Our Back Yards Are Front Lines
Thomas Rainer on the battle for nature
“The front lines of the battle for nature are not in the Amazon rainforest or the Alaskan wilderness; the front lines are our backyards, medians, parking lots, and elementary schools. The ecological warriors of the future won’t just be scientists and engineers, but gardeners, horticulturists, land managers, landscape architects, transportation department staff, elementary school teachers, and community association board members.”
So say landscape designers Thomas Rainer and Claudia West, authors of the influential Planting in a Post-Wild World. Their point is this: if we want to save the planet, we need to abandon the notion that nature exists apart from us, somewhere “out there,” and instead embrace the job of bringing it back into our cities and suburbs. And by “we,” I mean you and me. Us. We need to make it our responsibility.
The key, Rainer and Thomas say, is thinking about plantings as communities of compatible species rather than collections of prized ornaments.
“The way plants grow in the wild and the way they grow in our gardens is starkly different. In nature, plants thrive even in inhospitable environments; in our gardens, plants often lack the vigor of their wild counterparts, even when we lavish them with rich soils and frequent water. In nature, plants richly cover the ground; in too many of our gardens, plants are placed far apart and mulched heavily to keep out weeds. In nature, plants have an order and visual harmony resulting from their adaptation to a site; our gardens are often arbitrary assortments from various habitats, related only by our personal preferences.”
In this 4.5-minute and lovely video, Rainer shares more on loosening up the landscape, using framing to tame potential chaos, and choosing the plants that actually want to grow in our spaces. For those who worry that native-plant gardens are unattractive, here’s your rebuttal.
Rainer’s and West’s words are music to The Bees’ Knees ears (let's not to think too deeply about whether knees can have ears). So here’s a shoutout to their efforts to bring nature home, beautifully. Odd video, but catchy song.
Yeah, unfortunately there's no getting around the need for managing invasives. But ideally if we're planting the right natives in the right places, they'll start to outcompete some of those invasives.
Letting things grow in our yard often results in the more powerful invasives. They are still beautiful.