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.