“We decided to focus on the role of beauty,” explained Maria Landoni, ASLA, PLA, founder of Sur Landscape Architecture and curator of an online discussion organized by the ASLA Climate & Biodiversity Action Committee.
Beauty plays an important role — it helps people emotionally connect to landscapes. Through that connection, people are more likely to value the biodiversity that make places beautiful and functional. And then they are more likely to invest in protecting and restoring landscapes.
Uli Lorimer, director of horticulture with the Native Plant Trust, understands the beauty of wild landscapes and wants to bring that beauty to more American public spaces. He views this as a critical effort because 30-40 million hectares of native vegetation in the U.S. has been lost to development. “This is equal to all national and state parks combined,” he said. Much of that land has been covered with more than 63,000 square miles of lawn.
Despite this loss of native landscape, the U.S. is still an ecologically rich place. There are more than 20,000 native tree and plant species that provide a range of ecological functions — from habitat for pollinators to stormwater management.
To bring more of these beautiful and functional plants to more people, Lorimer called for applying “ecological horticulture.” This approach supports the genetic diversity of plants, ensuring non-uniformity, resilience, character, and climate adaptation. “Look at skunk cabbage that grows in the wild — no two flowers are the same.”
At the Brooklyn Botanic Garden in New York City, where Lorimer once was a gardener, the team designed a garden based on the New Jersey Pinelands, a unique 1.1 million acre ecosystem designated by UNESCO as Biosphere region. The goal was to transfer some of the wild beauty of the pinelands to the garden in Brooklyn, a space surrounded by tall buildings.
“We intentionally planted small trees, which establish themselves better. We brought in a combination of ruderal and annual plant species, including milkweeds, ashers, and goldenrods” — some of which were cultivated from seeds from the pineland landscape.
Lorimer highlighted the project to raise a key point: “There is a big disconnect between beauty and diversity in the wild and what you can purchase for projects.”
Plants can be propagated from seeds or cuttings. Large-scale nurseries find taking cuttings faster and easier. Seed-grown plants result in diverse sizes and are therefore seen as riskier.
“Most plants are also cultivated to be pretty, not for ecological function. They do next to nothing for pollinators, like the 4,000 species of bees in North America, 25 percent of which are specialists that rely on particular plants.”
The Native Plant Trust, where Lorimer currently works, grows all plants from seeds. Three-fourths of seeds are collected from the wild. The Trust produces 50,000 plants from 300 species each year. Lorimer said this is just a very small portion of the total number of plants produced each year. “In some areas of the U.S., like California, there may be many native plant nursery options, but in other areas nothing.” Demanding high-quality native plants will help more people understand their value.
“For a long time, I suffered from plant blindness,” said Dawn Dyer, ASLA, PLA, principal, Studio-MLA. “It’s easy to have a lack of awareness about different types of plants. We are taught in school about animals but not plants.”
The project that helped her see is the Natural History Museum in Los Angeles, where Studio-MLA designed multiple gardens to serve as spaces for students, educators, and visitors. The landscapes’ 14 garden zones offer “tangible experiences” of different Californian habitats.
The gardens were designed to be beautiful but also provide food or shelter for birds, butterflies, spiders, insects, and lizards. Dyer focused on four zones Studio-MLA designed: the transition garden, living wall, urban wilderness, and commons. Each garden has a unique plant community.
In the transition garden, silk floss trees attract birds and butterflies. The crevices of the living wall are filled with rosemary, grapes, and succulents. “Pollinators and birds love it. And people keep stealing the dudleya plants.” And in the urban wilderness zone, there are native ferns and oaks around a pond, which provides a shelter for a range of species. “When I saw a hawk there, I knew we were successful.”
Studio-MLA planted more than 600 new plants from 200 species and more than 140 new trees. The new trees helped increase the shade canopy by 50 percent. Approximately 70 percent of the plants are native. “The gardens have led to an increase in biodiversity — naturalists have made more than 11,000 observations of more than 800 species.”
The projects is designed to help others not be blind to plants. “The hawks, monarchs and bees show what the plants can do.”
Kelly D. Norris, plantsman and artist, said we have a limited vocabulary when trying to describe the beauty of landscapes. “We need to expand the language of aesthetics and create a pattern language. Designing landscapes is a process. It’s not just about the components of the design but about time; how landscapes change over time and be resilient.” Norris said the role of the designer is to “align aesthetic intent with ecology.”
Designers will benefit from spending time in nature, reading the landscape. He offered an example of a landscape that had “collision” of two gradients, which led to different soils, amounts of water, and plant communities. These kinds of collisions inspire Norris — they show that “landscapes aren’t single entities but strands of greater ecological cloth.”
Norris showed how he studies the natural spatial arrangements of plants in the wild to understand how plant density and dispersion changes over time. These quantitative analyses help him create a model for distributing plants in designed landscapes; a model that results in beauty and ecological support. “Resilient plantings emerge when aesthetic principles align with ecological processes.”
“Planting is also an act of disturbance in ecological terms. When we plant with intention, we can have a significant impact on the landscape. We can profoundly change a place.” He said “many designers oversimplify because of a fear of complexity.” But designers can lean into the complexity. They can bring density and a diversity of species together, creating visual complexity. They can create zones that are aesthetically intricate but also characterized by fineness and subtle contrasts.
