On Tuesday 3 September we’re joined by Kevin Philip Williams and Michael Guidi, Assistant Curator and Horticulturist respectively at Denver Botanic Garden, as they invite us to work, live and play with shrubs, celebrating their new book ‘Shrouded in Light: Naturalistic Planting Inspired by Wild Shrublands’. Ahead of the talk, delve into this exclusive extract from the book:
SEEING SHRUBLANDS
“Should I pursue a path so twisted?” Patti Smith, ‘Pissing in a River’
From a human perspective, shrublands are predominantly landscapes of scarcity, prevented from becoming something more desirable by environmental constraints. Yet our projections of ideal landscape conditions blind us to the deep and enduring productivity of shrubby landscapes.
Shrublands are everywhere, and depending on where you find yourself, you might call them any one of myriad names: boscage, bramble, briar, brush, bush, carr, cedar scrub, ceniza, cerrado, chaparral, copse, fynbos, garrigue, heath, karoo, kwongan, macchia, mallee, maquis, matorral, monte, moorland, petran, phrygana, pindan, pocosin, restinga, roee, sand sage prairie, scrub, scrubland, shinnery, shrub swamp, shrubland, shrub-steppe, strandveld, thicket and thorn are just some.
They appear where environmental conditions place plants under considerable stress. Aridity, nutrient-poor soils, disturbance, poor soil aeration, intense temperatures, short growing seasons, and windy environments can favour shrubby growth and contribute to the presence of shrub-dominated plant communities.
The classic models of stable shrubland biomes occur mostly in deserts, semi-arid continental interiors and the five Mediterranean climate regions of the world, covering more than ten percent of the Earth’s terrestrial surface area.
However, the very conditions that promote shrub-dominated growth also present challenges to human settlement and development. It’s no coincidence that the North American prairies – and not the shrublands – were plowed under for agricultural use. The very environments that hewed such resilient growth forms translate poorly to agriculture. Thus, the utility that we can extract from these landscapes is something more akin to respect and appreciation, rather than domination and coercion.
The Grand Repeater
Even though teasing apart the individual components and interactions of shrublands can be challenging, humans are pattern-seekers, and something about shrubs en masse makes sense to us. Why do we find them appealing? What is it about these clumps, clusters and lines that make sense?
The modern domesticated shrubscape is often a tamer and more psychologically accessible place than its wild counterparts. A field of topiary, intricately knotted boxwood, starkly sheared hedges or neatly rounded shrub bubbles (shrubbles?) offer neat, tamed and civil forms and collections. This human urge to impose form, geometric and otherwise, may be rooted in our need to align ourselves with sustaining forces and to justify our choices of where to build our homes and care for ourselves and our kin.
Far from being fully unsettled and antagonistic places, shrublands have long been sources of food, water and shelter, and reading the different properties of shrubs in the landscape was crucial to the survival of early humans. They no doubt understood that larger and thicker vegetation coalesced around water sources, perhaps developing an appreciation for the aesthetics of contrasting species around water lines. They would have known the phenology of flowering and fruiting, depending on the fruits, nuts and berries of shrubs for survival. In the wild, finding rounded shrubs is not a sign of human hedging, but a sign of game; in shrublands with wild ungulates, it’s not uncommon to find fields of browsed shrubs that look as if they have been sheared, dwarfed or miniaturized. Recognizing this phenomenon as an effect of animal presence, humans would have begun associating pruned shrubs with protein, a fitting history for the modern deprecatory nickname of green meatballs.
When we create shrubscapes we force a context. Depending on species and maintenance regimes, that context might reside in the realm of the unfamiliar and uncomfortable or that of the bountiful and reassuring. Shrubs can hide or reveal, be the thicket or clearing, create a line or the outline, stand alone or weave together. Learning to read the landscape, to read shrublands, may require reading many genres in many languages, but the stories are familiar. We have known them since the beginning of our time.
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Kevin and Michael will be in conversation on Tuesday 3 September, 7pm. Tickets available to attend in person or watch online (live or on demand): book tickets
Buy the book
Shrouded in Light: Naturalistic Planting Inspired by Wild Shrublands by Kevin Philip Williams and Michael Guidi, £40, Filbert Press