Landscape Architecture Magazine

Margie Ruddick and Thomas Rainer talk about their new books on wild landscape design.

From the July 2016 issue of Landscape Architecture Magazine.

In the past several months, Thomas Rainer, ASLA, and Margie Ruddick have each published books centered around notions of designing “wild” landscapes in the public realm to help restore ecological diversity in urban settings. Ruddick’s book is Wild by Design: Strategies for Creating Life-Enhancing Landscapes (Island Press, $45), and Rainer’s is Planting in a Post-Wild World: Designing Plant Communities for Resilient Landscapes (Timber Press, $39.95). We invited the two to ASLA’s offices to talk about the project they have in common. This interview has been edited and condensed.

Why did you each decide to write books on wildness in landscape design?

Margie Ruddick: I didn’t actually think of my work as wild at all until Anne Raver wrote this piece, “In Philadelphia, Going Green or Growing Wild?” [about Ruddick’s home garden, in the New York Times], and then I started to get e-mails from people all around the world, and I realized: This is wild gardening.

Thomas Rainer: It felt like a good place to be, and we [Rainer and his coauthor, Claudia West, International ASLA] are both plant geeks. We had a lot of practical problems to work out in terms of how to do interesting but ecologically diverse horticulture in the public realm. I’d come from Oehme, van Sweden, so I spent almost a decade learning this great plant palette, but, you know, with gardens that have lots and lots of resources. I’m now doing work mostly at a public scale, which is innovative, though in wanting to push ecological work, they just don’t have the resources to keep it up. I needed a new kit of tricks; I needed to have a new education.

You both mention childhood early on in your books.

Ruddick: It’s about really responding to landscapes, I mean, to Central Park, in New York City, but also to the beach where I grew up and really just being in landscape, observing and feeling immersed. I think the immersive part of it is really important. It’s about being in the process and not just being in something that you look at.

Rainer: I was a suburban kid in Alabama, and we had U.S Steel on this enormous tract of land that literally backed up to our backyard. We had this wonderful ability to walk out the back door and walk in any direction as far as we wanted. It was the Central Piedmont forest, which had some great boulder fields and all kinds of really fun stuff for a semiferal teenage boy to wander in. By the time I was in high school, almost all of that was developed because it’s suburbia. I watched some of my favorite childhood play spaces turn into the worst suburban tract houses, and the creek where we caught crawdads is now a pipe underneath the Super Target parking lot. Watching that develop so quickly had a huge impact.

It was really interesting teaming with Claudia West on the book because she’d come from East Germany, with this totally different perspective of a communist bloc country, with just awful mining, and couldn’t hang out laundry without it getting dirty. And once the [Berlin] Wall fell, she watched the economy come back and the taking of these really polluted sites and bringing nature back.

Who are your books written for?

Rainer: We were initially focusing on designers. Designers and adventurous gardeners. Timber Press is a horticultural press, so it’s definitely a horticultural book. For us, it’s a design and horticultural book. I felt that this wouldn’t appeal that much to landscape architects, honestly, because it’s so plant-focused. I think there are a lot of landscape architects who like plants—I know that we all know what that means at this table, but to my mom and people who don’t understand the profession, it’s shocking that landscape architects spend probably less than 10 percent of their time on plants.

Ruddick: Way less.

Rainer: Yeah, maybe way less, exactly.

Ruddick: For me the range is people who just want to know about landscape. A little Landscape 101 to students—ultimately it’s for students in allied fields, architecture or engineering, who don’t know a lot about landscape. It’s introductory in some ways. Also for people in other countries, because so many times I’ve done work in other countries, and they’re just at sea because they have to sort of import American design. The book gives ways of actually making your own path to designs so that you’re not just buying a whole process.

Rainer: I don’t always think that’s a bad thing that so much of our attention is not dedicated to plants. There are other big issues that we are focusing on. But I do think it’s hard to address the challenges of cities without plants in some way. I am concerned, particularly, with seeing young graduates coming out of some programs who aren’t required to have any plant design at all. You get these graduates who can render these plans with such beautiful ecological complexity, but can’t tell you three species. We need to get better at this kind of hybrid ecology and horticulture in terms of really understanding the plants.

Ruddick: You need to know what you can’t do. We’re doing a reforestation project in agricultural soil, and I’m like, I can’t do that. We need a guy who really knows what he’s doing on the science level and even coming up with spacing and everything. Those people are really designers. The fallacy used to be that the designers design everything and they hand it off to either engineers or plant people, and now everybody, including the excavators, are really designers in the process, so that the reforestation guy is doing stuff that then all of a sudden is leaking back into the rest of the projects. It’s very much a collaborative thing.

How would you each describe the reception for your books, and their ideas of wild planting?

Ruddick: I’ve been so happy that friends of mine or people I know have read the stories and they just kind of get absorbed in the stories, and the information gets absorbed that way, and that’s been really gratifying. A good confirmation that it’s a good way to impart information and ideas, so that’s been the fun part of it.

Rainer: The best reception I’ve been getting is from people who have been engaged in this native plant debate in one way or another. Because the book in many ways is very much committed to ecological performance and very much committed to native plants and the whole range of pollinators and following the relationships that that brings, but not being dogmatic about it. Some of the best remarks I think we’ve gotten are from people who feel really relieved by it; they feel permission that if I include an exotic in this mix, the sky will not fall. Also some of the worst we’ve stumbled on are when I give talks at native plant conferences, from people who peg this book as a novel ecosystem book. Which to them feels like compromising, capitulating to the invasiveness, which is not quite what the book is about.

Tell us your thoughts about the larger native plant debate.

Ruddick: Well, the title of my book before it turned into Wild by Design was What Are We Doing Here Anyway? I called it that because you can follow all these checklists and you can do all the native plant stuff, but if something isn’t going to work, or if you really just want a lilac because it really means something to you, what are we doing here? Are we just slavishly following the checklist, or are we actually making places that have resonance and have meaning for people?

Rainer: It’s just such a loaded topic now. I’m in garden chat rooms and on Facebook with a lot of horticulturists, and I see weekly in these raging debates between the advocates and the others that it is becoming as polarized as any American debate out there. Which is a little bit sad to me, because I don’t think these people are really that far off from each other.

What do you have to say to people about maintenance?

Ruddick: I always kind of make a joke for clients who want things that look like they’ve always been there. I say, “If you want this to look like you’re a billionaire, our fee will be $50,000. If you want to make it look like nobody was ever here, the fee will be $200,000.” It’s so much more energy-consuming really to make a landscape look like it’s settled in and look “natural.” The same thing goes for maintenance.

Rainer: A lot of times you’re relying on a contractor through a maintenance contract. It’s the difference between capital and operating budgets that I never had to deal with so much in the private realm, but is a huge issue in the public realm because it’s gifts or it’s onetime allocations or a congressional set-aside for a capital project. If they can shift costs into capital projects, which is having the initial contractor do a maintenance contract for two or three years as part of the warranty or an extended warranty, that seems to be more palatable. I never had to think about that kind of difference in the private realm.

So how are your own gardens going?

Rainer: I have a small garden, [a] ridiculous, midcentury house, which is a shoebox, like Levittown. Which is kind of a fun backdrop, because who cares, right? One half of the property is trying to be this great exterior, highly managed and maintained. It’s about getting as much bloom as possible, that kind of horticultural jockery side. The other side is pretty wild, and I let a lot of self-seeding happen. I have a little area I seeded, which is really interesting to see how that’s evolving.

Margie, you mention yours at length in the book.

Ruddick: What’s interesting is I sold the house and moved [to upstate New York], and I just went back this weekend just to drive by, and they are maintaining it. So now I have another blank slate. I can’t stand it. I’m renting my house, and I have friends who ask, “How are you going to do anything? This place is so sterile.” It must be my karma. Here I am again in this blank place.