Stuck in Succession
We’re in the midst of a cold snap in Maine. Not like the ones we had in my childhood— those week long spells of double-digit negative temps every January— but a cold snap nonetheless. The truck makes a few extra groaning sounds before turning the engine over, and any firewood I hadn’t gotten around to stacking yet is stuck in a frozen shell of snow until the next thaw.
Design work continues on, unaffected by these conditions, but the cold brings a quiet with it that can’t help but affect my work. As I look out the window from my seat next to the fire, I trace the contours of our back garden and plant trees in my mind. I can see the bones of the landscape and not rush past them.
I make plans for spring, jotting down plant lists on a piece of paper. As I think through new plants & plans, I have the realization that — aside from a handful of tough native shrubs for the growing hedgerows on the north side of the property — my list for the home garden is heavy on grasses, perennials, and sculptural, multi-stem trees.
Sure— some bigger canopy trees as needed, and a smattering of evergreens here and there on the periphery. But it’s clear, subconsciously, I’m dreaming up meadow and early succession woodland edges.
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It can be argued that I’m a product of our current cultural design epoch. Meadows and prairies are IN.
But, to give myself credit, I don’t think I’m attempting to create these ecotypes at home because it’s what’s in vogue. I think it’s deeper than that, and it’s why more and more gardens are being designed with a heavy herbaceous layer and why dogwoods, serviceberries, and birches (among others) are so popular right now.
Succession — the age old, cyclical process that our landscapes endure— is well understood. Forests burn, or are disturbed by wind, people, or animals, and new vegetation comes in: starting a long journey of morphing from exposed site, to grassland, to woodland edge, to forest. It happens anywhere trees grow, and always has.
But it’s not always a part of the vernacular when talking about gardens. Human landscapes have been seen in a vacuum, growing apart from the wilds beyond the fence. We mulch, and prune, and weed and in the past haven’t thought about how this fits into natural waves of regeneration and succession.
So why do we maintain our landscapes the way we do? And why the fascination with grasses & sculptural, early-succession tree species like birches in our gardens?
I will venture to say it comes from the hundreds (thousands?) of years we humans have cleared land for villages, food, or to provide a sense of safety in an otherwise scary world. We, aware of it or not, are attempting to pause natural succession now at a point in the cycle that feels most familiar to that of our human-disrupted landscapes of the past.
So much of modern human history has gone hand in hand with logging, grazing, burning landscapes to open up areas to inhabit and cultivate.
Today, at a time when many of us are far removed from these primal actions of our ancestors, it’s clear that our sense of aesthetic beauty in an ornamental garden is innately dictated by these cleared lands of yore.
When forests open up after disruption, and light hits the soil, the successional process begins again. If you’ve walked a landscape in New England that was logged in the last 30 years, you’ll know the experience of looking up and realizing there’s no canopy to speak of. The sun is coming through and inviting new species out of the soil. Walking through these places in spring, you see an ocean of ferns and ephemerals covering the disrupted ground and hiding the feet of alders, serviceberries, and birches starting to reach their branches to the newly exposed sunlight.
It is not a coincidence that these are the experiences and visual cues we are emulating in our gardens. Hayscented Ferns are flying off the shelves of wholesale nurseries faster than any perennial right now. Wild Sods, whether it’s fern, blueberry, or some mix of native groundcover, are being sustainably harvested in the Northwoods and shipped all the way down the eastern seaboard to residential projects in the Mid Atlantic. Horticulture and gardening magazines are liberally publishing articles about the ‘Trub’; a not-so-attractive way of describing those mid-height species, somewhere between shrubs and trees.
Most of us will always leave space for beloved woody plants in our gardens. And there is still very much a need — visually and ecologically — to provide shrubby habitat for wildlife at home. But our love and inherent draw towards meadows and young woodlands is much deeper. It’s a reminder of who we are and where we came from. Our current state of garden design feels to me like less of a fad and more of a collective realization of what kind of landscape makes us feel calm and in control.
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I’ll add another log to the fire, and put away the plant lists for the day.
It’s too cold to putter around outside but it’s too beautiful to sit inside for much longer. Boots on, I’ll take the dog out for a walk and head towards the neighbor’s young woods to see what inspiration I can gather.
