Wild By Design

Strategies for Creating Life-Enhancing Landscapes

Margie Ruddick

• Publisher: Island Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781610915991
• Topic: Arquitectura
• Subtopic: Arquitectura general

Can nature—in all its unruly wildness—be an integral part of creative landscape design? In her beautifully illustrated book, Wild by Design, award-winning designer Margie Ruddick urges designers to look beyond the rules often imposed by both landscaping convention and sustainability checklists. Instead, she offers a set of principles for a more creative and intuitive approach that challenges the entrenched belief that natural processes cannot complement high-level landscape design. Wild by Design defines and explains the five fundamental strategies Ruddick employs, often in combination, to give life, beauty, and meaning to landscapes: Reinvention, Restoration, Conservation, Regeneration, and Expression. Drawing on her own projects—from New York City's Queens Plaza, formerly a concrete jungle of traffic, to a desertscape backyard in Baja, California, to the Living Water Park in Chengdu, China—she offers guidance on creating beautiful, healthy landscapes that successfully reconnect people with larger natural systems.
A revealing look into the approach of one of sustainable landscape design's most innovative practitioners, Wild by Design stretches the boundaries of landscape design, offering readers a set of broader, more flexible strategies and practical examples that allow for the unexpected exuberance of nature to be a welcome part of our gardens, parks, backyards, and cities.

Chapter 1:

A Laboratory for Wild By Design

The lessons of my own landscape helped me develop a set of rules for how to let a wild landscape emerge: Let things happen, but make sure it looks intentional, so as not just to let things go; try not to create mess in other people’s yards; get help. But there is also the design part, which is where the strategies in the chapters to follow come in. You can’t just plant a lot of stuff and let it go. The wild garden, or the eco-park, or the eco-city, needs a lot of tending, coddling, nurturing, and sometimes brutal hacking back, in order for it not to devolve completely into a massive tangle of trees, shrubs, and vines.

In order to have a “wild garden” and not a seemingly abandoned lot, you need to walk the thin line between order and chaos. And you need to exercise a greater design hold than many would imagine. The landscapes I make have a strong formal structure, for the most part; at least that is another rule I follow that I sometimes break. A strong formal hand helps to bring out the wild: It is that structural order against which the wild is clearly visible.

I went to Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, a school that at the time prioritized “design” over “ecology,” from the Natural Resources Group in New York City, where I helped map the wetlands, woodlands, and meadows of the city’s natural parklands. I don’t attribute my career in landscape design to childhood visits to gardens; rather, I am certain that the wild beaches and back dunes of eastern Long Island, where I spent summers, planted in me the seeds of my vocation.

The seeming “naturalness” is the product of watching, weeding, moving, adjusting.

I have always loved wild places, urban or otherwise: the dunes and scrub of eastern Long Island, which I consider my native landscape; the Shoshone River in Wyoming’s Tetons, where I spent two childhood summers; the Ramble in Central Park, where I worked in the mid-1980s. But until recently I didn’t realize how much my work tries to capture, even for a brief moment, and even in the city, the feeling of being immersed in a raw, sometimes wild piece of nature. I didn’t recognize how dualistic my own design process is, toeing the line between wildness and order. It was not until 2011, when my own domestic landscape was branded a “wild garden,” that I started to connect the dots.

In the winter of 2005 I bought a ranch house in a leafy Philadelphia neighborhood. After living in Philadelphia twins, or duplexes, for a dozen years, it occurred to me that what I really needed was a ranch house: compact, efficient, manageable, with a free plan, like the New York apartment I grew up in. I wanted the inside/outside connection that made the ranch the ultimate California type.

As I surfed the Internet for ranch houses in my neighborhood, the perfect house popped up onto my computer screen: butt-ugly, beige and gray brick, sitting in the snow all by itself, but a compact three-bedroom with corner windows and space all around it and a lot of light and air inside. A visit revealed a warren of small rooms packed into the small footprint of less than 2,000 square feet, but the walls would be easy to pull down. My home renovation engine went into overdrive.

Home reforestation project: the awkward age.

However, my fine-tuned radar went blank when trained on what, given my career, some would assume to be the first thing I would tackle: the landscape. The little ranch sat on a third of an acre, with one large silver maple (twin leader, weak crotch) and two bedraggled native dogwoods in the side yard, struggling to survive the lower-limb blight that has taken so many of them down in these parts over the past decades. All else, save the house footprint, the double-wide driveway, and a couple of concrete paths and pads, was lawn. And not just any lawn but a carefully tended, tidied, and chemically enhanced lawn. Once spring arrived and I got a look at all those perfect emerald green blades pushing up from the thawing earth, I realized that we were in trouble: Major volumes of herbicides, fungicides, and othercides were probably deployed to make a lawn that green and unblemished. The spring thaw revealed a sign planted on one side of the lot advertising a national lawn care company with a chemical-sounding name.

People would come to visit, look at the blank rectangle of lawn, and say, “So, I bet you have big plans for the landscape, right?” Well, no, actually. It was a blank slate; I am a designer of the adaptive reuse era. Give me a blank slate and I will have no idea what to do. The same common phrase kept popping into my head: Don’t do something, just stand there. So gradually, over the next 5 or 6 years, I inadvertently engineered my own private reforestation and garden project.

That first year I discovered, after one pass at mowing all that lawn, that there was no way I was going to spend over an hour a week mowing. I didn’t even want all that lawn. So I figured out how much lawn I really needed—a front path, an ample side yard for games, enough lawn at the back so we could hang out—and made a mowing plan by walking the outline I wanted for the lawn with the mower. That one move, what could be called discerning mowing, stood in for a more strategic design process for the next 2 or 3 years.

Rethinking Lawn: Starting with Mowing Plans

Where I mowed the lawn, albeit unaerated, unfertilized, and otherwise untreated lawn, the short lawn remained, growing more mossy at shaded low points where it stayed dampest after rains and sprouting with dandelions, clover, and violets, as well as crabgrass and other “weeds,” kept low by their weekly haircut. Where I didn’t mow, the grasses and “weeds” grew knee high by July. Sometime around that time each summer I would catch someone, a friend or neighbor, or even a member of my own family, looking askance at my messy front yard, and I would quickly scout around for someone to come weed-whack the naturalizing lawn-turning-to-meadow. Often I would hijack a crew from a neighbor’s yard, offering them $50, and they would go at it, but somehow, mysteriously, when I tried to get them back for another pass they would be tied up. My landscape scared even the landscapers.

In a bid to appease the neighbors and attract some skilled landscape help, I decided to clean up the edges of my messifying front yard. I mowed straight strips of meadow and overseeded them with turf grass, creating a tidy border around the property on the sidewalk and driveway sides, and a nice clean lawn path curving up from the sidewalk to the side yard. There, I told myself. Now it looks intentional.

Keeping the Edges Clean

In her book Messy Ecosystems, Orderly Frames, University of Michigan landscape architecture professor Joan Iverson Nassauer argues that although a messy groundplane promotes ecological health and even biodiversity, we are, at least as Americans, culturally averse to accepting the mess in our own back yards, or our neighbors’. She illustrates that a tidy margin of lawn, for instance, or the orderly frame of the title, increases people’s comfort with a landscape that carries the “disorderliness” or mess that supports life. A landscape that has been let go or cultivated for habitat will receive more buy-in if the public edges are kept neat, framed by lawn, walkways, or other devices. I found that once I had mown clean edges my neighbors calmed down considerably. Letting things happen can be instructive and fruitful, but it also can look like you are just letting things go; put a tidy frame around it so it looks as planned and managed as it in fact will be.

Roughly mown edges and a path up the middle of the space make the reforested patch (augmented with oakleaf hydrangea and ferns) appear more intentional.

By my third year of this experiment, the woody plants that had started to seed into the “meadow” began to harden off and show themselves. One whole bank of former lawn, where the side yard sloped down to the sidewalk, sprouted thick with black cherry seedlings, considered by many to be an invasive threat. Wild black cherry not only reproduce like mad, they also tend to be allelopathic: They send out into the earth at their base certain substances that discourage anything else from growing there. I knew that if I simply let them go, the bank would become a dark black cherry grove where little can grow on the groundplane, and the birds and the winds would broadcast black cherry seeds all over the neighborhood. My neighbors would not appreciate this, and I would just have this dark grove with little of the vertical layering that makes a landscape diverse. So I coppiced the whole stand, cut it down to about 3 feet high, and repeated whenever it looked like it might start to shoot out into a grove again, maybe several times a year.

In early spring the black cherry stand, left, is coppiced; the cherries, oaks, and other volunteers to the right are hand-pruned and underplanted with ferns, hellebores, and plants left over from the landscaper’s other properties (a hosta can be seen poking out of the middle).

Coppicing creates a bushy, thick habit, like a dense shrub layer. By cutting back in the spring, we prevent the trees from fruiting, lowering their value to birds, butterflies, and moths. But the practice achieves two important goals: The low, full stratum is home to many more species than a tall open woodland would be, and keeping the trees from producing berries keeps the plants from spreading throughout the neighborhood and beyond. In practice it is a rule, too often broken, that you do not change the topography of your property to send water to a neighbor’s land; you do not empty a swimming pool (if you have one) by placing the vacuum hose end directed toward someone else’s land. The same should go for dispersing invasive species, although in practice that takes a lot of maintenance. My property is a source of Norway maple, Japanese maple, and other invasive types, but I don’t have the heart or the means to remove them completely.

Keeping Stuff We Don’t Want off the Neighbors’ Property

The regeneration in the front yard was more mixed, because it gets more sunlight—black cherries, but also grasses and sedges that started to turn my front yard into a real meadow. Or so it appeared to me; some people still thought our place looked abandoned, and occasionally strangers would walk right up to the windows and look in to see whether the house was for sale.

That third summer I decided to make a vegetable plot in the front, and I planted a couple rows of tomatoes, and zinnias, and pumpkins for the fall. Kids loved it. Although the emerging forest/coppice had yet to achieve the look of something anyone could name, in the meantime this part of what was the front lawn had become a field.

The street often isn’t visible, to the left, beyond the vegetable/flower/herb patch.

Exporting Less

The next summer I started to add native plants at some of the edges, to provide a little color and screening of the chain link stretch of back fence—Carolina allspice, oakleaf hydrangea, and a variety of viburnums—and to start to articulate the spaces that were emerging through my mowing patterns. I planted a mix of aronia and leatherleaf viburnum to screen the two back corners (one the leaf pile, the other the brush pile) and the short side of the house, to keep the tools, containers from plantings, and compost bins out of sight. I finally had enough land, and two back corners that could use rounding off, to turn to larger-scale composting than just kitchen waste. More to spread around the garden, less to send to the landfill. Regardless of how many branches felled by winter storms we pil...