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Landscaping Fails When it Disregards the Real World By RON SULLIVAN

Special to the Planet
Tuesday February 08, 2005

I’m interrupting the trees-of-Berkeley series for a short rant. Nice words about our city’s trees will resume in two weeks. 

Gardens in Berkeley schools have sprouted contention along with the posies for several years. The one on the grounds of Willard School on Telegraph Avenue, planted by volunteers and lately much-altered by the school district, is only the latest. A couple of years ago, a students’ garden at another Berkeley school was demolished without warning, for construction access. Another was removed—though it’s now replanted—when neighbors complained that there were rats in the neighborhood. I live pretty close to that one; there are still rats in the neighborhood and, I suspect, every other neighborhood, too. I’ve seen them playing Flying Wallendas on the utility wires downtown, and yes, I can tell a rat from a squirrel.  

It’s fascinating to me, the way roadkill is fascinating, that there seems to be a widespread or at least influential attitude that a garden is disposable and that the work of making a garden is to be taken for granted and dismissed when convenient. The work I mean is the thoughtful, dirty-hands stuff of dealing with soil and plants and the place they’re in. 

I see a shade of this unpleasant color even in people who should know better, like landscape architects. I have come to prize those who know their plants (“plant materials”) and the place they’re using. When you’ve worked with a few of them, you learn that there are some who understand that they’re working with land, not just rooms without ceilings, and some who, apparently, don’t. This is the Ozymandias School of Garden Design. Remember those “two vast and trunkless legs of stone” that stand over the engraved “Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!” The works, of course, are long gone; the shattered monument is surrounded by wasteland.  

Landscape architects who concentrate on “hardscape”—walls, walks, accessory buildings, garden stuff that doesn’t grow—to the detriment of actual plants might be doing architecture, but aren’t landscaping. Some seem to think that beneath them; one landscape architect wrote an indignant letter to the San Francisco Chronicle’s magazine when he was referred to as the “landscaper” of a project, huffing that he wasn’t to be mistaken for those guys who dig the holes and plant the shrubs. Indeed, it seems dubious, on reading that letter, that he would have that skill. 

One can almost sympathize, though, because mere plants are so often the first targets of the brickoholics, the people who see empty space wherever there isn’t a building. A stunt building with facings of unused signboards and an automatic gate made of (apparently brand-new) Volvo doors is somehow “green”—but what it replaced was a garden. People who don’t want their gardens shaded out by a high-rise next door are somehow anti-poor NIMBYs. Community gardens are somehow unworthy if all they provide is a place to plant, and if they’re so popular that there’s a waiting list, well, they must be “elitist” and needn’t exist. 

All this happens in an atmosphere of disregard for the real world, where ignorance of our surroundings is accepted as normal. So we have abominations like the word “landfill”—as if the land were empty before we dumped garbage on it!—and the sloppy use of “open space” and “parks” to make golf courses and soccer fields seem equivalent to actual wildlands, to habitat for animals other than us and our rats and roaches and pets.  

And we pretend that all green things are interchangeable, like so many chairs, as if a plant were merely an ornament and not home and sustenance for its own unique wild community. We pretend that taking down a tree is of no more import than moving a lamp. Trees aren’t just pretty; they’re the last chance for habitat in a crowded city, where they manage to fit so much acreage into so small a footprint because they’re vertical. We see that in buildings; how can we fail to see it in organisms? 

How much do we fail to see because it’s convenient to remain ignorant? What else do we close our eyes to, so we can destroy it without caring?