Michael Cooks Senior Project Final Paper

Two months ago I embarked upon a sustainable landscaping endeavor. The goals of the project were to:

• Reduce amount of mowed lawn
  
• Reduce irrigation 
  
• Reduce overall maintenance
  
• Improve the quality if the yard
  
• Incorporate native and beneficial plant species
  
• Incorporate edible and medicinal plant species 
  
• Incorporate artistic, non plant elements
  
• Design a landscape that would improve with negligence

I spent the first month designing and the second month implementing the design. And while the 2 months of my senior project are over, the project is not complete and will probably take a year or two for the flower beds to reach maturity and possibly 10 years for the evergreens to reach their full size. But that’s how it is. Nature moves slowly and I don’t think it’s a good idea to rush nature. Because while many landscapes require constant maintenance for as long as they exist, my design should require less and less work as time goes by. We’ll see.

I would like to start by saying that I am very proud of the work I have done. I worked about an average of 6 to 7 hours a weekday for the last 7 weeks and while I feel that I could have accomplished more, I am very happy with the experience. There is no doubt that It was worthwhile, but I do have doubts about the success of the project. I discovered early on that sustainable/native/natural urban landscaping is not a particularly well explored or popular field. It goes against many of our conditioned opinions of what landscaping should be and required a lot of guess work and postulation on my part do to the lack of available information. I was very lucky to have the support of many friendly, knowledgeable people in my community. One of the main things I learned is landscaping really is, and should be, and community project. From sharing resources, to plants, to propagation tips, to friendly comments and compliments, I couldn't have accomplished what I did on my own. I was happy to find that it was such a community supported thing and I hope it becomes even more so in the future. I’m beginning to think that it has to.

I am not interested in landscaping because it's a hot and trendy scene promising a quick path to fame and wealth. I am interested in landscaping because I am quite disgusted with its current state and I have a vision of the potential it has to benefit society and facilitate the restoration of the developed world. landscaping, for most of us, is our interface with the natural world, It’s the link between the city and the wilderness. Most of us don't think very much about it though. That makes me very sad. To many people landscaping is tulips, some mulch, and an stubby evergreen. Even worse, to many people landscaping is sitting on a rider mower and mowing their grass for the second time that week. For the most part, people these days view landscaping as a sign of status, if not simply a hassle and a chore. Keeping up with the jones', we do what we do to our yards because other people will think poorly of us if we don't.

But landscaping can be so much more. Landscaping can be healing and productive. Landscaping is one of the most powerful ways that we can make improve the health of the planet. As the saying goes, if we all swept our doorstep the world would be clean. 

Our yards are incredible assets and we should all be taking advantage of them. Most people think that our yards are just for standing in and occasionally have a BBQ but we can be doing so much more. We can grow food! What a concept! Instead of growing plants that just sit there and look pretty why not grow vegetables and herbs? Spend less time at Hy-vee and more time at home, enjoying the outdoors. Save money, save time, reduce emissions, improve the environment, and get wholesome exercise all at the same time! Most people have adequate yards for substantial production. Conventionally, landscaping places huge stresses on the environment by reducing biological diversity and destroying habitat for wildlife, but this doesn't have to be the case. Landscapes can be beneficial to both humans and the rest of nature. 

As I learned in ethnobotany, plants are the material basis of almost all society. Even though we may be considerably isolated from them they are still just as important. I envision a world were we will return our attention to the basis of production and partake in it, right in our own yards. Why not? Rather than spending all our time to make money to buy the things we need why not cut out the rat race and just do it ourselves, as a community. Now, there are certainly things that most of us wont be able to or want to do but we can and should be doing more. It's a new paradigm of landscaping and it has a long way to go to reach maturity. We have a lot to learn about the ecology of urban ecosystems and about working with nature rather than against it. It's a change that I think needs to happen and I look forward to facilitating it. The work I did during this project has been a great entrance into the field for me and has shown me just how much work is involved in landscaping. 

I should make it clear that this paper represents only a fraction of the work I've done these last 8 weeks. It's really just the tip of the iceberg. its been a very busy two months and I've had a lot of good experiences and a lot of bad experiences. All of them, however, were educational and appreciated. 

I would say the best part of the project was coming up with the design. I liked designing something that was both very artistic and very purposeful. I enjoyed meshing my own creativity with nature's creativity and I enjoyed the experience of bringing my design to a realization. I look forward to designing increasingly functional and beautiful landscapes in the future.

The worst part, though I thought it would be the sod removal, turned out to be finding a working chainsaw. It was definitely an unanticipated difficulty. I would say that I spent almost an entire week of finding chainsaws, struggling with them, failing to get them to work, and setting out to find another one. On my 5th attempt I was successful and Im very glad it worked out because I was getting remarkably frustrated. So I didn't get all my chainsawing done, but when I’m done with this paper it will be sitting there waiting for me! What did I learn from the experience? Well I now understand the importance of a landscape contractor organize and coordinate everything! I spent much more time hunting down things than I would have liked. This just strengthens my belief that landscaping should be community oriented project where everyone shares tools and resources. 

I learned a lot in the last 8 weeks.  Once I finally got a working chain saw I got some good practice slice tree trunks into flower pots. That was fun. I learned that a poor chainsaw is really really poor and  good chainsaw is OHHH so good. They're really not as scary as they seem. I learned how to use a roto-tiller. I know that they're pretty frowned upon in field of sustainable living, but I must say that it made the project possible. But my reliance on the tiller was mostly do to my lack of time and site preparation. If I had known I was going to do this project earlier Im sure I could have employed a more gentle and equally effective technique. But it definitely showed me that, like grass, the roto-tiller is a useful machine with a legitimate purpose thats simply been overly and inappropriately implemented. I learned how to use a hammer drill, a tool that I don't look forward to using ever again. All I can say is I can’t imagine using a jackhammer. I learned how to dive a car. I felt kinda bad about it but it's a really good thing that I did, and my girlfriend thought so too! I learned how to use Google Sketch-up, a really simple and useful computer program that was a tremendous help during my design phase. Im pretty sure it's not what professional landscaper architects use, but it's skill that Im sure will be very valuable. I learned how to divide and transplant plants, which is a pretty easy process but I had had relatively low experience in it considering that I'm a sustainable living student. I learned how to make mulch beds and like transplanting, it wasn't hard but its something that every landscaper should be able to do. I learned how to sow wildflower mixes. Hopefully some day I will know enough about wildflowers to be able to formulate my own mixes for greater appropriateness and integrity.

Besides learning many practical skills and bits of knowledge I also learned a lot about myself and how I work as well as ways in which I will need to change in order to be successful in landscaping. One of the main areas that got a lot of attention was my patience! Easily the most important thing I got out of the project. I have a feeling its something I will be learning for the rest of my life. Things actually went pretty well for the first 5 or 6 weeks. But in the last 2 weeks, especially with the deadline coming up I began to experience considerate amounts of frustration, anger, and anxiety. Needless to say it was not very enjoyable. 

My main concern was that I wasn't going to finish what I had planned to do by the end of the month. The first thing I eventually realized was that worrying about that was not helping the situation in the slightest. The second thing I realized was that I had distorted the purpose of the project and the meaning of the deadline. For some reason I had gotten the idea into my head that the project needed to be finished by the end of the 8 weeks. That was a silly idea. The purpose of the project is to learn about landscaping, so the deadline is really more about this paper. The actual landscape is going to take a year or two to come to full fruition anyway. I made this realization just into time to allow myself to let go of the remaining tasks I have and work on this paper. Also, Im kind of against the idea that landscaping is just something that you plop down on your lawn and POOF it's all done! There should be space for interactions and adjustments. I have a whole month more to work on it and I'm sure I will be adjusting it every time I visit for years to come. I certainly don't think I know enough to get it perfect the first time so its better to view the project as an ongoing process rather than a one time installment. 

I’ve spent a long time hating grass and a long time attempting to not hate it. Grass is obviously a huge, huge part of landscaping. Im not sure if it should be. In short, I feel that lawn is a very useful landscape innovation but is overly and inappropriately used. Before I talk about why I don't like it we can talk about what I do like about it. 

Grass is very useful ground cover for social areas. It is very hardy and can withstand a lot of abuse. When compared to having bare, exposed soil, it is very good at preventing runoff and soil erosion. With the right species in the right climate, grass will turn green early and stay that way well into winter with relatively low maintenance. And while I still don't like it very much, I have yet to see a more widely suitable ground cover.

But maybe thats part of the problem. The one size fits all paradigm that has become prolific in this industrial age is really not how nature works. Rather than finding a holy grail of ground covers we should be looking to our native ecosystems for local solutions.

Mowed grass is over used. Like I said its very reasonable to have it in social places like picnic parks, sport fields, and places where people walk often, but these days mowed grass is the default. Everywhere you look, at least where I am, is an endless field of manicured lawn, places where, for the most part, people never walk. 

Now its true that it doesn't take very much gas to mow a single lawn, but in the same way that the price of an apple in the grocery store does not actually reflect the true cost of the production of the apple, the cost of gas and the pollution produced by one mowing of a lawn does not reflect that true damage of the mowing of one lawn. The are many hidden costs that we and/or our children pay, such as all the energy and non-recyclable materials that go into the production of each lawnmower for each yard. That is not a small amount. 

The solution? Rather than focusing on more efficient ways to mow our grass focus on more effective use of our land like mowed or landscaped pathways.

For my project, the lawn was a major aspect and the choice I made (basically to do nothing to it) was a difficult (as undifficult as it sounds) choice to make. Its very easy to look at the lawn and say, "Oh, how cute, he's not mowing the lawn because he's lazy and messy." For this situation there's a thin line between laziness and purposefulness. Because I have, In fact, given it a lot of thought and I am very capable of mowing it.

I chose design the landscape with unmowed lawn for multiple reasons. Most obviously, it saves money, about $100 a month. That alone pays for the entire project in about 2 years. But more importantly I planned to leave the inner lawn unmowed because it had never previously been used and has even less likeliness of being used in the future. Except for when I have given people tours of what I have been, I am the only one who has walked around the yard. This is not a bad thing. It's ok that the lawn isn't used very often. It's just not ok that it was being mowed every other week when it isn't being used. The only reason it was being mowed was for social acceptance and because it was supposedly appealing. We don't frown upon  a woman who chooses not to apply makeup that is chemically hazardous and uncomfortable even though its socially desired and supposedly appealing. We don't frown upon her because we see the inherent silliness in the current state of cosmetics and feel that we should be appreciating her natural beauty. Now replace the word woman with the word lawn.

By not mowing the lawn I am making a statement and a stand. When it is discovered that a practice is not only not necessary but also dangerous it is not acceptable to continue the practice simply because other people are still doing it. people must learn to mow responsibly. 

But it's also not a good idea to just boycott lawn mowing and let out yards become a riot (GET IT?!). Just because we're rebelling doesn't mean we can't be tasteful and composed. That is where my wildflower beds come in. The idea is that they, basically, hide the unmowed inner lawn from view. It’s simple enough, most people won't even know that the lawn on the inside isn't mowed. The wildflowers on the inside, being shorter than the fence but taller than the grass will round out the yard’s growth. I feel that It will give the yard a rich and full feeling, a comfortable feeling that you wouldn't get from a mowed lawn and which will be much easier to express through pictures when the flowers have grown in. Until then I agree that the inner lawn looks a unkempt and I will be trimming down the grain heads and dandelion puffs for the time being. While I feel strongly that the lawn will be a success, it is indeed an experiment and I look forward to seeing how it goes. 

I really do look forward to seeing how it goes. My life up until now has been moving quite fast, everything change and reorganizing with each new stage of my education. But now as I enter into the adult stage of my life I look forward to watching things grow. That part of what intrigues me so much about landscaping, watching nature change and interact and grow in its surroundings. Maybe by seeing how nature interacts with our society we can get some insight into how we should behave in it. I want to learn how to let nature solve my problems and fulfill my desires. I want to learn how to invite nature into my home without dominating or suppressing it. I view landscaping as a partnership with nature towards a brighter future and I look forward to it.

THE END!