Other Gardens

From Ollywiki

In the future, trees will eat your architecture

There is a botanical rampancy out here on the West Coast that soon overwhelms almost any human attempt at imposing order. Anything we build starts to get subsumed by vegetation almost as soon as we turn our backs. It has taken just 25 years for this paved tennis court to be completely obscured by these young Grand Fir (Abies grandis) trees. They started innocuously enough, tiny seedlings coming up here and there in the little cracks. But soon, the growing trunks started bursting the pavement apart, while the writhing roots buckled it from below as they transformed its petrochemicals into needles, bark and wood. These materials sloughed off continuously as the trees grew, forming a dense carpet of organic debris that encouraged moss to get established, and even more seedling trees. If left to their own devices, these firs could grow to 70 metres tall. By then, the tennis court, which even now is pretty hard to find, will be just a forgotten discontinuity beneath an ever-growing accumulation of biomass.

Superorganism

The establishment of orchards was one of the first things European colonists did after clearing, what to them seemed a menacing and gloomy wilderness. Orchards epitomize an ordered vision of nature as an agrarian utopia, where botanical fecundity is ensured through the agency of man. But look at this! The branches of these immigrant apple trees have themselves been colonized by a lichen moving in from the rainforest. It’s called Lobaria. Though it might look a little creepy, there is much more to Lobaria than meets the eye. The flappy, tendrily mass is actually a symbiosis of three separate organisms - fungi, cyanobacteria and algae - coexisting in a state of primordial, self-sustaining bliss. The cyanobacterium fixes nitrogen from air, converting it into fertilizer with which it feeds its symbiots, as well as making it available to the tree on which its symbiotic matrix grows. In return, the apple tree provides a useful scaffold from where the Lobaria can optimally position itself to take advantage of moving currents of air. The apple tree/Lobaria community has formed a kind of super organism for which the human gardener is no longer required. Lobaria doesn’t even like people. It perishes quickly when exposed to air pollution and industrial logging practices.

Broom - reconsidered

The campaign against Scotch Broom in British Columbia at times seems almost racialized in its anti-exotic intensity. Every spring, self appointed posses of ‘broom busters’ and ‘road guardians’ fan out across the hinterlands of Vancouver Island to exterminate what they see as a ‘noxious invader.’ While it is indeed a problem in certain ecosystems, Scotch Broom is primarily a colonizer of landscapes already disturbed by man. In the impoverished terraines vagues of highway embankments and industrial parks, broom provides valuable services - adding nitrogen to the soil by way of symbiotic bacteria that grow on its roots, as well as providing cover for migratory songbirds and attracting pollinating insects. In these places, broom’s lemon yellow flowers are sometimes the only splash of color in an otherwise dreary continuum. As vigorous as it is, broom doesn’t tolerate shade, and will gradually diminish if larger tree species are able to seed into an area naturally. In the meantime, we might as well enjoy it because, despite our best efforts, broom will be part of the scenery for many years to come.