Considering complexity
Lessons on complexity in planting composition from dry summer landscapes.
Our creative conceptual work with plants is fuelled by time in natural landscapes and the practices of studying and tending plants. We are continually surprised and have our approach with plants challenged for the better with experiences out and about with plants. Time in landscapes nurtures curiosity and inquiry with plants and how to explore and enact plant communities in planting design and care. This continual cycle of discovery and learning fuels a lifelong love of the plant world, enriching our vocation with potential and possibility.
The plant communities we find in dry summer climates have both a sweet subtlety and drama. There are bold structures and xeric adaptations for survival in the heat and higher evaporation. Together with fluid and rapid responses plants make to the seasons, as the ultimate survivors. There is a palpable thrill to time in arid vegetation when plants respond in super saturated bloom to abundant rainfall.
These mass flowering events, known as Super Blooms, are a beloved character of arid environments, unpredictable and dependent on seasonal rainfall; they challenge community perceptions of deserts as barren and places dirth of beauty.
Travelling earlier in the year to California for our work and ongoing research was a masterclass in the opportunity and possibility of planting in our Australian context. It reaffirmed our approach and illuminated the wonder to cultivate in the dry. This trip allowed a rare opportunity when the elements aligned to spend time in the Super Bloom of the Carrizo Plains. California is renowned for its diversity and quantity of wildflowers, and its reputation did not disappoint.
The hills and valleys, super-saturated in bright magenta and golden hues, were the epitome of a super bloom with the landscape painted in colour, but what has stayed with me as a practitioner was the complexity and abounding details in the ephemeral layer of wildflowers. The desert vegetation held a structure of shrubs and grasses, which the ephemerals ran alongside, wound through, and emerged out of. These ephemerals were in a mind-blowing diversity of shape and form, building such astounding detail and composed complexity through the landscape.
This experience continues to drive our practice to explore the possibilities for complexity in plantings within projects. These experiences cultivate an abundance of thinking about how to enact and nurture layered complexity. Also, facilitate, design and tend dynamic plantings that contain complexity through time. Complexity that extends through the seasons. Wonder that extends beyond that atemporal time and window to beauty, which is a Super Bloom. But as always, planting is always considered through our Australian lens, the context of place and the future climate.
