Biodiversity in Landscaping

Throughout the world, across the span of time and the breadth of culture one pursuit has seen a sustained passion for mankind; The noble art of Landscaping. From the earliest times we have altered our environment to suit our needs and our desires. Whether that was to build farms, fields, cities or fortifications we have sawn, hewed, carved and chopped our way to a kind of mastery over the land. We can construct a mountain, well, little ones at least; we can create vast gorges and flatten hills. Through the use of machines weighing over 13,000 tonnes we can carve whole new waterways, create vistas where there were none before and arrange the lie of the land to our design.

Plants also become our instruments, whether for the production of food, medicine or for decorations in our gardens we hold dominion over the plant world and the keys to the kingdom are the secrets of genetics. We can breed roses to be frost resistant and bloom brighter and have more pungent odours. Splicing and grafting have been techniques of altering genetic strains to produce more viable crops, hardier plants or tastier foodstuffs for many years, yet never before have we been able to directly manipulate the DNA code.

Cultures around the world have maintained biodiversity in food strains, from the rainbow hued corn of South America to the wild varieties of rice that seed in secluded paddies throughout Asia.
Yet now the diversity is being threatened, the keys to the kingdom of food are being held to ransom and the price? The homogenisation of all the food in the world.

Do you want your garden to look like everyone else’s? That each sculpture you put in place is proscribed? That each strain of plant you place is limited by the few that will suit all climates and grow to carefully encoded dimensions? No more wild nature, not even the semblance of wilderness, and no choice, our ability to decide what we will eat will be determined by who owns the seed stock. Our ability to enjoy a richness of delights from our gardens and the gardens of those we know will be decided not in our cozy homes, by the fire, planning out what to plant for the coming season, no. What we get to eat will be decided in laboratories and courtrooms.  Far from any of the structures of democracy the fate of the worlds food resources will be brewed in a test tube.

If you are reading this and have any interest or care for the land, the people and the plants of this planet then please do some more research on the topics I have raised. There are ways of taking action to preserve the biodiversity of the plant kingdom and there are many avenues to digitally, vocally and physically lend support to doing something about the threat to our food. Of all the things fundamental to life it is water and food. This is one issue worth standing up about.

Thankyou for reading.

Written by Jamie Grant for A&R Evergreen Landscape Construction and Design Brisbane