Essay For A Piece About Plants and Decay
In this garden, which he hadn’t looked at since the day Hugh arrived, when he’d hidden the bottle, and which seemed carefully and lovingly kept, there existed at the moment certain evidence of work left uncompleted: tools, unusual tools, a murderous machete, an oddly shaped fork, somehow nakedly impaling the mind, with its twisted lines glittering in the sunlight, were leaning against the fence, as was also something else, a sign uprooted or new, whose oblong pallid face stared through the wire at him. Le Gusta este jardin? It asked…
LE GUSTA ESTE JARDIN?
QUE ES SUYO?
EVITE QUE SUS HIJOS LO DESTRUYAN!
The Consul stared back at the black words on the sign without moving. You like this garden? Why is it yours? We evict those who destroy!
— Malcolm Lowry, Under the Volcano, 1947
For this marvelous city, of which such legends are related, was after all only of brick, and when ivy grew over and trees and shrubs sprang up, and, last the waters underneath burst in, this huge metropolis was soon overthrown.
— Richard Jeffries, After London, or Wild England, 1886
Richard Jeffries, a self taught naturalist, wrote the book After London, or Wild England as a kind of speculative natural history. The story concerns a last-man-on-earth scenario set in an abandoned London, which has been overrun by plants, the Thames and wild animals. One hundred and ten years after Wild England’s publication, the New Scientist of London invited an expert panel to evaluate the accuracy of Jeffries’ predictions. They found his book to be surprisingly accurate. It was the panel’s opinion that if left to its own devices, at around five years, succumbing to a natural fire cycle, much of what was flammable in the city would burn and in less than ten years roots would make short work of London’s roads; forests would thrive in the growing space generated by the destruction of the roads, fed by the nutrient rich ash provided by the fires. As levees and culverts burst, groundwater and an unfettered Thames would swiftly undermine the foundations of even the sturdiest buildings. The panel predicted that in less than two-hundred years, there would be little left of the city of London, save for a few ruins, shrouded beneath a dense deciduous forest.
When I first arrived here from Vancouver at the end of May, I was struck by how quickly everything grows in the spring. I was further impressed upon my discovery that consistent rainfall keeps everything green and verdant throughout the summer; On the West Coast, the summer months are arid and waterless – everything dries up and very little growth occurs. Here, however, everything continues to grow rapaciously. I remember taking a walk late at night, around the middle of June and thinking how strange it was to look everywhere and see plant life growing over everything. I walked past a trade school somewhere on the east side, which seemed poised to be consumed by jungle-like thicket and was amazed by how seemingly little effort was put into landscape maintenance in this city. Part of what amazed me can be captured in this passage from urban theorist Mike Davis’ book Dead Cities:
The ability of a city’s physical structure to organize and encode a stable social order depends on its capacity to master and manipulate nature. But cities are radically contingent artifacts whose “control of nature,” as John McPhee famously pointed out, is ultimately illusory. Nature is constantly straining against its chains: probing for weak points, cracks, faults, even a speck of rust… Cities accordingly, cannot afford to let flora or fauna run wild. Environmental control demands continuous investment and systematic maintenance: whether building a multi-billion-dollar flood control system or simply weeding the garden.
Around that time I began a somewhat free-from photographic exploration, for lack of a better word, of the urban flora, as well as some of the structures affected or surrounded by it. A number of thoughts started to come into my head. I was interested by the way that our collective imaginations dictated not only the form of nascent structures, but also determined what shape already existing structures would continue to take. Simply put, with any structure, the owner must make numerous managerial decisions throughout its lifespan: to maintain it, at what level to maintain it, should he or she renovate, should he or she expand it, or allow it to fall into ruin. Furthermore, if it is the natural inclination of human structures to decay – altogether quite rapidly, then every aspect of a city’s form, including the already existing parts result from a continual intentionality and are expressions of citizens' beliefs and ideologies. Even things like statues or stately old buildings, which seem constant and static, must actively and consciously be kept in stasis. As much as the city is a physical object, it is a map of the belief systems of its citizens, with past overlapping present. At least this is the case as much as one’s economic privilege permits, since the more power one has, the more the city is an extension of his or her fantasy. The less power one has the more the city exists as a thing to which he or she must cater. The film-maker Jean-Luc Goddard once commented that in the Israeli - Palestinian conflict, the Israeli version of the story was told in the form of the epic, while the Palestinians' story was told in the form of the documentary. By this he meant that the Israelis, having power were able to be the agents of their own story-telling, and thus created their own heroicized version of the history of this conflict. The Palestinians, on the other hand, largely divested of power, became the subjects of other people's story telling - the subjects of documentaries. Because of these differing dynamics, the Israeli version of reality could actively be constructed as the product of Israeli fantasy, whereas the Palestinians' lives became objectified by the cameras of journalists recording their lives in the form of "objective" historical documents. Even though both sides are part of the overall historical event: the Israeli - Palestinian conflict, each one has a very different relationship to how the reality of it is created. For one reality is pliable and responsive to its desires, beliefs and fantasies, for the other, it is an external object to be observed and understood. This relationship is accurate for many situations throughout the world, and is useful in describing how people relate to the cities they inhabit. The more power one has over his or her environment, the more that environment reflects one's own dreams and fantasies, that is to say, becomes part of one's personal epic. The less power one has, the more that environment forms itself into an objective reality, that is to say, the more one becomes a character in its documentary (the documentary that results from the epic of power).
The city, an object which is both artificial and natural, maintains itself in the artificial sphere through imagination. But it is better perhaps to define these terms not so much as natural and artificial but as epic or documentary. In this sense, the distinction between artifice and nature rests less on the division between human production and natural production, but more along lines of memory and forgetfulness, ownership and loss, attention and neglect, between the ability to impose one’s belief system on a physical object and the necessity by which one must watch the object of his or her attention fall into ruin or transform into something outside of his or her control.
The city composes a living historical chronicle of the belief systems of its citizens, as well as a document of the elements outside our control, which we typically refer to as nature. I was interested in exploring the shifting relationship between fantasy and objective reality within the city. Also, this project gave me a misanthropic optimism in understanding how quickly plants could undo what has sprung from the ugly imaginations of past inhabitants.