Designing Interactions in the Landscape by Dirk Smit

DESIGNING INTERACTIONS in the Landscape

Dirk Smit INTER -Action studios

In South Africa, landscape architects and even more so, planting designers are members of an unknown profession to much of society. I, like many in these professions, believe that planting design can and does add value to design projects in the built environment.

Planting takes architecture to a different level, through their varying characteristics in size, shape, texture and colour. The inevitable result of nature being incorporated into man-made hard structures, results in the birth of an ecology. This is vital to both mankind and to the construction project – where ecology makes various building materials possible.

Landscape architects and planting designers are the fundamentals of most design projects.

My attention was drawn to planting design in 2015. I was a qualified horticulturist working for a landscape architecture office. I found that within the industry and office, the same plants were used, which made up what we called, the ‘winning recipes’. These recipes consisted generally out of plants which are well known in the South African landscape context – Agapanthus, Dietes., Plectranthus, Tecoma etc. Furthermore, these plants were used in a ‘traditional planting design’ method with bubble diagrams. An example of this consisted out of groupings of 36 Plectranthus sp. (six packs)

Figure 1 - One of my first observations, of how plants adapt and survive in the wild - Lapeirousia corymbosa (Helderberg mountains)

in front, 24 Agapanthus sp. (4kg) in the middle and 40 Tecoma sp. (4kg) as a hedge. Other landscape companies were following the same or similar principles. These traditional planting methods are substantiated through the traditional use of geometric and regular patterns from the 19th and 20th centuries. Frederick Law Olmstead initiated the idea around ‘ecological landscape architecture’, with the perennial border by the British designer, Getrude Jekyll and the Brazilian painter, Roberto Burle Marx.

These artists created landscape design paintings, using swift organic strokes and lines. However, in a South African context, during the 21st century, it did not complement the environment, project budget, architecture and most importantly – the aesthetic of plant growth over time. What I did understand, was that these traditional methods were used for elongated blocks as drift planting. This set out the aesthetic perception for the experience of the viewer, along with making maintenance easy.

From my experience in the industry, landscape projects seem to merely be born by a series of left-over spaces due to work done by architects or engineers. In most cases, we aren’t the front runners of the projects, or given a chance to design the landscape spaces which we could conceptually develop or install. This led to my argument around interactions of planting design, essentially all we were doing was planting. The ‘winning recipes’ were applied to these spaces, which didn’t always aesthetically work or respond to the site analysis of the project. Landscapes or planting need to be well thought about due to constant ecological change and that is what sets us aside from other sectors in the built environment.

As I knew that my interest lied in planting design, I began my research through observation from experience (before I read books by professional

Figure 2 - Plant Interaction between Dimorphotheca and Drosanthemum. Found in Cape Flats Dune Strandveld, Scarborough, Cape Town.

planting designers such as Piet Oudolf, Gilles Clément, James Hitchmough). Observing plants in their natural environment, I noticed how they grow, adapt, support, survive and flourish seasonally through mother nature (of course this meant that there weren’t any human influences). This lead to my question – if plants grow, adapt, support, survive and flourish on their own over time, why do we spend so much time on the ‘planting plan’, something which will require a significant amount of maintenance? Additionally, a planting plan is a representation, distancing us from the installation process and which will change on site or need to be amended in a few years.

Fast forward three years, I find myself in 2018 – completed my BTech and Masters of Landscape Architecture, titled ‘Connecting with the Touchscape’. My thesis questions how we can encourage the connection between humans and ecology. A mindful understanding of how interactions can offer a design manifesto for cohesive actions between humans and ecology. A similar topic to what I am exploring and experimenting with now in my company. Since my thesis, I have gathered a lot of information from research, working and talking to knowledgeable people within the industry.

I am now a landscape architecture lecturer and recently registered my company titled ‘INTERAction studios’. Since the 2020 ‘COVID-19’ pandemic, mother nature is desperately urging us to think differently about how we are living our fast-paced lives, as well as using the resources sustainably and giving back what we take. This will probably take some time and I know that it’s challenging with deadlines and grand openings. I hope that this will encourage council and private clients to have a mindful approach to how things need to be done.

We should design for ecology and then for people. It’s about the circle of life. The interactions which affect the plant species, then in turn affects us again, with wind, precipitation, soil and all pollinators and microbes. It is imperative to understand these interdependencies and then to start an ‘ecological landscape design’.

Ecology is always changing and adapting. We cannot restore it, but we can design with the ecological succession that we experience. Gregory Bateson talks about it in his book ‘Mind and Nature’: "I hold the presupposition that our loss of the sense of aesthetic unity, was quite simply, an epistemological mistake," meaning that we create our own perceptions in the world we live in from anthropology and phenomenology. So, in fact, the starting point should be natural plant arrangements combined with your design skills.

Figure 3 - A community of Ornithogalum, Ursinia, Albuca, Cotula, Seriphium and Cynodon. Found in Swartland Shale Renosterveld, Darling, West Coast

This ties in with what I do at INTER-Action studios. We look at ecological planting design through the aesthetic, resilient, biodiverse and seasonal lens. This is done through the process of designing plant interactions, where plant types are selected to form a community for the specific project. Solely looking at interactions between the human experience, plant growth and the broader ecology.

With this process in mind, I encourage clients to approach landscape projects differently. It’s about the process, starting with analysis which needs to run over a prolonged time period – at least one year – so that we can analyse the site through its different connections or rejuvenating the soils if necessary. This is project specific, i.e. stripped landscapes, post-industrial, rehabilitation and other important landscape forms. We can decide how we will design the landscape and arrange the plants on site. This will be followed by a management period of least two to five years. Argued through designed plant interactions, they should be aesthetic, resilient, biodiverse and seasonal – combined to adapt over time and not requiring traditional maintenance. I look forward to combinations of grown plant material and plants from seed, as well as liaising with the horticultural industry, in growing important plant types and species.

I am interested in the idea of landscape being made up of a series of connections which have interactions with each other. Interactions are similar to when Emile from the movie ‘Ratatouille’ eats cheese and strawberries in separation, but when he combines the two flavours with each other, “something completely new happens!” The interaction is what I am fascinated about – how does the planting and landscape look aesthetically when these interactions communicate together.

ABOUT INTER-ACTION STUDIOS

I specialize in Planting Design, with the motto: design. | arrange. | manage. I’m fascinated by the interactions between different plants and the relationship of human experience to the growth of plants and broader ecology. My designing process specifically looks at Aesthetics, Biodiversity, Resilience & Seasonality.

Figure 4 - Installed project - Lalegno Factory, Road Verge Planting Design. In Cape Flats Dune Strandveld, Firgrove, Cape Town

DIRK SMIT

MLA, LArch Dip. Hort

+27 72 381 7110 dirkjasmit@gmail.com @inter.action.studios @Dirk j. Smit

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