Chlorophyll
From Ollywiki
The Green Stuff
From its very beginning, the city of Vancouver has had an uneasy relationship with its chlorophyll. Early photographs, taken soon after the onset of European colonization, suggest a kind of botanical war zone. A smouldering battlefield, studded with giant stumps and a few rude buildings, is all that remains of a vast, primeval rainforest, mowed down in an evangelical fervour to transform it from an overwhelming wilderness, into a tame, ersatz Europe.
Yet chlorophyll was not easily deterred. As the lofty firs fell before the gods of economic triumphalism, the magic green pigment started to express itself as a leafy garden city. Waves of new immigrants brought plants with them from all over the world, and the mild ocean climate facilitated virtually endless permutations of horticultural lushness. It wasn’t long before the emerging neighbourhoods began to sink into an exotic, verdant profusion of roses, rhododendrons, laurels and even palms.
At the same time, industrialization was beginning to smother great swathes of the city’s landscape beneath sprawling warehouses, factories and seemingly impenetrable pavement, threatening to isolate the land forever from chlorophyll's leafy ministrations.
But this was not to be. For lurking in the biodiversity of newly arrived plants was a whole new flora of disturbance. Deliberately imported as ornamentals, or arriving by mistake as errant seeds in the fodder of animals, these hardy opportunists soon escaped from the farms and gardens and injected their vital pigment back into the built up landscape.
Inexorably, this cohort of hardy newcomers, including Scotch broom, tansy and Himalayan blackberry, began to form a ruderal, or “ruin” ecology, eroding the sterile geometry of the railway corridors, roadsides and empty lots.
They were joined by some indefatigable natives, who came back from the dead to jump into the botanical free-for-all. Big leaf maples, alders, cottonwoods and a few others soon re-colonized the deforested landscape, resprouting from their severed stumps, or traveling in from the city’s periphery as seeds carried in on the wind and in the droppings of birds. Freed of their original rainforest competitors, these trees soon erupted into rampant, interstitial forests, forming a fecund, seething edge to the orderly landscapes of commerce, and exhaling sweet oxygen back into the tired urban air.
And so it continues, the constant ebb and flow between chlorophyll and the built environment; sometimes co-mingling, sometimes in a state of low-level warfare. A relationship of perpetual flux and renegotiation.
While the horticultural aesthetic of Vancouver’s affluent neighbourhoods tends toward ersatz versions of the English country estate, by now a universal signifier of class privilege, it is in the poorer areas that the real innovation occurs. Here, every square metre of public chlorophyll has to be fought for with tooth and nail, especially since many of the residents have no access to private gardens and often lack the means to transport themselves to the lush parks of the more affluent districts. The Downtown Eastside, Strathcona and Grandview-Woodlands neighbourhoods had long been victims of this kind of botanical apartheid, suffering the lowest green space per capita ratios in the city. In the late 1980’s, feeling deprioritized and abandoned by municipal investment, a group of Eastside residents took over a portion of the vacant acreages that lay on the edge of the city’s railway lands. Within a few years, they had transformed these parched wastelands into lush community gardens, complete with allotment plots, orchards and ponds, creating opportunities for small scale agriculture and recreation previously unheard of in the neighbourhood. The largest of these land occupations became the Strathcona Gardens and the Cottonwood Gardens . These initiatives grew out of an informal, community-based design methodology and a deep-rooted culture of activism, which enabled the gardens to coexist, somewhat peacefully, with the marginalized populations of sex trade workers and homeless people, who also used the land as a de facto “commons” in which to live and work. And the ruderal ecology, rather than being obliterated as it would have been in a conventional park design, was retained to form a ‘wild edge’ that seamlessly integrated into the ecology of the surrounding industrial landscape.
It is in these marginal edge lands that the renegotiation between chlorophyll and the built environment can be seen playing out in its purest form. Here, chlorophyll advances and retreats in response to the human cycle of construction, occupation, abandonment and redevelopment. The now abandoned track beds of the downtown railway lands support a diverse and thriving ruderal forest of cottonwood and dwarf birch, which in turn provides habitat for songbirds, coyotes, red tailed hawks and even itinerant bald eagles. An ad hoc human settlement exists here also, centred around an array of large diameter concrete pipes in which people periodically live, sleeping on discarded mattresses and pieces of old upholstery, dragged in from surrounding streets. Despite the rough edges, or perhaps because of them, the self-organizing and complex ecology of these railway lands provides an unmitigated landscape experience, unique within the city.
It would be interesting to think about what could emerge from this landscape were it possible to leave it in this protean and unstructured form. But the chances of this happening are slim, unless we can honestly ask ourselves the question:
What can we not do?
Of course there are things that will need doing in a growing and dynamic city, but perhaps there is a middle way. Perhaps we can bring ourselves to find some space for anarchic weed ecologies within the ordered bourgeois confines of our new urban developments. Do we dare give up some control to let chlorophyll simply do what it wants? And what about members of our own species? Surely we can find enough generosity within Vancouver’s vital urban project to allow people to explore opportunities for small scale agriculture and even temporary housing in the context of our public green spaces.
We are chlorophyll’s symbionts. For the past 2 billion years, chlorophyll has made life as we know it possible on this planet. A green pigment that eats light to give us food and the air we breathe is something that human ingenuity has so far failed to improve on. Despite our misplaced efforts to hold it back, chlorophyll hasn’t shown any signs of slowing down in Vancouver. It just keeps changing its form, ensuring perhaps that we will stay one of the lushest cities on earth.
