure funding for large landscape architecture projects in modern day communist China.

Let’s just define the difference first.

Precision is “the quality, condition, or fact of being exact and accurate.” (Oxford English).

Perfection is “a state…of completeness, flawlessness, or supreme excellence.” (Wiktionary)

Precision is good.

Perfection is bad.

To landscape architects as well as any related professions such as gardening, landscape maintenance and urban design, this idea will resonate. The broad spectrum of factors that go into a design process, engaging with, at best barely predictable things, asks us to avoid perfection. Like, no-one wants to be called a ‘perfectionist’ right?

Precision alludes to a type of behavior or way of doing. If you are a precise person you engage with a thoroughness and daily set of actions that will produce a desired response. Not to say that precision isn’t also a finished state. Something can be precise, but precision is needed to make it become precise. Perfection on the other hand is much more about the end, a final result that is free of error. It is ultimately static. Perfection also does not necessarily demand a perfect way of doing things if the finished result appears perfect.

Striving for perfection is a huge issue. You can’t have a perfect landscape, a perfect plant, a perfect garden. These all suggest something that it is flawless. The medium that we’re working in couldn’t be further from this. Anything that dictates a fixed end state is not engaging with what makes landscapes great. Our projects are full of dead things, failed experiments, left overs and decay.

A pristine white wall will always dilapidate. So, what’s the point of designing something to fail from the outset?

A constant bugbear, and I promise not to be too harsh, is the ‘Architecture’ in landscape architecture. As a very static profession its influence on landscape can at best give a healthy amount of structure, at worst can be extremely constraining. By just simply comparing when you take photos of an architectural project compared to a landscape project shows this. A building is “finished” on the last day of construction, when people haven’t moved in and started messing it all up. The photographer prioritises stark cleanliness to show the beauty of the building. If you we’re to take a photo on the same day of a landscape project it would be a disaster. You’d just get a bunch of gravel, exposed dirt, irrigation systems and stunted plants. It would look atrocious. This aside, there is never a perfect time to take photos of a landscape or garden. At every stage, centuries after construction, during summer or winter, thunderstorms or sunshine, during weddings, parties, anything is a fantastic time to go on site and just see.

We cannot demand our landscapes, gardens and cities to be like this, to be architecturally perfect. We cannot finish them. Precision on the other-hand is great, it allows for us to be intentional and employ a well-honed set of tools to make things that are emergently beautiful.

Of particular importance to landscape, precision allows for contingency, enabling a set of potential ecological and designed outcomes. With a precise and contingent attitude to landscapes we can stretch design over months, years and decades that creates a continual and responsive relationship with the project. For example, a botanical garden is precisely contingent. It is a defined space where designers, gardeners, horticulturalists and a whole range of other people negotiate and deploy a set of strategies and tactics that promote the flourishing of plants. This design is negotiated down to the minute, with a gardener deciding what do cut, mow or trim contingent on the daily situation. Another example are Indigenous cultural burnings. They are extremely precise and contingent on the weather, time of year, where the burn starts and potentially ends. But you would never call this perfect. Creating a precise practice that allows for the best possibly contingency is potentially the most important element of landscape architectural design.

To assume that precision and perfection are mutually exclusive is silly. We need to be careful with our choice of words, and play down perfection. And if I’ve been in anyway convincing, please, leave flawlessness to the architects. All throughout landscape architecture I find practitioners working with extreme precision to achieve emergent, vibrant and ultimately unknowable outcomes. I find landscape that haven’t yet become, and never will.

Img 1 - Teresa Moller Punte Pite

This is a raw thought and I haven't heard it talked about before in landscape architecture, or anywhere beyond medical science. The idea of hormesis is very much relevant in discussing landscape processes, evolution, development and protection.

Hormesis is defined generally as a favorable biological response to low exposure of toxins or stressors. There are many, many examples of this. Think vaccines, a low dose or weakened virus stimulated a positive biological response in our body by triggering our immune system without making us sick. Similarly, think a good gym sesh. Stressing your body by lifting weights or running fast creates micro-tears in your muscles. These are not enough to damage your body and instead stimulate muscle growth, making them bigger and stronger.

This phenomenon is everywhere and is exemplified in microbes, plants, animals and humans again and again. Stressors, pain, adversity is essential to flourishing and is really important because its opposite, the complete avoidance of pain is looking like the emergence of a global pandemic. So many diseases of western civilisation could be explained by this very simple idea; that people, plants animals and even societies slowly degrade and fall apart without a healthy amount of hormetic disturbance.

One example of this is the abundance of food in our modern society. In many parts of the 'developed' world we have eliminated hunger. Sounds good right? Well, not exactly. To completely remove the positives of being hungry is an issue. We're now starting to find out that eating 3 square meals a day may be detrimental to our health. Not eating, i.e. fasting. triggers autophagy, the removal and cleaning of dead or damaged cells to create new healthy ones. This 'self-eating' is only triggered by the stressor of having an empty belly for a day. This gives the body the space to take pause and do a bit of spring cleaning. This low dose stressor actually improves bodily functions across the board.

Of course, if you didn't eat for a month or two, this positive stressor then turns into real stress and eventually damages your body. This is fascinating to me because through our drive to eliminate one evil, being hungry, we have created another, not being hungry enough!

Hormesis is very much both a biological fact as well as a philosophical or ethical position. Should we strive to eliminate pain and adversity or embrace it? We know deep down that we need challenges to grow, it’s the textbook line of every self-help guru. But if that is the case why do we all aspire to live in houses decked out with white-goods galore, a stocked fridge, car and 5g wifi?

This is a long-winded intro but what is interesting is that the idea of hormesis hasn't really been directly discussed in relation to landscape, landscape architecture or ecological design. Of course, the idea of disturbance and environmental stressors as part of healthy functioning ecosystems have been studied at great lengths but they're not explicitly discussed in relation to hormesis. Hormesis is currently only discussed at the microbial, plant, animal and human level and it has not been explored in relation to landscape systems or at any scale larger than the individual organism. A quick Google search yields no response for "landscape hormesis". So there, if anyone in the future is wondering where this came from. I coined it! Similarly, a Google search of "environmental hormesis" only relates to mechanisms present in individual organisms and does not relate to ecological or environmental systems on a larger scale. So, what is landscape hormesis? This is my very nonscientific notion.Landscapes and ecosystems can be seen through a hormetic lense in the same way an individual organism can. Landscapes benefit from low levels of disturbance. The notion is that if landscapes are exposed to low level stressors they grow and flourish, if those same stressors are to vigorous or pervasive they will be damaged.

The first example that comes to mind is fire. In Australia almost every landscape is dependent on fire for flourishing. This is outright a hormetic stressor. Indigenous people have perfected over thousands of years employing this stressor to promote biodiversity, increase biomass, grow food and overall improve the health of their landscapes. Indigenous people “cool burn”, they burn at times when the stressor of fire will create just enough disturbance to create a positive response in the landscape, burning off dead plants and encouraging new growth. This is clearly hormesis at a landscape level. Having said that this stressor can very easily plunge into a catastrophic weapon. The 2019 Australian Bushfires, where roughly 3 billion animals lost their lives, is the best example when this system goes wrong. The same tool used for environment flourishing becomes its greatest enemy. White Australia, through decades of neglect and not allowing ritual burning eventually lead to so much dead matter accumulating in the bush that everything burned to the ground. Fire destroyed everything. From a hormetic perspective fire moves from a low dose stimulant to a high dose inhibitor. i.e. fire turns from friend to foe.

There are so many more examples of stressors that can either benefit or destroy landscapes and ecosystems. Cyclones, Typhoons, Floods, chopping down tress, introduced species, farming and just plain gardening can all in the right doses stimulate positive hormesis and in the wrong dose do a lot of damage.

This notion runs to the centre of landscape management and design. Do we design landscape that embrace pain, adversity, disturbance and positive hormetic stressors? Or do are we designing fragile landscapes, bloated and full, ready to crack and be completely destroyed with the next unknown catastrophe?

Img 1 - The hormesis J-Curve showing some landscape hormetic stressors. I’ve adapted this from Wikipedia’s diagram.

Img 2 - Cool burning low hormetic stressor. Courtesy of recreatingthecountry.com.auion.

Img 3 - Devastating fires high hormetic stressor. Courtesy of guardian.com.au

I’ve just finished reading Michael Pollan’s Second Nature. A book about his experiences in his smallish garden in New York state. This is by far my favorite passage in the book:

”Consider what weeding is. The process by which we make informed choices in nature. Discriminate between good and bad and apply our intelligence and sweat to the earth. To weed is to bring culture to nature. Which is why we say when we are weeding we are cult-ivating the soil. Weeding in this sense is not a nuisance that falls from gardening, but its very essence and like gardening, weeding at a certain point becomes an obligation. As I learned in my garden bed, mere neglect will not bring back nature. In this my yard is not so different from the rest of the world. We cannot live within it without changing nature irrevocably. In having done so we're obliged to tend to consequences of the changes that we've brought, which is to say, to weed. Weeding is what will save places like Yellowstone, but only if we recognise that weeding is not just something we do to the land. Only if we recognise the need to cultivate our own nature too. For though we may be the world's gardeners we are also its weeds and we won't get anywhere until we come to terms with this crucial ambiguity about our role. That we are at once the problem and the only possible solution to the problem.”

As landscape architects we have a funny relationship to weeds. We know they are clearly pests, thwarting our attempts at revegetation or creating that perfect bucolic image. On the other-hand we defend them as the underdog or just being misunderstood. At its most controversial and existential we must ask how does weeding reflect back through society, through immigration, gentrification, taxation and the structure of the city. Is the unencumbered xenophobia we feel towards certain plants the last acceptable releasing of some repressed violence?

Making choices in a garden, a landscape or a wilderness ultimately means some plants are in, some are out. If we are to agree that a ‘weed is just a plant growing in the wrong place’ we must look at the human motivation to move or remove that plant. We must look at the cultural and the personal drive to define a space by deletion. Many of you will know, that the amount embodied energy needed to get down on hands and knees, in the sweltering heat and pick thistles all day long is a clear indication that this is a emotional and no trivial task. This too can be said for the big places, our wilderness or farmland areas. To get out there in a chopper and shoot brumbies and water-buffalo, or to spray hectares and hectares of farmland with what is essentially Agent Orange is driven by something deeply resonant.

We're moving quickly. We're fucking up the planet. What are we to do?

Do we trust our governments to solve the environmental crisis for us? Or do we pick up a shovel, a garbage bag and get to work?

This leads to two terms that dramatically, but quite succinctly, summarise how I feel about our ecological crisis and the regular anxiety I have around acting upon it.

Oikophobic Techophilia is the fear of home and the love of technology. Taken further it is an obsession with the international, digitally connected no-place where we now live most of our lives. Globalists that want to dissolve communities, states and nations in the name of some international cause. I know, I can see the irony that I'm writing this on Instagram/Substack, the ultimate digital no-place.

On the contrary, Oikophilic Technophobia is the love of home and the fear of technology. This is some straight up luddism, denial of 'progress', lets go back to all growing our own veggies kind of thing. Its this League of Gentlemen "This is a local shop, for local people", British small world mentality that is holding us back. Or maybe not.

I like this contrast. The Globalist NWO, tesla driver destroying communities and traditions VS Nouveau-Amish unpasturised milk drinking, native plant loving local person.

To put it less obliquely. Some people think that we should prioritise global top down measures as solutions to our environmental problems while others believe its all about bottom up community action and ownership. This is important, because we all shift between these two poles of action. We understand that global environmental issues need some form of united approach but also understand that a homogenous response, one size fits all policies will not work for all places on the planet.

And where do landscape architects fit into all of this? Its simple. If you're working for a big, international studio, or one that works on projects all over the world, its almost impossible not to be a Oikophobic Technocrat. You are probably working remotely, never have been to the site, you don't speak the language and you communicate almost exclusively through computer based images, documents and conversations. And its opposite, the landscape architect driven by Oikophilic Technophobia is one that works in small teams, on local projects usually within walking distance. They prioritise handshakes, local slang, spontaneous on site meetings. They're happy to draw details on the back of a napkin, let the builder take the lead and listen to their client over a warm afternoon drink.

For me, it depends what side of the bed I get out of that morning. Sometimes I'm charging ahead with ideas of international carbon credit schemes, bringing in the army to stop the destruction of the amazon, assassinating every oil and mining CEO on the planet and other general enviro-anarcho-terrorist fantasies. On other days, I see all global actions as a horrendous obliteration of individual and group rights and dream of sitting in a small town hall passionately debating the value of road verges in 'our community'. I dream of campaigning to defend some local bug, or a grove of trees from greedy developers, or just getting out there and picking up some rubbish.

Its all too much really, maybe I'll just start with weeding the garden and fix the global environmental catastrophe next Tuesday.

Img 1: a Permablitz in action

Img 2: the offices of James Corner Field Operations

Throughout my career I’ve never really taken much notice of permaculture.

I dunno why.

Maybe I was too enamored with the highfalutin landscape urbanism.

Maybe I didn’t like to get my hands dirty. Literally.

Maybe I’m more of a painter than a sculptor.

Maybe I just hate plants.

Or maybe it was my education and landscape architecture isn’t great at opening up to similar professions.

While I studied and practiced I learned we regard ourselves as the ultimate collaborators. Able to twist and mold ourselves depending on who we work with. Civil engineers like us, horticulturalists, architects (mostly), artists and many others.

So why is there this big blackspot with permaculture? Why is there no collaboration? A profession that is so similar to landscape architecture that normal people just consider us all ‘gardeners’?

I’ve been reading an old thesis by Sky Allan, written in 2004, about the overlap between permaculture and landscape architecture. Her conclusion. No history of collaboration and a whole world of potential. Of course there are many landscape architects who also regard themselves as permaculturalists and visa-versa but there is no outspoken romance going on. As Sky says “While interaction between the two areas occurs through individuals, there is virtually no formal cross over via education, conferences or journals…”

Sky has a few good reasons why landscape architects haven’t delved into permaculture or made long lasting ties. I’ll list them below as dichotomies in my own ranty language…

Landscape Architect (LA) – Big, public, lots of money Permaculturalists (P) – Small, private, communities, not a lot of money

LA – Established, working for “the man”, sellout

P – Alternative, left-wing, environmental extremists, fringe

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LA – Fancy pants universities, expensive, straight out of high-school, in the city

P – Rudderless hippies, cheap, from all walks of life, usually in some outdoor bush-school environment or garden.

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LA – Knowledge, books, theory, idealism, strategies

P – Practicality, know-how, elbow grease, materialism, tactics

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LA – Native plants, pretty flowers, big ecosystems

P – Farmers, obtaining a yield, cottage gardens, food forests.

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LA – Agnostic about peoples place in nature

P – People firmly placed as ecological design agents

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LA – Animals as some blurry agent, client or thing

P – Animals equal to or more important as design agents than humans

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LA – Set and forget, maintenance as a nuisance/afterthought, hurry up and grow so I can get some nice pictures

P – Incremental, slow, haphazard, design is maintenance: maintenance is design, design as process.

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LA – high end design, craft, picturesque

P – piece-meal, functional, practical

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LA – not into aesthetics….but really are.

P – not into aesthetics… but really are.

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Img 1 - David Holmgren teaching permaculture in his garden.

Img 2 - Christopher Girot teaching landscape architecture in his lecture hall.

No, I don’t mean your mum’s house, the pantry, or your local souvlaki joint.

I mean WHERE.

What is the supply chain that keeps you alive?

My gut is all over the place….

Each week I eat food from every single continent. Living in an international city, with an international lifestyle my diet is definitely global. Apples from Poland, salmon from Norway, beef from Argentina, wine from Australia, avocados from Mexico…you get the point.

I’m tapped into a global W.E.I.R.D supply network and am able to access food that is utterly environmentally, climatically and culturally alien to where I live.

I know, I don’t try to eat local. It’s bad.

I promise I’ll change.

Similar to the idea of ‘you are what you eat’, one could assume that ‘you are where you eat’.

Do you gulp down Indonesian Almond milk?

Or are you someone that vehemently eats only those things bio-regionally appropriate?

Are you invested in global food supply chains to nourish you? Do you depend on food that transport with ease? Canned, dried, preserved?

Do you eat animals transported live?

To get to your plate, does the side of asparagus consume more carbon than the rump steak?

Do you chow down on thawed fruit, sapped of all nutrients? Can you actually look the person in the eye who grows your food?

Do you live off your land? Or someone else’s?

The house + garden is an average American or Australian suburban home. Seen in isolation from the landscapes necessary to sustain it (which is the way in which most perceive their private property) it seems innocuous; it is however, a paradisiacal illusion. Its true condition is shown in the image whereby the home includes the 58 hectare ecological footprint required to sustain it.

Viewed in this way, suburbia’s aristocratic pretensions have become a reality, one now impacting negatively on the whole world – for, if everyone on earth lived this way we would require 5 earths, not to mention a new carbon neutral atmosphere. What this means is that first-world suburbia takes much more than its fair share of the world’s resources and its excess reciprocally equates to others’ deficit.

The average (global) ecological footprint for a family of 4 is 8.8 hectares, not 58. For us then to live averagely (another suburban ideal of sorts) we must contract the ecological footprint of the average suburban family by about 86 per cent. On the one hand the obvious way to do this is to impose frugality on first world suburbia. But this would be punitive and therefore unlikely to be successful.

Moreover, having seen our fabulous estate, the world now aspires to live as we do and to suppress that desire is impossible. Therefore, perhaps in tandem with some new measures of frugality, the only thing to do is rede- sign all the systems that constitute our lifestyle so that they have a radically reduced ecological footprint and then make those systems available to the world.

That is not a punitive project but rather, an immensely creative and proactive project - one that will preoccupy the 21st century and beyond...

(text by Richard Weller, image by Donna Broun and Kieran McKernan)

If any of you know a little about landscape architecture history you’ll know that during the late 90s and all of the 00s the reigning zeitgeist of the profession was a thing called ‘Landscape Urbanism’. During that time it was all about ecological processes, biomimicry and complicated highfalutin philosophical theories.

It was thoroughly academic but it was pretty important. It was essentially landscape architecture on overdrive, slamming and mashing almost every profession and theory through the interpretation of landscape. Things got a bit wacky.

The whole movement essentially boils down to this:

“Landscape always comes first”

Screw the architects, the economists, the property developers and engineers. Landscape reigns supreme.

So, how does this lead all the way back to an unknown Aussie farmer?

Well, I’m being provocative but maybe this farmer, PA Yeomans, was truly the first landscape urbanist.

Before James Corner, Peter Connolly, Charles Waldheim and all those fancy pants uni people Yeomans was waxing lyrical on the city being an ecological system, dynamically responding to landscape context processing and managing waste within the city confines. This is straight up landscape urbanism 30 years before the term was even coined!

Yeomans even wrote a book on it. “The City Forest”.

It’s pretty short, and it doesn’t go into much depth on what this City Forest would look like, but the foundational tenant of the book is that the city should be designed with the environment and landscape as the driving force.

Essentially Yeomans took his well-established Keyline Design and supersizes it up to the city scale. All our current ideas on urban biomimicry are there; urban heat island effect reduction, urban forests, urban agriculture, water sensitive urban design and dynamic natural processes integrated into hard engineering. It’s really visionary and I would argue that no-one on the planet at that time was thinking that way, of an urbanism integrated into ecological systems theory and environmental restoration.

50 years on, it warrants a revision

Img 1 – The City Forest (1971) Img 2 – Demonstration day img 3 – A Keyline Farm (Amy Mason)

“Eating with the fullest pleasure — pleasure, that is, that does not depend on ignorance — is perhaps the profoundest enactment of our connection with the world. In this pleasure we experience and celebrate our dependence and our gratitude, for we are living from mystery, from creatures we did not make and powers we cannot comprehend.”

I know that farmers markets, organic food and farm to table are all the rage now but I recently really enjoyed re-reading Wendell Berry’s 1989 essay ‘The Pleasures of Eating’. The idea that we should know where our food comes from, especially during the microwaved 90’s, may have been a completely foreign concept. Things change. Now supposedly over 50% of Aussies grow some or all of their own food!

Many of the simple suggestions that Berry makes in this essay have thankfully taken seed, grow you own food, buy from a farmer, understand food’s origin. What I think is resounding in this essay, and what I regularly forget, is that eating real food is not only for sustenance but for pleasure. A particular pleasure in knowing that growing, supporting and knowing where your food comes from is deeply satisfying beyond just a full belly.

Joe's Garden always stood out to me as strange. A market garden surrounded by suburban houses. Its a beautiful spot and a remnant of a pre-WW2 Aussie urban culture where food and sub-urbanism was much more closely linked. When food chains were so small that literally your neighbour was growing your community's food. Its a piece of urban heritage that should be more revered and potentially brought back into our cities.

Img 1 Joe's Market Garden, Coburg.

I know, this is a bit of downer, but I thought I just might remind everyone.

A while back I read Ernest Becker's The Denial of Death.

The main tenant of the book is that the underlying trauma for everyone is that knowledge that one day we will die. Its what drives people, conciously and unconciously. It drives culture, society, art, love, family, politics and sport. It drives everything.

Furthermore Becker claims that to cope with this trauma we all fashion an 'Immortality Project', or a Causa Sui as he call it, and we believe these projects deliver us all from existential oblivion.

Everyone's project is unique. For some its humble, like being truthful, a good parent, an honest boss. For others grandios, power, influence, reputation or notoriety. For some its tangible, like raising a family, money, a house or two. And for others esoteric, god, science, the environment. But does what we do, day in day out, protect us in any way? And in the end what difference does it make?

As Becker puts it:

"The causa-sui project is a pretense that one is invulnerable because protected by the power of others and of cultures, that one is important in nature and can do something about the world. But in the back of the causa-sui project whispers the voice of possible truth: that human life may not be more than a meaningless interlude in a vicious drama of flesh and bones that we call evolution: that the Creator may not care any more for the destiny of man or individual man than He seems to have cared for the dinosaurs..."

Img 1 John Gollings after a bushfire

Img 2 Jackson Pollock blue poles

I recently re-read Jared Diamond's provocative 1987 article "The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race" and was struck by how far this line of thought has come in 30 years. When it was written it was fringe thinking that we got it all terribly wrong and 30,000 years ago, resisted temptations and avoided agriculture all together.

Tim Morton says that our entire world, from cars, farms, submarines, nature reserves, global warming and cities are just a progressively complex expression of our desire for security. ‘Agro-logistics’ he calls it.

The tragedy? There is no turning back.

This cornel of thought is now sprouting. A whole raft of doctors, scientists, anthropologists, nutritionists, conservationist artist and designers are turning to the ancient for inspiration.

As a landscape architect what I’m struck by is that all of this relates to land, how it is conceptualised and managed and eaten. I’m struck by the fact there are still people haven’t got on the agricultural steam train. What a treasure that is!

Img 1 Indigenous burning, central Aus. https://www.coolaustralia.org/

Img 2 Industrial drone harvesters, USA. https://theconversation.com/

What was the "Green Revolution"?

Norman Borlaug, yada yada yada, saved the planet, end of story.

I find with many historical events a David and Golliath narrative. Two people that represent dramatically opposing views at a critical point in the development of our modern world. I.e. Jane Jacobs vs Robert Moses, Ansel Keys vs John Yudkin, Essendon vs the Roos Round 16, 2001.

Though they never met, and were never in direct competition Mollison & Holmgren vs Borlaug may have been one of these great fights. Industrialised Agriculture vs Permaculture.

The 70s marked a schism in the future visioning of agriculture. On one side was Borlaug's Green (Industrial) Revolution; bold and brazen with giant claims about saving the world. And on the other, two quietly spoken Aussies proposing a different vision; one of reconnecting, rehabilitating and existing lightly.

Where do we sit today? What future did we choose? Well, there isn't a permaculture farm around every corner.

The immediate influence of these two opposing 'Green Revolutions' is the visual impact on the landscape. The rationalisation, homogenisation and pollution of the industrial farming landscapes stand in stark contrast to the organic, shifting and adaptively formed landscapes of permaculture farming.

Images are Miska Henner of feed lots in Tascosa, Texas in comparison to work by Ian Milliss and Lucas Ihlein documenting PA Yeoman's (an Australian proto-permaculturalist) farm in New South Wales, Australia. Both farming techniques produce beef but obviously with completely different resultant landscapes.

I've just finished reading a bunch of books on the microbiome.

Microbiome research has exploded over the past decade and has really revolutionised nutritional science as well as influencing a whole range of other disciplines.

When reading one of Tim Spector's books, he mentioned that one should tend to one's microbiome like one would tend to a garden. In essence, your body being a garden.

As a landscape architect, of course I latched onto this phrase!

So much good stuff here, only the beginning. But the revolution in understanding the microbiome, what makes it healthy, how one tends to it is in so many ways how we should tend to our greater environment.

The way we treat ourselves, what we put in our mouths is directly linked to our environment. The health of ecosystems and the plants and animals we eventually may eat creates our inner microbiotic garden. And in the same way, if our ecosystems are sick, full of factory farms and pesticides, so to our gut will suffer, our inner biodiversity withers.

Tend to your garden.