I have been helping out with a public arts initiative during Glasgow International (festival of visual arts). Soil City is an urban laboratory and series of events organized by the Open Jar Collective. It is designed to initiate a multifaceted conversation about soil as if it matters to life in the city. I have been helping in particular with site visits by the mobile laboratory, which includes a pair of purpose-built bikes designed to enable the collection of all kinds of ‘data’ pertaining to the material diversity, social uses and meanings of soil at sites around the city. These events provide a visually and socially engaging way of approaching a variety of social and environmental questions; of greatest interest to me, is the plant surveys which provide some of the data being collected.

I prepared a mini guide to indicator plant species for use in these surveys. This includes a short list of plant species selected for their widespread presence in Glasgow, and their relationship to different kinds of soil (e.g., acidic, basic, fertile, infertile etc.). In other words, by identifying whether any plants from the list are thriving at a given site, you can learn something about the soil there. Some reflections about that process can be found here. The guide itself (minus photographs) can be found here.

Gorse (Ulex europaeus): suggestive of poor soil, in which it can thrive due to the nitrogen-fixing bacteria in its root nodules.

Although I have yet to finish thinking about this little project, probably the most interesting observation it has raised so far, is this: while the ‘indications’ provided by plants with respect to soil are often mixed or inconclusive, the ‘reading’ of plant presences at a given site, and particularly the kinds of relationships this identifies–not only between plants and soil, but between different plants, and between plants and human activities (such as gardening, dumping of organic material, etc.)–initiates a new mode of perception. Not only is it a way of seeing more in the urban landscape, it also reorganizes the perceptual field ever so slightly. For someone like me, who was already always on the look-out for plants, it causes me to see them in terms of their groupings, or past events, rather than individual species. It is hard to fit into words how modest-yet-profound a difference this is.

For eight years, a property developer called New City Vision (NCV) has been trying to gain permission to build condos on the North Kelvin Meadow. The campaign to prevent this development from going forward has gained significant momentum in the last couple of years, due in part to the activities of The Children’s Wood. Last week, members of the City Council’s Planning Applications Committee visited the meadow in response to a request from the Children’s Wood, who have submitted an application of their own to retain the land for community use and outdoor education. Hundreds of people of all ages, including several groups of children from local schools and nurseries, came to the meadow in the midst of high winds and heavy rain to show their support for this alternative application. The councillors arrived a half hour late and toured only a small portion of the site, their heads down or turned towards the planning officers who led the tour. Then they returned to Council Chambers where they deliberated for approximately two hours before granting approval to NCV’s application.

Waiting for the councillors to arrive. Photograph by Chelsea Lowe

Immediately following this decision, an alternative proposal submitted by The Children’s Wood, was also granted planning permission. The fact that two conflicting applications could be granted planning permission for the same site is a surprise for many people (myself included)–one that bears some consideration. As was repeatedly emphasized both within the committee meeting (which I attended as an observer) and in the planning officer’s report (available here), planning decisions are not supposed to be political. The decision to sell land rests with the landowner (Glasgow City Council), and they are only beholden to consider the opinions of residents on land use designations as part of the process for approving the City Development Plan. But official review of the new Plan is not yet complete, which means that objections to the zoning of the NKM for housing do not bear on this decision. Whether the ninety houses and “executive suites” are built thus depends solely on whether the application is judged to be in alignment with current planning policy–a supposedly objective process that requires councillors with a strong opinion one way or the other to absent themselves from the proceedings, but nonetheless resulted in a clean split along party lines (with all the Labour candidates voting in favour of the application, and the Scottish National Party voting to reject it).

Consequently, the key weakness of the NCV application–that the loss of opportunities for nature education, imaginative play, food gardening and community events can be compensated with an upgrade of football pitches at another location–is considered resolved by the assertion that current uses of the meadow are illegitimate (i.e., “informal/ancillary”) in relation to its original designation as a playing field. In other words, even though policy at the municipal and national levels favours the protection of urban greenspaces–for which the meadow technically qualifies–it need not be treated as a greenspace since it is not officially designated as such. At the same time, should the landowner decide that current uses of the meadow are desirable, they could grant permission for their continuation, thus (I think) providing the basis for recognition of an alternative “established” use. Except that the council has already signed a contract for sale with NCV, which means that the application will have to be rejected at the level of the Scottish Government for this response to become conceivable (which is apparently, what happened to an application from a different developer in 1996).

Working through the absurdities and injustices of this situation has been a useful but painful education. Leading up to the site visit, hundreds of person hours were invested in preparing the meadow and Children’s Wood for inspection: volunteers spread wood chips, repaired composters, built new raised allotments, weeded and removed debris. We worried that councillors would not see the meadow’s beauty or vibrancy in the depths of January. Colourful signs were painted, trees decorated with knitted fruit and flowers and large format photographs of the gardens, smiling children and fruiting apple trees were printed, laminated and distributed throughout the meadow on the morning of the site visit. Nobody knew the route the councillors would take across the site, and so there was some confusion about where to stand, how to make sure our signs and banners and children would be seen. But we were mistaken in all this, for in the end it mattered very little what had been made visible; the councillors were not there to look–at least not at us, our signs, or the fruits of our labours. These were after all, unauthorized and therefore irrelevant augmentations of the property in question. And so it was that rather than standing before the councillors to be seen, we followed behind them, chanting and shouting our message as opposed to showing it–only to be prematurely dispersed due to confusion about the visit’s itinerary.

In some ways this was a profoundly disheartening experience–a direct and bodily confrontation with the disenfranchisement that is built into the planning process. On the other, I think that some people understood from the moment the site visit was granted, that this was a different kind of political opportunity. A moment in which we could be seen, not by politicians–or at least, not by the members of the planning committee–but rather by an audience of journalists and voters and community members whose hearts were still available to be won. The site visit and the committee’s decision has been very well-covered in the local and national media. A petition to the Scottish government, asking them to ‘call in’ and reject NCV’s application, gained over 1200 signatures in its first 24 hours. Most importantly, and even before the visit happened, the number and diversity of volunteers actively involved in the campaign increased noticeably. I arrived on the day of the visit ready to face my fears about the meadow’s future, but I found that standing there in the rain with so many others–family, friends, neighbours and strangers–was a comfort and an inspiration even as hopes for a different outcome were so quickly disappointed. And while the work of preparing for the visit made us all more vulnerable to this disappointment, it also produced a collective experience of hope–and that is what journalists are writing about now; that is the light in which everything we have done may finally become visible in a lasting way.

We moved to Glasgow from Los Angeles, which many people imagine must have been a difficult move. We did (and still do) miss life by the beach, but I was actually ready to leave Los Angeles’ desert ecology. I love the comparatively moist, vegetal abundance of Glasgow. What I miss more than the beach, is stress-free cycling. Glasgow is a terrible city for cyclists (surprisingly, much worse than Los Angeles, or at least West LA). I won’t get into all the reasons it is so bad here (though the rain and high winds are definitely part of it); what I want to write about is the kind of intangible good that can come from giving bikes more room–actually, of using plants and bikes together to reorganize urban spaces.

I just returned from a three month research trip to Montreal. While I was there, I stayed in the socially and environmentally progressive burough of the Plateau-Mont-Royal, where gardens and bike lanes alike are plentiful. I had lived in Montreal before, but not since recent additions to the city’s considerable cycling infrastructure. I spent some time towards the end of my visit trying to articulate exactly what this changed about my experience of the city, and also to see some of the inequalities that the urban good life seems to imply. Another work in progress…

One of the Plateau’s many ‘ruelle vertes’

On riding to work in Montreal

Most days I ride up Rachel to the George-Étienne Cartier monument at the base of the mountain in parc Mont-Royal, where I turn left and ride downhill into the McGill ghetto. An unnecessary climb, but worth it, not only for the exercise (by the end of my stay I am noticeably more fit!) but also for the view of the mountain, which in the fall, provides a continuously changing spectacle from St-Denis all the way to the park. It is at once inspiring and comforting, since its beauty is a surprise that I remember. As the leaves change colour, the face of the mountain visible from the street increases in density, each tree showing itself as an individual with its own timeline. It becomes briefly a kind of magical other place that is both within and above the city, and I become much more convinced of its mountain-ness—it seems to grow in size as it gets brighter with colour, and then, once the leaves begin falling, to shrink again, but leaving its topography more clearly visible. By the end of my visit, it stands as a promise of winter’s proximity, and all that entails. I do not, consequently, mourn the leaves’ passing, even though I will leave before the snow comes, and won’t ski or skate or toboggan there even once this year.

The mountain so captures my attention, that I barely notice the two rows of planters lining the pedestrian approach to the mountain, which are tall with ornamental ginger and overflowing with annual flowers. The bike path goes around this pathway; the planters are there to mark and beautify a different time—that of walking, and sitting rather than riding. Such plantings appear almost overly indulgent from a bike. Do we really need all this beauty in one place?

In contrast, many of the bike paths are planted with trees and ornamental grasses—plants large enough to produce an effect from a distance, or at speed. At the end of November, the grasses make an audible rustling on windy, traffic-calmed streets. From a bike riding through the Plateau-Mont-Royal burough, it feels as if we are actually in a new kind of city. It is not one with which I am in all ways comfortable—I wonder for example, at the effects of the growing disparity in the quality of public spaces across different buroughs of the city—but the way it feels is nothing short of inspiring. We feel healthier, happier—in fact, we are healthier, and we have at least, more moments of pleasure in public. At this stage in my life—with a young child, and a chronic health problem, these are not incidental differences. A good quality of life may help to sell real-estate, and is thus contributing in many parts of the city to a rather remarkable pace of gentrification, but it also makes it easier to be a good parent, to do a good job, and to take care of your health. It is therefore, no small thing to encounter beauty, and to be surrounded by the vitality of other living beings, on a daily basis.

I remember asking one of my interviewees if she thought that the enthusiasm for urban agriculture in Montreal was due in any way to the quality of the urban environment and the (often very generous) use of plants in public spaces. Maybe, she said, but pointed out that some of the most interesting projects come out of a lack of action on behalf of the city, because then people have to work out new ways of getting things done. Although I feel somewhat protective of what has been done in the Plateau, for bikes and for plants, I also wonder whether similar effects (of inspiration, health and happiness) might be produced, with less problematic socio-economic implications, through more collective, less institutionalized efforts. But this is of course to imagine another city again—one that does not yet seem quite possible, even here, amongst the tree-lovers, cyclists and alleyway gardeners. People may be healthier here, but many of them are also overworked and underpaid. There is no camaraderie to speak of on the bike paths; it is possible that many of the people who ride up Rachel, towards the mountain with me, do not have time to enjoy the beauty of its changes.

A new planning application has been submitted by New City Vision, who want to build 100 “owner-occupied units” on what is currently the North Kelvin Meadow. This is a very upsetting prospect–one that has informed much of my writing here to date–but one that had, until this re-submission, been indefinitely delayed. At the same, the Children’s Wood has submitted an alternative proposal to retain the space as a community woodland, which provides a concrete, infinitely more hopeful vision of ‘development’. While the period for submitting formal representations to the Glasgow City Council has passed, it is not too late to write to politicians. More information about the campaign to save the meadow can be found at the following two addresses.

http://northkelvinmeadow.com/

http://thechildrenswood.com/

In the process of writing my objection to NCV’s application, I was struck by how my feelings about plants and trees do not really count in the course of such decisions. You can write about about biodiversity, and the health benefits of having access to open green space, but you can’t say “It makes me happy and hopeful to walk down my street and hear birds singing.” Or at least, it is hard to imagine this getting discussed in the course of the City Council’s deliberations.

Nonetheless, I think the way plants make us feel can tell us a lot about the places we live, and our ways of being together in the city. So I have been experimenting with other ways of writing about plants, trying to make them, and my feelings about them, speak of larger questions and circumstances. This is an excerpt from a larger piece, in process, about trees in the city.

Five moments in the life of an abandoned playing field

Briefly, a pond. A homemade, old-carpet-lined pond: about five metres long, kidney-shaped and ringed by salvaged concrete, bricks and rocks. A pond of murky water that kids threw rocks and dirt into, and which kept draining out. An invitation for self-righteous grumbling by parents of small children; an attestation to the lack of consensus. A modestly audacious, some say misguided, but most importantly, unselfconscious experiment in urban design.

An empty, debris-filled, old-carpet-lined hole where there used to be a pond. An argument for oversight, better communication. A large, or at least, quite visible mistake.

A partial re-filling of the hole. No more carpet, rocks or bricks.  A somewhat magical, somewhat upsetting transplantation not of saplings, but juvenile trees—birch trees, ash and a small oak tree, dug out from other locations around the meadow and arranged in a friendly, slightly haphazard cluster, as if by a giant child playing at forest-making.

The trees drop yellowed leaves. They stand, nearly bare, in and around the partially filled hole where the pond was, markers for a graveyard of foolish intentions. “What a waste.” The trees here are born of neglect, and suffer both experimental violence (by young boys) and the threat of future violence (by development). We both mourn and resent the loss of these ones, neither broken nor burned.

But spring brings a surprise so profound it takes a while to fully register: buds, and then leaves on three of the trees. There they stand, amongst the grasses that have taken over the old pond hole, bolstered by little mounds of protective rocks at the base, so thin and vulnerable and yet alive, undeniably green. It seems a small miracle, but it is better than that: the gift of being wrong, of discovering that the world has more to offer than you supposed. These trees, once signs of naivety and recklessness, now speak in a much more mysterious way.

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#northkelvinmeadow #urbanmeadow #openhearts

A post shared by Erin Despard (@ilovenorthkelvinmeadow) on May 30, 2014 at 4:33pm PDT

The snowdrops and crocuses are up here in Glasgow which means that true spring is somewhere not too far around the corner. For me, a sometimes gardener who is also a working mother without a permanent job, it is both too soon (since I haven’t acquired let alone started any seeds), and never soon enough (after 5 months of cold, damp greyness). One way or the other though, it has got me thinking about gardening, and in particular about the small collective garden in the North Kelvin Meadow (NKM) that I helped to care for last summer.

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Still some edible sprouts under there. #northkelvinmeadow #urbancommons #wintergarden

A post shared by Erin Despard (@ilovenorthkelvinmeadow) on Dec 30, 2014 at 12:04am PST

This is a garden that, though modest in its ambitions, suffered a series of organizational and logistical problems–all of which were exacerbated by the lack of regularly present volunteers. As one of the facilitators for the garden, I was undoubtedly part of the problem. I struggled to be available to participate in work sessions on a regular basis, to keep the garden watered in some fashion through the summer’s improbable (and for many Glaswegians, scarcely conceivable) drought, and to contribute to the group’s Facebook page. Then I went away for a month (which unfortunately roughly coincided with the departure of the other two facilitators). Needless to say, while we did well with the peas, greens and brussels sprouts, the garden did not produce quite as bountifully as it could have under more consistent care.

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Exploring the fine line between collective gardening projects and urban foraging. #growyourown #northkelvinmeadow #urbancommons

A post shared by Erin Despard (@ilovenorthkelvinmeadow) on Sep 9, 2014 at 12:17pm PDT

Such gardens normally survive their early days on the backs of a few hard-working volunteers who are sufficiently invested in its success to give it inordinate amounts of time and energy. Other volunteers may come and go, but such a project continues as long as those key organizers do. I would dearly love to be one of those people for the NKM garden, and in fact, for certain stretches of last season I was, but I couldn’t keep it up: it brought extra stress to my family life, and after I injured my back, physical discomfort. But this post is not supposed about me, or rather, not only me–because I am surely not the first volunteer gardener to come up short on time.

The troubles with this garden are important, since they speaks to circumstances that are increasingly common, and increasingly normalized. In times of increasing austerity measures and decreasing opportunity, where people are required to work more and more, and at the same time make do with less (renumeration, health care, job security, etc.), they don’t have the time or the energy to work on the kinds of projects that might make their lives and the lives of others better. Consequently, not only is the number of volunteers available for collective garden projects declining, but the skills necessary for their organization are also in short supply. After all, who has time for developing interpersonal relationships, let alone a group process anymore – it’s all about getting something–anything–done with the resources available.

My question as I contemplate my involvement with the garden this season, is how it might be made to respond to these circumstances without simply mirroring them. That is, how can it be made to function effectively (as a community resource and creative space) without overworking its key volunteers? How can we have something we want and need, but pay less dearly for it? In this context, and because it has been part of my ‘job’ over the last couple of years to think about the relationship between visual social media, plants and place, I have been wondering whether community gardeners (and other grassroots organizers) might learn something from social media.

In posing this question, I don’t mean that what we need is more, or better, social media. As much as people are happy to ‘like’ grassroots social endeavours and voluntary organizations on Facebook, it hasn’t done much in our case for actually getting people out to the garden. It is more because, as Matthew Fuller and Andrew Goffey have observed, the success of social (and other, similarly ‘evil’) media is based to a large extent, on its exploitation of otherwise wasted time–the moments where people have nothing better to do, or when they are too tired or bored to do ‘real’ work. Checking your news feed, liking a photograph, tweeting–these social actions fit into the cracks of the everyday, making life a bit more interesting and enabling the maintenance of otherwise severely compromised social relations. I am just wondering if a collective garden could be made and maintained using a similar strategy?

To the ears of serious gardeners and garden-philosophers alike, this may be a somewhat shocking proposition (because gardening is one of the quintessentially ‘slow’ human endeavours, is founded on relations of care, and so on). But my reasons for making it are serious: part of what makes collective gardening such a socially and politically empowering experience is its requirement that the people involved create and find ways of sustaining the relationships necessary to the garden’s survival and effective use. Except in situations where a garden is administered and provided with funding by a larger organization, the solutions to the myriad practical, organizational and interpersonal problems that arise in the course of collective gardening projects do not exist prior to the involvement of those who make and care for it. When time is in short supply, are we therefore to give up on the creation of gardens altogether? I am suggesting that changing times may inspire a new form of garden, and new kinds of social relation to sustain it.

To give an example, the kind of tactics I am thinking of here pertain mainly to an expansion of the possible occasions for gardening work. What if volunteer gardeners were encouraged to complete tasks in the garden in a more piecemeal fashion and at times that worked best with their schedule–on the way home from work for example, or as a short activity to undertake with young children? If information could be provided that was adequate to coordinate such contributions (perhaps a rather large ‘if’)–utilizing for example, an updated version of the community notice board, complete with garden plan, ‘to-do’ list and QR codes that link to appropriate instructional Youtube videos–then it might become easier for certain time-pressed gardeners to make a contribution. It would also change what is entailed by ‘collective’, putting a greater emphasis on communication processes, and less on physically being together.

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Just doing a bit of advertising for @ilovenorthkelvinmeadow. #northkelvinmeadow #urbancommons #instagramforgood #guerrilamarketing

A post shared by Erin Despard (@ilovenorthkelvinmeadow) on Jul 6, 2014 at 7:20am PDT

I think it is an open question as to whether this would be a worthwhile trade-off (less time together, but potentially, a better-cared for garden and healthier volunteers). It might also lead to mistakes on behalf of less experienced gardeners, an unevenness in the pace of work, and failures to respond to changing conditions (a garden needs watering when it’s dry, after all, which may be long before someone finds the time for it). But at least in our case, where attendance at work sessions was highly variable last year, these risks are present already. More important to me, is how the processes of experimentation and refinement to make such an arrangement function effectively would offer insight into the changing social and communicative possibilities that a garden offers in an age of social media. How might the identity of ‘gardener’ change, when gardening is something you do on the way home from work? Can people still feel they are part of something bigger than themselves if they don’t spend time with the other human beings who are helping to make it happen? Perhaps most importantly, such an experiment affords the opportunity to articulate more clearly what is in danger of being lost, and to identify strategies for re-inventing the political potential that collective gardens have held in the past.

This post has been a long time coming, and some things have happened in the meantime that have caused me to re-think what I should call the second landscape value I want to articulate. It seems worthwhile nonetheless to start from my original thinking, since the limitations I now see in it are themselves instructive.

Tree decoration encountered in the Children’s Wood. Photo from my Instagram experiment (@ilovenorthkelvinmeadow)

I wanted to write about the value of ‘landscape sovereignty’, and by this I meant to highlight the surprising and bewildering qualities of neglected and unregulated landscapes. I was thinking in particular of the way different areas of the North Kelvin Meadow (particularly the Children’s Wood) change on an almost daily basis, such that any visit is likely to turn up new objects, structures and other interventions in the landscape–the intentions of which are sometimes clear (as with the addition of new gardens, ‘bug hotels’, birdhouses etc.) and sometimes not.  Overall, the frequency and the variety of these interventions turn the meadow into a vibrant as well as unpredictable and sometimes bewildering space of inscription. It is maximally inclusive of active participation in its shaping. The legibility of this inclusiveness makes it a welcoming place for a variety of experimental, marginal and sometimes illegal activities. I see the majority of these in terms of the provision of creative, safe spaces for people and activities that are not welcome or don’t have as free reign elsewhere. (Of course, this inclusivity also makes the meadow susceptible to destructive activities; I would guess that as many trees have been removed, burned or otherwise damaged as have been planted there over the last year.) Perhaps even more important, a diverse and open-ended space of inscription enables explorations similar to those described with respect to the value of visual density, but pertaining to the social dimensions of wilderness. They also invite further participation in the shaping of the landscape–even if that often ends up being preoccupied with repairing the damage caused by others.

I still believe all these things are true and important, and would attribute them equally to the woods at Kilmahew (perhaps especially the ruined seminary, which has been a pilgrimage site for graffiti artists, ravers and arsonists since its closure in the mid 1980s). Except that now a massive rhododendron removal is underway there and the landscape has been so thoroughly and violently altered, that the idea of it possessing any sovereignty seems painfully naive.

For the ‘before’ version, see a previous post: https://communicativelandscapes.wordpress.com/2014/05/07/valuing-unregulated-and-neglected-landscapes-part-1/

I think the mistake is in attributing the qualities I have observed and value to the landscape itself–as if it were something essential or enduring, when in reality, landscapes such as Kilmahew and the NK meadow are only circumstantially (and usually temporarily) sovereign. In most ways, their specific qualities and local significance are much more tenuous than those of a well-established and regulated landscape (though these too can be vulnerable to economic pressures, as the proposed sell-off of Glasgow’s Victoria Park demonstrates). There are so many reasons for this vulnerability that I feel slightly embarrassed about wanting to write about landscape ‘sovereignty’. However, there is something in this wish that seems worth excavating.

I think the effect or impression of sovereignty signals something important, something to do with the relations that shape a landscape while it remains unregulated. Perhaps another way of reading inclusivity is in terms of instability and indeterminancy. The ‘community’ that coalesces around use of the meadow could be accused of not knowing what it wants, just as the state of the woods at Kilmahew was seen, not to constitute but to obscure the landscape. In other words, part of what is legible in such landscapes, is the ongoing failure–or more positively, the struggle to appear–of those relationships and ways of working that might shape and care for landscapes in ways that are different from those implied in top-down processes of design and regulation. From this perspective, there is no sovereignty of landscape, just different degrees of openness and indeterminancy in the relations implicated therein.

So while I no longer think it makes sense to write of ‘landscape sovereignty’, the ongoing event of its simulation, through more-than-human social processes and investments that are contextual in the extreme, is of great interest and value in itself. What can we learn from such landscapes about the circumstances of social change and the constraints on sustained innovation? From this perspective, between a simulated sovereignty and visual density (which, due to some of the long term side-effects of unrestrained growth is perhaps equally tenuous), neglected and unregulated landscapes start to have a pedagogic or social scientific value. Recognizing this value is perhaps less a question of aesthetic appreciation and more one of social learning and experimentation.

The value I want to describe in this post (in a very preliminary fashion), is that associated with the quality or effect of visual ‘density’. I oppose this value to that of clarity or transparency, which is often an orienting one in public landscapes–not only for the sake of facilitating different aspects of its use, but also for security reasons (since a fully ‘legible’ landscape makes people who are using it in ways other than its ‘intended’ use easy to identify… and monitor or apprehend).

Birch tree and other plants growing out of a trailer in Kilmahew Woods, Cardross

These are landscapes wherein ‘the more you look, the more you see’. They tend to contain a relative abundance–or at least, a more complicated layering–of vegetative material, and also to be relatively free of external control (though not necessarily intervention). This does not however, presume diversity or complexity: a well-designed garden can present a diverse range of species, and produce complex visual effects, while also making everything clearly available to view. It is rather the number of plants, their form and growth habit, as well as the style of their juxtaposition with other elements, that produce effects of visual density. 

The Getty Garden, Los Angeles: a garden with maximum diversity (of species and visual effect) and maximum visibility

As a value, visual density is associated with specific circumstances, practices of appreciation and experiences. I treat each of these in turn (briefly, in broad brush strokes) as a way of elaborating its importance more clearly.

Processes and circumstances producing visual density. Although I can’t claim any scientific authority in this regard, it would seem to me that, in circumstances where conditions are conducive (i.e., most importantly, adequate rainfall) all that is required to produce multiple layers of vegetative growth and an attendant density, is the passage of time, and the lack of external control over those processes. Of course some plants produce such effects much more quickly than others (e.g., the twisted, horizontal growth habits of Rhododendron), but growth in general tends to obstruct vision the more it proceeds unchecked.

Appreciating visual density. In order to really see a landscape that has overgrown, you have to look more closely and more actively. Not only is a comprehensive survey from any combination of vantage points impossible, the visual quality of density stands in opposition to the model of vision implied in the survey (that everything can be made available to sight, more or less instantaneously): it foregrounds the impossibility of ever seeing everything, let alone at once, and in so doing, exposes the artificiality of any landscape that offers as much. In an overgrown landscape, where the foreground seems a tangled, disorganized mess, the question of interest is not, ‘how does it look?’ but ‘what did you find?’ In other words, things have to be noticed in order to be seen, which implies an active engagement as opposed to a more passive reception of views.

Experiences of density. A landscape that is visually dense or deep is one whose contents cannot be quickly assessed. Such landscapes frequently make people uncomfortable, especially in urban settings, where, as research in environmental psychology has shown, people often fear that excessive growth conceals persons or activities that are in some way dangerous. However, to the extent that such fears can be allayed–e.g., by visiting the landscape in the company of others–a visually dense landscape can feel wild or mysterious in a positive way, producing an experience of heightened awareness, which can be invigorating and is certainly rare, especially in cities. At the same time, by inviting different practices of looking, it provides an opportunity to experience the pleasures of discovery, and to practice noticing and identifying different plant and animal species, or the traces of natural processes and human intervention. As will be appreciated by anyone who has attempted to weed an overgrown garden, or locate particular species of plant in the wild, these activities require a perceptual attunement which it takes time and sustained effort to develop.

Kilmahew woods, Cardross: a landscape where the lost and forgotten are found over and over again, but never returned

Ultimately the question that remains unanswered here, is how we might elevate such values–which suggest gentler, more inclusive and more enchanted ways of relating to urban landscapes–to a greater social and cultural prominence? Aestheticization of visually dense landscapes, via photography, urban nature writing and so on, is one avenue. But in the highly mediatized city, where communication seems to be more and more event-based–whether as ‘news’ in a conventional or social media sense–I wonder if it there is a need to develop more direct, performative strategies. I am just at the beginning of thinking about what those might be; in the meantime, you can see/follow my little Instagram experiment…