PLANTS

Sonja Dümpelmann

Sonja Dümpelmann is a landscape historian and professor at the University of Pennsylvania Weitzman School of Design. She is the author and editor of several books, including the prize-winning Seeing Trees: A History of Street Trees in New York City and Berlin (2019). She has served as President of the Society of Architectural Historians Landscape History Chapter and as Senior Fellow in Garden and Landscape Studies at the Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, Washington, DC.

lants stand at the core of landscape architecture. As life-sustaining organisms, plants in their myriad forms, shapes, colors, and sizes are a fundamental component of most landscapes, regardless of how much or how little these landscapes are shaped and designed by human hands. However, as history reveals and this essay argues, plants have been both landscape architecture’s strength and weakness. In the future they could be its strength. Today’s concerns about global warming, climate justice, as well as social and environmental justice more generally show that it is high time for landscape architecture to reconsider its vegetal origins and the manifold values of plants. It is necessary to overcome the presumptive weaknesses that have often been associated with a preoccupation with plants.

Shedding light on plants’ uses and roles in landscape architecture’s history can not only enlighten the present but also suggest future possibilities of designing with and for plants. As will become clear, plants sit at the confluence of art and science, as well as culture and nature, which characterize designed landscapes. They can imbue landscapes with meaning, for good and for bad. Plants have been misused in various ways and contexts to wield power, marginalize and subdue people, and to hide them, their labor, and problems in plain sight. However, plants’ changeability and malleability— that is, their “plantness,” their perpetual process of becoming—also uplifts us humans. Plants’ changeability has enabled them to persevere and protect us. In the Anthropocene, however, it is no longer only us who need protection to survive but the plants themselves. Through mutually beneficial collaborative projects with plants, landscape architecture is in the unique position to further understanding of the relationships between human and nonhuman nature and work against environmental crises.

Poetry

Plants encapsulate what distinguishes landscape architecture from other design disciplines dealing with the built environment. Plants are nature, both in a literal and figurative sense. They are not only a living material with their own agency, but they also symbolize nature. Plants are synecdoches of nature at large. The ways in which plants have been used and manipulated over time to create place, make space, and shape gardens and landscapes of various types has always been an indicator of our relationship with nonhuman nature at large. Plants are therefore also the subject of and the result of culture, as the terms agriculture, viticulture, arboriculture, and floriculture attest. In landscape architecture plants are both nature and culture. They sit squarely within what the early professional landscape architects described as a synthesis of agriculture, horticulture, and forestry as well as engineering and architecture.

In landscape architecture plants are more than a resource that can be harvested to provide medicine and drugs, food, and energy. They are also more than building materials and creators of space, and they provide more than what today are often called ecosystem services – the remediation of soil and water, the protection against soil erosion, the cooling of air, filtering of dust, buffering of sound, and the sequestering of carbon. Besides these functions, in landscape architecture plants are used to lift the human spirit, provide pleasure and psychological well-being, and foster identity. They are chosen and arranged for their form, sound, texture, color, smell, rhythm, and meaning. Oftentimes, landscape architecture is at its best when it employs plants to fulfill multiple of these functions and to achieve what the ancient Latin writer Horace in relation to poetry called the dulce utili – a mix of pleasure and utility.

This concept, in other contexts described as the combination of art and science, is one of the bedrocks of landscape architecture, cited in particular by 18th-century British landscape gardeners. It has also given rise to cultural technologies including Vegetationstechniken, literally “vegetation technologies,” used in the shaping of the land. An ancient example is the Etruscan and then Roman planting practice of training vines on and between trees described by Pliny the Elder and other Latin writers as “married vines,”1 and famously represented in a mural excavated in the late 19th century at Pompeii’s casa dei Vettii.2 Quite fittingly, in this ancient fresco small cupids