Futurescapes
Posted August 4th, 2010
opinion by Jhan Hochman, Working Owner, email hidden; JavaScript is required
You’ve probably noticed the terribly reductive landscape of most American yards: a square plot with an increasingly large, central focus (house), surrounded by an increasingly thin frame (yard), the largest portions of the frame devoted to lawn (providing vista both to and from the house) and narrow strips of various plants (providing shade or decoration for the house). Here, land (communality and commons) is subservient to house (privacy and property), and plants are relegated to decor. This is the ungreat outdoors, streets of one studio-like set after another, where nature as prop(erty) and backdrop is forced to serve the human show.
So consider reversing or balancing priorities by means of native and/or edible landscapes.
Native “naturescaping” brings back flora (spirea, mock orange, huckleberry, vine maple, maidenhair fern, snowberry, oceanspray, oxalis, etc.) most conducive to bringing back fauna (birds, bees, and other insects, at least), and because natives are more adapted to peculiarities of the native microclimate, there’s far less need for constant interference by obnoxious yard artillery and the invasive valve-and-tube network of watering systems (especially with disconnected downspouts). The nativescape can instead be a branchy, frondy, leafy, petally habitat overshadowing and cooling the edificial focus, a yard only occasionally and quietly maintained with pruning tools.
Edible landscapes are of two kinds: gardens where food and companion plants are mostly separate from inedible, decorative plants; and the other kind actually referred to as “edible landscapes,” where edible plants are planted amidst non-edibles. These latter landscapes are especially effective for folks wanting to raise food but not particularly pleased with the usual “esthetic” of plants arranged in formations like battalions of soldiers. With edible landscaping you can have your yard and eat it too, planting peppers, artichokes, rhubarb, chard, and kale amongst lavender and columbine, or chives, fennel, catnip, and oregano amidst inedible plants with similar needs of water, soil, and sun. And when faced with the desire for a mostly esthetic choice (say, Japanese maple), one can often choose instead an esthetic-edible choice (black elderberry).
The future of landscaping brings the local all the way back to front and back yard; to stoop, terrace and patio. This is forest and farm footsteps away.
http://extension.oregonstate.edu/mg/metro/sites/default/files/Edible_Landscaping.pdf
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