RESILIENT LANDSCAPES

The Five Seasons Garden is a learning landscape designed to reveal life’s regenerative cycles, our place within them, and how we can participate more intentionally for the well-being of the land, the many beings with whom we share it, and ourselves.Each seasonal garden offers highly nutritious foods and medicinal plants that provide support for that time of year. Many are plants that naturally emerge in that season. Drawing from Classical Chinese Medicine and place-based Indigenous knowledge traditions, we also explore deeper correspondences: how a plant’s color, taste, growth pattern, ecological niche, and medicinal actions may help us understand its relationship and value to a season. When we recognize that our physiology, emotions, and dispositions change with the seasons and that plants have evolved qualities that help living beings meet these seasonal changes we begin to understand that the seasons move through us, not merely around us.We are, in every sense, part of the natural world. The elements live within us. Kinship is not a metaphor. Here, the garden becomes a place to witness these connections at work and, through our educational programs, to explore how they might guide meaningful changes in the ways we care for the land, ourselves, and one another.er.

RESILIENT LANDSCAPES

The Five Seasons Garden is a learning landscape designed to reveal life’s regenerative cycles, our place within them, and how we can participate more intentionally for the well-being of the land, the many beings with whom we share it, and ourselves.Each seasonal garden offers highly nutritious foods and medicinal plants that provide support for that time of year. Many are plants that naturally emerge in that season. Drawing from Classical Chinese Medicine and place-based Indigenous knowledge traditions, we also explore deeper correspondences: how a plant’s color, taste, growth pattern, ecological niche, and medicinal actions may help us understand its relationship and value to a season. When we recognize that our physiology, emotions, and dispositions change with the seasons and that plants have evolved qualities that help living beings meet these seasonal changes we begin to understand that the seasons move through us, not merely around us.We are, in every sense, part of the natural world. The elements live within us. Kinship is not a metaphor. Here, the garden becomes a place to witness these connections at work and, through our educational programs, to explore how they might guide meaningful changes in the ways we care for the land, ourselves, and one another.er.

AskNature.org is home to an online community of life scientists, designers, architects, engineers, chemists and entrepreneurs exploring nature-based sustainable solutions to human needs.
Bringing Nature Home, How You Can Sustain Wildlife with Native Plants, a book by Douglas Tallamy documents decades of research on the capability of some plants to sustain hundreds of different insect communities, while other plants (largely invasives) have not yet found a following.
The Carbon Farming Solution, A Global Toolkit of Perennial Crops and Regenerative Agriculture for Climate Change Mitigation and Food Security, a book by Eric Toensmeier that offers an array of carbon mitigation strategies built upon plants and changes to our contemporary agricultural and landscape practices. These changes are rooted in Permaculture and the necessary support of the living systems that provide us with ecosystem services.
The Center for Ecoliteracy is a great resource for educators working on sustainability curricula or school gardens.
Cornell University, Department of Horticulture has always had an amazing extension program. Now many of these resources and more are also available online
Gaia's Garden, A Guide to Home-Scale Permaculture, this book on Permaculture by Toby Hemenway is more accessible than Mollison's original textbook, Permaculture, A Designer's Manual. It includes new urban strategies for small spaces and is filled with practical wisdom on constructing more resilient, productive and beautiful landscapes.
High Performance Landscape Guidelines from NYC Parks and the Design Trust is an excellent primer on designing and building more sustainable landscapes in NYC.
The Kemper Center for Home Gardening at the Missouri Botanical Garden offers concise and well organized information for home gardeners.
The Living Landscape, Designing for Beauty and Biodiversity in the Home Garden, a book by Rick Darke and Doug Tallamy offers us a long needed presentation of ways we can create landscapes that are beautiful, familiar and comforting, while also abundant, biologically diverse, ecological and sustainable.
Planting in a Post-Wild World, a book by Thomas Rainer and Claudia West introduces us to a way of designing deeply layered plant communities. This is a way of making gardens that draws on the intelligence of the plant world and selects plants, in part, for their ability to support other plants and the overall health of the plant community.
The USDA Plant Database provides standardized and thororough information for all vascular plants found in the US, including images, native distribution, classification, nutrient requirements, propogation and extensive references.
Wild Urban Plants of the Northeast, a book by Peter Del Tredici is both a field guide and important review of the emergent vegetation of the urban environment. In addition to concise and useful botanical information he summarizes the cultural and ecological significance of each plant. This book will change the way you look at weeds, helps us understand why some plants thrive in cities and offers new solutions for the sustainable design of urban green spaces.
↑Back to Top