Reflections of an Urban landscape architect
How meadow restoration matters to a metropolis
writing and photos by Allison Ong
Vesper Meadow’s Program Director, Jeanine Moy standing by some willow restoration plantings on Latgawa Creek.
I first met Jeanine, at the start of a thousand foot tall rock climb in Yosemite National Park. We got to know each other on the edge of a cliff, chatting and looking down onto the valley below. I had been living out of my car, driving around the country, climbing, camping, and enjoying the outdoors. Every day I basked in beautiful scenery and let plants and rocks lift my spirits and calm my mind.
The degraded banks and non-native grasses along Latgawa Creek at the Vesper Meadow Restoration Preserve.
While multi-pitch climbing (climbing heights of multiple rope lengths) the landscape is put in wider perspective. A thousand foot perspective allows one to reflect on geologic patterns, ecological zones, plant communities, patterns of water movement etc. and you start to process the interconnections in the landscape, living things, and think about your own relationship to it all.
All of this time spent outside eventually got me thinking about how important it is for humans to be able to connect with nature. I decided that I wanted to help facilitate that connection, so I went back to school and became a landscape architect. Jeanine became the director of a meadow restoration.
It’s funny to me how our mutual desire to connect people to nature brought us down different paths. Living in Seattle, I get my fill of nature in local parks, gardens, and the spaces between buildings. On weekends and holidays I drive out of the city to reimmerse in more wild spaces. Then I come back to the office and I draw planting plans and construction documents, scheming to bring some of that wildness to the city. My coworkers understand these impulses. Landscape architects are constantly trying to balance the needs of the City with the needs of local ecosystems. However, when it comes to the design process, the City is the more demanding client. It can be easy to lose sight of the natural world and the things that inspire us. This is why I decided it would be a good use of my office’s research time to spend a few days volunteering at Vesper Meadow.
A journal excerpt from guest blogger, Allison Ong,, featuring Vesper Meadow restoration sketches and notes.
My husband and I drove seven hours and spent three days shadowing Jeanine in mid October. It had just rained, quenching the smoke from the nearby fires. We romped around the meadow, talked strategy against invasive species, sketched, spoke with conservation partners, planned future gathering spaces, and harvested willow stakes for use in Vesper Meadow’s beaver-based restoration strategy. The creation of Post-assisted log structures (PALs), human-made structures that mimic beaver dams and lodges will recreate the ecological function beavers serve to keep the creek healthy. The mindset with which Jeanine approaches individual interventions (such as a PALs) reminded me a lot of one of the key aspects of landscape architecture - systems thinking. When I was a student, it was often emphasized that the land you’re working on doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It is a part of a larger network that goes beyond property lines. PALs rely on rain and runoff from the watershed to cause a chain of events that results in the restoration of the floodplain and wetland plant habitat. It’s success depends on the larger systems it fits into.
“One of our key roles as landscape architects, is to influence what people think is beautiful. If people believe that native meadow plants, PALs, and seasonal flooding are beautiful, that is a powerful form of advocacy for ecologically healthy landscapes. ”
Allison and Dan harvest willow stakes in preparation for fall 2021 riparian restoration work days.
New grow from planted willow stakes and native sedges and grasses recolonizing the riparian area.
I drove back to Seattle feeling rejuvenated, thinking about why a restoration mindset is useful in urban landscape architecture. It’s unlikely I will ever be restoring a meadow in the city, and yet a meadow in Oregon can affect what we do in Seattle. There’s an influential essay by Beth Meyer, a landscape architecture professor at University of Virginia, called Sustaining Beauty: The Performance of Appearance. In it she argues that one of our key roles, as landscape architects, is to influence what people think is beautiful. If people believe that native meadow plants, PALs, and seasonal flooding are beautiful, that is a powerful form of advocacy for ecologically healthy landscapes. A great example of this is the now trendy xeriscape (cacti, succulents, and decorative gravel) in desert areas where once people wanted lawns. Biking through downtown Seattle, I’ve been seeing office building landscapes featuring logs and stumps. Things that were once seen as unkempt are being recognized as contributors to healthy urban landscapes. In my work, it’s important to be aware of ecological restoration strategies in order to learn what healthy landscapes look like. If we do our jobs well, we can bring that understanding to the city to teach others to value ecological health as well.
Now that I’m back at my desk in Seattle, I try to remember the sound of the creek, the grass blowing in the wind, and the sparrows perched on fence posts. I feel lucky to be in a position to try to bring some, even if just a little, of that feeling to my city.
- Allison Ong is a Seattle-based landscape architect and rock climber.