A Collective Design
By Michael McMillan
“Landscape design,” I say, even though I feel like this phrase doesn’t come close to explaining what I do. Depending on who’s asking, I might dare say, “ecological design,” What is ecological design anyways? How do you create an elevator speech that says, “I strive to be a living systems enabler, to facilitate relationships between people and the land to bring about healing, and abundance for all of life’s biodiversity down to the last soil microorganism,” while maintaining humility and acknowledging that there is a lifetime of learning ahead?
Several years ago, during my dreadlocked dirt-bagging days, I hitchhiked down to Mount Princeton hot springs in the San Isabel National Forest, with the intention of solo hiking around 60 miles of the Colorado trail to Monarch pass. While soaking, I met a worn-out, bearded backpacker probably twice my age. He had just gotten off the trail, was also solo hiking, happened to be a mycologist (mushroom expert), permaculture enthusiast, botanist, and was also named Michael, spelled “Mycol”.
Traveling together happened serendipitously, our conversation and our feet wandering off into the mountains. Equipped with my Plants of the Rockies field guide, I stopped to eagerly identify every wildflower, cacti, shrub, and tree I could find. Mycol seemed thrilled to have a youngster to mentor along the journey. Instead of painstakingly identifying each and every plant from the book, he taught me patterns to look for in flower and leaf structures. Each day we’d play the trail rousing game of “name that plant family. Before long, I could name every plant family in the forest. Asteraceae (sunflower family), the largest family on earth; “if the flower looks like a star, it’s probably an aster”. Brassicaceae (mustard family), also known as Cruciferae for their characteristic “cross” flower structure, always has four petals at 90-degree angles. Fabaceae (pea family), known for its relationships with nitrogen-fixing bacteria renting space on their roots and their unique ship-like flower structures. On and on we went, botanizing all the way.
I wanted to be able to survive in the woods simply by relying on my knowledge, and more so, my relationship with the land. Learning individual plants was essential, but while walking, eventually I began to notice the patterns of plant communities or guilds. The brassicas like watercress tended to grow closer to creek beds, under praying western monkshood, willows, and Doug-firs. The lupines, purple asters, and aspens moved into previously disturbed areas, perhaps where there was rock-slide or avalanche. Heracleum cow parsnips filled the understory of older Aspen forests. Mixed with sweet cicely, red elderberry, columbine, Fendler's meadowrue, the slow-growing blue spruce worked its way towards the canopy as the aspens became old and died. This is a practice of reading the landscape and tuning into the ecological story that is unfolding before you. All of this must be considered when designing a space.
Four years ago I moved to a new community in Southwest Colorado to work as an Americorps volunteer supporting a school to farm program. I fell in love with the area and cultivated a passion for growing food. I found mentors who could teach me the nitty-gritty details of growing all of my favorite vegetables in the harsh high desert climate. After a year and a half, I was hired to teach the agricultural science program at the middle school. My students and I grew blue corn, Navajo pumpkins, red curry squash, lemon cucumbers, and walla walla onions bigger than the 6th grader’s heads. We cared for the heritage orchard of 67 trees of nine varieties, pruning every winter with the local apple gurus. I’d start each class with a Kichwa greeting, “Ali mashi kuna,” and some students would reply, “What’s up?”, “Hey, Mr. Michael”, and some “Yá’át’ééh,” a greeting in Navajo. It brought me endless joy to send food insecure kiddos home with bags of fresh vegetables for free. Before going to harvest we’d read Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Honorable Harvest poem aloud as a class: “Ask permission of the ones whose lives you seek, abide by the answer…” After three years with some of the same students, we began to witness the rhythms of the land. We recognized the same family of finches return each year. We watched in amazement as cattails and cottonwoods moved into the pond we dug years before. The land was teaching us one season at a time.
“Will you help me get my garden started? I can pay!” a friend said one late summer day. Excitedly, I went into her backyard to see sparse grass, rocks strewn everywhere, overgrown box elder trees, but lots of potential. I dove in, using the scattered river rocks to build raised beds. I planted clematis vines, raspberries, daylilies, seeded grass and wildflowers in terraced garden beds coming down the slope from her back door. I releveled the flagstone patio, pruned the trees and restarted her defunct compost bin. She worked with me some of the time. We talked about lots of things, from work to love to politics, music, and travel. Pulling weeds is one of the best ways to get to know someone; iced tea, lemonade, or a cold beer speeds along the process nicely.
Another friend asked me to help her start a garden, then another. “Maybe I should start a business…” I thought. Now it’s been a year since I founded Solstice Sown Designs LLC. I’ve gotten lots of different gigs: designing a drought-resilient forest garden for a friend’s farm, supporting a cattle ranch with custom irrigating 300 acres on a daily basis, planting trees here and there, revitalizing a permaculture property that had been taken over by perennial pepper weed, and renovating a historic apple orchard with my trusty Stihl chainsaw.
All of these smaller, temporary projects brought meaning, new challenges, and new relationships to my life. Yet my dream project sprouted up this past fall: designing a layered forest garden with edible, medicinal, nectary and nitrogen-fixing species from ground cover to canopy. Visualizing the garden to be, I saw strawberries running over lichen-covered logs and rocks, violets painting touches of purple across the ground. As the seasons change, each organism plays its part in the ecological orchestra. Daffodils, hyacinths, lilacs, tulips, and wild iris open the symphony. Spring deepens into summer and the bees take their time to visit each blooming flower: arnica, echinacea, and lemon balm. King Stropharia mushrooms silently decompose the wood chipped pathways. Western monkshood delphinium stands tall and dark growing around brambles of raspberries and blackberries. In the good years, there are too many apples, pears, wild plums, serviceberry, and Nanking cherries for one family to eat. The leaves of tall aspen trees quake in the wind.
The family of Lewis woodpeckers watched me all along as I went back and forth digging, planting, and watering to bring this vision to life. I can invite all the members to the biotic garden orchestra — some will have an outstanding performance, some won’t play at all, and others will show up uninvited. The most successful work happens when my client and I invest in a shared vision together. We both understand and accept that nature is the real “designer”; we simply observe and interact. I’ve adopted a teaching from the Wild Yards Project to apply to my own work: “When the thing you planned is long gone and the thing you have is much more than you hoped for and way past being yours at all.”
Ecological landscape design isn’t a one and done kind of deal. Developing rich soil full of humus and growing forest gardens takes years. It is a transformative and educational process aided and informed by science. I’ve learned that growing in my design practice is really growing to become a more powerful listener, to the land and to my clients. I’ve learned that ecological design is a kind of dance with the landscape, continuously learning, adapting, and evolving as the land does.
As humans, we have the opportunity to become ecosystem enablers, through regenerative design. Getting our hands in the soil and planting trees — and acknowledging that they will live much longer than we will — tends to deepen human relationships, too.
As I finish planting the mountain mahogany, I hear my client call from the house, “Hey Michael, you’ve been working awfully hard, would you like some cookies and tea?”. We end up sharing poems, land ethics and stories — and that is all part of the holistic process that creates the relationship between land and people.
