GROUNDWORK Ed.03
PLANTING A LANGUAGE OF CARE
As practitioners working with plants, the language we use to engage our clients and collaborators can deeply influence the kinds of attitudes they develop to the non-human world.
Is the language we use and how gardens and landscapes are cared for constraining our approach to planting design? Coming from the perspective of a gardener, the word “maintenance,” for instance, doesn’t seem compatible with the activity of caring for plants, gardens and larger public landscapes. The assumptions embedded in the language of “maintenance” do not sit well with the nature of plants, their life cycles or the way plants are adapting and responding to our changing climate. To “maintain” something is to control it – and such a language of order and control constrains the potential and possibilities of where our gardens and landscapes might lead us.
The term “maintenance” belongs in the realm of “good repair,” of keeping things to a standard, of fulfilling an expectation. It prescribes tasks that come together to keep a working order to ensure “good upkeep” in a site’s plantings and their surroundings. It conveys an assumption that vegetation is to be kept neat, tidy and unchanging – that plants that die will be replaced with the same species, that anything that grows spontaneously will be removed – that the newly defined garden will remain as it is.
The language of maintenance assumes that plants and their composition in a landscape will continue to exist in specific shapes, like a seat, building, or cut-out panorama. It is language that defines plants as static and fixed, rather than as living beings of a place. The terminology aligns plant care with that of building maintenance and its associated tasks of repair and repainting. Maintenance is the language of tasks completed and repeated in set intervals to a preordained calendar. Using this language for plant care suggests that we want the plants in our landscapes to be elements and blocks, all known and specified. It is an approach that takes cues from our regimented working schedules, rather than from the varied and dynamic qualities and characteristics of plants.
Maintenance, with its schedule of the “daily” or the “weekly,” has a short-term view of a garden or landscape. The tasks of maintenance are often undertaken in isolation without considering context. Such a response fails to engage with how a garden is and how a landscape grows through the shifting seasons and evolves with a changing climate. How appropriate are tasks when they are at a remove from the garden’s wider physical and temporal context?
Towards a “management” approach
By contrast, the term “management” recognizes a greater complexity in plant care. The language associated with management is entangled with the activities of observation and evaluation, and it can lead to the formation of interventions that respond more sensitively to the garden as a community from a longer-term view. This terminology speaks to the nature of plants within systems – systems that are dynamic and changing.
Management, as a concept, better illustrates what kind of care gardens and landscapes need. As a gardener, I believe that gardens and landscapes have much to teach us. Plants show us their lifecycles, opportunistic natures, relationships with other plants, insects, and animals – they show us their responses to environmental conditions and reveal their roles within a plant community and ecology. Plants always are surprising us. The simplified nature of task-orientated maintenance inhibits our ability and the value of the care practices to grow the garden in concert with plants.
Managing a landscape involves nurturing a deeper knowledge of how individual plants and larger vegetation communities may form and change over time through observation that informs when interventions happen and for what purpose. Feedback and evaluation of plant performance is used to plan future interventions and actions – for example, plantings can be adapted in response to changing microclimates. We can rethink and redefine plant care as considered interventions within a system, as part of a larger process in play. This is an opportunity to see plant care as integral to a larger system where considered tasks are planned for and applied in response to how we have observed plants – and the broader landscape – are performing. The language of management shapes the ambitions and expectations of plant care for gardens and landscapes to grow and thrive, to adapt, change and progress.
There is a whole vocabulary to explore in evaluating the relationship of care and intervention with plants – the words “grow,” “nurture,” “tend” and “cultivate” are among those that engender active care. These also take a longer view of where a landscape and garden might be headed.
As horticulturalists, gardeners, landscape architects and designers, we use language to engage clients, collaborators and stakeholders that can have a profound influence on what attitudes they have to the plant world. By carefully considering the words we use, we have the ability to nurture greater possibilities for care and advocate for strategies that give a landscape the space to flourish and continue to grow in resilience and complexity.
Published for Landscape Architecture Australia, May 2024
Words: Jac Semmler, Super Bloom
Images: On Jackson St, Sarah Pannell
