Jungle Vomit

Gardening requires exuberance. They are full of design possibilities, always evolving and never finished. Understanding soil, exposure, plants and hydrology make them arenas for limitless experimentation following either trial-and-error methods or more scientific research. Garden design – like all design – must confront the question of style. Andrew Jackson Downing, America’s first landscape architect, clarified the British debate about landscape style stemming from Edmund Burke and others who defined the “beautiful” and “sublime.” For Downing, classical gardens were highly geometric and artificial, and therefore inappropriate for rural estates. He advocated for the modern approach of which he distinguished the “beautiful” and “picturesque.”

The Picturesque style was a buildable sublime. It was composed of angular, rough shapes, shadowy nooks, mysterious paths and spiry evergreen trees. It was meant to engage the imagination and arouse sentiments of wonder and awe with its irregular forms. The Beautiful was composed of simple and flowing shapes, smooth surfaces with colors of gradual variation, deciduous trees and elegant ornament. It was meant to satisfy feelings of harmony with its regular forms.

Today, we might say we have the Sustainable style. Landscape programs start by fixing the site’s existing unfortunate circumstances including remediating contaminated soils, restoring altered sub-surface hydrological streams and groundwater systems, and cleaning the air of pollutants. Grading and plant choice can do this, and more. Shade trees support buildings designed to be cooled and heated passively, surfaces of water basins reflect natural daylight deep into floor plates, green roofs slow the initial of impact of storms, and vegetated retention swales absorb and clean urban runoff.  After these repair and mitigating duties, garden design is asked to be uplifting, therapeutic, contemplative and recreational. They sometimes instruct and memorialize. The Sustainable style then, would be composed of water-retaining topography, plants that filter and clean soil and air, and tall trees where shade is needed and short ones where there are power lines. But what is the look of this style? We’ve all seen it and might say it looks like jungle vomit.

True, this evolved style is not seeking pleasing appearances, but sound ecological activity. Nonetheless inspiring stewardship must engage people's emotions so that they care about the environment. People need to not only understand that what they perceive is healthy – this is abstract – but also to appreciate it through their senses – this is physical. Beyond fragrant scents, rustling and murmurings sounds, and appealing materials for the path, bench and handrail where our bodies touch, what we see is important. Static pictures or unfolding scenes, designs appear and this can either be a visual mess or reflect the human need for some order in their relationship with nature. A jumbled collection of plants, no matter how hard working, need some organizing principle that is visible. This might be a unity of materials and forms as repetition is a device that displays design presence. Thus, the Sustainable style can fit the local situation and look like it belongs to the world, as we do.

Sublime Intent

The English language has its limitations. To call something ‘awesome’ is commonplace and usually means we’re impressed, but if we said instead that we were filled with awe, that sentimental expression would be met with perplexity. Designers who seek more than an appreciation for the practical may be motivated to impress others with the novelty of their work. It is one thing to say that their work defies the imagination, but does it prompt wonder in the spectator who wants more of it? What can possibly be wonderful – full of wonder – today when the ability of computer simulation is so advanced that the imitation of reality is nearly indistinguishable from reality itself?

Ancient philosophers starting with Longinus considered the sublime an aesthetic category distinct from the experience of the pleasant or beautiful. In literature, the sublime went beyond appearances and had the ability to elevate thought with noble sentiment. Strong emotion, eloquent diction and figures of speech as well as dignified word arrangement produced an effect that went beyond sensory perception and mental understanding, and entered the imagination. In life, the wonders of nature (in America this first included Niagara Falls, the Natural Bridge in Virginia and Yosemite Valley, and then the Grand Canyon) produced reactions at the very limit of human understanding that are hard to describe and impossible to recreate.

Landscape architectural theory from the 18^th century shifted the unbuildable sublime to the picturesque. That aesthetic category had a vocabulary: evergreen trees, rough angular surfaces, dark shadows, mysterious spaces and unfolding sequences that lead to experiences of surprise and delight that were only slightly and safely terrifying. This contrasted with the beautiful where orderly geometric designs of classical rationality were displayed. The risk, of course, was that the picturesque landscape caused confused and chaotic feelings, while the beautiful garden was subject to determinations of tastefulness, appreciated but predictable, and sometimes boring.

Beethoven spent four years near the end of his life composing a Mass in D major, Opus 123. Known as Missa solemnis, this is a massive musical undertaking. Performing the difficult score requires a full orchestra, large choral ensemble and multiple soloists, and for this reason it is seldom performed. To say that the complexity and volume of sound is astonishing is an understatement. Beethoven is said to have been motivated to outdo even himself in his attempt at the ultimate compositional form meant to awaken and inspire spiritual feelings. The feverish pitch is surmounted time and again, nevertheless the sublime moment occurs in a rare passage where the lead violinist and flutist exchanged a melody; perhaps one representing the Holy Spirit and the other the eternal struggle of mortals. Just as Missa solumnis ends with a plea, “Grant us peace,” the sublime achievement in design may be found less in attempts to overwhelm and impress, and more in the simple experience of a awesome exchange between a person and something that has nothing to do with human intentions sublime or otherwise, such as the peace granted when contemplating an old tree.