Paper short abstract:

This paper examines the challenges faced by urban forest garden projects by means of Batesonian concepts such as the steady state - which a forest garden achieves with the help of human 'collaborators' - and the observer-centric world, in which property regimes are included as observers.

Paper long abstract:

This paper represents an initial foray into asking how the temporality of what might be called the 'plantscape' of a city, and that of its 'lawscape', are held in tension by the human actors who attempt to mediate between them. The conundrum was made visible to me through my involvement with Lyneham Commons, a forest garden initiative in Canberra, Australia. The basic idea of a forest garden is to cultivate trees, shrubs, and ground cover plants, all of which should have an edible or medicinal use, so that they eventually form a self-sustaining system that requires little in the way of maintenance.

Urban forest gardens face particular challenges precisely because they are cultivated on land held and managed under complex public property regimes. The Lyneham Commons project, for example, is not permitted to cultivate a 'complete' garden until the local authority is satisfied that the initial stage of the project is viable. But in forest gardening terms, the project cannot be deemed viable until it has reached the 'steady state' of a self-sustaining system, an entity achieved years in the future after plants have matured both above ground and below, in cooperation with a mycorrhizal network. But none of these processes occur in the absence of any human intervention. It is here that I wish to draw on the work of Gregory Bateson to examine both the notion of the steady state and of the observer-centric world, where the latter can stymie the former when one of the observers involved is a bureaucracy.