“The fact that human beings create such things as gardens is strange […]” reflects Robert Harrison in his 2008 book Gardens: An Essay on the Human Condition – a book that was recommended to me by my partner in weird academic interests, Rea! (psstt, who now also has a blog)
“Why would gardens be strange, you weirdos?” you might be thinking. As the author puts it – they mark a bizarre and somewhat conflicting (but not fully antithetical) human desire to both represent nature as well as to transfigure it! Many of us, especially those born and raised in cities, are used to considering a walk in a garden or park as quasi-wilderness where we could get some… #nature #hotgirlwalk.
Admittedly, compared to “restaurants shaped like hats and hamburgers, and four-level freeways with ten thousand ramps” (which is how Umberto Eco describes California), green spaces within cities might truly feel like nature.
And why shouldn’t they? What is nature? Now, a 25-year-old blogger can’t claim to define what different cultures, philosophers and a plethora of other disciplines have tried to define for centuries. But I can claim that there is, my intuition tells me, a difference between a hike in the mountains and a walk in a city park that resembles an outside mall, or a walk in a well-curated garden.
Let’s look at one example. My close Bulgarian friend Ellie, a passionate hiker, lived in Germany for some years where she also felt disoriented in her perception of what nature was. She had told me that the well-maintained Alpine forest paths were in fact so well groomed, so accessible and at parts even asphalted, that she sort of felt like walking in a park instead of real mountains.
Or, likewise, near the Bulgarian village where I used to spend my summers as a kid, a fortress remains were discovered in the foothills of Rila mountain. So, to aid and encourage tourists, a well-constructed path appeared with wooden benches at every few meters, trash cans, and signs to indicate how long is left until the top. Bulgarians from the region quickly boasted about how “Western” this site has become. As if it were no longer the same mountain hill - it had now become civilized. But doesn’t this show just the cultural element of being in nature? It was already partly the product of human work – paths and signs were there, just now there is also a funicular… as well as a coffee shop.
Not saying it is necessarily a bad thing or that I haven’t enjoyed my hot chocolate alongside my kartofki with sirene at that coffee shop myself, but one could argue that all of this is “unnatural”.
Yet, we have to admit that whether our hikes have newer benches and shiny signs in English or not, these are still places where humans have intervened. It just matters howit is done, which subjectivizes how people perceive it.
That said, much like this sentiment of unnaturalness in what is supposed to be nature, we can feel naturalness in what is supposed to be non-nature. Another one of Rea’s finds – the landscape architect Thomas Woltz articulates this intuition in an interview to the New York Social Diary:
I realize they [people in general] don’t think public parks are constructed spaces. They think they’re just the part of the city that didn’t get built on.
Poor landscape architects… for many people seem to be practically blind to the results of their labor.
And I swear, it’s a real job! I’ll save you the UN’s International Labour Organization definition, but my friend Rea rightly observed that once you get into landscape architecture (LA) academia it seems as if it is all propaganda for the field itself.
Couldn’t be more true if we read Yue Xing & al. ’s definition who calls the practice of landscape architecture (LA):
a beautiful place where humans and nature are integrated
Well, that’s rich! When have humans and nature ever been integrated??!
Definitions aside, the secret LA agents are doing their thing and constructing green spaces and most of us, city children who need to have city jobs in order to live a normal life, will at minimum a few times a year want to go to a park, a garden or an accessible hike.
But is landscape architecture getting us any closer to understanding nature or is it getting us further away? If the lines have globally been blurred between what we see as nature and what we see as artifice, don’t we risk, or even already experience, a progressive desensitization to experiencing nature? Maybe sometimes LA doesn’t aim to mimic unconstructed nature, maybe other times it does. Nevertheless, in both cases, the result is thatgreen spaces are both somewhat simulating untouched nature but also transforming it into something different that no longer reflects the reality of nature.
As Henry David Thoreau writes in Walden, “Be it life or death, we crave only reality!”. But in response to this, Harrison’s essay on gardens adds the equal craving to “[…] adorn it with costume and illusion, and thereby to respiritualize our experience of it.”
In other words, WEIRD!
In Part 2 I will not only continue to shamelessly quote my friends and use their personal experiences for examples but I will also get to AI in landscape architecture as well as, the one and only, Jean Baudrillard. Thank you for reading and, as always, if you enjoyed please like, subscribe & let me know what you think!