Growing with many hands

Queering planting design, by Mattie O’Callaghan

May 28, 2024

Queering planting design, by Mattie O’Callaghan

I sit beneath a wild cherry tree in the cool not-yet-spring sunshine in my local park; the buds are just beginning to open themselves up to the world. They are hermaphrodite, containing “male” and “female” reproductive parts in the same flower. In this I find a deep reassurance; the possibility of containing multiple genders. Following many dark winters of slowly slipping out the gender I was assigned to at birth, I think like the cherry; I am finally ready to bloom.

Writing this article out of my masters thesis, I wanted to bring together my experiences of becoming a landscape architect and how I could reconcile that with living in a queer body and the ongoing violence in the world. We have prided ourselves, as landscape architects, in creating public spaces where plants and people can live well together, but with increasing climate change, biodiversity loss, unequal distributions of land and capital, in what ways are we actually addressing these issues?

From my research, I believe that planting design and practices have remained distant from questions of power and social justice. In my discontent, I began to turn to queer practices and found great inspiration in their challenges to power and continual dismantling of binaries. I began to wonder what we might learn from those who have been actively connecting beyond divides.

Planting design in landscape architecture

The origins of landscape architecture are not quite as innocent as we might assume. Its founding father, Frederick Law Olmsted, created Central Park in New York City as a deeply colonialist and heteropatriarchal project. As well as evicting people, the project aimed to restore white masculinity following views that urbanisation was causing moral degeneracy and spending time with “nature” was the cure.1 Queer acts were seen as unnatural and the dirty, industrial cities were encouraging these behaviours. Central Park was to be the antidote, amplifying spaces for team sports, heterosexual courtship and highly regulating queer sexual contact.2 If these are the hidden origins of the landscapes we are creating, how might we be perpetuating division and violence in our designs today?

A blossoming movement fronting ‘queer ecologies’ is showing that not only is nature queer, but through entangling ourselves more deeply with the earth, we can also dissolve boundaries, and find healing and transformation. Much-loved is Derek Jarman, who in creating a garden out of the shells and shackles in a bleak landscape in Dungeness, became a carer of his own body, his community and his garden.

For where the state and society has failed in care (in the AIDs crisis, current healthcare, welfare state), queer communities have risen up to form mutual aid networks, to challenge power relations and reimagine futures. Ecology has always been part of this care network, including gardens, cruising spaces, and metaphors for diversity. It is this inherent intimacy with plants that led me to consider how we might engage with queer as a methodology. In planting design, this includes asking: How are we designing spaces? With what plants? For whose benefit?

Challenging boundaries

I began by thinking how queerness might help us challenge binaries in planting design. Plants have historically often been viewed as bounded individuals. We grabbed any we thought were aesthetically pleasing, separated them from their neighbours and kept them alive in their isolation with fertilisers and pesticides. A lot has changed since then with the naturalistic planting design movement, up to recent designers such as Piet Oudolf, challenging traditional horticulture and landscape design’s rigid control on individual plants. Yet even these planting schemes were still often created without consideration for how they would work as plant communities, leading to gaps and static blocks of singular species.3

Recently, challenges to plant binaries have been fronted by designers such as Cassian Schmidt, Claudia West and Thomas Reiner, who look at how and which plants grow together in the wild, and how this might inform the design of public spaces. In recognising that plants have their own agency, the garden becomes something not to control, but an ongoing process of enfolding through the seasons. Despite this, there still exists a significant divide between designer and plants, with practices such as chemical clearing of sites and the removal of ‘undesirable’ vegetation and weeds. In practice, we are still prioritising designer control over a collaboration with the plants, perpetuating that nature-culture divide.

Instead, looking to queer practices, some are asking, ‘has the queer ever been human?’.4 In a dissolution of binaries and borders, queerness invites us to consider how we are made up of a multitude of different organisms, bacteria and fungi. The boundary between our skin and the world isn’t quite so thick as it seems.

By embracing ourselves as part of the network we can begin to listen a bit deeper to plant stories, as Robin Wall Kimmerer encourages us to do.5 In particular, her story of the Skywoman, who arrived on earth with only seeds to sow, brought to my attention how seeds could be a way of challenging our rigid planting design methods. Many designers have been turning to seeds, such as Nigel Dunnett with his 20 million seeds sown for Superbloom at the Tower of London in 2022, or brownfield gardener John Little. Full of diversity, moving wherever they please, and holding important stories within their cases, seeds could be a queer metaphor for collaborating with plants differently.

Yet, it is not enough to just scatter seeds and challenge binaries, without more deeply interrogating power relations, especially given the impact that greening public wastelands can have. Before the redevelopment of The High Line in New York, it was a cruising space for the queer community. Although now beautifully planted with inspiring designs and seeding, including by Piet Oudolf, and rebranded as a LGBTQ+ friendly space, it does not come without some form of displacement having taken place - of queer bodies, their entanglement with weeds, and local communities who have been driven out by increasing gentrification.6 Sowing seeds is not radical by itself and we must remain critical to the power implications planting can have.

Looking more politically and deeply at our current state of crack down on queer (especially trans rights), climate change and ongoing war and violence, it becomes important to think about how we look after and save these seeds. Turning to the incredible work of the Palestine Heirloom Seed Library, organised by Vivien Sansour, the project collects seeds and stories in a time of genocidal violence, resisting the borders, binaries and monocultural dimensions dividing us. This mode of collaborating with plants in their seeded form and creating multi-entangled libraries and support networks forms conditions for collaborative possibilities. Queering, as a way of seeding and finding alternative ways of caring beyond traditional binaries between designer and the land, can encourage us to scatter more seeds, to put our ears to the soil and listen to what germinates out through the wounded land.

Centering care and gardeners

There is more to care than just scattering seeds and part of a queering of plant design includes the importance of the bodies who care for and with the lands. There have been strong trends in recent years, especially from the New Perennial Movement, following increasing cuts to funding for public spaces, and calls for sustainability, for creating ‘low maintenance’ landscapes and cutting labour. This has been counteracted by calls for designers to be more actively involved in planting and management. Yet, both of these have neglected critical concerns of capital and labour, and the work of landscape labourers has been viewed as low-value despite how they ‘literally…labour so others can live’.7 I ask with queer ecology’s attention to longer-term care of communities: what might a queering methodology bring to creating critical caring practices of planted spaces?

Although there has been increasing attention paid to caring for the earth, bodily labour within these sites has been neglected, as seen in the low wages for gardeners, with the recent strike of Royal Parks gardeners at Regents Park asking for equal pay to other Royal Parks Gardens.8 Queerness is rooted in paying critical attention to bodies and capital, and through mutual aid networks, such as STAR, a shelter and social space for queer and trans street youth formed in 1969 in New York. While today, London projects like The Outside Project, London LGBTQ+ Community Centre and queer growing groups such as m.u.d. and Young Rotters are making bodies feel valued.

Some landscape practices are moving towards process-based approaches, where they increasingly value the work of gardeners and maintenance staff on projects. Brownfield gardener John Little is one such big advocate after his work on the Clapton Park Estate. While EMF in Girona is investing more into the ongoing management of its spaces, such as Parc Guelle, in collaboration with the city’s municipal workers. Spending more money on people over plants, embracing the self sown, offers an alternative to the low-maintenance showy displays we are used to. Yet, it seems that more attention is needed to examine wages, to amplify the voices of those who work on the ground, and to challenge the power relations which keep us in this hierarchical system.

Queerness brings our attention to the invisible labour and networks caring with our land, something which landscape architects must pay more attention to. For we need to better value the care that queer people, Indigenous people, gardeners and land workers take to tend to the lands we design. An ethic of care for labourers is intrinsic to an ethic of care for the landscape, and we need to move beyond capitalistic systems to think about new modes of ownership beyond privatisation or poorly resourced public lands.9 What might a common and care-full future look like?

We have scattered the seeds, I am unfurling my petals to the world, but we must continue to save them, to share stories of resistance, mutual aid and future world-building contained within them.

This essay has emerged from my Landscape Architecture MA Thesis ‘Growing with many hands: how might queering planting design and practices make space for caring-with land better together’. If you would like a pdf copy, please email mattieocallaghan@gmail.com.

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