Landscape designer Claudia West to speak at JC Raulston Arboretum’s 40th anniversary symposium

Growing up in East Germany in the 1980s, Claudia West had a different view of the natural world. If anything, she didn’t encounter nature, not as we know it in the United States. East Germany, at the time, was an industrialized, polluted place, where rivers often ran the wrong color. Yet after the Berlin Wall fell, West witnessed a remarkable rebound. New wilderness sprung up in what had been industrial blight.

“Plants grow on the moon,” she writes. “I have seen it!”

This weekend West, co-author of “Planting in a Post-Wild World: Designing Plant Communities for Resilient Landscapes” and an innovative landscape designer at Pennsylvania’s North Creek Nurseries, brings her ecology-based landscape design approach to Raleigh for JC Raulston Arboretum’s 40th Anniversary Symposium on Sept. 23-24. She’s one of a handful of speakers, whose accolades range from plant breeding and exploration to curating the Royal Horticultural Society’s Garden Wisley just south of London. The Symposium celebrates 40 years of the Arboretum by looking forward another four decades.

What West offers is an ecological landscape design perspective based on pragmatism, compromise and functionality. Rather than manicured lawns with carefully placed individual plants, she designs dense plantings that mimic natural ecosystems.

“Our gardens are more important than ever before. They will be the home of future nature,” she says. “What we plant matters more than it ever did.”

In the United States, the remaining natural areas are few and isolated from each other. Private, public and commercial land, by West’s philosophy, can help fill this gap. West retains her German accent and the memory of a childhood there, but also a greater European perspective on natural areas. There are very few undisturbed areas in her home continent.

“It’s a manicured country,” West says. “We understand that all the forests, all the pastures and meadows, they’re only diverse and there because of human management.” If we accept that humans are part of nature, she continues, and that we can be its stewards, we can actually foster diversity by managing landscapes and making them more functional.

West is clear: she doesn’t mean managed landscapes are as diverse as they were before human disturbance. That takes hundreds or thousands of years. What she saw in East Germany after the wall went down, though, was that people can recreate nature. In Europe, there aren’t the same discussions about native plants, so landscapes are created using the plants that work, first and foremost. How would one define a native plant in Europe anyway? They don’t have an event like the arrival of European settlers, she says, to use as the dividing line between native and non-native plants.

“For us, how far back do you want to go?” she asks. “The Celts, the Romans, all of them brought their own plants.”

Her approach is based on compromise. She describes things in terms of spectrum – from wild to neat, or from native to exotic. When she works with a client, she meets them in the middle. She doesn’t want to take someone’s lawn away, say, and she isn’t going to insist someone give up their beloved peonies and roses. Rather, she’d like to complement these features with something beautiful and dense that brings wildlife into the space, whether it be a yard, a municipal planting or a commercial plot.

Her ecological approach works like this: in traditional landscape design, she explains, plants are viewed as individuals. This one tree or this one flower go in this specific spot, with grass as its backdrop. It’s almost like painting. If that one plant fails, however, there’s a hole in the landscape, and the design collapses. Rather, West works in populations and percentages.

“It’s almost like a soccer coach,” she offers. “You manage the team players on your team and you kind of control them, which way they go, how many of each you have in the game, instead of controlling exactly where they’re located.” By allowing populations of desired plants to interact dynamically, she creates diverse imitations of natural ecosystems. If done right, these require less active maintenance than a traditional landscape.

West also prefers to work with the soil as-is. Many beautiful plants thrive in depleted, gravelly earth, rather than the rich, dark soil preferred by many landscapers. She calls this over-amended soil, and feels its use is the equivalent of coddling our plants—and that it can lead to short plant lifespans and other avoidable problems. Stress is an asset, she writes in “Planting in a Post-Wild World,” and often a plant’s fitness for a kind of environment correlates to its defenses against that environment’s shortcomings. Like in reunified East Germany, where living things bounced back in what had been polluted industrial areas, West knows quite well that plants can grow anywhere.

“Often less is more and I love working with whatever soil I have available,” says West. “I can usually find a suitable plant palette for even the most difficult soil conditions.”

This story was originally published September 16, 2016 at 9:45 AM with the headline "Landscape designer Claudia West to speak at JC Raulston Arboretum’s 40th anniversary symposium."