Garden Design for Abundance and Resilience
Earth Day has just passed. Spring has very much arrived in the Chicago area. Migrating birds are coming through in the millions (speaking of, please turn off your lights at night, especially outdoors, for the sake of nighttime migrators). It’s a season of renewal, abundance, and hope. But, as a professional wet blanket, I’m also thinking about global air temperature records (March was the second hottest on record - second only to last March) and scientific reticence (thanks to Anya Kamenetz’s post last week) - the inclination of scientists to underestimate global climate risks. According to this article in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists:
“That underestimation inhibits public understanding and policy making. This is a field in which knowledge is relatively new and growing quickly; the physical reality is changing rapidly; uncertainty can become an excuse for political delay; and the cost of not understanding the systemic risks may be the viability of major Earth systems and human societies.”
And I’m thinking about abundance and enoughness. Ezra Klein’s new techno-utopian book, Abundance, is getting a lot of buzz. I haven’t read it, so maybe I shouldn’t comment (gonna anyway). But it sounds like the same, tired, White guy, growth-obsessed environmentalism we’ve been hearing for decades.
It always surprises me how much people bristle at my advocacy for sufficiency, or enoughness as a personal, collective, and cultural practice to get ourselves out of the climate crisis. After decades working on climate, it’s become clear to me that if we don’t tackle our growth and consumption addictions, we’re toast (or broiled). I know I should be more empathetic about this addiction; after all, I suffer from it, too. But I think the whole environmental field wastes time walking on eggshells around science, policy, culture, and lifestyle so we don’t upset people (hello, reticence!). I’m sick of being told us climate folks need to deliver hope and comfort to people at the expense of accurately explaining what’s happening and why.
And with that in mind, before I get into today’s actual post, I wanted to share two recent pieces on sufficiency, which I came across via journalist, Twilight Greenaway. It’s a two-part series by Lloyd Alter, a professor of sustainable design. The first is “How to build a world around sufficiency, or ‘frugal abundance’” and the second part is “Sufficiency vs abundance: Less is more vs less is a bore.” These pieces are both responses to Ezra Klein’s new book, and also little sci-fi thought experiments, grounded in very real research and policy proposals, of what a future of sufficiency would look like.
The first step to undoing the vice-grip of consumption ideology is to be able to imagine something different, a world with an abundance of relationships, sharing, beauty, free time, and joy. Not material stuff.
Now onto design for abundance in a place where abundance is undeniably good: the garden!
Here’s my usual caveat: I’m a chaos gardener. I’m half-assed when it comes to gardening, and definitely do not strive for perfection. Design is not my forte and my garden doesn’t always read as “intentional.” I’d like to be better at garden design, but I consider it a kind of visual art, which I’ve never been very good at. Plus, it requires a level of attention to detail and planning that taxes my ADHD brain. So I’ve made my peace with my chaos garden.
That said, I’ll share some approaches to garden design, both for native plants and for food, that I’ve learned and drawn from over the years.
Permaculture
Permaculture is a design philosophy that was co-developed by two Australian guys, Bill Mollison and David Holmgren. I’ll say at the outset, it draws heavily on Indigenous land management practices that had been in place around the world for thousands of years before White folks ruined literally everything. The permaculture scene is still pretty full of hippy-dippy White folks who could stand to be a bit more racially aware, but is becoming better at acknowledging its Indigenous origins and drawing more diverse folks into the fold.
Permaculture abides by three ethics: Earth Care, People Care, Future Care. Its goal is to design gardens - but also buildings, communities, and beyond - to maximize the well-being of life, eliminate waste and pollution, and leave the ecosystem healthier than we found it. Pretty good goals, I’d say.
This method of design works well for mixed gardens, where you’re growing both food and native plants (and ornamentals or companion plants) all together. I took a permaculture design course a number of years ago from Midwest Permaculture, so can attest to its complexity. But there are elements of it that can be integrated into gardens without having to go all-in. For example, spirals are a big deal in permaculture, especially herb spirals. The spiral design is good for small gardens, packs a lot of plants into a small space, and can be used for both herbs and veggies. Here’s a little how-to.
Rather than tell you all I know about permaculture, which isn’t actually all that much relative to experts, I’m going to point you in the direction of some resources.
Gaia’s Garden by Toby Hemenway is the go-to book for home permaculture
Permaculture Women’s Guild garden design ideas
And because White people appropriate everything and then pretend it’s theirs, here’s this article: Decolonizing Regenerative Agriculture: An Indigenous Perspective
Matrix Planting
Matrix planting is the approach I’d recommend for a fully native and/or perennial garden. It’s the go-to design philosophy for naturalistic gardens. It consists of considering not just individual plants, but “plant communities,” and planting your garden densely, in layers of plants that naturally live together. There’s typically a base layer of grasses or other groundcover, with groupings of taller plants and shrubs to give it structure and diversity. Plants with similar needs (moisture, sunlight, etc.) are grouped together, and the plant communities feature a mix of shallow and deeper root systems so that they all play well together. The result is something much more wild looking than your traditional, manicured garden (which is often as much - or more - wood mulch than it is actual plants).
If your garden is mostly wood mulch with a plant here and a plant there, I’m gonna make fun of it. Sorry. But it’s for the sake of the planet.
In a matrix-design garden, once the plant communities are established, nature is meant to take over, and the garden should need minimal maintenance. The density of plantings keeps weeds at bay, retains moisture, keeps any one plant from taking over too much, and means the garden is generally more resilient. True matrix planting takes a lot of work in advance to plan your plant communities, but all that work up front should pay off in a garden that just happily does its thing without the need for much interference. Including, I should add, fall and spring cleanup. In naturalistic gardens, chopping all your plants down is a no-no because these gardens are as much for the birds and bugs as they are for people, and they benefit from these plants all year round. Plus, a well designed naturalistic garden takes into account how the stems and stalks and grasses will look in the winter and uses them as interesting structural elements.
So here are some resources:
The Know Maintenance Perennial Garden by Roy Diblik is a great book on this style of gardening, and Chicago/Wisconsin area friends can visit Roy’s nursery and demonstration gardens at Northwind Perennial Farm near Lake Geneva, WI. It’s gorgeous. Plus, they have goats you can pet!
Prairie Up by Benjamin Vogt. He’s another evangelist for natural landscape design and has lots of good resources. This book is especially focused on Midwest native gardening.
Here’s a video from a Wild Ones chapter featuring Benjamin Vogt explaining the basics of matrix design.
Here’s a useful article from Horticulture Magazine
And last but not least, Wild Ones provides ready-made garden designs and a ton of other resources to get started. This page also includes a video with Larry Weaner, a big deal ecological landscape designer. Why is it apparently all White guys in this field? I don’t know the ins and outs of how racism and sexism show up in landscape design, but obviously it’s a thing.
Square-foot planting for food
Finally, I’ve already written about square foot planting, but I wanted to include it again here because it’ll be a good approach for designing veggie gardens, especially in raised beds. Rather than rewrite a bunch of stuff, I’ll just direct you to my post “Let’s all plant a resistance garden!” which gets into lots of detail about veg gardens.
Some additional tips for naturalistic gardens. First - it’s best to plant two or three of a plant (or more, if you have the space) rather than one. In nature, plants generally grow in clusters, and if you have just one little buddy hanging out on his own, it can either get lost, or look goofy. That said, if you want to save money and you’re planting something like echinacea that will very happily spread, then go ahead and plant just one, and in a couple years you should be able to divide it, or it’ll have spread by seed. Second - think clusters not rows for naturalistic gardens. This will often be true in permaculture, as well. Rows are not natural and often not the best use of space.
Lastly, ignore the comments and/or side-eye from those neighbors who have their landscapers leafblow their gardens bare every week, leaving pristine swaths of wood mulch for you to enjoy, stripping their gardens of any life or originality.
You don’t want to be like those people, anyway.