Showing posts with label nature stories. Show all posts
Showing posts with label nature stories. Show all posts

Wednesday, April 12, 2023

The Story in the Garden

What does the phrase "distributional green equity" mean? Is it about equal space for different plants and grasses? Equal space for each blade in a lawn? 

No. It means that social groups called "marginalized" should have equal access to green urban environments -- although in urban settings "green" may have nothing to do with grass, trees or gardens. It may refer to electric charging stations, bike paths or playgrounds with plasticized ("safe") ground cover.

The equity part means that everyone can be equally deprived of nature space: everyone has equal access to universal paving.

Just as certain narratives are censored in today's media, there is a visual cancelling of gardens. A well-designed garden is a visual story. Strolling through it you become acquainted with plant-characters interacting, either calmly or boisterously, in weather-driven plots, each season a different chapter. 

Garden-stories come in different genres, some classic, some contemporary. Horticulture goes through historical phases, and a well-designed garden brims with references to various periods and styles, depending on the story it's telling. These are censored when a landscape is paved -- the back stories of plants erased, the histories they had bodied forth being cancelled when they convey something which culture warriors fear and want to suppress: the past. 

It's sad when books are banned, magazines shuttered, language policed and conferences picketed by silencers, but these things don't only happen in the verbal world. Horticultural stories and ideas too are lost when gardens are erased under equitizing regimes in planning. 

Crowded hyper-urbanized planning results from overpopulation, but it works in lock-step with cultural story-suppression. Heritage-garden storytelling has been declared "colonialist". When large masses are crowded together, many views, traditions and intentions rub up against each other just as people do physically on public transport, and high-rise towers do on the horizon of the city-scape. 

It's not only the oxygen, tree canopy, floral abundance and bird song we lose when space is over-crowded. Under a regime of equal-concrete-for-all we also lose, by design, the stories that gardens tell in botanical language.

Every tree we eliminate in pursuit of pave-and-build development, had a life story of its own. Every tree was an individual shaped by its biography: its limbs showed its relationship with light as it turned seasonally toward the sun over decades, and the birds, arthropods and lichens that lived on it were its life-companions. Much of its story took place underground where roots stretched toward water and interacted with fungi and micro-organisms in soil.

Together these individuals make a forest-family when left to their own lifestyles, and when we pick off their relatives and log away whole woodlands as building sites, we are destroying a tree-nation, we are committing genocide in the form of arboricide. 

Garden stories are linked to a past we are too-often told is "shameful", meaning we should be ashamed of private household gardens as something privileged. But instead of engaging in some sort of de-privileging exercise, why don't we privilege everyone equally? Why not give all urbanites and suburbanites access to life-giving green-space around their houses? 


Sit for a while at the feet of trees, and listen ...