Land Matters
In a preview of the September Land Matters column, Landscape Architecture magazine editor Bill Thompson, FASLA, asks if green solutions thrive among the manicured lawns of the suburbs?

Are suburbanites ready to embrace bioretention basins and other landscapes that improve the ecological health of their neighborhoods—even when those conflict with the manicured neatness of the suburban lawn?

image courtesy of NAM Planning and Design LLC

They are and they aren’t, if experiences in Pennsylvania’s Neshaminy Creek watershed are any indication. There, two landscape architects designed two state-of-the-art stormwater management systems at two places in the watershed. Both double as native meadows and wildlife habitat. When it comes to how the systems went over with their communities, however, all similarities end.

As related in “Parting of the Waters” in this issue, Pennswood Village, a Quaker retirement community, got a large, complex stormwater system, designed from scratch, that looks like a native meadow. The Quakers, who underwent a lengthy consensus-building process leading up to the design, love it. The other system was at Sweetwater Farm, a nearby subdivision where a landscape architect was brought in mainly to find a way to discourage geese who were feeding (and defecating) on the grassy margins of an existing stormwater system. Her solution—lush native plantings around the ponds above—helped solve the goose problem but earned the wrath of the home owners, who find a meadow altogether too shaggy to blend with their manicured backyards.

Why do members of one community love their stormwater meadow, while members of the other loathe theirs? In an attempt to find answers, I reread Joan Nassauer’s “Messy Ecosystems, Orderly Frames,” in Landscape Journal (Fall 1995).
 
People can spout “green” slogans all they like, writes Nassauer, fasla, “but once we begin talking about changing the landscapes where they live—about specific changes in the way the landscape will look even for the purposes of improving ecological quality—we encounter fear, anger, rejection.” The nub of the problem is that people often don’t understand or even see ecological function, but they do prize neat, orderly landscapes as values associated with neighborliness, hard work, and pride. To make ecologically functioning landscapes socially acceptable, Nassauer advocates (among other things) “cues to care,” such as mowing strips around the wildflower meadows or planting flowering trees.

As I look at the two stormwater systems, however, I already see cues to care in both, so something else must be at work. Looked at very broadly, I suspect that Pennswood Village residents and Sweetwater Farm residents are at two different places on a cultural continuum in their ability to perceive beauty in a complex, “messy” natural system. The Quakers at Pennswood Village have somehow evolved to the point that they can appreciate the beauty in such a system. Sweetwater Farm residents, by contrast, are generic suburbanites who view chemical lawn treatments as the holy grail of landscape care and think that if a plant wasn’t bought at the lawn and garden center out on the bypass, it should be weed whacked out of existence.

I cling to the belief that American culture is gradually evolving toward the Pennswood Village position. The question is, where is our culture at large in 2006? What out there might indicate that Americans at large have actually progressed beyond the Sweetwater Farm mentality on the long road to retrofitting the American suburb?