To Make A Garden Wilder Than The Wild
The Ins and Outs of Cities and Forests
“Just as we’d closed the loop and linked ourselves
Back to the living planet we had ruined,
And made a garden wilder than the wild”
– Frederick Turner, Apocalypse
“No man manages his affairs as well as a tree does”
– George Bernard Shaw
Germans are credited with starting the Christmas tree tradition as we now know it, in the 16th century when devout Christians brought decorated trees into their homes. This midwinter ritual that has its roots in older forms of nature veneration — a celebration of evergreen vegetation that has morphed into an idolisation of the evergreen growth economy — is a good starting point for an exploration of humans and trees, cities and forests.
Across Germany almost 30 million Christmas trees are sold each year. In Berlin alone 400,000 trees are cut down and used every Christmas and then thrown in the trash, while a report by Friends of the Earth Germany puts the overall number of street trees in Berlin at 430,000 — a stark ratio of one felled Christmas tree a year for every living street tree.
How is the cutting down of Christmas trees related to a cutting off from body and from other beings? And how is this related to our explorations of the urban biosphere — of what the city is and what it could be?
The living trees in the city play a central role in protecting the environment and are therefore vital for our own health and well-being. Briefly, trees and green-cover act as an an “air conditioning” system for the city, releasing water vapor through photosynthesis, refreshing the air, and filtering pollutants. Berlin’s abundant verdant spaces – surrounded as it is by nature conservation areas and containing many parks and reserves within city limits – serve as its purifying lungs and carbon sinks. Trees play a pivotal part in the regulation of the groundwater levels¹ of a city born in the swamps at the junction of two rivers². They provide food and habitats for many animal species, and much more. A rich and vital tree population is a testament to a city that cares for all its inhabitants and strives to provide them with a wholesome environment.
Berlin’s oldest tree, older than the city itself, is an ancient oak named Dicke Marie (“Fat Mary”), which stands in the woods a short walk from the houses of the northern neighbourhood of Tegel, where we’ve been working these past few months, exploring the urban biosphere in a series of walks, workshops, gatherings and conversations. On one of these biosphere exploration walks we paid a visit to this majestic old tree, taking turns reading from Suzanne Simard’s “Finding the Mother Tree”³, which tells of the important role that such mature trees play in their environment, helping to coordinate an interlinked network that heals, feeds and sustains the other members of the forest.
Simard calls the complex underground web of mycorrhizal fungi that facilitate the exchange and communication among plantlife in the forest the “wood wide web”. We humans appear to have logged off this web of connections and have failed to log back on, our communications limited to what is in many ways a form of disassociated anthropocentric intranet.
Older than Tegel, which in 2022 celebrated its 700th year anniversary, Dicke Marie is a remnant of a landscape that is much older still. Its beginnings can be traced back eleven thousand years prior to the founding of the human settlement, to the advent of the geological epoch of the Holocene and the retreat of the glaciers of the last ice age from the glacial spillway now occupied by the city of Berlin. This warming allowed for the emergence of temperate forest cover and the development of the region’s ecosystem as we know it, with its familiar flora and fauna.⁴ Why then do we not celebrate, in conjunction with Tegel’s 700 year human anniversary, this 11,700 year ecological anniversary of oaks and the pines, red squirrels and wild boars?
Cities are a manifestation of such a collective psychological pathology of separation and isolation from nature, argues Emanuele Coccia, whose writings we‘ve been exploring in our urban biosphere reading group sessions (“Common Nature. Beyond the City and the Forest”⁵). Coccia sees the city’s antithesis in the image of the forest (from the Latin foris, ‘external’, ‘outside of’) as a representation of our rejection of the Other. Cities, a manifestation of our enclosures of culture and cultivation, represent a dissociation from nature and therefore reflect a relationship with the other that is characterized by dominance, manipulation, and extraction. Within city-limits we find the city-zens, the urban and the urbane, the polis and political agency. And beyond them are all that is “natural” and “wild”. Coccia likens the exclusion of the forest to that of the refugee camp, which could be read as embracing the immigrants and the stateless, the non-city-zens, the dark other and the poli(s)tially excluded.
Gardener-researcher Giles Clément, whose writings we have also been exploring⁶, finds the founding act of every city, the original nucleus from which cities develop, in the act of enclosure at the basis of gardening. The garden, from the old Germanic gards, “enclosure”, is to Clement the fundamental separation of cultivated and wild that enabled the ‘urban revolution’: a consequence of agriculture enabling the accumulation and long-term conservation food. A more prosaic example of this tendency for othering and enclosure can be found in the tradition of the allotment garden, so common in Tegel. This tradition, which interestingly developed in Germany initially as a countermeasure to urbanisation – a socially important act of commoning, of expanding people’s access to land and nature for a widening spectrum of socio-economic class – exposes a conflicting, innate human drive for enclosure and exclusion. A plot of land, which left untended might lie “fallow”, sprouts a boundary and then a shelter. With this come decisions about the permeability of boundaries: hard or soft – who enters and who is excluded, what species are welcome and which ones are not, whether an excluded entity is allowed as a temporary visitor, is prevented from entering the private boundary of the home, prevented from crossing an external boundary, or even sought out and eliminated far beyond these boundaries, as is the case for “invasive” species. (There is much to be said about such terminology and its application. More on this, later.)
One might say that the city is in a fundamental way an amplification and multiplication of these tendencies. But the geographical boundaries we draw around our gardens and cities are to a large extent an illusion. Cities are in practice extensive, far-reaching systems of cultivation, extraction and disposal – interdependent, multi-species endeavours that involve the removal and exile of other species, while ignoring our own interdependence on these species.
The interconnectedness of human and tree goes very deep and far back to our earliest stages of physical and mental evolution as a species. Coccia reflects on how forests and trees have played a significant role in shaping human anatomy, identity and technology. We perceive our technology, and therefore our contemporary human society, as arising from our relationship to stones and rocks, due to stone tools from the Palaeolithic and Neolithic periods of human advancement being easily preserved and studied. But to Coccia the Homo Sapiens is first and foremost an arboreal primate, shaped by life on trees. Technology, as an extension of our physical abilities and our anatomy, derives therefore from this early relationship. Coccia believes that our desire to reduce every-“thing” to stone and to forget the role of forests in the development of human bodies, culture and technology is a form of pride that allows humans to believe that they are alone in an infinitely appropriated world. For Coccia, relating to our body means to relate to the trees that shaped it – a fascinating proposition to a somatic explorer and avid tree hugger like myself.
There is much that can be learned from the physicality of trees that bares relevance to how we humans interact with the world. Observing trees closely on our biosphere explorations, I was struck by the way in which trees appear to grow in negotiation. The journey of a root, a tree trunk or a branch is not a straight line from A to B but a spiralling and forking one that flows and navigates its environment in relation to the ground, surrounding plants, living creatures, the weather and available sunlight. And while there is a good deal of repetition of structures in this organic growth, these are iterations that are similar but not identical, each one uniquely shaped in response to the conditions in which it is formed. This results in tremendous variety of permutations and richness of form, consistency, colour and shade. Our constructions in comparison are linear, straight-edged and repetitive, with minimal alterations and limited diversity. Even our most radical architectures offer a very limited application of organic principals. When considering that diversity is a central element in the resilience of ecological systems one wonders if there is something we might learn from trees that could enhance the resilience of our own artificial ones.
Walking through the streets of Tegel in autumn, with piles of fallen leaves crunching underfoot, one can imagine the trees that line its sidewalks attempting to compost the city, mulching the roads and parked cars under a thick carpet of decaying foliage, breaking down the pavement with their roots. I find it somehow comforting that as much as we might strive to build lasting constructions, our edifices are sure to be broken up and consumed by trees in the long run.
In contrast to organic processes, our cycles of consumption and disposal are out of whack. Our creations are everlasting where they should be transient and short-lived where they should last: A “disposable” plastic cup may last for a day, while the plastic it is composed of remains for an eternity. Contrast the way in which a tree draws nourishment from its immediate surroundings, from the earth and air, and disposing any byproducts in situ, with the way a human might source their nourishment from another continent and dispose of their waste in the middle of a distant ocean. On the streets of Tegel we find a concise representation of this in the form of Amazon parcel delivery hubs on one side of the cycle, right next to used clothing collection containers on the other. And next to those we have foliage disposal containers, our attempt to subordinate the trees’ metabolic cycle to our own.
The question of how to reorient our collective perspective is an urgent one. If (according to Anna Tsing, whose writings we’ve also been exploring⁷) plants could only develop on land once fungi produced soil by digesting rocks, what is the cultural equivalent of such fungal action, that will allow us to move away from our stone-age-based technologies, to dissolve our rock-solid perception of the world to reintegrate the forests and to regrow our affinity to other beings, our rhyzomic interrelations?
On our biosphere explorations we visited a local meadow orchard on the outskirts of Tegel, an example of human cooperation with, and cooption of nature. Meadow Orchards (Alernately also Orchard meadows) are traditionally a collection of fruit trees in an area of permanent grassland, generally comprising a mixture of apple, pear, cherry and plum trees – sometimes also walnut trees – of different ages. Meadow orchards expanded in the vicinity of and in conjunction with European cities, peaking in the mid-1900s but steadily declining since then. Recently though, there has been a renewed appreciation of meadow orchards for their environmental value⁸. Appropriately managed, they provide habitat for many species of birds, insects, and other animals. Species diversity is so high, that they have even been referred to as the rain forest of Europe. Such diversity, essential for the long term survival of both flora and fauna, is in part reliant on cultural biodiversity, namely the practices and knowledge developed by the societies that create and maintain it.
The forest-garden, a tree of life at its centre, is fundamental to the myth-making of the agrarian societies that have birthed our own – perhaps an imagining of a more natural human existence that isn’t at loggerheads with the forest (pun intended). The English word “paradise” is etymologically linked, through Latin and Greek, to the Hebrew “pardes” for orchard, itself from the Persian “pairidaeza” for an enclosed garden. Still, it is a dualistic perspective that confines an ideal of balance within the perimeter of the walled forest-garden, and expels all that is dark, transgressive and unacceptable beyond its walls into the “real” forest, uncultured and wild. (For more about the forest-garden idea and practice, and a nuanced view of the complex topic of a return to Eden, back-to-nature approach to environmentalism, see here)
A profound interconnectedness of humans and trees invites a re-visioning of the future shape and function of the city as a place where wild and cultivated are in an ongoing conversation: where structures grow and dissolve organically, with circular, localised cycles of creation and dissolution and meandering journeys that negotiate their environment. Such complex agglomerations, made up of multiple, intertwined interactions are much less planned than emergent. Jane Bennet proposes⁹ Deleuze and Guattari’s term assemblage for such living, throbbing confederations that are able to function despite the persistent presence of energies that confound them from within. J.K. Gibson-Graham posit¹⁰ such assemblages, as experimentations with new practices of living and being together and the ingredients of a new world shaping movement, that allows us (that is, all the human/nonhuman participants in the becoming world) to organise, be organised and “thrive in porously bounded spaces in which there is some degree of interconnection, a distinctively diverse economy and ecologies, multiple path-dependent trajectories of transformation, and inherited forms of rule”. Could a city be such an assemblage? And if so what models should we adopt that will manifest this?
To explore these questions, we might look beyond traditional approaches to urban planning and design, and consider the city as a dynamic and constantly evolving entity that is shaped by the interactions between its human and natural elements. This requires a shift in mindset from viewing the city as a fixed, static entity to seeing it as a complex and ever-changing network of relationships and connections. By embracing this perspective, we can begin to envision a new type of city that is more attuned to the needs of its human and other-than-human inhabitants, and that is able to adapt and thrive in the face of ongoing change. Such a city would be a place where the wild and the cultivated are in constant dialogue, and where the structures and systems that make up the city are able to grow and evolve organically, in response to the needs of all its inhabitants.
Bibliography
- Theresa Frommen and Timothy Moss: Pasts and Presents of Urban Socio-Hydrogeology: Groundwater Levels in Berlin, 1870–2020 – MDPI (2021)
- Rod Giblett: Cities and Wetlands: The Return of the Repressed in Nature and Culture (2016)
- Suzanne Simard: Finding the Mother Tree (2021)
- Marco Mina: The Return of the Forest: how trees reconquered the European continent after the last Ice Age – Forest Monitor (2017)
- Emanuele Coccia: Common Nature. Beyond the City and the Forest – Nella selva | Wildness: «Vesper» No. 3 Autunno-inverno (Fall-Winter 2020)
- Gilles Clement: La Sagesse du Jardinier (2004)
- Anna Tsing: The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins(2015)
- Michal Forejt and Ralf-Uwe Syrbe: The current status of orchard meadows in Central Europe: Multi-source area estimation in Saxony (Germany) and the Czech Republic (2019)
- Jane Benett: Vibrant Matter – A Political Ecology of Things (2010)
- J.K. Gibson-Graham: A Feminist Project of Belnging to the Anthropocene (2014)
Common Views are currently exploring these questions and more in the Berlin district of Tegel, Reinickendorf. This current phase of the Biosphere Berlin project is a first step towards a longer, multi-year project in Berlin. Our next public activities will take place in January and February 2023. To find out more and stay informed, check out our blog and news sections.
