against innocent gardens

Each of us lives in landscape. There is no out.

The question is not whether you will shape it, but how honestly you will live with what your shaping costs.

Landscapes are not neutral ground. They are shaped by forces that do not ask permission. What is named presses against what is never acknowledged - explicit intentions and latent drives grinding against one another in plain sight.

To live in landscape is to be enmeshed in a field of relations that exceed control or full understanding. As humans, we are always already shaping what we inhabit. The only choice is whether to do so deliberately/intimately/reciprocally or to allow others to decide on our behalf.

I choose not to pretend neutrality.

I love landscape.

I love tiny gold-backed Pentagramma clinging to the cliffs that cradle the spring-rushed Rogue River.

I love squelching out through a sparse pine forest to discover fields of Sarracenia stretching out as far as you can see.

I love the happy exhaustion after a summer day pulling weeds and the rasp of lantana foliage that causes my skin to erupt in little pimples. 

I live my love by making landscape my work. Sometimes this means witnessing. Sometimes it means designing in collaboration with other people, their whims and desires. Sometimes it means gardening, tending my own plants. Each is a practice of the same love, operating at different intensities of intimacy and commitment. These practices vary, not in their driving motivation, but in how deliberately, how closely, and how persistently I choose to interfere.

I refuse the belief that human involvement with the world is inherently tragic. I believe humans can enchant the world through cultivation - not as fantasy, but through attention and ongoing care. 

I have witnessed a lineage of gardeners, designers, artists, and thinkers who pursued their visions without guarantees. What they modeled was not a method but a practice: the pursuit of individual vision through cultivation and care. This lineage is uneven, sometimes contradictory, unresolved. I grow in its shadow. I carry its questions forward and allow them to trouble me.

I enter this work knowing I am not neutral. There are forms, textures, rhythms, and presences that compel me beyond usefulness or reason.

I want foggy mornings, slow evenings, endless drizzling rain. I want old trunks strung with lichen, piled with moss, and erupting in licorice or resurrection ferns. I want my own cloud forest. Tree ferns that dwarf me, outrageous baubles of pendulous flowers, condensation tracking down the rigid veins of a Fuchsia boliviana leaf and swelling in a bubble at the tip. I want my Epimedium, my Arisaema, my Paris to be rare enough to feel slightly wrong.

My wants are not innocent. Sometimes, I can’t reason them out. I pursue the visions anyway. In my work with landscape, I choose to be accountable for wanting and for living with what that wanting sets in motion. 

Working with landscape promises no redemption, purity, restoration, or absolution. The work demands care without endpoint, attention without guarantee, and responsibility without the comfort of completion.

My work is not about the easy answer. It is about contact. About attention. About pursuing right-relation with a world that fights back. Ecological benefit, social value, and educational function may emerge, but they are not guarantees. No garden is innocent. No landscape resolves into a stable moral position.

For this reason, I reject work rooted in guilt, rescue, virtuous performance, or inherited obligation. I do not design to soothe conscience. I do not reenact nostalgia. I do not restore imagined pasts. I do not launder aesthetics as ecology. I work in the damaged, the hybrid, and the ongoing.

I enter sites already charged with plants, with living inhabitants, with old mistakes no one wants to own. I pay attention. I speculate. I interfere. I observe. I wait. I revise.

 I accept that my interventions will have consequences I cannot fully predict. I do not disappear when they arrive. I stay with them. I see them through. 

The joy of working with landscape is that it pushes back. Landscape will always remind you that control is an illusion. Consider plants. They are living lineages that refuse, persist, and outlast expectation. They punish impatience. They ignore convenience. They teach without instruction - by dying, by surviving, by failing where I expected success. 

To love landscape is to accept undoing and remaking—

of the site and of myself.

Delusions are endless.

Including my own.

Understanding is optional. Attention is not.

To work driven by desire and discovery costs me certainty. It costs the comfort of consensus, the ease of alignment, the protection of neutrality. There are easier gardens to make.

I have seen them.

I chose not to build them.