Cool green water flows from “The Source of Shareula” cave near at the base of a limestone cliff in Racha. The deep pool, bracketed by concrete foundations (for a bridge? a swimming dock?) allows full submersion on hot August days. The flow from the cave, at just over 4 m³/s it powers the nearby Chelishi hydrostation, adjacent to the 15th-century Chelishi Monastery.

But what is the source behind the Source? Some topo maps show the rivers Shareula and Shaora splitting from a small divide (+1144 m) near Nikortsminda, with Shaora flowing into Shaori Reservoir. Digital maps label the Shareula river flowing out of Shaori. At the southern end of the reservoir near the Narkerela Pass (+1218 m), penstocks siphon water from Shaori to feed the 32 MW Tkibuli hydropower plant (+668 m). Tkibuli, with all that clean power at its disposal, remains the coal mining center of Imereti. On the web site of EP Georgia Generation, Shaori HPP’s operator, there’s a mention of foibe, or funnel on the west side of the Shaori reservoir, near the rockfill dam. Is the foibe the Source, with an underground river connecting to the cave? Typical Georgia: something dramatic, inexplicable, and sublime, with a bit of crumbling concrete and trash in the corner.

Ruderal will be exploring two regions in Racha this October, Shakhartali and Shkmeri/Mravaldzali, with Cityförster, conducting field research and planning of new recreation zones. While Racha is best known for alpine peaks and glaciers at the border with Russia, and Rioni Gorge vineyards—the protected origin of the Kvanchkara grape—these two high plateau areas of Shkhartali and Mravaldzali are relatively undiscovered. They hug the dramatic divide between Racha and Imereti and feature diverse topography and plant communities, including evergreen forests and juniper, hazel and holly scrubs, and well-preserved Oda-type houses.

Works in Progress

Bodbe Hotel’s landscape phase one is complete, and Phase 2 well underway. With the opening of new padel courts, the lower campus is alive with activity.

Tsqneti Chiaroscuro:

A pine plantation near the Ukanakhevi gorge surrounds this garden in a Soviet-era parkland planting dominated by—you guessed it—stands of monumental Himalayan cedars. We doubled down on the evergreen darkness, adding a patch of hardwood forest and understory planting, to highlight a meadow clearing adjacent to the home. Final grading and drainage are in progress, with planting scheduled to start in October. Save for a few proper amelanchier specimens from Poland, the trees and shrubs are sourced from Kakheti and Lagodekhi nurseries.

New posts on the Substack:

• An Exclusive Interview with The Ancient, Giant Plane Tree of Telavi: Guest editor Ben Arenstein nabbed this exclusive with one of Telavi’s millennial icons.

• The Murmuring of the Forest Multitude: An interview with Stefan Laxness on the practices and promise of Community-Led Landscape Restoration

• A Future Canopy for Historic Gudiashvili Square in Tbilisi: A new layer of trees will provide continuity as older plantings succumb to disease and age.

• A Garden of Restitution: Outside of the carceral realm, a neutral space: a garden proposal for the 2018 Tbilisi Architecture Biennial.

• The Fertile Sections of Lower Manhattan (no it’s not a Sonic Youth Side project): Material and Imaginative Natures in Lower Manhattan, 1968-2008

• More Power Thuja: Designing a garden in a former pastureland in Tbilisi’s suburbs

Landscape Architecture Magazine’s October issue will feature the Betania Forest Garden, with new project photos by Grigory Sokolinsky.

Ruderal’s Benjamin Hackenberger spoke about the Tbilisi Urban Forest on “What’s that Green?” (Link to Spotify episode) and detailed how we worked with a team of environmental experts to develop an aesthetic approach to forest design, rooted in science.

Ruderal will be out and about this fall:

At Auburn University, the week of October 4-10 , a workshop with Wagon Landscaping, Auburn landscape students and faculty.

At ASLA New Orleans, on Friday 10 October, panel discussion, “Feral, Making Wild Landscapes” with Mathieu Gontier of Wagon Landscaping and David Hill of Hillworks. Discussion of our studio methods and feral aspects of Arsenal Oasis and Betania Forest Garden.

In Porto at the University of Porto, Faculty of Sciences on Monday, November 3rd, “Landscape Architecture Research Methods in Academia and Practice.”

In Prague at KRUH on Thursday, 6 November. “The 24th lecture series, titled LAND/SCAPE, will introduce progressive landscape studios and visionaries focused on reimagining the use of public spaces, landscape resilience, the reintegration of nature into cities, and the promotion of biodiversity.”

And Vienna on Monday, 1 December at the Institute for Art and Architecture , Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna.

Sarah’s field drawings are featured in The Shape of What Remains, an exhibition by Aea: Culture Initiative, curated by Nata Tatunashvili, at the Venice Design Biennial.

The Shape of What Remains: Six gestures of repair across broken geographies, presented by Aea: Culture Initiative, reflects on how we live when the world is ruptured. The project consists of six compartments, shaped by the lived experiences of women from the Aea community, forming a non-linear atlas of survival.

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Hope we can catch you somewhere on the road this fall!

Architectural spaces of the carceral system include interrogation rooms, holding cells, courtrooms, prison complexes, and individual cells. This space is distilled to a five-dot, or quincunx, prison tattoo, the center dot representing the prisoner. The four dots at the perimeter represent the bounds of the prison cell.

Tied to these spaces in prolonged and oppressive relationships, prisoners and their relations lacks neutral spaces to mediate between the carceral system, family, and society at large. And so we ask, what is the architecture of such as space and where is it located? And what restitution, respite, or progression of thought, could occur there?

The theme of the 2018 Tbilisi Architecture Biennial was “Buildings Are Not Enough.” It was held in the city of Gldani, a microrayon (a Soviet-era, self-contained city extension, outside Tbilisi.) The event examined the optimism and rigor of the original microrayan plan, and the ways its citizens adapted the strict plan to individual and collective spatial and programming needs, through the transition from communism to the free-market capitalism of today. Gldani is also home to Prison #8, a high-security facility for men. Criminal justice and police reform in the early 2000s included a zero-tolerance enforcement policy that led to mass incarceration of men in Georgia, and the removal of criminal gangs that once enforced prison order, replaced by state officers. In 2012, the Georgian press released videos revealing systemic torture of prisoners by guards. This inescapable violence visited upon prisoners brought constant fear and trauma to those already serving sentences, and their loved ones. Massive protests, prisoner amnesty, and regime change followed the release of videos. Yet the state did not provide amnestied prisoners with psychological therapy or physical rehabilitation after their torture. The theme of the Biennial, “Buildings are Not Enough,” is thus threaded through the complexities of prisons and prison architecture; that physical isolation by secured architectural space is “not enough” to address all aspects of carceral realities.

We propose a neutral space in the form of a garden adjacent to the prison bus stop. It serves as an intermediary space for visitors, workers, and released prisoners. The first planting is 25 Zelkova Carpinifolia trees in a quincunx pattern. Zelkova, or dzelis-kva, means “pillar stone” in Georgian. There is an open area at the center with a round table surrounded by a shade structure and seating, with an additional ring of benches at the edges. The tree at the center of each quincunx pattern represents the body of the prisoner, and the quincunx orchard echoes outward, representing the transfer of state violence throughout the family and society. Each year, another 25 trees are planted in this pattern with another table. Each drawing is of a Zelkova Carpinifolia seedling to be planted in the garden.

The garden is an evolving and material evocation of the point of the trauma of incarceration and its effects. It recognizes the experiences of citizens who were subject to extrajudicial and corporal punishment. Its existence provokes thoughts that although many elements of our society have advanced, the nature of crime, punishment, rehabilitation, and reintegration hover close, unresolved, and unrelenting.

The 900-year-old tree is a 4.8-star tourist attraction near the Batonis Tsikhe fortress in Telavi, the sleepy capital of Kakheti, Georgia. In our cursory, pre-interview research during the August heat dome, we soporifically clicked on this article about “this majestic organism, the largest tree in Georgia” by the Georgian Tourism Board (GTB), which describes the tree as “a natural marvel that has borne silent witness to centuries of history.” and “dwarfs its surroundings, echoing the grandeur” and is “an enduring testament to Georgia’s rich natural heritage.”

As the Telavi Plane tree attests to being “a natural marvel that has borne silent witness to centuries of history,” then of course, our stalwart member of the Platanaceae family is likewise witnessing the Age of Artificial Intelligence. Curious if AI might have written this effusive tourist-trapping entry, we then asked our chatbot to weigh in & analyze the text for markers of such provenance. Our virtual assistant assured us the work was written by a human, noting:

The text has a few minor stylistic quirks that are more typical of human writing than the often-perfect, almost sterile grammar of AI. For instance, the use of “shouldered by the local municipality” is a slightly less common phrasing than “paid for by...” or “covered by...” This kind of subtle variation in word choice is more indicative of a human writer’s personal style. And “In short, the text exhibits a clear authorial voice and a deliberate stylistic choice that points toward a human writer. It’s an example of writing that is meant to be more than just informative; it’s designed to be evocative, a characteristic that requires a nuanced understanding of language and emotion that, until very recently, was a distinctively human trait.”

Telavi GPT possesses a human trait or two itself—evidenced by its desire to be a podcast guest! When Telavi GPT’s publicist reached out to us with an inquiry, we jumped at the opportunity. Now with the situate/contextualize out of the way, let’s get down to Ben Arenstein’s interview, conducted earlier this summer in our podcast studio, with this “symbol of Georgia’s strength and resilience”—the Telavi Giant Plane Tree.

Additional note: The Telavi GPT uses they/them pronouns, as they carry both male and female flowers, though on different stems.The interview transcript has been edited for length and clarity.

Benjamin Arenstein: I’d like to start by thanking all our listeners for tuning in to the program. We have with us today an extremely special guest. We’ve been trying to get them into the studio for years, but until now, we physically could not. It took some finagling on the part of their manager, and after a few back-and-forths, the producers finally agreed to purchase 2000 kilos of soil so that we could set up this interview. Without further ado, I’d like to introduce our guest— the Telavi Giant Plane Tree. Giant Plane Tree has had an unbelievably prolific career, producing over 100,000 leaves annually, housing thousands of bird nests, and providing shade to over a dozen square meters of earth. While most of our listeners are likely familiar with your previous work, what they may not know is that you have a memoir coming out this year, which you are here to talk about today.

GPT: That’s right, and thank you so much for having me on. I’m a long-time listener and a big fan of the show.

BA: That’s always nice to hear. So you have been alive for centuries, but I want to start our conversation by asking why you decided to write your memoir now.

GPT: Well, as you can imagine, it’s never an easy decision for a tree to write a book. It’s akin to an act of self-immolation. As you well know, paper has to come from somewhere, and too often that somewhere is trees. These could be friends, relatives, or colleagues. I actually dedicated this memoir to my great uncle, who was himself cut down for paper. Some stories, though, are too urgent not to be told. My life is one of those stories.

BA: So what in particular should our listeners know about you and your story?

GPT:The first thing they should know is that the life of a plane tree is no walk in the park. In fact, we can’t walk at all. We are just in the park. Our entire existence is watching and waiting, hoping that someone will finally see the trees for the forest. With me, that happened. As I got older, people began to take notice. Finally, I have fans who drive thousands of kilometers to visit me. TripAdvisor calls me a “must-see.”

BA: Several years ago a team of French dendrochronologists accused you of faking your growth rings by at least 100 years. Whatever came of that scandal? Were you afraid of being cancelled?

GPT: This was a devastating time for me; but I endured the humilation of core sampling to prove the haters wrong. Turns out, the droughts I suffered in the middle ages compressed the rings, which the French team misinterpreted as me manipulating my record. During this difficult time, I reached out to the Tnjri Tree (a 2,000-year old Plane Tree in Armenia) as they also have had their integrity questioned by the French. The best outcome, I can honestly say from this ordeal, is that Tnjri and became close friends and we’re actively sharing mycelium now!

BA: I hope it’s not a spoiler to say that the climax of the book is when— after finally developing a sense of yourself— you are literally split in two by a group of foresters, whose intentions remain a question mark even now. Against all odds, you survived. But how did you become truly whole again?

GPT: In my memoir, I compare this moment to the Judgement of Solomon. Neither half should have survived. You can never truly recover from a moment like that, but you can continue to move forward. The scent of the Kakhetian sunflowers wafting on a warm summer breeze, the buzzing of bees as they pollinate my neighbors, the trickle of wine from an autumn kvevri. That is what kept me going. And so long as this memoir isn’t remaindered and pulped too soon, I will be happy.

BA: Thank you so much for taking the time to speak with us today.

GPT: The pleasure is all mine.

Special thanks to our guest editor and podcast host Benjamin Arenstein! Arenstein is a dendrological dandy and PhD candidate at the university of Chicago.

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Simultaneously, a different sort of natural public space in the city was lost: the fertile section of imagination. Conjured by individual and collective imaginations in the open, undeveloped, wild, and abandoned spaces that once populated lower Manhattan, these places to explore, transgress and trespass, imagine and dream, are endangered and essential public spaces. Can we preserve these ambiguous places to explore, transgress and trespass, imagine and dream in the city? Or is it their very precarity that draws our longing and anticipatory nostalgia?

One Place After Another

Works from 1969-2010 directly influenced the ideologies and design technologies of the next generation of landscapes on the west side of Lower Manhattan: Chelsea Cove (MVVA Inc, 2010), Phase Three of the High Line (James Corner Field Operations and Diller Scofidio + Renfro, 2014), Little Island (Heatherwick Studio and MNLA,2021), and Gansevoort Peninsula (James Corner Field Operations, 2023). This string of public and private parks on old piers and docks were built after the removal and reconstruction of the elevated west side highway as a surface boulevard. More on these parks and this recent era of urban succession in a future post.

Seeding the City: Early artist works

As Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring(1962) and the first Earth Day (1970) brought increased awareness of environmental issues, nature moved from artist’s subject to artist’s medium. Nancy Holt and Mary Miss created site-specific works that directly engaged natural materials and processes. Until this time, Lower Manhattan's parks and landscapes reflected a picturesque and Victorian view of nature, constructed on grade. However, starting in the 1970s, new critical site works highlighted ecological processes, the physical and symbolic work of ruderal species, and invented new relationships and technologies to create nature in the city.

Three ephemeral works in Lower Manhattan raise metaphoric-political questions through occupation and process: Painting for Wind (Yoko Ono 1969), Bowery Seeds (Hans Haacke 1971), “Wheatfield - A Confrontation, Battery Park Landfill, downtown Manhattan, 2 acres of wheat planted & harvested, summer 1982” (Agnes Denes 1982)

Yoko Ono’s Painting for Wind (1969) featured a small packet of seeds hung from a larger piece of paper, and text instructing one to cut a hole in the paper, then cut a hole in the bag, and place it in the wind (Masters 2008). Bowery Seeds and Painting for Wind are examples of early works of ruderal aesthetics in lower Manhattan. They foreground ideas of latency, ambience, and emergence: the seeds lie dormant in the soil; the atmosphere provides sun, water, and windborne seeds; the seeds then germinate on a given fertile substrate as formed by the artist.

Bowery Seeds: Hans Haacke (1971). Hans Haacke placed soil on the roof of his Bowery studio and later photographed the vegetation growing on the pile. In published project images, the small pile of rough soil, green forbs, and grasses dominate the foreground in sharp focus, with a blurred urban context in the background. Here, the idea of site is defined by the soil, as the locus, and wind as a mechanism of seed distribution. As a site work that renders visible urban energy flows, Bowery Seeds sits between his contemporaneous works of institutional critique that also “daylighted” otherwise unseen patronage relationships (Haacke’s cancelled 1971 solo show at the Guggenheim, Shapolsky et al Manhattan Real Estate Holdings, A Real-Time Social System as of May 1, 1971 traced the financial relationships of the museum’s trustees and a notorious slumlord) and ecological systems (Rhinewater Purification Plant, Krefeld, Germany, 1971).

“Wheatfield - A Confrontation, Battery Park Landfill, downtown Manhattan, 2 acres of wheat planted & harvested, summer 1982” (1982). Denes’ ecological line of works began in 1968 with Haiku Poetry Burial/Rice Planting and Tree Chaining/Exercises in Eco-Logic (Spaid 2012). The work “calls attention to our misplaced priorities and deteriorating human values.” It is a deliberate act of “wasting” real estate through occupation (Spaid 2012).

Denes installed the work on a site that would later become Battery Park City in lower Manhattan. To prepare the site, Denes and her crew cleared, amended the soil, and dug furrows, sculpting a fertile section within the “rusty metals, boulders, old tires and overcoats” of the landfill. In photographs of the work, Denes walks through a sea of wheat with the mountainous towers of Wall Street in the background, echoing the traditional landscape painting compositions of agriculture and farm laborer foregrounded against sublime mountain wilderness.

Wheatfield set the precedent for inserting provocative, productive-symbolic landscapes in the unrelenting impermeability of lower Manhattan, mocking the notion of “highest and best use” of land. By highlighting the aesthetics of agricultural labor and making art of clearing, soil preparation, planting, and harvesting, she brought attention to the precarity of the earth’s agricultural landscapes and ecosystems. Wheatfield planted these ideological concerns on two fallow acres in the financial center of the world. Like her contemporary Mierle Laderman Ukeles (1978, Touch Sanitation), Denes sought to foreground the quotidian and hidden life support processes—food production, garbage collection—at play in Manhattan.

Framing the Past: Alan Sonfist’s Time Landscape

Alan Sonfist’s Time Landscape (1965, opened 1978) ushered in a wave of work where artists and designers reproduced fragments of landscapes in a postmodern ecological pastiche, later seen in The High Line, Teardrop Park, and South Cove. These works use the spatial and technical methods of landscape architecture of the 19th and 20th centuries’ picturesque and modern parks, to create landscape vignettes representing plant communities at a particular moment of history, location, or ecological succession.

Time Landscape, at La Guardia Place and West Houston, represents the landscape of pre-colonial Manhattan. Commissioned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Time Landscape is a living museum diorama, complete with a didactic plaque, where passersby can witness the growth and evolution of plantings behind an enclosure.

Sonfist consulted with ecologists at MIT to develop a suitable substrate and plant list, as “there were no established guidelines for creating an urban forest in the 1960s, our collaboration was crucial in crafting an immersive experience that reflected the rich biodiversity of a natural forest. “ (Lorenzo, 2025) Sonfist and volunteers amended the site’s soils and planted a small grove of oak and beech saplings, and a thicket of dogwood and cedar. Much of Sonfist’s work centers on the resilience and precarity of ecological systems. The works are insertions that assert, as critic Jonathon Carpenter writes about Sonfist’s ecological works, “Nature asserts itself as itself. It exists alongside people occupying space with the same legal status as they do: humans and nature together equally.” (Carpenter 1983).

A Section to Imagine: Joel Sternfeld’s Walking the High Line

Abandoned in the late 1980s, the elevated railway viaduct of the West Side High Line Railway evolved into a wild urban meadow. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, urban explorers reached the surface from the street via secret access points, or descended from adjacent buildings. Joshua David and Robert Hammond formed Friends of the High Line in 1999 to preserve the structure from demolition and lobby for its conversion to an urban linear park. In 2000, photographer Joel Sternfeld, with permission from railway operator CSX, spent a year photographing the High Line’s landscape and context.

Sternfeld’s images are the establishing shots in the new ruderal aesthetics and an example of the “aesthetic implications of the new paradigm in ecology” (Simus 2008). On the High Line of the 1990s, several cycles of ruderal vegetation and decay thickened the soil profile, with organic and inorganic debris filling the gaps between the stabilizing rail ballast. The additional soil provided diverse substrates for more species to thrive. This thin carpet dominate the images, but the physical vegetation is only half the picture. Here, the ruderal vegetation was a placeholder for the projection of any number of fantasies. Sternfeld’s images have two parts: the vegetated path and the sky and skyline, creating two spaces for imagination. There are no hints of the traffic below; the sky is overcast and dampened. The contrast of the vegetated carpet between the greens and desaturated context and sky creates “a pocket of scraggly disobedience” (Dion 2013) in Chelsea.

After publication, Sternfeld’s serial images of the High Line operated in a rhetorical capacity, attracting New Yorker’s attention to the viaduct’s precarity as an urban artifact. Friends of the High Line used the images for fundraising efforts and formed the backdrop renderings of the future landscape. One can draw parallels between Sternfeld’s images and the wilderness survey images used by lawmakers to promote the preservation of Western landscapes in the mid-19th century. In “Imaging Nature: Watkins, Yosemite, and the Birth of Environmentalism,” Kevin Michael DeLuca and Anne Teresa outline how folios of Carleton Watkins’ sublime images of Yosemite Valley circulated among the elite of the East Coast and government officials in Washington, DC. Watkin’s images provided Fredrick Law Olmsted with a shared visual referent for his campaign to preserve Yosemite Valley from destruction or private ownership (DeLuca, Demo 2000). Both Watkins's and Sternfeld’s images transported potential stakeholders to otherwise inaccessible sites and ultimately saved the places from demolition, and advanced its radical transformation as a legible, safe and predictable urban space.

The green glitch of the High Line in the otherwise unrelenting fabric of the city opened a space of collective imagination. For a brief time, no one person had a claim on the future of the High Line; its ownership was tangled and there were no speculative renderings. It was a rare, unoccupied space in Manhattan, open to transgression: physically through trespass, or virtually, via Sternfeld’s depopulated images. The images conjured a kind of virtual air rights that said: this land is everyone’s: dwell here for a moment, and imagine. In the essay “Walking the High Line”, Robert Hammond, in conversation with Alan Gopnik, spoke of the “hallucinatory” qualities of the space:

“The High Line is just a structure, it is metal in the air, but it becomes a site for everybody’s fantasies and projections… I just pray that, if they save the High Line, they will save some of the virgin parts, so that people can have this kind of hallucinatory experience of nature in the city” (Gopnik 2001).

The construction of the High Line Park resulted in a peculiar commercialization of the High Line’s space of imagination. As Sternfeld and the Friends of the High Line asked us to imagine what might “grow here”: today billboards for new condos beckon us to imagine living alongside the park–to virtually occupy the space through the purchase of viewing rights. Though Sternfeld’s pictures remain, the real ruderal landscape is long gone, leading one to consider if “imagination sections” could be preserved in cities, or does the power of these spaces lie in their ephemerality?

The Fertile Section: Advancing Landscape Technology

Ecologist Eric Sanderson, in his book The Manahatta Project, reconstructed the landscape ecology of pre-colonial Manhattan using historic maps and data. The peninsula’s landscapes were diverse and permable, organized by the underlying geology, featuring gradients of wet to dry, with lowland and upland conditions and biodiverse plant communities (Sanderson 2009). Manhattan’s urban topography today is sealed, paved with buildings, streets, and plazas, save for small pockets of permeability in parks and gardens, tree wells, and storm drain inlets.

To create a fertile section for plants to thrive in the dense confines of Manhattan, one must dig, amend, decontaminate, sequester, support, and drain rainwater. How and what will grow is determined by the material composition and dimensions of this section, be it a cosmopolitan mix chosen for aesthetics, a collection of ruderal species, or a recreation of a pre-colonial Manhattan landscape.

Lower Manhattan features several landscapes about landscapes, including South Cove (Childs Associates, 1985-89), Irish Hunger Memorial (Brian Tolle and 1100 Architects, 2002), Teardrop Park (Michael Van Valkenburgh and Associates, 2004), and The High Line. Each evokes a distant and iconic landscape in a small plot in the city: an Atlantic seaside cove, a potato farm in County Mayo, Ireland, the Hudson River Valley, and an abandoned urban rail corridor, respectively. Though they differ in program and reference landscape, each relies on intelligent sectional detailing, surface materials, and vegetation choices to create an immersive surface that both represents nature and performs as nature (Bennett, 2014). The projects drew from technical advances in urban soil science, pioneered by Phil Craul (Craul, Lienhart, 1999, Kirkwood 1999).

The High Line Phase One

In 2004, Friends of the High Line selected four teams to submit comprehensive proposals for the High Line: Diana Balmori, Zaha Hadid and Skidmore Owings and Merrill; Steven Holl & Hargreaves Associates; and TerraGRAM (Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates, D.I.R.T. Studio and Beyer Blinder Belle) and James Corner Field Operations & Diller Scofidio and Renfro (JFCO & DS+R). The JFCO & DS+R scheme High Line advances the sectional work of South Cove and incorporates state-of-the-art construction technologies, also hidden under complex layers of vegetation. First, between the rail structure and the new “green roof” landscape is a sandwich of protective waterproofing, drainage matting to capture and convey water, a layer of expanded obsidian gravel, and geotextile filter fabric to hold the soil in place. Next are the pavers tapering into combs, which play on a scale that both recalls and amplifies an image of wild grasses growing through cracks in the sidewalk (Field Operations 2004).

The waterproofing and water conveyance sections are indispensable to the technical success of the project, and the paving system provides material continuity and wayfinding cues. Above the technical section, interwoven with the pavers, is the enveloping environment of the planting. The designers thickened and modulated the soil profile to support the diverse plantings, and varied the height and density of the plantings that draw the eye to the detail of texture.

From Picturing Nature to Nature-Based Solutions

While the art and landscape works of the late 20th and early 21st century focused on symbolic representations of nature in the city, current projects evolve new nature-based technologies with traditional engineering elements like flood barriers to guard against sea level rise and storm surges. Succeeding the “representational” fertile sections are today’s ecological prosthetics, such as Living Breakwaters Scape and Ken Smith Workshop’s Mussel Beach at ERW Esplanade, demonstration projects of substrates and shellfish that might someday scale up to rebuild lost habitat and provide storm protection. As it has been the vanguard in art and music, Lower Manhattan also holds ground as a place to witness the many zeitgeists of nature in the city.

MAP

References

Bennett, K.E. 2014. "Beautiful Landscapes in Drag, the Material Performance of Hypernature." Journal of Landscape Architecture 9, no. 3: 42-53.

Blum, A. 2009. "Metaphor Remediation." Places Journal, September. https://placesjournal.org/article/metaphor-remediation-a-new-ecology-for-the-city/.

Beatrix, Lorenzo. "In Conversation with Alan Sonfist." Artofchange21. Accessed August 20, 2025. https://artofchange21.com/en/in-conversation-with-alan-sonfist/.

Carpenter, J. 1983. "Alan Sonfist’s Public Sculptures." In Art in the Land: A Critical Anthology of Environmental Art, edited by A. Sonfist, 151. New York: Dutton.

Craul, P.J., and J.R. Lienhart. 1999. Urban Soils: Applications and Practices. New York: Wiley.

David, J., and R. Hammond. 2011. High Line: The Inside Story of New York City's Park in the Sky. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Del Tredici, P. 2010. Wild Urban Plants of the Northeast: A Field Guide. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

DeLuca, K.M., and A.T. Demo. 2000. "Imaging Nature: Watkins, Yosemite, and the Birth of Environmentalism." Critical Studies in Media Communication 17, no. 3: 241-260.

Field Operations. 2004. High Line Proposal. New York: Friends of the High Line.

Gopnik, A. 2001. "A Walk on the High Line." New Yorker 77, no. 12.

Hauser, E. 2013. "An Elevated Plain." In A Field Guide and Handbook to the High Line, edited by M. Dion. New York: Printed Matter, Inc.

Kirkwood, N. 1999. "Abstracting Nature's Details: A Planted Path along a Cove." In The Art of Landscape Detail: Fundamental, Practices, and Case Studies. New York: Wiley.

Masters, H. 2008. "The Artist in Her Unfinished Avant-Garden." ArtAsiaPacific, no. 58: 142-149.

Paletta, A. 2014. "The High Line's Last Section Plays Up Its Rugged Past." Metropolis Magazine, October 14. http://www.metropolismag.com/Point-of-View/October-2014/The-High-Lines-Last-Section-Plays-Up-Its-Rugged-Past/.

Pickett, S.T., and P.S. White. 1985. The Ecology of Natural Disturbance and Patch Dynamics. Orlando: Academic Press.

Pickett, S.T.A., V.T. Parker, and P.L. Fiedler. 1992. "The New Paradigm in Ecology: Implications for Conservation Biology Above the Species Level." In Conservation Biology: The Theory and Practice of Nature Conservation, Preservation, and Management, edited by P.L. Fiedler and S.K. Jain, 65-88. Springer US.

Sanderson, E.W. 2009. Mannahatta: A Natural History of New York City. New York: Abrams.

Simus, J.B. 2008. "Aesthetic Implications of the New Paradigm in Ecology." Journal of Aesthetic Education 42, no. 1: 63-79.

Spaid, S. 2012. Green Acres: Artists Farming Fields, Greenhouses and Abandoned Lots. Cincinnati: Cincinnati Contemporary Arts Center.

Stalter, R. 2004. "The Flora on the High Line, New York City, New York." The Journal of the Torrey Botanical Society 131: 387-393.

Van Valkenburgh, M. 2004. High Line RFP: TerraGRAM. Request for Qualifications ed. New York.

Wright, A. 2013. Future Park: Imagining Tomorrow's Urban Parks. Clayton, Victoria: CSIRO Publishing.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Sarah Cowles: Can you tell us about your research in community-led landscape restoration and the recent exchange in Tbilisi this spring?

Stefan Laxness: The event in Tbilisi was a scientific exchange funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation, titled “Community-led Landscape Restoration in Science and Practice.” The exchange aimed to build upon discussions in the context of my doctoral research on this subject with five other community organizations from across Europe. The group included Joám Evans Pim of Fundacion Montescola , Nik Völker and Corinna Lawrenz of Veredas da Estrela, Ian Thomas of Welcome to Our Woods, Maggie Brand, Deme Gorgadze, and Data Tsintsadze of Napirze, Ana Trapaidze of Dighomi Meadows, and Nino Jabidze Free University of Tbilisi. I also invited external individuals to bring different perspectives on landscape restoration and nature conservation, including Mark Walton from Shared Asset (UK), Prof. Dr. Jaboury Ghazoul, Professor of Ecosystem Management and Environmental Systems Science at ETH Zurich, and Veronika Schick, PhD student in the Natural Resource Policy Group at ETH Zurich, Prof. Dr. Bram Büscher, Professor and Chair of the Sociology of
Development and Change group, Wageningen University; and Amrita Kaur Slatch
DAAD Doctoral Research Scholar, RWTH Aachen University. Most importantly, it was a celebration of our work and knowledge exchange around the active projects in Georgia, specifically the floodplain forests of the Mtkvari River, including Napirze in Rustavi and Dighomi Meadows in Tbilisi.

SC After graduating from the AA with a degree in architecture, and a brief stint in commercial practice, you worked for Forensic Architecture, an interdisciplinary practice investigating historic and contemporary state and corporate violence, and reconstituting the players in spatial narratives.

In the case of landscape restoration, you are studying the actors who restore a damaged landscape, its ecosystems, and/or adjacent societies, following the impacts, sometimes violent, of state and corporate actions on that landscape. With restoration, some lands are no longer impacted, while others remain threatened and continue to be degraded. What brought you to the restoration side of the timeline?

SL I came to landscape restoration through some serendipity, where I witnessed the work of Froxán Commons, a community-led landscape restoration of a former eucalyptus plantation in Spain. There, the restoration projects are linked to a broader, slower environmental violence. Though often less devastating than the cases we studied at Forensic Architecture, there are commonalities, such as unequal access to resources, histories of exclusion, and ongoing attempts to usurp, degrade, and expropriate land in Portugal and Spain, where these violent tactics facilitated industrial eucalyptus production. Now, there’s Dighomi Meadows in Tbilisi, where the municipality did not stop the illegal mining of public nature lands in the floodplain. I saw these community-led restoration efforts having effects beyond a normatively good environmentalism, by responding to the conditions of injustice and violence that are built into the territory.

SC You were initially interested in rewilding and noted that while humans delineated areas to be rewilded and dispatched resources, human interaction remained on the sidelines, choreographing the actions but not part of the ensemble. You mentioned a murmuring of human activity that is part of community-led restoration. What are the other differences between community-led restoration vs. top-down rewilding in terms of method and ideology?

SL Rewilding was an exciting proposition for me: how to reinvigorate abandoned areas by reintroducing megafauna. It felt slightly exotic and slightly dangerous and wild, but the more I engaged with literature, my critique was that rewilding is centered on depopulated and abandoned areas. The practice doesn't address why these places are depopulated or abandoned, but it serves a political agenda that benefits people, not necessarily those who had to leave or abandon their lands. We should question who is pushing for depopulation in the name of rewilding.

Rewilding, in its original sense, refers to the passive management of ecosystems through megafauna—a top-down, scientifically managed approach. In contrast, community-led restoration is a practice of working from the ground up, experimenting, and building networks with other people who continuously engage with the land, and does not exclude the possibility of rewilding.

In the case of Froxán, it's nominally a rewilding project, but where the imaginary, the politics, and the labor are enacted by a broad segment of people from throughout the territory. It wasn't an isolated group; it was deliberately open to the participation of others.

Regarding the sensory dimension of these practices, though these places were often deemed abandoned or depopulated, in Froxán, the human sounds were almost deafening. There were conversations, chainsaws, and trees falling, the clinking of cutlery on metal dishes, imbuing the landscape with a murmuring presence of people.

SC What are the key differences between community-led landscape restoration and ecological/scientific restoration in terms of practice and approach?

SL While scientific ecological restoration involves a level of experimentation, uncertainty, and consensus building, it’s done within the boundaries of a reasonably stable, bounded system. Stakeholders and authorities, such as land owners and the government, decide to restore an area. With that scientific expertise, they focus on a specific area. Communities, on the other hand, are starting from a minor position of power. It might not be their land, and they don't have the backing of the state, nor scientific expertise in their favor, but they know that they need to do something.

Restoration ecology is practice-based work. You need to hire contractors, you need volunteers, and you want your citizen bird watching group to get involved for public buy-in. One of the challenges is the cost and time of labor. Those aspects are shared; it's the same actions at the end of the day, but perhaps what's missing is the ready mobilization of funding, skilled labor, and measurement.

Measurement is a critical component of scientifically based restoration, involving the baseline before, during, and after the restoration process. It is often challenging for communities to measure their progress because they lack the necessary capacity, budget, or labor to do so.

SC Yes! One of the things we most regret is not taking a baseline survey of Arsenal Oasis before opening the water system and creating the ponds.

SC The climate crisis has led to numerous landscape restoration and afforestation projects. How has crisis driven the emergence of new restoration practices?

I’ve taught at the AA with “crisis” as a framework for the studio to think through territorial design. It’s defining a specific, urgent condition in space and a time frame for response. Because if you declare something a crisis with one year to respond, another with 50 years, it’s a different response—different strategies, materials or resources.

In this idea of crisis, there is also this idea of latency. A crisis occurs at a moment when certain conditions come together, allowing for the condition to be recognized and acted upon simultaneously.

Community-led landscape restoration initiatives I have worked with began around 2014 to 2019, driven by environmental legislation that recognized specific responsibilities and climate crisis targets. People on the ground recognize that the territory is mismanaged, seizing on some of the vagueness of these climate policies and appropriating frameworks to do the work themselves. Welcome to our Woods, a response to the 2015 Wales Well-being of Future Generations Act, which enshrines the responsibility of public bodies to act in ways that protect future generations, and the results are measured annually. They leveraged the Act to pressure the Welsh government to begin co-management of state lands. These groups are interesting for policymakers and donors. We're at a specific junction where environmental degradation can be addressed by local communities and linked to high-level policy.

SC Most of the groups don’t own the land they are restoring, and often conduct the work without formal permissions or leases. These lands are not so degraded as to be a lost cause, yet are not attractive enough for local private or public exploitation. There’s something about ambiguous land uses and location, or degraded/abandoned conditions, that suggests that “something can be done here, is worth doing here, and no one will stop you.” Are there other landscape characteristics and conditions that elicit this stewardship? And what kinds of activities change the relationship, for example, when the city might decide to lend financial support or create an MOU for the group to manage the lands formally?

SL There's always a lot of talk about environmental conflict between different stakeholders or different actors over access to resources and the inequity between them. In the groups I am studying, there’s a notable lack of conflict. That is not to say that there is no conflict, but rather that there is no significant loss if the community organizations take over. They are accessing and transforming degraded land, or at least it's not economically profitable enough to justify strong conflict. They might not always ask permission at first. Over time, they gain tacit or explicit permission through activities such as bird walks, guided tours led by local or international experts, and meetings with local government officials. Volunteer to help overcome labor challenges of restoration work. The activities allow you to maintain a foothold in the landscape when you can't achieve more ambitious projects.

SC Rituals are a part of community-led restoration that isn’t present in scientific restoration, such as seasonal celebrations and activities.

SL Rituals are an affirming part of this work, as restoration is a long-term process; it's essential to create moments that also celebrate the hard work that has been done. In Froxán and Galicia, regular eucalyptus clearing actions are often followed by food and drink, and some form of community discussion. People sing songs about" de-eucalyptization,” translating ancestral practice to a contemporary setting. They're very low-budget and somewhat low-intensity ways of maintaining a presence and visibility.

SC Is an urban connection critical to the success of these initiatives?

SL With exceptions, most projects are connected to urban areas, meaning that most people's livelihoods are not based on the land; they’re not farmers or foresters, which leads to different ideas about different futures for the land.

SC You mentioned that these activities create an “urban commoning.” Can you describe that in more detail?

SL Commoning is the process and practices by which a collective refills the material and immaterial stock of a community. Commons has been about practices of sustainable management of natural resources, but urban commoning is different—it is practices and processes in a malleable space where people can interact.

SC So, in terms of community-led restoration, a communal action leads to a physical commons.

SL It's about making things open, accessible, and a place of potential for others. While at the same time trying to derive benefits that allow them to sustain that process, because you can't just create an open space and then run yourself into the ground. You must create a system that enables people to sustain the effort. My colleague Nitin Bathla coined a different term—"restorative commoning”—for initiatives that are not necessarily tied to typical “green economy” thinking but are open to other imaginaries and pluralities.

SC How do these groups evolve in parallel with their sites? What are some examples of groups gaining or losing power and influence relative to their initial goals?

SL All groups experienced tremendous evolution and progress, gaining power and access over the past few years. Many are meeting their goals, while some have changed course. Welcome to Our Woods’ initial goal was to produce goods from the diseased industrial larch plantations and educate people about lumbering and woodworking. There were regulatory complexities they couldn’t overcome to achieve their full vision, but recently, they built a sawmill and are teaching vocational courses in partnership with Black Mountains College.

SC. It becomes a much finer-grained mesh of production in the process, transforming sometimes monocultures of trees into biodiverse landscapes with heterogeneous activities.

SL Yes, this ties back to the differences between scientific and community-led restoration, where the ecological dimension is often difficult or not permitted, so socio-cultural narratives and activities are foregrounded. A notable aspect of these initiatives is the blurring of boundaries between environmental, economic, and social aspects. Sustainable community-led forestry fosters biodiverse woodlands that can attract tourists, yielding positive economic benefits.

SC In the Tbilisi workshops, Ana Trapaidze of Dighomi Meadows commented that the restoration of the floodplain has become a means toward an end, a framework to jump-start a new “landscape citizenship” in Georgia. How do you see these de facto citizenships that arise in the context of restoration specifically being conditioned by ecology, watershed, the more-than-human, and environmental justice?

SL In the exchange, someone said landscape restoration is a self-evident action–if you want to fix something, you can restore it. But when we look at why a place needs restoration? What are the political, ecological, or economic failures that contributed to the decline of a landscape? Anna Trapaidze of Dighomi Meadows said the work addresses not only a physical condition or an ecological condition in the landscape, but also the problematic institutional and social relationships that have been created over time. One part involves restoring the landscape, and the other involves restoring connections and accountability in local government.

SC What are examples of how landscape architects might contribute to the process of restoration in the community-led model? Could this approach reveal a more effective and generative role for landscape architects in community engagement?

SL We have the example of Maggie Brand, who, as a 2025 Fulbright scholar, worked to direct Napirze’s spatial and planting design, as well as the visual communication of the project. Her expertise is in the service of the group, and she applies her skills to their goals and is attentive and embedded. Often, the design community believes their work will be all that is necessary to activate things, but there might be a disconnection with stakeholders that can build the required momentum. And this doesn’t only apply to designers; it applies to scientists, social scientists, and anyone who offers specific knowledge to a community-led project. These groups are so generative and have a lot to teach us about the places they are working.

SC I agree that there is potential in a co-evolution of the project, where things the designer wouldn’t consider, and vice versa, can emerge. Through collaboration, something new and unexpected can also emerge.

SC What are some unexpected outcomes emerged from this exchange, and which aspects were the most satisfying?

When I conceived of the exchange, I assumed we would discuss topics such as best practices for measuring biodiversity or securing funding. However, the conversations among participants centered on the question of why they do this work, and it’s more about foregrounding the restoration of institutions and democratic processes through basic activities, such as walking and clearing trees, with local government leaders. These activities are fundamental to the longevity of the process. They're not just performative. They're not just ornamental. These groups are ultimately about building community and restoring autonomy and accountability of public institutions. And for everyone to see and celebrate each other’s work, expanding, continuing, and reaffirming the work that they do. And I include myself as a researcher, not a practitioner, but there is value in feeling connected to a network of support, leadership, and inspiration that exists out there. Someone in the exchange said, "Oh, I'm glad to see that I'm not the only crazy person out there." Many work alone, and it’s key that we organize another event soon.

SC It’s time to restore the community that does the restoration. Thank you, Stefan. I appreciate you taking the time to speak with me and reflect on the event and your research. It was generous of you and the others to come here, and the leaders of our local groups are very grateful for the new connections and conversations that resulted from this exchange.

As the Dedakalaki (tr. “mother city”- the capital city of Tbilisi) heats up with more towers and traffic congestion, the aggregate and cement slurry is pumping in the pastures surrounding older villages of Tabakhmela, Tsavkisi, and Shindsi. Families fleeing the city for the suburbs typically pour concrete single family homes, encircle them with high breeze block retaining walls, and plant them with few lines of thuja, a rose, picea pungens, or a topiary olive, and a blanket of turfgrass. On larger plots, micro-suburban developments like York Town’s Vista Garden (tagline: “Elegance and Nature”) and Simetria Park are taking shape among the dirt roads and pastures.

A colleague explained that homeowners in the suburbs level their hillside sites to capture every square meter on their deed. Nature outside the walls—clean air and views—is best appreciated at a distance. Inside the plot, all must be leveled and tamed.

Doing our level best

For a garden in Tabakhmela, we countered the local trend of “landscape incarceration” by engineering a series of folds and terraces for comfortable climbs and spaces for play and relaxation. The land is surrounded by forests connecting two steep ravines, with views to the Kojori mountains above and Kumisi plain below.

With but one tithe to vernacular “max it out and retain” approach, in a level section from the front entry to a green roof over the garage—a non-negotiable artifact of an earlier architect’s plan. The turf “pier” overlooks the Kumisi reservoir and a monastery complex with an allée of persimmon trees. From the garage, a stair threads between woodland forest edges, leading to a pine and perennial patch. A gravel garden with shaded dining area and kitchen squares with a terraced plum orchard. The upper terrace fits games like croquet, and badminton. A shaded “summit garden” alongside the ravine forest overlooks the the pool and ridges beyond.

It’s ok, the plants will cover that up

Final planting and siteworks commenced in spring 2025, which meant a patchy process negotiating local nursery and installation markets. While Sartiflora, a Warsaw-based nursery supplying ornamental plants to Georgia, provided the quality and quantity of imported mass perennial, specimen trees, and shrub planting needed for much of the project, Kakheti's Karibche, a local nursery growing trees from seeds and cuttings, handled the biodiverse Miyawaki planting of local species on the western, construction-disturbed edge. While the two suppliers’ nurseries are a kilometer apart in Sartichala, Kakheti, we’ve narrowed the gap to a meter.

We’re rounding out the punchlist phase of the project, with only a gate, pathway paving and the literal kitchen sink (outdoor) to complete. With this built example, we can walk clients through this living alternative to the typical suburban yard.

Gudiashvili Square sits in the heart of Old Tbilisi, just off Freedom Square and a few blocks from Sololaki. The square appears on maps of the city in the 18th century. It has had many names: Bejanas Baghi, Abbas-Abasi, Kolortaghi, Alaverdov, and Moghnis Square. In the 1990s, the square was named after Lado Gudiashvili, a 20th-century avant-garde artist famous for his portrayals of Tbilisi life.

The houses surrounding the square were built in the 19th century. During the 2010s, many of the surrounding buildings fell into disrepair and were in danger of collapsing, and the square was in poor condition. There were many ad-hoc structures, and a rough metal decorative fence surrounded the square. The trees were neglected and many had been topped, but a massive Celtis tree anchored the space. The first renovation proposal—to convert the area to a shopping center—was met with fierce resistance.

In 2020, Tbilisi City Hall initiated a plan to rehabilitate the buildings and the square and restrict vehicle access. Tbilisi architect David Giorgadze won the competition to redesign the square and surrounding streetscape. His scheme included leveling the square and removing any enclosures.

Our first studies focused on adding planting to small intersections and within the many residential courtyards that surround the square, to restore the lost color and vertical green elements during rehabilitation. Sadly, these “green pockets” were phased out of the project.

As there are few trees in the neighborhood, it was critical to conserve the existing planting even though many are quite damaged. We developed a scheme to incorporate a new, biodiverse canopy, and added a fragment of Georgian forest in the center. The new canopy is set within a grid. As the damaged trees die off and are replaced by new plantings in the tree wells, the loose organization of the original urban planting will be maintained.

Unfortunately, many of the renovated buildings surrounding the square remain vacant a few years after reconstruction as the property costs are too high. Yet today the square is a busy and shaded oasis in a dense neighborhood, a favorite place to meet a friend and order food from moto-courier. The trees we planted in 2021—though much smaller than anticipated—are filling in the middle ground.

“დღეს ვმუშაობთ?/ Are we working today?” Probably not. Rain comes in 3-day residencies while rare sunny mornings scatter to afternoon thunderstorms. The clay soil adheres to to tires, tools, and boots. Countering this mired mood, prismatic atmospheres surround the city; in meadows scarlet poppies and wild violet orchids abound.

Follow us here: Given the trend away from social sites and apps, we’re shifting our focus to publishing and building our community on Substack, so check back often for in-depth project news from our studio, archive and colleagues. Please tell a friend!

Share Ruderal

Updates from the Studio and field: With architects Irina Dikhaminjia and Peter Culley of Spatial Affairs Bureau, Ruderal’s new studio is taking shape in the Shadinova House, a listed cultural monument in Tbilisi’s Sololaki neighborhood. Elsewhere in Sololaki, Giorgi and Robin Winogrond hosted an EUmies Out & About event and a tour of the Tbilisi Urban Forest, with a lively gathering Gudiashvili Square. Spool Journal published Sarah and Ben’s article “Building Biodiverse Urban Forests in the Post-Soviet City” in Landscape Metropolis #10: Urban Forestscapes (open source). Our Tbilisi Urban Forest was honored in Barcelona as a finalist for the European Prize for Public Space. Sarah shared Ruderal’s recent work at lectures at Rapperswilltag in Zurich, the Hearst Lecture Series at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, and a gathering in the garden at Terremoto in Los Angeles, California, and she will present “A Landscape Lexicon” at the monthly Landscape Association meeting at Tbilisi Hills on 15 June at 15:00.

Champagne flowed when Benjamin was honored with a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Action doctoral research position at the University of Ljubljana with the LANDLABs Consortium. He will work with Dr. Ana Kučan to develop a long-term landscape development plan and pilot projects for the Sečovlje Salt Pans, located in the Dragonja estuary near Piran on the Adriatic Coast of Slovenia.

Ruderal Merch! A risograph-printed poster of Tbilisi Urban Forest and an illustrated booklet featuring our Tbilisi projects are available at Kona Books. Design by Ruby Zielinski and printed by Xaraxura Press.

Dog days: Last summer Photographer Grigory Sokolinksy captured the dappled summer haze of Sololaki’s Gudiashvili Square, where we added a new layer of trees to replace an ailing urban canopy.

Cutting, filling, elevating: This winter, Black Sea Group’s heavy machines shaped roads and terraces at Veli in Bakurtsikhe, while shoring continued at the The Basketball House in Kaklebi. Guests at the Bodbe Hotel will float on Giorgi’s Canopy Walk from reception to the pool, and his Tabakhmela Pavilion will shade summer parties near Kojori.

Ashes to Acers: Despite the soaked spring, new projects are taking shape in Tbilisi and Kakheti. Vakho Tsulukidze’s brigade is hard at work planting new forests and shrub understories in Tabakhmela and Tsqneti, including local Quercus castaneifolia, Pterocarya fraxinifolia, and Zelkova carpinifolia. Once earthworks conclude this spring, We invite you to sunbathe on the lawn of the Sky Beach at the Bodbe Hotel.

That’s all for now, see you again in summer!

Share Ruderal

Today, the Dragonja estuary hosts a nature park in the decommissioned salt pan, a museum with a restored traditional salt pan, and an active salt pan where Piranska Sol is still produced.

According to the LANDLABs brief:

The landscape laboratory site is located at the Southern edge of the municipality along the border with Croatia. The area is characterized by almost a millennium long extraction of salt and is one of the last active salt extraction sites at the Adriatics. The production on the northern part has been modernised at the beginning of the 20th century while at the southern part traces of medieval salt-production landscape are still present. Currently, the site is caught in conflicts between the protection of nature and cultural heritage, the municipality’s economic aspirations, local population, private investors etc. The site’s rich and complex history, closely connected to the Venetian Republic and the present Italian minority of Piran, is being flattened by economic pressure giving priority to tourism over local salt and agricultural production, resulting in a clash of interests, threatening to lose the world’s unique cultural landscape. This clash misses the opportunity to develop potentials of the site for the benefit of all interested parties. There’s an urgent need for a long-term landscape development plan.

About LANDLABs

The LANDLABs Doctoral Network is a Maria Skłodowska-Curie Action, the EU flagship programme for doctoral and postdoctoral training administered by the European Commission under the umbrella of Horizon Europe. The funding supports a team of supervisors and candidates who will focus on the integration of practical and academic approaches to doctoral training in research through design. The deliverables for the Network are public-facing pilot projects, landscape plans, and theoretical writings that propose new approaches to cultural and ecological entanglement, eco-aesthetics, and the question of beauty in anthropogenic landscapes.

Ben will study toward a Doctor of Arts (DA) in Landscape Architecture, a terminal degree focused on mastery of an art in teaching and practice.

Follow the Network on instagram for updates: @landlabs.eu. Milestones, reports, and more in-depth information can be accessed on the project’s public site, landlabs.eu.

These drawings interpret the material and aesthetic conditions of the Krivila River gorge in Chiatura, Republic of Georgia. Chiatura was chosen as an investigative site due to the records of change and devastation in the landscape since mining began in 1879. The place and the problems are gritty -- ­socially, aesthetically and ecologically.

Chiatura is the site and subject of a series of workshops introducing techniques of landscape research, analysis, interpretation and design through intensive site exploration and artistic production. The first phases of the workshop focused on how land use and social spaces are stratified in relation to elevation. Participants created visual records of their interactions and observations along the vertical spans between the area's mountaintop mines, city center, villages and river valley.

The third phase, presented here, poetically captures the grit of the site-the physical, material and textural elements that define the aesthetic character of Chiatura.

Manganese is mined at upper elevations of the Kvirila gorge. The ore is processed and then transferred to railcars at the river bottom. One system of ropeways (cable cars) conveys ore from the mines to processing facilities on each side of the river. A second set transports people from the river bottom to the upper levels of the gorge and from village to village. Black sediments from mining operations foul the Krivila River from Chiatura southward. Half of the operations are in ruin -- a linear landscape of black drifts of ore and piles of crumbling concrete. The other half continue to employ nearly 3,000 citizens of Chiatura. In the months between our visits, these workers were on strike for a livable wage, safer working conditions and proper protective clothing, including gloves and boots without holes.

In this workshop's two-day exercise, participants explored Chiatura's physical and metaphoric grit through its landscapes. On the first day, three sites were investigated: a concrete plant in Darkveti near the start of the gorge, an abandoned ore washing plant and the ltkhvisi-Zodi ropeway. Resilient vines, grasses and ruderal species grew over skeletons of machines and broken walls. A fishing net made from a lace curtain hung near the river. In a grove of trees, men pulled rebar from concrete blocks with their bare hands to sell for scrap. The rusted ropeway car crossed safely over the gorge.

Workshop participants created drawings interpreting their observations at these sites. Soils, mining surplus, vegetation, architectural and industrial artifacts and water are represented in this visual vocabulary. The drawings serve as reference points that will guide aesthetic and material decision making for continued projects in Chiatura.

— Sarah Cowles and Erin Lynn Forrest

Wendover, Utah, is located in the Great Basin at the edge of the Lake Bonneville salt flats and is the former site of a WWII Air Force Base where Colonel Tibbets of Enola Gay and his crew prepared for the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombing missions. Long abandoned, the landscape of barracks, hangars, and Wendover infrastructure remains on the gypsum plains, slowly decaying in the harsh high desert environment. 

In 2008, during a residency at The Center for Land Use Interpretation's Wendover Field Station, Sarah Cowles produced a series of Sumi ink drawings depicting the numerous material piles found around the air base and former barracks. They captured the angle of repose of deteriorating domestic structures as they transitioned from architecture to layered piles of material.

Wendover’s harsh climate, with hot, dry summers, cold, windy winters, and occasional “pile fires,” accelerates the decomposition of temporary structures. Ongoing demolition works around the air base add to the varied wasteland topography. The piles reveal the visceral result when the orderly architectural section collapses.

The studies reveal the alternating mineral and organic layers contained in settlements, and the new orders that result from gravity and decomposition. They fuel approaches to embedding the materials of cultural history in landscape sections.

This text, titled ‘We Come in Peace’, developed from a workshop program that Ruderal Academy hosted in the Western Georgian city of Chiatura in 2012 for the Tbilisi Triennial. 12 years later, the ongoing ecological disaster in Chiatura is no less prevalent, with residents of Shukruti, a village severely impacted by the region’s mining operations, announcing a hunger strike and bringing their months-long protest to the doors of parliament.

Ruderal Academy, founded in 2008 by Sarah Cowles, is an itinerant school of landscape interpretation and ecological design. The academy is educational, productive, and projec­tive, where participants utilize both fine art and design research techniques to analyze current landscape condi­tions and speculate on possible fu­tures. Ruderal Academy partners with edu­cational and cultural institutions to locate a specific site of study and de­velops a semester-long study program. The selected site serves as both the campus and the primary text.

Learning at Ruderal Academy has both horizontal and ver­tical implications; participants gain both transferable skills in landscape analysis and an in-depth knowledge of site and situation enhancing subsequent projects in the region.

In the fall of 2012, Ruderal Acad­emy 007 was based in the city of Chiatu­ra, Republic of Georgia. Chiatura is a center of manganese mining in the foot­hills of the Caucasus mountains. Pre­vious sites of Ruderal Academy inves­tigation include: hypersaline lagoons in the San Francisco Bay, a reservoir breach in a state park in the Missouri Ozarks, a channelized industrial river in the Berkshire region of Massachu­setts, and the landscape of the US-Mex­ico border in El Paso, Texas and Juarez, Mexico.

Ruderal is an ecological term that refers to species that are adapted to thrive in conditions of scarcity and disturbance. Ruderal species are of­ten called pioneer species in that they hold territory in advance of more stable species. The ruderal suggests a form of practice that begins with the given; to work from the ground up, to work fast, iteratively and with minimal means. As such, Ruderal Academy lands in sites of transition and disturbance, places with rich political, histori­cal, social, industrial and ecological contexts. The school is open to students, professionals and local citizens from all disciplines who are interest­ed in both gaining analytical skills and creating interpretive works in an intensive collaborative setting. Participants in Ruderal Academy programs address a particular place at a par­ticular time, and establish a temporary community of learning, exchange and dwelling. Lectures and tours are pro­vided by local professionals and schol­ars, and participants receive feedback in critiques from designers, artists, and professionals.

Ruderal Academy programs are comprised of three phases:

1. Site inventory, archival research and documentation

2. Analysis and interpretation of research

3. Development and execution of site-specific interventions, de­sign proposals, or studio artwork

Ruderal Academy 007: Chiatura

Chiatura is the site and sub­ject of a series of workshops introducing techniques of landscape research, analysis, interpretation, and design through intensive site exploration and artistic production.

Chiatura is a working landscape dominated by mining operations and fa­cilities. Manganese is mined at upper elevations of the Kvirila gorge. The ore is processed, and then transferred to railcars at the river bottom. Black sediments from mining operations foul the Krivila River from Chiatura south­ward. Half of the riverside operations are in ruin - a linear landscape of black drifts of ore and piles of crum­bling concrete. One system of rope ways conveys ore from the mines to process­ing facilities on each side of the riv­er. A second set transports people from the river bottom to the upper levels of the gorge and from village to village.

The first phase of the workshop fo­cused on exploration of the region and resulted in a series of artworks inter­preting how land use and social spaces are stratified in relation to elevation. These works were exhibited at the 1st Tbilisi Triennial. The second phase fo­cused on materials of the site; the ore and grit - the physical, material, and textural elements that define the aesthetic character of Chiatura. The third phase, developed over winter 2013, synthesized the two previous ana­lytical phases into a design proposal and into a remediation program for the city and the Kvirila gorge.

On the first day of the first phase, each participant was assigned to a dif­ferent sabagiro or gondola, to travel from the bottom of the river to the upper elevations. They spent the day sketching, slowly returning to the guesthouse in a Situationist 'derive'. Each participant returned and shared stories and vignettes about the land­scape of the gorge. This exercise helped build the group's collective knowledge of the site.

The next day, participants were assigned a series of landscape terms to define both verbally and with illustrations or photographs from Chiatura, creating a common, site specific language to discuss and evolve the project. After a few days some participants had to return to Tbilisi and a core group of 4 students remained. The following days participants revis­ited certain sites for further sketch­ing and study, including the terminus of the mine train, an ore processing plant, and the village of Darkveti at the upper plateau.

The installation at Europe House - entitled We Come in Peace - is an interpretation of a series of 'social and ecological incidents' that occurred during the workshop, and at different elevations within the gorge. A large section-elevation drawing orients viewers to the topography of the gorge, and each installation carries an eleva­tion notation that corresponds to the section drawing. In these works, the participants sought to capture how spa­tial, social and psychological implica­tions of how sabagiro travel within the topography of the city create an idio­syncratic vertical urbanism.

Peace

Mshvidoba, or 'Peace' is the name of a miner's sabagiro. It rises 1000 meters from the center of the city at a 42-degree pitch. We Come in Peace re­fers to a pop culture meme; a message to humans from friendly aliens arriving on planet earth.

Rainbow Geyser

Walking down from Itkhvi­si through the big black ore puddles past the mill-at the river, a geyser of water, 12 meters high, bright white against the black dust. A second break nearby, a softer arc. Under the bridge, a weeping, pulsing rainbow. A system fails, and produces absurd beauty.

The Jackals

At dusk, up the canyon to Sark­velotubani, howling from the cliffs, a chorus, a crescendo. Didn't know they were there, did we, and not this many. I stop, a dog ahead, and a drunken her­mit is descending, talking talking talk­ing. He speaks of his daughter. I choose him over the angry dog below, together we walk for 5 minutes, he peels off up the stone path, talking talking talking. When the canyon opens, a grind, a whine, a water pump starts. They say they never saw or heard this man, but the jackals, they did.

Entry

Corning into Darkveti from Sa­chkhere, into the gorge, the first mill site grown over with grass. A green passenger car on a siding. At the turn where the tributary meets confluence is exoskeleton of a cafe, cantilevered over the river. In shadows, the monu­ment reads 'Chiatura'. The cliffs rise, undercuts hung with ferns, weeping wa­ter. The Kvirila river runs black from here to Zestaponi.

Waiting for the Ore Train

At night we rode Peace up, walked past the blocks. At the tunnel entrance a hydraulic sound, a pump, air perhaps, and boys and a grandmother are saw­ing logs together for firewood. The boys sit on the log pile, some wrestling. Green light reflected off the trees. Af­ter a half hour the mine train comes, the catenary arcing. We follow it to the tipple, watch as the ore is unloaded into cable-drawn hoppers that traverse the gorge to the mill on the south side.

The Busy Man

Searching for the Darkveti-Sareki rope way, driving up the cobble road laid by German POWs, past the ruin of the chemistry laboratory, we ask a man sitting alone on a bench for direc­tions. He looks about, and informs us he is busy at this moment, but can tell us. Look behind you, bavshebo.

As outsiders to the city, the workshops participants were seen as aliens; treated with equal parts hos­tility and hospitality. The stories de­picted represented the sublime and elu­sive genus loci of Chiatura; a place where rocks fly and the river runs black.

During the second phase, participants explored three sites in Chiatura: a concrete plant in Darkveti near the start of the gorge, an abandoned ore washing plant, and the Itkhvisi-Zodi ropeway. They observed the resilience of the land and people of Chiatura and explored ideas related to physical and metaphorical grit filtration, catchment, and processing. On the second day, they created drawings interpreting the sites, representing soils, mining surplus, vegetation, architectural and industrial artifacts, and water. These visuals serve as reference points to guide aesthetic and material decision-making for future projects in Chiatura.

Institutional partners and sponsors of Ruderal Academy include The Knowlton School of Architecture, The Saa Fox School of Design and Visual Arts at Washing­ton University in Saint Louis, Robert Reich School of Landscape Architecture at Louisiana State University, The Rubin Center at University of Texas at El Paso, The Center for Land Use Interpretation, Tbilisi State Acad­emy of the Arts, The Massachusetts Museum of Contempo­rary Art, The Center of Contemporary Art, Tbilisi, and Bureau for Open Culture.

So it is our honor to return the volley back “ევროპისკენ” (“towards Europe”) with significant honors in our field: Ruderal’s Tbilisi Urban Forest is a finalist for the European Prize for Urban Public Space. The Prize is a biennial competition “organized to recognize and make known all kinds of works to create, recover, and improve public spaces in European cities.” Tbilisi Urban Forest was also shortlisted for the 2024 EUMies Award, which recognizes the best built works in Europe completed between 2021 and 2023.

RUDERAL OUT AND ABOUT
“Building Biodiverse Urban Forests in the Post-Soviet City” by Ruderal’s Benjamin Hackenberger and Sarah Cowles will be published in the upcoming SPOOL: Urban Forestscapes issue.

“Principles in Motion: Ruderal's Sarah Cowles on Cities, Landscapes, Inventiveness, and Rigor”: Julia Gamolina interviewed Sarah about her path from art school to establishing Ruderal in Madame Architect.

The Fertile Section: Sarah shared Ruderal’s horticultural side in the Planting Forward series, hosted by American author and plantsman Kelly D. Norris.

Tbilisi Unfolding: A vibrant collaboration between Ruderal, the Ubani Center, Ieri Store, and photographer Barrie Hullegie captured the colors and textures of early spring in Tbilisi. The work culminated with an exhibition at the new Kinos Saxli complex in Tbilisi and a presentation and panel discussion on “Unsealing the City” with Peter Culley of Spatial Affairs Bureau (London).

INTERNS ADVANCE
Ruderal welcomed interns Philipa Gercke (TU Berlin), Arielle Steere (UC Berkeley), Sandro Kviriashvili (Georgian Technical University), Marion Frotzbacher (TU Vienna), and Erasmus program participants Ejvind Spence and Andreas Jensen (University of Copenhagen.)

Fulbright for a Floodplain: Ruderal summer research associate Maggie Brand completed her MLA at Auburn University and will return to Georgia in fall 2024 with a prestigious Fulbright Fellowship, working with Napirze, a community-led effort to restore the Mtkvari River floodplain. (For recent updates on the Napirze project and team, see Anna Edgar’s article in OC Media.)

Do you know a student or recent graduate interested in exploring independent research in the region? Get in touch!

NEW POSTS ON THE SUBSTACK:
» A new material horizon for the Dighomi Meadows of the Mtkvari River. Ruderal intern Ejvind Spence summarizes his design thesis, which focused on the degraded Mtkvari River floodplain:

Rehabilitation strategies for the site … are constrained by both the frameworks of large multinational donors and the size of the site … I was interested in approaches to the site that were more playful and exploratory; seeing where engaging with it as a site of both destruction and regeneration could lead…

» Women Reclaiming Narratives, Reclaiming Spaces: Philipa Gercke interviewed Kristine Gabisonia (Stop Didi Lilo Landfill) and Ana Trapaidze (Dighomi Meadows Neighborhood Initiative) on becoming environmental justice leaders and building media momentum against environmental degradation.

My community is a very young community … we didn't have a sense of community during the pandemic … we became unified because it was unbearable to see so many trucks coming to the site; our neighbors were really angry about the dirt and noise and dust of the trucks that arrived daily at high speed. - Ana Trapaidze

» Thick Talk: In “Origins of Material Curiosity”, Sarah interviews Matt Dallos, founder of Thicket Workshop. He discusses his practice in upstate New York, focusing on native thicket planting. In “An Immersion of Wildness” he shares PhD research on early directions in wild gardening in America.

» A tour of Georgia’s geothermal landscapes and a proposal to renew the Gurkeli Sulphur Baths near Akhaltsikhe, by Frederik Aunsberg, Frederick Wolf, and Johannes Harder.

Thinking about visiting Georgia? Come for the Tbilisi Architecture Biennial 2024: September 28 – October 19, 2024. Ruderal’s Giorgi Nishnianidze joined this year’s open-call jury.

With the theme of “Correct Mistakes,” the Tbilisi Architecture Biennial 2024 will explore the interdependent relationship between the environment and humanity, focusing on their mutual influences. It will also explore the interplay between Georgia's natural resources and societal challenges resulting from historical exploitation, environmental policies, and climate change.

Leveling Up: This summer, we’re building gardens around Tbilisi’s hills in the villages of Tabakhmela, Tsqneti, Kaklebi, and Nushis Baghi. Construction and planting continue at Lopota Lake Resort, the Hotel in Sighnaghi, and the Open Corridors Peace Camp. Stay tuned to our Instagram and Facebook pages for more updates!

Share Ruderal

[Read more: From Academia to Activism at the Dighomi Meadows]

The full 190 hectares of the floodplain has been slowly destroyed by surface mining and illegal dumping since 2015, but my thesis research focused on just one hectare, reshaped by illegal dumping between December 2019 and April 2020. 

Rehabilitation strategies for the site are being developed, those strategies are constrained by both the frameworks of large multinational donors, and the challenges of taking on a site of this size. I was interested in approaches to the site that were more playful and exploratory; seeing where engaging with it as a site of both destruction and regeneration could lead a design, particularly in light of there being large numbers of similar sites across Georgia. 

My research focused on whether the meadows’ ecological and recreational functions could be rehabilitated without romanticising or hiding the story of their destruction. In order to do so, I found myself in need of exploring an approach to landscape architecture that was completely unexplored in the Danish scene as far as I knew. 

The philosophy behind my approach was inspired by Anna Tsing’s book The Mushroom at the End of the World as well as Gilles Clement’s Manifesto of the Third Landscape. In Tsing’s book, she explores nature that develops after human destruction, which Tsing terms ‘third nature’, with a focus on its development resulting from human intervention, while not being controlled by it. 

Clement, on the other hand, describes his third landscapes as being abandoned and ‘undecided’ spaces that ‘[express] neither power nor submission to power’, creating a neat connection between ‘third nature’ and ‘third landscape’. In Dighomi Meadows, I saw a third landscape rising from human destruction, and I saw ruderal vegetation — third nature — that was slowly colonizing the landscape, bringing life to a place that had been destroyed. 

Conversations with Sarah Cowles and Ben Hackenberger at Ruderal helped me to find the tools I needed to bring this philosophy into the world of design, particularly the ideas of using ‘disturbance as design’ and seeing the surpluses of an unbalanced landscape as the key to unlocking it. With those principles, tools, several site visits and multiple consultations with my supervisor Megan Maurer and my colleagues at Ruderal , I put together a design for the site. 

Geodiversity and ‘surprise’ seeds

A key tenet of my approach to the site was to frame the impacts of what could have been viewed as degradation of the site as a feature and even an opportunity.

For example, the dumping of a diversity of waste materials at the Dighomi Meadows has led to surprisingly high geodiversity at the site. This diversity of structures, minerals, and hydrological conditions creates the conditions for equally varied biodiversity, as it generates an abundance of habitats in a small amount of space. 

Similarly, the site’s seed bank includes not only native species from the site’s riparian forest and wind-borne ruderal species, but also a contingent of ‘surprise’ seeds that have been brought to the site within the mounds of waste. 

Animals from the riparian forest — turtles, tortoises, birds, snakes, insects — have established habitats in the new landscape, with the site’s flora and fauna transforming the site over four years from a site characterized by waste and destruction to a coarse, chaotic, but dense and diverse meadow. 

My design showcases some of that diversity, using the waste mounds as a feature of the landscape, rather than an obstacle. 

My final design centers on a series of narrow walking paths that connect the different corners of the site, moving both between and across the mounds. The paths following existing paths seen in drone footage and site visits. The paths also connect four interventions: The Island Bridge, The Edge of Reason, The Supra Grove, and The Heart of Dighomi. The interventions all aim to acknowledge the landscape’s past while creating ways for people to engage with the site. 

The first intervention, the Island Bridge, shapes a visitor’s first encounter with the meadows. Excavating earth from the west entrance and reestablishing access with a bridge mimicking the tire tracks transecting the site creates the feeling of entering an island, and more firmly separates the experience of being outside the meadows from that inside. The entrance is a natural low point, with excavation bringing this even further down, inviting plants more adapted to wet conditions to grow under the new bridge. 

The Edge of Reason, on the other hand, takes visitors up to a viewing point, with a blue railing at the top of a steep four meter slope establishing a viewpoint. The barrier of the railing then becomes a handrail, leading the visitor through a small group of invasive Amorpha Fruticosa and onto a small platform at the water’s edge. This is the only access a visitor has to the water and it is the only place the visitor sees the old landscape at eyeheight, getting a clear impression of the vast size of the new landscape. 

The design also seeks to engage with how people interact with outdoor spaces in Georgia, and the ways in which people living in the area and Georgian visitors might want to engage with the site. The Supra Grove uses deliberately placement of rock piles in a flat area of the landscape to encourage tree growth, that over time could produce a shaded grove reminiscent of those used for feasts or ‘supras’ in many natural Georgian forests. The intervention is by no means a guarantee of a shaded grove, but its prospect is encouraged by a quick progression of existing Populus, Tamarix, and Carpinus between the piles that make up the borders of the Supra Grove and across the entire site. 

Finally, the Heart of Dighomi takes on a site where existing flora is being quite literally pushed out of existence, and creates an opportunity to bring about new life. In the north east of the intervention area, five poplars from the old landscape are rapidly dying due to the pressure exerted by waste on their root collars. However, beneath the crowns of the decaying trees, the mounds of river rock are rapidly being recolonised by young poplars and other trees. 

In my design, a raised path of framed steel grates leads off from the main path across several piles of limestone, through the young and vibrant rubble forest. Two irrigation tubes are placed between the mounds, loosely following the path. The tubes are similar to the ones that slither through the northern riparian forest, transporting irrigation water to the football fields in the Olympic Village. One tube is attached to one of the dying trees, pumping water into the hole that surrounds it. The other coils around a fallen tree onto a flat piece of land, letting water out onto the trunk which then follows the terrain down into the depression around the last poplar tree of the pre-destruction generation to remain somewhat alive. 

The water changes the two trees’ decomposition process from aerobic to anaerobic, and creates varying degrees of wetness in the area, inviting plants more adapted to wet conditions to recolonise the former floodplain. 

In these interventions, I deliberately chose not to clean the area or remove broken plastic from the mounds: I wanted the destruction that created the landscape to be visible and tangible. By removing plastic or focusing on making the site as conventionally beautiful and pleasing as possible, the intervention would run the risk of erasing the story of the site’s destruction, romanticizing and simplifying the site’s rehabilitation. 

I did not want to create a project that claims that we can have the same ‘nature’ after we destroy a landscape as we had before. I wanted to create a landscape where the violence and loss of destruction sits alongside the beauty of nature’s own rehabilitation. Walking in the area, we never lose the feeling of the landscape being unnatural, but by diving into the diversity and heterogeneity of the landscape and the vegetation, we can recognise that the landscape and its reclamation can at the same time be ‘natural’ in its post-human, ruderal development. The vegetation that develops after destruction is still nature, even if it grows from tainted soil. 

Such an approach to nature reframes value systems and common assumptions: by only seeing value in untouched nature, we will soon see no value at all, and by learning to see value in an area like Dighomi Meadows, we slowly begin to see value everywhere. 

This is not to suggest that destroying ancient ecosystems is justified, but in a context where it will happen regardless, we need to begin to find value in new landscapes that emerge from that destruction, and recognise the richness of ‘third nature’.

editor - Anna Edgar 

Kristine Gabisonia is an ecological activist, entrepreneur, teacher, mother of three, and neighbor of the Didi Lilo landfill. Her fight against the pollution caused by the landfill’s long-term mismanagement and its direct impacts on neighboring populations began in 2023.

It continues, with Gabisonia heading a group uniting local residents in their determination to improve the environment that they live in and hold local government accountable. 

In April 2024, I met with Gabisonia to discuss her campaign. 

Hi Kristine. First of all, can you give us an insight into the current situation at the Didi Lilo landfill and its impact on neighboring settlements?

The Didi Lilo landfill has been operating in violation of regulations for 14 years, resulting in surface and underground water pollution as well as gas emissions. This contamination leads to the dispersion of polluted and noxious air into nearby settlements, contributing to respiratory diseases, breathing difficulties, and allergies in the local population. It also has a negative impact on the psychological well-being of residents. 

On top of this, the proximity of the landfill to Tbilisi International Airport poses a significant risk to passengers. Similar types of garbage dumps near airports have previously resulted in accidents, particularly due to encounters with migratory birds.

Tell us about your organization, ‘Against Didi Lilo Landfill’. How was the organization established?

In the summer of 2023, when the situation became unbearable, I took the initiative to seek out like-minded individuals in our communities and began to take action. We formed an initiative group to address the issue. This group serves as a platform for organizing activities and meetings to address the challenges posed by the Didi Lilo landfill.

Although our initiative group comprises representatives from three settlements, it's important to note that many more communities are affected by the landfill’s impacts.

What does your organization do to address the issue?

We communicate almost daily with our group members, keeping each other informed about the latest developments. 

We also hold monthly meetings with the ‘TbilService Group’, the authority responsible for addressing our concerns. During these meetings, we review ongoing projects, discuss future plans, and work to ensure that our opinions are considered and any violations are rectified. Our aim is to maintain consistent pressure and vigilance, allowing neither ourselves nor the authorities to become complacent in our efforts to address the issues associated with the Didi Lilo landfill.

I asked Ana from the Dighomi Meadows Initiative the same question: through resistance, you challenge profit-oriented development models. In doing so, you confront powerful players such as governments and corporations. What has their reaction been towards you and your activities?

Yes, it's crucial for us to demand accountability from both Tbilisi City Hall and its subordinate organization, the Tbilservice Group. At the beginning, initiating communication with these entities was quite challenging, as we had hoped for a civilized discussion with the two parties, which unfortunately did not materialize. Consequently, we felt compelled to organize a rally and stage a picket at the landfill. 

Although this action put the entire city [of Tbilisi] in an uncomfortable position, it was necessary to compel the authorities to engage in dialogue. 

Following the rally and picket, we finally secured a meeting with the mayor of Tbilisi, who attentively listened to our concerns and pledged to take specific action. Subsequently, monthly meetings were scheduled. While our initial efforts were not taken seriously, our unity and persistence ultimately pushed them to act otherwise.

Tell me more about the community of your organization. Who actively participates in it? How do you coordinate and organize your activities? Do you primarily communicate and coordinate online?

Our organization is made up of people from settlements neighboring the landfill. Women oversee the main strategic aspects, while men assist us in conducting negotiations; we have effectively distributed the roles. We primarily meet online, but we also convene in person, especially during relatively serious situations, for discussions.

Ana told us that she has faced some challenging situations, and used live broadcasting as a tool to give her a degree of security. Do you have similar tools, strategies, or experiences?

I use live sessions very often. This especially helped me during our protests. After spending the night protesting at the landfill, I received an urgent call from my partner, informing me that equipment was being brought in and that the police were preparing to disperse the protesters, issuing warnings. At the site, I encountered a significant police presence and vehicles for transporting detainees. 

I attempted to contact various journalists and organizations, but unfortunately, none showed immediate interest. Our saving grace came from going live. I showed my children in the background; narrating the situation to the residents, urging them to mobilize and join us. I emphasized the potential danger to us and the others present. 

Approximately five minutes after the live broadcast ended, cars began arriving, filled with families, friends, and neighbors, bearing food, drinks, and words of encouragement. I remain immensely proud of this response. 

Women, particularly stay-at-home mothers, played a crucial role during this time. Without their involvement, I am uncertain how events would have unfolded. It is likely that our story would have reached its conclusion then and there.

As a working woman, mother, and community member, what personal challenges have you encountered in your activism? Are there any experiences you'd like to share?

At present, I am a work-from-home mom, which entails balancing work, childcare, and eco-activism. This demands a significant amount of time and energy. After the demonstrations, amidst numerous sleepless nights and heightened stress, I even found myself hospitalized; I experienced a heart attack on the bus, with my child present. Fortunately, everything turned out well, and I survived. 

An initial challenge in our community organizing was the lack of female representation [in leadership positions]. I recall that during the organization of the first public meeting between the community and a local organization, the men initially did not allow me to speak, despite my being the organizer. However, their perception of me has since changed, and they now place their trust in me, albeit after considerable effort on my part.

As I am solely responsible for raising my children, I often have to bring them along with me to meetings and events. We advocate for their right to a safe and healthy environment, safeguarding their future. It is imperative that our actions prioritize safety, particularly concerning our lives and the lives of our children.

On one occasion, I invited mothers to join us with their children, emphasizing the need to create an environment that is safe for all, including our children. I firmly believe that a country that prides itself on its European identity and considers itself civilized should prioritize the safety and well-being of children and women.

There is a framework that puts forward that environmental justice is a feminist issue. The argument is that those who are least responsible for climate change through the destruction of the environment experience its greatest impact, with women, girls, and other marginalized groups most acutely impacted. Others have noted that women seem often to be at the forefront of environmental movements. Does gender feed into your understanding of your role in environmental activism?

As women, we possess significant power to contribute to positive change in the world. It has taken centuries for us to secure our rights, and even today, we have to continue to advocate for our equality in various fields. 

Women inherently possess the foresight that the future requires; we have the capacity to envision and care for future generations. We recognize the critical importance of preserving forests and maintaining a clean environment for the benefit of future generations. Our concern extends beyond just our children of today; we hold a vision for the future. 

We must advocate for our voices, our bodies, our independence, our choices, our children, our future, and our planet. Our unique perspectives as women foster solidarity among us, making it imperative for us to unite and support one another. In times of solidarity, we can accomplish more.

In what ways do you believe environmental movements can better support and empower female activists?

It is crucial for women like us to have access to specialized courses that can enhance our skills, as well as opportunities to connect with experienced activists and organizations. Furthermore, support with mental and physical health is essential. Active engagement in activism can pose significant challenges, and having resources for maintaining your well-being is invaluable.

How have things changed since you started, both for you and regarding the landfill?

My life has undergone significant changes; I find myself with less time, but I’ve gained a wealth of knowledge about environmental care and protection. I discovered a strength within myself that I didn’t know existed. 

Regarding the landfill, we’ve made progress. Following the city mayor’s directives, a tender was initiated to explore alternative sites. Discussions have also begun about implementing a gas collection system and for the tendering of wastewater treatment plants, with expectations of a company taking that on soon. We were also promised that the area of landfilling [at Didi Lilo] would be reduced and that a new area for landfill would be found. However, we lack a monitoring mechanism at this stage to ensure these promises are fulfilled. Despite the challenges, we are steadily advancing, taking small but significant steps forward.

What are your hopes for the future of the Didi Lilo landfill?

I am hopeful that we will soon close the existing landfill and manage it in accordance with regulations. Installing gas collectors and water filtration systems is imperative: this is essential for safeguarding the health and right to life of the local population, as well as mitigating risks associated with international flights, and potential outbreaks of water and bird-borne diseases. It is also crucial to restore the local ecosystem, focusing on protecting indigenous plant species listed in the Red Book, whose existence is threatened by the presence of the current landfill.

What do you hope to achieve, personally and collectively, as an environmental activist in the coming years?

The path we have embarked upon will not be easy, and we are prepared to persist in this endeavor until we achieve our desired goal. We acknowledge the possibility that legal action may be necessary along the way. We also aim to raise awareness and promote environmental consciousness in the population. 

Simultaneously, I intend to address smaller-scale issues such as water and sewage problems, as well as the maintenance of recreational areas and trees. However, my aspirations extend to long-term plans, particularly in the realm of environmental conservation. I trust that our determination and unity will remain steadfast, as they are essential prerequisites for success. 

I hold firm to the belief in a greener future, recognizing that responsibility for the Earth lies in our hands.

Thank you so much Kristine. We wish you all the best. 

Photographs: Tornike Mermanishvili, originally published on Chai Khana.

Edit: Anna Edgar

This is a study project by the three landscape architecture students from University of Copenhagen Frederik Aunsberg, Frederik Volf and Johannes Harder. The project came to life through a common interest and urge to explore places that were distinctively different from the framework which we had previously worked with in Denmark. Through recommendations and research, we quickly found that Georgia contained all the qualities we were looking for, and we ended up contacting Ruderal. After a dialog with Sarah Cowles and an introduction to this intriguing and almost completely unexploited natural resource, the geothermal landscapes in Georgia, the framework for the project was set.

We arrived in Tbilisi at the beginning of December 2023. After spending a few days in the capital exploring the city, visiting Ruderal’s studio, and arranging meetings and interviews, we left the city to start exploring the rural and geothermal landscapes in Georgia and the sulfur baths located all over the country.

We rented a car for the journey to Kutaisi, Borjomi and Akhaltsikhe. We went on foot for shorter distances and further explorations of cities, villages, and nature parks.

In our study, we took a hands-on approach to understanding the landscape. Visual documentation played a big role, as we utilized photography and videography to create a detailed visual record. We gathered insights and knowledge from locals and experts. We noted down plant registrations, sketched the landscape, enabling us to capture immediate impressions, key features, and design ideas, and did spatial investigations on-site.

Sulfur baths in Georgia

During our study trip, we visited seven sulfur baths, each offering a unique experience. We encountered a wide spectrum of settings from highly commercial spa ventures in Tbilisi to almost abandoned ruins like the one in Gurkeli. Overall, there was considerable variation in staffing, opening hours, costs, and amenities such as changing rooms and toilets. Additionally, the water temperature varied significantly. Below, a gallery featuring selected photos shows our diverse sulfur bath visits.

Gurkeli became the chosen site for our final design proposal: Gurkeli Sulfur Bath. Our aim is to showcase a model for revitalizing Georgia's abandoned natural sulfur baths, emphasizing ecotourism as a key focus.

Gurkeli Sulfur Bath:
Revitalizing neglected recreation

Gurkeli Sulfur Bath is located ideally for promoting ecotourism. It is situated in the lesser Caucasian Mountain range, surrounded by the Borjomi-Kharagauli National Park. It lies in the borders between civilization and untamed nature. There are many existing hiking trails in the national park. Therefore, it makes sense to connect them to Gurkeli Sulfur Bath while also creating new smaller ones that range from a day trip to a couple of hours. This means you can reach the bath from a longer trip through the park and rest your sore muscles in the sulfur bath. The only other way to get there is through Gurkeli village, which lies 3,8 km south of the bath. You can now hike to the bath or drive and park your car some 100-200 m from the bath.  

In our design proposal, we have been inspired by The Transcaucasian Trail’s approach to ecotourism. Therefore, the revitalization of Gurkeli Sulfur Bath will be done in collaboration with the locals of Gurkeli. They will be involved in creating the hiking trails, building the new structures, and maintaining the area. Furthermore, they can benefit economically from this by renting guest houses for visitors, selling food and beverages, and facilitating hiking trips. 

New hiking trails will be established to connect Gurkeli Sulfur Bath with the surrounding landscape and some of the close existing long-distance hiking trails. Our approach for new hiking trails is to use already existing trails as much as possible. The locals, shepherds, and other explorers might have used these trails. Establishing the new trails requires some renovation and improvements, including clearing undergrowth and fallen trees, relocating eroded trails, and building bridges.

New interventions, such as a platform framing a view over the characteristic landscape, will be established. These interventions aim to enhance the connection between hikers and nature. By strategically framing captivating views, this initiative reflects our aim to enhance the overall recreational experience, encouraging a harmonious interaction between hikers and the scenic landscapes they explore. The platforms offer the opportunity to facilitate a resting area or lunch stop during a hike or as a destination for a short one-day hike.

To enhance the awareness of the landscape, nature, and environment, we will install information boards at strategic locations within the area and along the trails. These boards will provide detailed information about the specific characteristics of the landscape, ecotypes, and unique vegetation in the current area. The goal is to educate hikers, offering insights that enhance their understanding of the environment and foster a stronger awareness of the importance of conserving natural habitats and biodiversity.

The concept for the revitalization of the Gurkeli Sulfur Bath is built around a foundation of a handful of simplistic design interventions. We are keeping the outer walls of the existing ruin but removing the roof. To frame the deteriorating building, we are creating a wooden exoskeleton that aims to highlight the manmade structure and its contrast to the surroundings. Parts of the ruin will be left to natural succession, while the rest are transformed into a maintained garden-esque area, with wooden floors and new fruit trees.

The two areas will also vary in level to emphasize the transition. The existing 8x3m concrete pool is downsized to 4x2m and partly moved inside the ruin's walls. An additional smaller and shallower pool is added, with a more nature-inspired appearance. To keep out grazers and stray dogs, the outlying terrain is lowered to match the level of the former pools and the area is constrained by a drystone “Ha-Ha wall”. Smaller installments such as changing cubicles, a shower, and a wooden interior serve to make the bath more visitor-friendly.

Ana Trapaidze is a force to be reckoned with. A physics and biophysics lecturer at the State Medical University and mother of two, Trapaidze in 2020 launched a movement to protect an illegally exploited forest in the suburbs of Georgia’s capital, Tbilisi. In the years since, she has grappled with the government and prospective developers, built a deep-rooted community movement, and is now overseeing the implementation of a major environmental regeneration project involving multinational development banks and the Georgian government. 

Throughout her shift from independent activist to community leader, Trapaidze has remained outspoken and determined to fight for the causes she considers important. Following the Georgian government’s reintroduction of controversial laws in spring 2024, Trapaidze was visible at the frequent protests, encouraging others and sharing information about the legal amendments and the fight against them, alongside her nature conservation work. 

In March of this year, I met with Trapaidze to discuss her journey from academic to activist. 

As the founder of the Dighomi Meadows Neighborhood Initiative, could you explain what the Dighomi Meadows are, and why they’re so important?

Dighomi Meadows is a riparian floodplain forest on the right bank of the Mtkvari river, the main river which flows through the city of Tbilisi.The Dighomi Meadows are located at the northern entrance to the city: a pathway not only for the river but also for air flow. I usually say that they’re the lungs and kidneys of the city.

It's a very biodiverse location and the last remaining riparian forest [in the city]. Riparian forests are vulnerable worldwide, and that's also the case in our city, but there’s now a trend of restoring these kinds of areas because they have huge potential in terms of both biodiversity and providing some resilience towards climate change. So I think it's a multifaceted beneficial treasure of the city.

You founded the Dighomi Meadows neighborhood initiative back in 2020. Could you share how it began, and what drove you to start with this initiative?

My family and I moved to the area during the pandemic. Before we moved, we thought this area was green and nice, because we saw on maps that there was a forest and a river nearby. But what we saw in reality was ongoing degradation: there was very intensive extraction of gravel from the riverbanks, and construction waste was dumped into the mine holes and the adjacent forest. In the first few weeks after we moved there, the landscape degraded so much. 

That's when we started to ask around and I decided I was going try to figure out what's going on: if this was an official infrastructure project or if this was illegal. So basically, we turned into activists overnight. We asked the media to support us, and they came and gave us the label of ‘eco activists’.

You often share information about waste dumping on the site. What action is being taken to address it? And have you collaborated with the community, or has it primarily been you and your husband? 

So first of all, my community is a very young community. It's a newly built apartment complex: not many neighbors know each other, and we didn't have a sense of community during the pandemic. However, we became unified because it was unbearable to see so many trucks coming to the site; our neighbors were really angry about the dirt and noise and dust of the trucks that arrived daily at high speed. 

One of our first protest actions was drawing a zebra crossing. We couldn't even protest because we were so scared, but we stopped the traffic for 10 minutes. We could see what the vehicles were transporting in different directions — bringing construction waste in from one side and taking gravel out on the other side — and we could also calculate their number. 

That was a time when the neighbors came together — we all came out. While we were out there we were sharing Facebook Lives all the time, because that was the weapon we had in our hands. 

So you use the the internet and live broadcasting both for safety and to amplify pressure? 

Yes, for security, it was something very instinctive. I was staying at home taking care of my kids and working from home. I saw trucks coming, and one more truck means 20 more tons of construction waste. I went down with my toddler in my arms, and asked myself: what do I do? how can we get help? 

I turned on Facebook Live and said ‘you're being recorded now’. I felt secure, and some people also responded and came. This was our way of organizing people, by showing them what was going on. 

Through your resistance, you challenge profit-oriented models of development. In doing so you confront powerful players like the government or corporations. What has their reaction been towards you?

What was going on was obscure. Why were they not taking measures that they were supposed to take? Many times the only response we got was that we needed to contact someone else. So we had to deal with both the wrongdoing itself and the authorities. We want to highlight both the criminal acts, and the weakness of the institutions that should be preventing them. 

You started the fight while working from home because it was the pandemic, as a mother of two kids and as a neighbor. What kind of challenges have you faced?

From my window I had a good view of the site. I was lucky that I was working from home, and as a lecturer I had flexibility, so I could shift my duties so I could accommodate activism. 

The first days were a sprint: we had to write emails to inform people, gather people, contact everyone, mobilize all the resources, and communicate what's going on. I would forget to feed my kids. I remember clearly that for several months we often only had time to order something. When people asked me how they could support us, I said maybe send some pizza. That was a big sacrifice I had to make, neglecting my own family all the time.

Why do you think it's important for us to speak about female activism?

I have most experience in Georgia, and what I see is that activists are usually women. I don't know why, but maybe it’s do with the job market — Georgian women often agree to a job first, and only later look at the financial aspect of it. It’s the same for me with activism: the purpose is more important than the money. Maybe I have to compromise and won’t be focused on my career, but I’ll pursue this activism. 

Many women do that. I think it’s because we already experience so much inequality, and so are ready to take on a variety of different roles. I think this versatile approach makes activism more feminist.

And what gives you the hope or strength to carry on with the work you’re doing? What inspires you?

When I first started people would tell me that court cases can last years, and it will be a long and hard path. But I want justice, for me justice is very important. 

There are going to be some sprints, but a lot of it is a marathon where you have to spread your energy evenly, and maybe sometimes get a boost. Usually the boosts are when I see new activist groups forming, and they tell me ‘We heard your interview and got inspired that we could protect our local playground or lake, and also bring change to our community’. That gives me so much energy. Being part of the formation of an environmental activist network is the most rewarding. It’s a big honor and joy. 

What changes have occurred since you started, both for you personally and for the meadows?

I’ve been doing this for four years already. I often say that in four years someone can get a PhD degree.

If there was a PhD in floodplain activism, you would definitely have got it! 

I have ended up becoming a professional in this. I’ve sacrificed many things, but gained so much experience and so many skills.There’s a feeling of ‘flow’ when something works out and you succeed. Personally, it’s been a really fantastic experience. 

And in terms of the meadows, we’ve managed to stop the criminal activity that was ongoing: we stopped the trucks and even the gravel mining factory: their site got demolished after a three and half year fight. We’ve got attention from people and the media, and gathered supporters in the city and country-wide. We’ve managed to get City Hall to get professionals together around a table. 

Now there’s ongoing development of the Dighomi Meadows rehabilitation strategy. This document involves first of all setting a baseline to understanding what we have right now. Some investigation helps us to map out the condition that the meadows were in a few years before the destruction, and what steps are needed to restore the place and make it beneficial for our society.  

So this project is ongoing, including public discussions on the proposals, in which non-governmental organizations and civil society play a major role. When the document is released we will have to make sure that the action plan is being followed. 

To end this interview: what is your vision for the future of the Dighomi Meadows?

I really want the Dighomi Meadows as much as possible to turn into a real floodplain forest with a riparian forest. We have a new law on forests in Georgia, and if the area is categorized as a floodplain forest it becomes a specially protected forest. The law has many different instruments to protect the forest. I the floodplain to be rehabilitated, and for the majority of the area to turn into riparian forest. 

Ana, thanks so much for sharing your words, wisdom, and experience. We wish you all the best for the fight.

Let us know about projects or people making a difference in the local environment by sending us a direct message via our Instagram account.

Photography: Ejvind Spence, Dighomi Meadows neighborhood initiative

Edit: Anna Edgar

A staircase descends into the quarry at Warren Manning’s wild garden at Dolobran. This project haunts my recent thinking about plants and design. In this image, I particularly like how you can see the response of the spontaneous plants on the stairs to foot traffic. It’s easy to overlook that this garden was an intimate process of people, plants, and design. There’s something important about this image to remind us that historical projects had a seedbank that expressed itself through seeds germinating on a stone staircase.

We’re down in the Dolobran quarry now. Look at the curve of this path and how the vegetation is trimmed back to create a certain effect, yet it is also allowed in areas that run a bit out of control. It’s a place that receives care—skilled labor—in the service of an experience with wildness and plants.

This is a garden, photographed in 1907, that I think would draw attention today. I’m pretty sure it’s part of Manning’s quarry garden. It appears that the planting is derived from the process—either the spontaneous generation of the Comptonia or a few were planted and allowed to spread. And there’s this path, this designed line jogging up the slope. It’s much different than the path in the quarry. We’re seeing degrees of wildness, which I think shows the subtlety of the project overall.

This effort toward wildness in gardens wasn’t just on the East Coast. This image is from a Los Angeles, California public park, designed by Theodore Payne in ~1913. It was intended to prove that locally native plants could serve as a prominent element of public space. To Payne, the project’s site was ideal because it was located within the city: “Thus, many people who would have been unable to do so had it been in some more remote place could visit it.”

From the 1920s on, there was more of an interest in wild gardens toward concepts and assemblages based on plant ecology. Edgar Wherry (shown here alongside Gertrude Smith Wherry in their wild garden in suburban Washington, D.C., in ~1920) was a prominent scientist and plant preservationist. Although he was interested primarily in more scientific knowledge, he also thought wildness could exist and be cultivated close to home.

One of the areas of Fairchild’s property was this site, where he seems to have intervened in various ways as a former field was taken over by a stand of cedars. He was modifying succession to meet experiential goals for the cut-through path. Fairchild wasn’t necessarily thinking ecologically, but I still find the possible overlaps between his work and that of Frank Egler, a radical and ornery ecologist who worked with herbicides to create shrublands later in the century. These practices have an early 20^th-century history that we don’t pay enough attention to.

It was a business, after all, this making of wild gardens. I think there’s something significant about this document from 1935. Showing a before and after of a private project, it was printed in a catalog for Vick’s Wildgardens in Pennsylvania, which grew native plants and offered design and installation services. There was an established market for native plants and fild gardens primarily in a suburban context. Of course, 1935 is the middle of the Depression ,and it’s also after that moment when wild gardens would fade from popularity hlready started—so this is a document that’s hanging on to a cultural moment already disappearing.

One of the elements that some of my historical work has led me to is how to build projects in the public realm that prioritize process and an unexpected sense of wildness. Being public, these are tangled up in low maintenance and thrift issues. This is the second year of a project—Sand Patch—that removed an erea of desiccated mulch and weedy bricks and placed 10-15” of sand on top of an unknown depth of existing limestone crusher run.

The project involved working with a different palette of plants than I was used to, which led me to think about how to study these plants and observe these intentionally stressful situations. There was no rescue on this site in that water had to be hand-carried. It’s been an incredibly informative process to see what has thrived and what has had to go. It’s one of those extended engagements between designers and a public space that I think is so valuable.

On the left, the existing crusher run was buried in the sand. On the right is the growth after the first year. The change here makes me hopeful about how we might work plants into the forgotten slices of the existing urban fabric in areas without a budget for an extensive redesign and rebuild.

We bare-rooted all the plants to plant in sand, which led to studying the various root textures and structures before they were in the ground. Whenever I think about this project, it has always been an excellent way to bring me back to how the plants are infiltrating the soil.

As planting designers, what do we do here? Adventive species. Tangles. Spontaneous thickets. These are challenging sites to work with, but when you look beyond perfection, a lot of positive work can be done.

Not that every project is a tangle, to begin with. This project is inserted into an existing lawn but prioritizes complexity, diversity, and an immersion of wildness in an everyday environment.

I try not to get stuck in the traditional confines of the garden. Much of this drive comes from my historical work. We’ve too often accepted that the scale of operations for working thoughtfully and creatively with plants is the garden. Beyond that, we think it’s restoration or conservation. But what if we don’t accept that? What if we continue to question the relationship between plant practices and design at various scales? There are so many important questions about design culture and ecology that we can think through. This project, for example, is thinking about inevitable suburban development to re-create xeric prairie patches. It’s a question not just of ecology but also culture. How do we make these plant species more culturally prominent in this region?

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Your PhD work is on the history of wildness in American culture, particularly with engaging wildness “close-to-home in the garden” and how there were hints of design and ecology in the late 19th and early 20th century. Can you offer more insight into this?

Interest in encouraging wildness in the garden can today appear very contemporary, but I’ve come to appreciate its deeper history better.

There’s this moment in the 1880s through the 1910s or so when, in the U.S. at least, divisions between what was considered nature and culture, between wild and cultivated, were more flexible, contested, and not as delineated as they would prove to be for much of the twentieth century. There’s an interest in cultivating wildness close to home in the United States.

Wild gardens have been discussed and debated in the United States at least since William Robinson published The Wild Garden in 1870. It’s really after the turn of the century when the idea gains traction. What follows is a few decades when early ecological ideas overlapped with a socially rooted and non-expert-driven interest in cultivating close-to-home wildness.

It’s a time when individuals were calling for the creation of national wild gardening clubs, when individuals were gathering local community members and starting public wild gardens as a way to build community, when schoolchildren spent time in wild gardens as part of their standard curriculum. It was also about escaping the pollution and disruption of modernity and tangled up in the history of suburbanization.

By the 1930s, this moment was largely gone, and it really wouldn’t return as a viable line of environmental thought until the 1980s and 1990s.

Are there aspects of those perspectives that we can see in today’s “wild gardening” approaches?

Other than the fact that any pursuit of wildness is deeply rooted in European scenic ideals, I don’t think there’s much direct intellectual connection between today’s wild gardens and those from the turn of the twentieth century.

There was this divide in the mid-twentieth century when the type of environmental thought upon which wild gardens relied wasn’t tenable. That meant many of the ideas didn’t persist. (There are exceptions. I see designer Darrell Morrison’s late-1960s interest in American Plants for American Gardens as one example. But even he notes in his book Beauty of the Wild that this connection was disjointed.)

In more ways than we might care to admit, the current dialog surrounding wild gardens or naturalistic planting—whatever you might now call it—is still catching up. That earlier iteration of wild gardens raised complex questions about building community, the relationship between art and ecology, and initiating a human culture of wild gardening. We’re just now returning to some of these concepts in many ways.

Of course, there are incidental overlaps in formal questions between then and now. Wild gardeners in that earlier moment also questioned how plants should be arranged to create a certain human experience of wildness or match a particular distribution found in a natural plant community. They even looked to spontaneous plant communities, such as remnant prairies along railroads,

to inform plantings.

What historical landscape works did you study that have informed your current practice?

One is a wild garden in a quarry designed by Warren Manning outside of Philadelphia, on an estate called Dolobran in the late 1890s. It is prominent in the archives because there are photographs of it and articles that describe it and discuss some of the planting practices that helped to manage it. It’s also a stunning site in an abandoned quarry, which very much fits with what Manning thought a wild garden should be—that it was appropriate when the setting was rugged, varied, broken: picturesque. But it’s wild gardens that exist slightly outside of the landscape architectural canon that I think have the most to offer us today.

In Minneapolis, a wild garden was started in 1907 by a group of teachers. Built adjacent to the city and surrounded by land that was developed or would be developed as housing, the garden was a few acres at first but would expand to more than 25. It was managed by a retired school teacher, Eloise Butler, for over twenty years. With volunteers, Butler guided the development of plant communities, introduced many species to the site, and maintained a trail network.

What’s so fascinating about it is how the garden insinuated itself into local society. Approaching a century after the death of Butler, it’s still there and apparently thriving. It is a lesson to all designers about what makes a project durable! There’s still an active group involved in the site, and the garden has a web presence. The garden is still alive and dynamic, even if the language is now more about preservation than gardening.

In rural Connecticut near the turn of the 20^th century, Benjamin Thomas Fairchild, the owner of a chemical company, bought an abandoned farm and then spent many years turning it into a cross between an ecological restoration project and a wild garden. I find it to be a surprisingly contemporary project. He spent much of his effort experimenting with planting strategies and management strategies to create desired plant communities or certain experiences for people on the site. Unfortunately, it’s not that well documented. It’s still there, though today it’s a protected nature preserve, not a garden.

And then there were many wild gardens, in front yards, for example, that were built in cities across the United States in the 1910s and 1920s. There’s almost no documentation of them. But it’s exciting to think that, for example, a woman living in rural Nebraska wanted to plant a garden of local prairie species in her yard in the early years of the 20^th century—and that she wrote about it and shared her ideas and used it as a nexus to gather a community of like-minded people. I’m sure many other stories like that are buried in the archives.

How did the Thicket Workshop emerge from the more academic/research aspects of your work?

When I was well into my PhD, my research showed how environmental politics, culture, and plant practices have been historically intertwined. That research made me want to work in design in a way that could bring together plant-centric research, practice, and an almost manifesto-based approach. How could I use built works to contribute to this critical dialog of plants and culture?

It’s been a somewhat difficult position to explain to my humanities colleagues. They often see my so-called applied interests in design as disjointed from my scholarly interests. I don’t see it that way at all. To me, they are inseparable—and that’s really what I want them to be. It makes me a better teacher, a better researcher, and a better designer. Digging in the archives, reading environmental humanities theory, and knowing the root structure of wild ginger are examples of the various modes I strive to bring together. There’s a path forward through it all, I swear.

Thrift is a drive in your work, in the locations and materials, and like all good design processes with limits and improvisation on site, it recombines into something complex with a new set of aesthetic rules to play with. What are some of those themes?

Maybe it’s worthwhile to start with the source of the thrift. In many cases, it’s imposed: a client has a small budget yet desires to make changes to their property. In other cases, it’s my argument: a client might have a sufficient budget, but the scale or condition of the property demands a multi-year intervention rather than a one-off planting. In small, experimental public projects, I often propose the work, and thus, there’s no budget, so I’m scrounging for everything.

Of the themes this has led me to, I’d say an embrace of imperfection has been the most common. I used to think of planting as something that had to meet predetermined ideals. We all get drawn in by those glossy images in monographs. I see planting as a much more responsive and adaptable set of land practices. It’s great if there’s a budget to search widely for specific species of native or near-native plants and a budget to plant 50 shrubs. But what if a client wants to make their 3-acre property more beneficial for invertebrates but has a small budget and the property is a thicket of invasive buckthorn? As designers, what do we do then? Where is the line between ecological restoration and design? Does it matter?

Embracing imperfection often means living with non-native grasses as a matrix between otherwise native plants; sometimes, it means the only gardening tool is a lawn mower that the client borrows from a friend once per month; sometimes, it means refereeing spontaneous plants toward desired effects. I’ve found this type of work to be incredibly difficult to photograph so far. But it seems worthwhile. In an expanded field, so to say, of planting design, these have to be situations with which we’re willing to engage.

I’m also very interested in working with clients who want to do some of the work themselves. Is the client hoping to engage directly with the site management? Or learn? Are they willing to grow plants? Will they hack down Rosa multiflora on the weekends?

And there are benefits beyond thrift in that approach: a client engaged with the work, I believe, is much more likely to stick with the project; is much more likely to see their view of the world and their environmental politics skewed a bit by that engagement; is much more likely to become an advocate to their friends and family.

As ecological restoration (as applied ecology) gained momentum in the 60s-70s, you mentioned that environmentalists were nervous that the practice would justify greater exploitation. In restoration, the naturalization aesthetic is baked in. Do you see any means or theorists who challenge that approach, to make meaning and develop new practices? (Natasha Myers)

More generally, I think much environmental thought in the twentieth century in the United States held a fair amount of anxiety about human intervention in the natural world. Whether you link this to the rise of the wilderness ethos or to some long-term trend toward viewing Nature as an inherently balanced entity in the absence of humans, it crimped environmental thought and politics for much of the century. We’re still living with the legacy of this in many ways.

I do think there has been a challenge to this mindset over the past few decades. Some of the work of William Jordan in ecological restoration in the early 2000s made the case for the deeply cultural aspects of restoration work, which to me suggests an environmental politics that’s very hopeful.

More recently, I’ve found the work of some ecofeminists and scholars in plant humanities, making me think about the role of plants in our built environment. Natasha Myers' work has been particularly helpful. And I’d recommend the work of Colette Palamar to anyone, especially the article “Restorashyn: Ecofeminist Restoration.” Both of these make me think about how to respond to an invasive buckthorn thicket.

How is 2024 looking for you on these plots?

Responsive! Especially to client goals, as the questions implied here tend to come up in conversations with clients. I might also ask for a z-axis here to represent time. There might be some really informative arcs to draw in that model. But if I’m putting a single point, then it’s:

You’re curious for designers to provide more honest exposition on the design process- you speak of the overlap between the personal essay and the design process.

I’m fascinated by the possibilities of the personal essay to offer more insightful takes on what it means to design, tend, and live with designed landscapes, especially those that thoughtfully involve plants.

Designers—write about your work on the process! First, I find these essays incredibly valuable as a designer, just to get a sense of what other designers are thinking and doing. Second, as an historian, I’ve come to realize how quickly the ideas behind a project fade. Lately I’ve been writing about some 1970s and 1980s plant practices on vacant lots, and I’m necessarily piecing together this story from fragments of news articles. What I wouldn’t give to have a narrative account of one of these projects!

Social media, in many ways, seems to offer some of these more off-the-cuff remarks on projects and inspiration. I think that’s what keeps me coming back to Instagram.

There are many examples of designers/plant people already adopting a more personal and essayistic approach to sharing insights. Here are a few:

“Improvised Landscapes” Nicholas Anderson

“Curious Methods” Karen Lutsky and Sean Burkholder

30 Trees: And Why Landscape Architects Love Them

In many ways, writings such as these are pushing back against efforts of scientification or rationalization efforts of the design fields that have been in motion for so long.

You mentioned that planting design needs a critical overhaul in the BSLA/MLA  curriculum. What are some areas where there could be more rigor?

In my experience, planting design often gets lumped in with the technical classes mandated by accreditation. (There are exceptions, of course!) That means the class ends up being about more technical details: about the correct way to group plants, about plant spacing, about proper plant communities for a region, or about identifying a certain accepted set of species familiar in horticulture.

It’s about practices that meet established expectations. However, I firmly believe that we need more challenging and rigorous questions that inform how and why we teach planting design.That question is: How can I spark an enduring and critical intellectual and material curiosity about the design possibilities of plants?

I want planting design courses that embrace both materials and ideas. I want students to plant seeds and watch them grow. I want them to understand the effort required to plant a flat of 50 plugs with an electric auger. But I also want them to spend time thinking like a lichen. I want them to think broadly and radically about how planting design can be related to plant preservation, culture, and regional economies. I find the juxtaposition of these methodologies, epistemologies, and practices necessary.

Often, planting design courses are too focused on teaching planting as a technical skill that follows a conventional route to solve problems using rational, textbook methods. I want to give students the tools, theories, and space to pursue new questions, practices, and arguments.

Merging the material and the intellectual, planting design has radical ecological and cultural potential in landscape design. That framing offers much potential as to how we teach plants.

Thank you Matt for speaking with us. You can follow Matt Dallos and Thicket Workshop on Instagram.

Recognition for Ruderal’s forest projects

Ruderal's Tbilisi Urban Forest and Betania Forest Garden are are nominated for the EUMies Prize: European Union Prize for Contemporary Architecture. The Betania Forest Garden received a Special Mention in Private Gardens from the Landezine International Landscape Award.

Tbilisi Urban Forest takes hold! 

The Tbilisi Urban Forest is taking shape on Narikala Ridge and the Okrokana South Slope. Ruderal collaborated with ecologists and urban planners on these pilot forestry projects to replant Mtatsminda Mountain with a biodiverse mix of Georgian endemic and climate-adapted species. Look up for new waves of color blooming in Spring 2024. Read more about the project here.

Work in Progress: Kakheti Resorts

Site work and planting are underway throughout Kakheti at The Bodbe Hotel near Sighnaghi, new resorts and spas near Kvareli, and at the Open Corridors Camp in Gremi. Ruderal is building three residential landscapes in Tsqneti, Tabakhmela, and Kaklebi.

Interns Abound!

In 2023, Ruderal welcomed interns from the Visual Art, Architecture & Design School in Tbilisi (VAADS), Auburn University in Alabama, USA, the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences (BOKU) Vienna, and the University of Copenhagen. They toured Georgian geothermal landscapes, cut new walking trails in the Rustavi Floodplain Forest, participated in design competitions in France and Georgia, and conducted research on the plant life and hidden gardens of Old Tbilisi. 

Substack shorts: Rustavi Floodplain, Goderdzi Botanical Garden, and reflections on our design theory and processes: 

• Raising Horizons, Digging Deeper: Wendy Andringa, founder of Assemblage Landscape Architecture, dives deep into urban soil sections. 

• All about Adjaran Alpine Landscapes: Ruderal visits the Goderdzi Alpine Botanical Garden.

• Making landscapes legible: Maggie Brand discusses cutting a "layer of legibility" into the Rustavi Floodplain in Drawing a Floodplain.

• From The Flat Files, the deep cuts from our archive: The Elusina Lazenby Experimental Forest, an installation turning the concept of landscape interpretive centers inside out.

• Reflections on "Taking Form": In Splice, Stack Trace, Sarah discusses the compositions of Georgian landscape painting that influence our work in Kakheti, while Ben Hackenberger outlines a Radical Retrofit approach to urban design in Dobrich, Bulgaria, in Catch Patches. 

Thank you for supporting our work at Ruderal. We look forward to new conversations and collaborations and wish everyone a peaceful and prosperous 2024! 

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