Trust us; we don’t know what we will do
I
“Are you confident this mulch will actually work? Looks like a whole lotta soon-to-be-dry compost to me!” I am not sure, but I’ve been hired to provide my agricultural insight, so I work to maintain his confidence. The farm manager continues, “I do like the look of the planting beds, I just hope all our plants won’t die cuz the mulch dries up.” It’s a fair concern.
We’re looking at 18 newly shaped market garden beds, covered in horse manure, with chipped wood marking the paths. Beyond the fenceline the juniper trees and Piñon pines dot the landscape, with the occasional bone dry patches of grass in between. This isn’t a true desert, but it feels close.
“I honestly don’t know,” I admit. “But I’m hoping it’ll act as a protective skin as long as we’re able to saturate the beds and then make sure there is enough irrigation to keep it moist.” We’re following sound ecological and market garden principles, but I’ve only ever seen this unfold in climates with at least three times the expected amount of annual precipitation. Meanwhile, the garden space itself is nested within the fences of a former corral, giving it a slightly unusual shape for such an otherwise rigid garden.
As is inevitable when trying to harmonize complexity, there is only one way to find out if our plan has any merit.
A few weeks later, a number of crops are sprouting and seemingly doing well. The standardized bed sizes are a game changer for the vegetable operation, freeing up mental space and time to focus on growing plants. The orientation of the beds align with the main gate, giving a sense of being pulled into the garden, and draws the eyes west toward the two hills between which the sun sets, and often spectacularly so. The fierce spring winds are also, conveniently, westerlies, and hit the short ends of the beds, causing less of a worry. Aesthetics, flow, and natural forces all seem to agree with this setup. And equally importantly, it feels right, giving the garden an inviting energy and a pleasantness that is not always the case in a production setup.
So far so good, but with so much left of the season there are still so many uncertainties to lean into. The weather will get significantly hotter, the days more stressful for the market gardeners, and a whole lot of unexpected things will come up, to which we’ll have to rely on a good mix of intuition, patient observation and testing. And a good dose of humility.
II
“Which one has more life?”
The renowned architect and design theorist Christopher Alexander, who passed away last year, asked this seemingly simple question to his students at UC Berkeley, repeatedly, while presenting pairs of photographs of all sorts of objects, buildings, artworks, and more. There would always be a certain level of bafflement about the question — and regular resistance — but the results were consistent: regardless of taste, people tend to agree about which object or structure has “more life” to an extraordinary extent.
When I first encountered Alexander’s writings around 2014 there was something wonderfully humane and warm to his ideas of what design was for and what it could do — not least what it should do. And at the same time something completely daunting: “Life,” he would declare, “is the only [design] criterion that is worthy criterion for the construction of the environment. That is not what is happening today.” Let the gravity of that statement sink in for a moment.
Many of us who have done our permaculture design courses are likely familiar with the eagerness and drive that often comes from being introduced to all kinds of inspirational projects, tools, and methods of restoring landscapes and working to create abundance. So much so that most of us are also equally familiar with the tendency to jump into “doing permaculture” by digging swales, building hügelbeds, and herb spirals, only to eventually recognize that we are actually partaking in an assembling of symbols often at the expense of sound ecological design. This is not an issue inherent to permaculture as such and by no means unique to practitioners associating themselves with the term; our tendency to look to given techniques and methods is much broader than that.
The point is simply this: it is easy to look for a tool, method, or “thing” that will solve a perceived problem, and to apply it in ways seen elsewhere. It is less easy to notice and understand more subtle flows and patterns that are particular to a place, to calm the ego that really wants to do (not least to do so in ways it already knows), and to try to take in more fully a more complex picture of what our alterations of landscapes and making structures actually lead toward.
As an alternative to what Alexander saw as increasingly mechanistic and alienating ways of building and designing, especially since the latter half of the 20th century, his pursuit to learn more about what gives a landscape, a building, or an object more life than not led him to study both vernacular building and how nature produces form. Both of these are characterized by a process of unfolding rather than the placing or imposing of a strict pattern onto a place.
Despite the fact that “unfolding” is not necessarily a measurable quality, this way of approaching design suggests that there may not be rules, but there are at least trends and patterns. “Having life” may not follow an objective rubric, but it isn’t arbitrary either.
This emphasis on unfolding is also a key part of our clients developing new understanding and skills enabling them to become better stewards of their land. There is no end point, no final destination, only trajectories that lead toward different expressions of what a place has the potential to become. This does not mean that anything is possible anywhere; it means that the way we act in landscapes inevitably affects them as the living systems they are, not separate units or entities, but as wholes within wholes that are constantly shifting and evolving, and within which we are also thoroughly nested.
Which means we can’t know in advance what we’re going to do when we design. We haven’t found out yet what the conditions will have in store.
III
March 2022. COVID-19 is still with us, but it is once again possible to travel. The occasional reports I’ve received about the garden have been positive: record sales within the first season, a newfound joy in working with standardized units to free up focus elsewhere, and the inherent beauty of so much lush growth. But during this interim period, I was only occasionally able to do the odd video call, so I have many questions in mind as I return to the market garden. I had also left the gardeners at a time when they still had many questions, and I’m not sure what I’ll walk into.
Some of the elements and routines that were implemented two years prior have not stood the test of time, and have either been modified or abandoned in favor of others more adapted to the particular local conditions. But in my absence, there has been a process of experimentation, again with some successes and failures — always with learning — that has taken on some trajectories that probably were less likely had I been present. Some of the new features could only have been given their particular shape and function by the particular people working in this particular garden. They know their place and themselves in ways I never will, and that needs to be acknowledged and honored. Clearly, they found both energy and direction in how I proposed that we work together, and have learned to actively experiment and learn in and from place, and with a playful attitude toward experimentation.
All I had done was adapt a somewhat generic and recognizable template to the location, alignment, shape, materials, and objectives of this particular ranch — but part of this adaptation was embedded in the process with the gardeners themselves; we learned to openly share assumptions, hypotheses, and doubts. As always, this was a process with many twists and turns, as it is not always easy to see the assumptions and biases that we bring with us. Similarly, it is easy to get accustomed to the “way we do things here”, and so the disruptive element of having an external advisor is helpful. And, ultimately, agreeing that we are working on cultivating an intentional trajectory rather than implementing a plan that is to be finished one day gave us the flexibility to try, learn, and evolve.
Not knowing what we will end up doing is not the same as not knowing how we will be engaging in a process; it merely implies being sensitive to what kinds of constructive restraints we as designers can provide in the formulation and evolution of our clients’ thinking. And to our own.
On the day before I was set to leave again, the farm manager and I sat down in the shade of a cottonwood tree at the edge of the market garden for a refreshing drink of cider. “So what’s next?” I asked. “Well, given where we are, I can see us moving away from market gardening. It’s been great, don’t get me wrong, but I now see it more as a successional stage on the way to a more perennial setup with plants that are less thirsty and will grow stronger over time.” We had touched on this idea two years earlier, at a time when the allure of the market garden was still strong, still the most appealing way of making a living from the land. The farm manager’s thinking has shifted from wanting a particular thing — a market garden — to seeing the practice of cultivation more clearly within the context of the particular place.
And from there, well… we don’t know yet.
This essay was edited by MJ Halberstadt
