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The meadow is part of a property that’s been abandoned for years. Outside of a forest mulcher brought in last year to remove dense thickets of privet, the soil has been relatively undisturbed, a rarity today. With only recent exposure to sunlight, there’s so much germinating here, not just weedy annuals, but native sedges and grasses. It seems foolish not to include these or other yet-unseen, interesting species in the site design; they’re already here. Taking a cue from the expansion method, I decided to add a test plot to this area, a bed where I pull non-natives and woody plants while allowing desirable perennials to grow. This bed will merge into the meadow as another seed-source, incorporating what’s in the soil into the broader design of the landscape by simply yielding space and time. It seems so obvious, but people live their entire lives without considering what seeds already exist beneath their feet. This approach is more akin to forest restoration than landscape design. I’ve been doing something similar at home for a couple of years. Since I got rid of the last remnants of my front lawn, I’ve been planting a little, but mostly monitoring what spontaneously emerges through the mulch, deciding what goes and what grows. The other day, I noticed a small, reddish bulge attached to an emerging sedge near one of my vegetable beds. It turned out to be the egg sac of a four-speckled hover fly, a graceful native pollinator. The eggs are often laid near aphids, who become the first meals of the newly-hatched larvae. Apparently, my soil holds host plants for beneficial, predatory insects. This kind of spontaneity is not a common fixture of landscape design. Designers will plan for the movement of plants over time, or design for an existing tree stump. And knowledgeable gardeners can manage sites that incorporate some spontaneous growth. But designers don’t typically abdicate control to plan for the unknown and unseen. Most projects don’t have the long timelines required to do so anyway. From this frame, planting feels hubristic, like I’m imposing my will onto the land. It’s true, I am. Planting, even when it’s done in accordance with a site’s carefully-observed conditions and the plants that are native to its eco-region, still means putting what I want in a place regardless of what’s already right there in the seed bank (the soil), or more often, fighting it back. This isn’t a condemnation; planting is necessary for regenerating biodiversity and fundamental to being human. But there is a strange dissonance to navigate between what I want and what local eco-types of plants could spontaneously exist without my intervention. I’m afraid this falls on a long list of daily encounters with discord, along with the fossil fuels required to transport sustainably-grown plants, or unavoidable dependence on plastic pots. For people who don’t live in a place that’s been struck by climate catastrophe (that list is shrinking fast), the consequences from these can be theoretical, more considered than felt. There are the more apparent examples of damage: taxes that have funded incomprehensible violence for longer than people would care to admit. Within these systems, there’s little I (or you) can do that doesn’t effectively hurt someone, somewhere. There’s a chasm between the world I want and the one I play a part in. In a recent essay for The New Yorker, Hanif Abdurraqib wrote, “These days, all I talk about and think about is the cognitive dissonance required to move through the world. Increasingly, I struggle to disentangle my many selves, to get on with the day. All my selves weep often. I try to have grace. I tell my friends that I’m no longer sure how anyone just drifts through the days, the months, without acknowledging the horrors. I imagine what it must be like to be able to turn off the parts of the world that unsettle you. It must feel like existing in an animated universe that adheres to cartoon physics: you fall from an inconceivable height and, landing, a cloud of dust billows up from the ground, but then you shake yourself off and keep moving.” On the days when I’m low on energy and lower on perceived options, I feel like I can either be like this cartoon or be stuck, immobile. Most days, thankfully, are more holistic. I can grieve while I plant and pull. I can decide to increase a place’s capacity to feed and shelter life, to give something meaningful. This helps narrow the gap between alienation and potential whole, between the world I’m complicit in and the one I want. As I try new approaches, I’m seeing that the dissonance between planting and letting the land express itself is actually malleable. In the projects that have the time for it, I can collaborate with the land more, yielding space and time to it instead of fighting it back. The steps I’m familiar with taking have contributed to the dissonance, so I’m slowly learning new ones. I squirm a little when I write about this kind of thing. It feels self-aggrandizing, if not preachy. I’m afraid that’s somewhat inevitable: the urgency of saving something, anything during a genocide in an age of mass species extinction. It’s, in part, wanting to call attention to dissonance in order to find ways to remedy, to make whole. But what I really want to say is, if I can listen to some source of dissonance enough to let it teach me new steps to get to a better world, then anyone can do that in their own way. Dissonance doesn’t have to be permanent.
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