he television camera zooms down on the contented baby, giving us a close-up look at the water retention properties of this latest high-tech diaper design. An off?EUR??,,????'??+ camera voice coos the benefits that can be derived from wearing this synthetic, bulky bag and the comforts it affords the baby. The real message is barely suggested the real purpose of diapers being the protection of carpets and furniture. Therefore, it is the baby who is obliged to endure the inevitable results of unpleasant clamminess and painful diaper rash.

Perhaps we have an inner need to protect ourselves against painful truths. Zoos build wondrously lifelike enclosures in order to faithfully reproduce the polar ice cap or a tropical rain forest, but the tiger isn’t fooled into believing that he is back in his native Sumatra highlands. The fanciful displays – like those currently under construction at the San Diego Zoo – are really for the pleasure of the public, but we need to fool ourselves, to pretend that the tiger has now, been made ecstatically happy. Likewise, we pretend that our children are delighted with the fanciful, brightly colored play equipment, clever tunnels and topography we provide for them, but if we dared to ask them beforehand what it was they really wanted in their play areas we might be surprised to find that aesthetics are not high on their list. If kids have been deprived of a more useful, more honest environment – in exchange for appearance?EUR??,,????'??+so perhaps have we all.

The Essence of Place

Consider the landscape, just by itself. Once upon a time natural laws were heeded by settlers and the site wasn’t threatened with occupation until there had been a thorough study of the prevailing ecosystem, wind and sun patterns, water availability, temperature fluctuations, soil content, drainage patterns, humidity and pests. Yes, even aesthetics. In other words, the essence of the place. Today we assess land qualities in quite a different way. Before a construction venture is anticipated we study the various economic determinants – growth potential of the area, competing enterprises, market analysis, housing forecasts, lending rates and profit margins. Then, if all the current indicators compute “go,” the site will be cleared and summarily striped of vegetation and character. Topsoil will be removed in the process, the subsurface drainage system crushed, topography obliterated, native trees and shrubs torn from the earth, dragged and stacked?EUR??,,????'??+like death camp corpses – to be burned.

Now the “improvements.” Subsurface drainage will be recreated in the form of concrete and PVC pipe. The topography will be reshaped in accordance with specified minimum slope standards, surfaces will be ground smooth, aerated and poisoned, fertilized and undulated. Then trucks full of trees will appear, most of them exotic, their thin, whip-like trunks strapped to stakes. After the plastic pots are popped off, they are dropped into uniformly augered holes, where the ghosts of native oak and alder linger. Then the grass is unrolled over the sterilized surface and ground covers, still growing with hot-house vigor, are fitted into the predetermined paper concept. Trees, shrubs, grass and ground cover must now be coaxed to survive by plying them with nourishment, protecting them against the native creatures from whom they have no natural immunity and against the native weeds and wildflowers who might otherwise hope to reclaim their former home.

?EUR??,,????'??Nature Is Not The Enemy Of The Landscape Industry, Despite What The Trade Journals Continue To Preach?EUR??,,????'??

That is what we usually do. The advertisements in this magazine spell out our dependency on tools and methods. But we’re not finished. We go to add artificial pools, cemented together with natural-looking stones featuring pretty little waterfalls that are kept clean and tidy through chemistry and ever gurgling by way of electricity. But one could just as easily sit beside a mountain brook and watch clear, cold water rushing past rocks and waterfalls, under miniature cliffs to expose their alder roots. From somewhere above, a large yellow maple leaf is apt to spiral down to the surface, to ride the current like some rudderless raft while slim, dark water stridders skate the edges, seeking the eddies. The brook is charged by deep snowfields somewhere above, the melting snow metered by the warmth of the sun which in turn sends the water to recharge aquafiers and fill earth dams, to percolate and leach the soil, degrade the leaf mold and other organic matter, raise the water table, replenish our storage tanks and reservoirs and irrigate our strawberries. There is something reassuring in all this. Beautiful too. Is any of this nobility of purpose or scale of beauty captured in whirring, recirculating fountains of shopping center pools? Not that we shouldn’t have fountains in shopping centers, but we have to acknowledge that our hard?EUR??,,????'??+edged, high-maintenance landscapes are energy consuming – unlike the energy producing landscapes of nature. Lineal vs. cyclical.

Wildlife Is A Missing Element

Wildlife is another element seen missing from the wholly contrived landscape. Rabbits, squirrels, birds and butterflies. The original occupants of the place will have departed with the appearance of the bulldozers or the bright green pesticide trucks. And it would be dangerous for them to return because there would be nothing for them to eat, no place for any of them to make a home, everything having been raked, pruned and blown. And poisoned. John Edmundson writes (Audubon Nov. 1987) that modern golf course management in California now requires such heavy spraying of fungicides such as diazinon and daconil that migrating waterfowl, foolish enough to settle onto the fairways and artificial ponds overnight, are found dead or dying in the morning. In the same issue of Audubon, Dwight Holing refers to the work of University of California, Riverside (UCR) professor Wilbur Mayhew, who has documented the decline of native animal species in Coachella Valley, California, resulting from habitat loss through the singular development of golf courses in the area. Not only do these introduced grasses used in the fairways require excessive amounts of water in order to survive the intense heat of the desert, but, having no immunity to local pests, must be saturated with herbicides. In the December 1987 issue of California Landscape Magazine, UCR is discovered on the other side of the fence, with plant pathologist Robert M. Endo’s recommendations: “Five fungicides provide good control of (blight) when applied as a drench once monthly for five consecutive months: Systhane, Banner, Rubigan, Spotless and Benlate.” He also raves about the wonders of PCBN, but there is nothing in the article about the dangers involved in their use or even a hint of a question as to the logic of using grasses that require such extreme measures to keep them alive. Now, if they just made the sand traps a little bigger…

There Is Room To Help Nature

Maybe we need to apply a little more imagination. Britain’s Nature Conservancy Council is currently engaged in a campaign to reduce such heavy?EUR??,,????'??+handed maintenance requirements in order to encourage a return of nature’s cycle to public parks – at least in part. “Let’s plant shrubs that will attract wildlife. Put aside a quiet corner of the park for a maintenance-free sanctuary or a backdrop where nature can unroll its richness with one form of wildlife attracting another. Let dead leaves collect under some trees and bushes attracting a new layer of insect life. There is room to help nature, not to doing more to areas, but by doing less.”

So, if we are going to make a real effort to encourage a return of nature to our own city parks, we will need to make some obvious adjustments in our management programs. St. Louis has attempted to do this in Forest Park by simply eliminating maintenance in one small, wooded section of eight or ten acres. It was the only area of the park where I was able to find an abundance of birdlife. Reducing or eliminating maintenance in a park seems overly simple, too easy. In the long run much more would be necessary. First, we would have to select the plant material very carefully so as to produce a sustainable ecosystem, one that included all areas of wildlife required to close the loop. The Hutton’s Vireo, for example, cannot survive as a species without the Coast Live Oak, from whose leaves it gleans a living. Certain woodpeckers will live only in certain pines, while exotic plants, no matter how adaptive to our soils and climate they prove to be, are not members of the club. The connection between plant and animal, between place and species, are well known to us as are the awesome homing instincts of the salmon and the Monarch butterfly. So before our enthusiasum for Mediterranean plants overcomes our logic, we need to remind ourselves of the things we’ve known since we were children. Introduced species either fail (or require human assistance in order to survive) or they succeed far beyond the ecosystem’s ability to maintain a balance. We all know the horror stories of kudzu, killer bees, walking fish, Nile perch and starlings.

But why blame the Landscape Architect? He didn’t order a golf course in the desert, with the purest of velvety greens. And it was the client who insisted on dichondra, wasn’t it?

Right. There are too many people out there who wouldn’t know a ecosystem from an egocentric, but they are calling the tunes. Take the theme park, with it’s carefully managed, carefully controlled and artistically enhanced environment. There is no more popular place in America for one to spend his dollars, considering the 235 million visitors that paid their way into the theme parks last year. That is more than the entire population of the United States. In 1987, 23 million people pushed through the turnstiles of Disneyland, Knotts’ Berry Farm, Magic Mountain and Universal Studios Tour in Southern California. That is almost triple the population of Los Angeles and Orange Counties combined. And in Florida, another 22.4 million pushed through Disneyworld/ Epcot – more than double the population of the entire state – to oggle mechanical dinosaurs from a boat?EUR??,,????'??+shaped conveyor on a submerged track. (Amusement Business, U.S. Census, California and Florida Census updated 1987 and 1985). No, for these folks Mickey Mouse is wildlife enough, thank you.

Developing “Paradise”

Tantalized no doubt by figures like these, big land developer David Murdoch is presently at work converting little Lanai, Hawaii, from pineapples to playgrounds for the mainland tourists. According to Los Angeles Times writer Tamara Jones, “The favorite beach is a paradise-perfect crescent of soft sand and talcum, fringed with coconut palms and translucent sea. But now bulldozers growl and saws whine over the slap of the waves. Trees are coming down, a new recreation center has been built, with Lanai’s first swimming pool.” Imagine, a swimming pool beside Hawaii’s “paradise-perfect” beach.

All around us the rhythm of nature keeps humming along, trying to tell us not to fix what ain’t broke. Shouldn’t we join the orchestra? In the 1947 movie, George Washington Slept Here, Jack Benny plays an urbanite who buys a Connecticut farm. One thing after another goes wrong, but when the handyman hands him a bill for spraying the farm’s trees for seven-year locusts, it’s the last straw. In his frustration, Benny utters the film’s most memorable line: “Who runs through the forest spraying the trees?” We laugh and the handyman frowns, but Benny’s question reaches for some deeper knowledge in all of us. Yes, we know the locusts will invade the trees. So will the insects. And the bark chomping rodents, hole drilling birds and root rotting fungi. And there will also be a struggle between the trees for space and sunlight. Some will lose out and fall in the next big wind, but there on the ground they will continue in their ultimate purpose – adding to the topsoil, hindering erosion, providing homes for the countless species of insect that will in their time provide food for a multitude of birds who will help to scatter the seeds for the next generation of trees. Plants living in the wilderness, without benefit of maintenance contractors and their deadly sprays, pay their membership dues – the price of their freedom. The old sycamore in the ravine is infested with insect grubs, blackened by a long ago fire, hollowed out by woodpeckers and sapsuckers, bent and misshappen by floods, but it proudly greets each new spring with a halo of bright new foilage. The corrotwood in the parking lot, staked and pruned into a tolerable form, seems sadly oblivious to nature’s rhythms, confused and alienated by an alien environment.

Nature Is Not The Enemy of the Landscape Industry

Speaking at Cal Poly University recently, Dr. Wes Jackson of The Land Institute prophesied that in the coming decades, technology in agriculture and landscape industries will divide into two camps. One camp would consist of those who would continue to depend upon progress in high-tech scientific solutions to problems, including chemical fertilizers and pest controls, gene splicing to produce crops resistant to such poisons and induced – growth hormones. The other camp would include those who more and more would learn to be dependent upon organic, less extractive methods of achieving biological balances already plentiful in nature, in order to produce better crops and ornamentals at a lower overall cost. Nature is not the enemy of the landscape industry, despite what the trade journals continue to preach. Rachel Carson demonstrated the need for natural, organic production methods in the 1950’s, causing an uproar from the supply side industries at the time, but she has been proven to be correct and Silent Spring became a halyard in the struggle to begin the elimination of dangerous agricultural poisons. Ann Spirn carries the role of nature further in The Granite Garden. The city must be recognized as part of nature. The city, the suburbs and the countryside must be viewed as a single, evolving system within nature, as must every individual park and building within the larger whole. The social value of nature must be recognized and its power harnessed rather than resisted.”

My first job as a Landscape Architect was with the National Park Service in San Francisco. My mentor, Al Kiehl was a patient man. He explained his design method to me in more or less the following way:

You’re used to beginning with a blank sheet, like you were taught in school. Normally that’s okay, but here, with all of nature around you, here you have to be subtractive, not additive. Your canvas is already full… with greens, blues, yellows, reds…all the colors, all the shapes and textures. Think of it as a good painting, only your job is going to be to make it great. Take something out, create some accents, open up some views. Discover something hidden, emphasize what is already there.

Later when I was in private practice in Miami, working from a blank canvas again, I tried to rationalize the differences in method and purpose. There I was, drawings unrolled and impatient for results, craning in the full grown trees, plopping giant boulders into a “natural” seawall, sculpting a miniature topography for putting, rolling out a royal carpet of green while rain fell from a hundred spray heads on a tropical pseudo-paradise. I thought about Yosemite and Al Kiehi, patiently waiting for Congress to act on Capitol Reef, waiting for the redwoods to grow.

My comment about the diaper commercial has caught a young mother’s attention.

“Are you suggesting that I stop using them,” she asks. “You want us to go back to the stone age or something?”

Hardly. I just hope she’ll remember what the thing is for, and largely because of it, why American babies are fifty times more stressful to the environment than Chinese babies. It might help make us be a little more circumspect, a bit more forgiving – maybe more patient with a crying baby. Anyway, why should we be expected to understand the workings of the natural world around us if we distrust, or worse, disapprove of our own nature?

Theme park attendance and our insatiable thirst for sport and other forms of paid entertainment suggest that we are fast becoming a nation of spectators, dependent upon external sources of amusement, diverted by exotic pleasures, alienated from both our inner nature and the nature that surrounds us. Landscape Architects may not go to the extremes of Jay Appleton’s Sir Giles Augustus Fowlingpiece, Who “instantly became neurotic if one but mentioned an exotic.”

And as Landscape Architects, we might wish to excuse ourselves from the whole thing by being too small in numbers to cause much of a difference anyway. But among the various professions that meddle in the environment, we alone ought to know how and why to do it better. We know what a diaper is really for. We know what the tiger knows.

Jere French is a California licensed Landscape Architect, and a professor of landscape architecture at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona. He has been a fellow in the American Society of Landscape Architects since 1986 and is a member of the National Committee on Education. In addition, French has been published in several periodicals and reference works in the field of landscape architecture and is a winner of the ASLA’s Bradford Williams Medal, 1971.