I never promised you a rose garden.… When landscape architecture becomes a laboratory for the Anthropocene

Abstract

In the summer of 2017, wildflower seeds were spread on a large, empty open space close to a motorway flyover just outside Copenhagen, Denmark. This was an effort to use non-mechanical methods to prepare the soil for an ‘urban forest’ to be established on the site, since the flowers’ roots would penetrate the ground and enable the planned new trees to settle. As a result, the site was transformed into a gorgeous meadow, and all summer long Copenhageners were invited to come and pick the flowers. In this article, I critically examine different aspects of this project – including the role of design, the perception of nature–culture relationships, climate change, and flower-picking as an event – in relation to my personal experience of visiting this meadow both on-site and on social media. The different temporalities that clash at the site give rise to conflicting interpretations, and I suggest that the meadow can be seen as a living plant archive of the Anthropocene, both physically and digitally. In doing so, I introduce and critique key conceptual pairs, including archive/death and bloom/decay, suggested by Lee Edelman’s queer cross-reading of Jacques Derrida’s ‘Archive Fever’ and Shakespeare’s Hamlet. I thereby contrast flower motifs pertaining to the cycles of blooming, decay, and nature’s (failed) eternal return in the meadow with the expansive futurity of the digitally mediated archive.

Establishing wildflower meadows in anthropogenic landscapes

“…The combination of a wildflower meadow framed by mown-grass all around strengthens the impression that the wildflower meadow has been purposely designed and managed (Meenar et al, 2022). Patches of diverse wildflower meadows within the urban green infrastructure, such as in road verges and wastelands (Figure 4), can significantly improve wildlife and increase human wellbeing (Barry and Hodge, 2023) by encouraging people to directly immerse themselves in the beauty of the colours and shapes of flowers (Steiner, 2023).…”

“…The low-input management respects the nature and functionality of the soil, and the reduction in mowing allows vegetation to grow tall and capture pollutants (Przybysz et al, 2021). At the social level, urban wildflower meadows enable citizens to get closer to biodiversity and to be involved in institutional or grassroots educational and citizen science programs, thus boosting their awareness of environmental issues (Steiner, 2023).…”