GARDEN OF DEMISE
CHE YI SHIH
Che Yi Shih AHK 2026 Anna Fink Fred Booy Ricky Rijkenberg
IORIGINAL
F RO M P E RS O N A L M E M O RY TO D E S I G N PREMISE
This project begins with a cross-cultural observation. In Taiwanese funerary tradition, death is public and everyday ritual spills out into the street, and sound, smell, and the whole neighbourhood are present. Yet underneath this closeness lies a quiet instinct to guard against death: the custom of handing out banyan leaves at a funeral, said to ward off bad energy, reveals that even the most intimately loved dead are, after death, reclassified as something to be kept at a distance.
European handle death similarly, cemeteries are pushed to the city's edge, burial takes place behind closed doors, and death becomes unspeakable in daily conversation. The two cultural share the same underlying structure — the removal of death from the field of everyday life.
In fact, humanity's ways of relating to death are far
more varied than these two models suggest. In Buddhist tradition, death is not an end but the beginning of the next life; in parts of Pacific Island culture, illness and sleep are both understood as forms of temporary death, so that death is not a rupture from ordinary experience but continuous with it. Nor is mourning confined to silence and avoidance: during Mexico's Día de los Muertos, families spend the night at the graveside with those who have passed, gathering in celebration rather than grief alone; in Ghana, funerals are often boisterous celebrations, met with music and colour rather than tears alone. Eastern and Western artistic traditions have each, in their own way, looked death directly in the eye — different in form, but arriving at the same posture. The Japanese Buddhist kusōzu paintings depict, across nine stages, a corpse's progression from death to bleached bone, treating decay itself as an object of contemplation and practice. Nicolas Poussin's Et in Arcadia Ego places a tombstone at the very centre of a pastoral idyll, reminding the viewer that death is present even in paradise. One confronts decay directly; the other gestures at death's presence through metaphor — yet both choose to face death rather than exclude it from view.
These examples show that fear and avoidance are not the only ways of meeting death. The Danish cemetery that doubles as a public park is a concrete instance of this other possibility: picnicking, play, and mourning coexist in the same space, the everyday lives of the living set directly alongside the dead. This project takes that as its starting point, and poses an open question: can decay and death be redesigned as an everyday urban landscape — a place to be walked in, rather than around?
IORIGINAL
THE ROOT: M O R TA L I T Y S A L I E N C E A N D T E R RO R M A N AG E M E N T T H E O RY
Human culture's attitudes toward death fall roughly into two broad types: death-defying cultures, which tend to isolate, deny, and exclude death from everyday view; and death-affirming cultures, which integrate death into the rhythm of life, treating it as something that can be spoken of and shared. This project is less concerned with which stance is "correct" than with a prior question: what is the psychological root of avoidance, and can it be addressed through spatial design? Terror Management Theory (TMT) offers one explanatory framework. The theory holds that humans are uniquely capable of recognizing the certainty of their own death; when this awareness is triggered — a state known as mortality salience — it produces death anxiety. To manage this anxiety, people deploy two categories of defense: Proximal defenses & Distal defenses
Proximal defenses are conscious, near-term responses — suppression and rationalization — that push the threat of death further into the future, or use reasoned argument to blunt its urgency. Distal defenses are unconscious, symbolic responses that work by reinforcing one's cultural worldview and bolstering self-esteem — that is, by believing oneself to be part of a meaningful, enduring system of values, a person gains a symbolic sense of permanence. Resolving death anxiety is not a matter of suppressing death's existence, but of allowing both categories of defense to operate in a healthy way: proximal defenses need a pace and a distance that allow suppression and rationalization to occur naturally; distal defenses need a narrative and spatial framework capable of reinforcing a worldview and affirming individual meaning. This is precisely the question at the heart of this project: does urban space provide the latter — a framework adequate to sustain distal defense? The next section will argue that it does not.
IORIGINAL
T H E B RO K E N C YC L E O F L I F E
Seen through TMT framework, the design logic of the modern city is avoidance institutionalized — but an avoidance that only ever addresses the spatial equivalent of proximal defense (removing death from view), while never providing the symbolic framework that distal defense requires: a space and a narrative capable of holding meaning and reinforcing worldview. Cities are built for growth and prosperity: spontaneous vegetation is cleared, old structures demolished, bare ground paved over, because unmanaged land is read as unfinished, unproductive space. The result is an environment that shows only life, never death — death has been removed, but the anxiety produced by its removal has never truly been given anywhere to go.
Et in Arcadia Ego places a tombstone at the centre of a pastoral heaven; its inscription: "Even in Arcadia, there am I" makes the point plainly: death is not the opposite of paradise but an inherent part of it; it is precisely because life is finite that the present moment carries meaning.
Simon François Ravenet I
This project's design premise is to bring that tombstone back into the city — not merely as a visual reminder, but as a way of supplying the distal-defense framework that has long been missing from the urban realm: making the cycle of life (body → soil → plant → memory) a complete, witnessable process, so that those who live within it can locate their search for meaning and continuity there, rather than relying on suppression and avoidance alone. Design premise: to make the cycle of life visible again
as a complete process one can inhabit within the city — thereby supplying the distal-defense framework long absent at the urban scale. Every design operation in this project serves this premise.
IIMETHOD & SITE
Burial is the engine that drives the whole system's transformation: the body decomposes into soil nutrients, which in turn feed plant growth, matter and energy continuing to flow along this path. This transformation is not confined to the exchange between soil and plant — it extends into every material the design uses: the vessel that carries the body, the flowers that accompany it, are drawn from the land itself, and will eventually return to the soil in some form. Materials within the system form a closed loop, rather than being consumed and discarded in one direction.
The landscape that receives this material cycle is not shaped by a single planting logic, but operates on two layers. Certain spaces require clear boundaries and precise proportions, and so their position and composition are directly determined by the design; the greater part of the landscape, however, is not formed by direct planting at all, but by establishing suitable substrate conditions and letting natural succession take its own course — here, the design acts on the environmental conditions themselves, not on the plants.
The site's existing concrete and brick paving is broken up and mixed, in varying proportions, into the sandy subsoil, producing an engineered soil (Technosol) with a range of drainage and aeration characteristics. Different substrates attract different plant communities on their own, so the character of this part of the landscape becomes a direct consequence of soil conditions, rather than a matter of human arrangement. Design-agency clause: the "occurrence" of succession is a natural process; the "conditions, boundaries, and pacing" of succession — substrate mix ratios, maintenance interventions, the delineation of directly planted areas — are design decisions.
This project is sited in the Heijplaat area of Rotterdam's port district, on a plot named Quarantaine-Terrein, on the south bank of the Nieuwe Maas and at the edge of the historic core of the Port of Rotterdam. The site's relationship to its surroundings is not one of isolation: it borders the Heijplaat residential community to the north, and faces the port's open water to the west and south — geographically, it sits at the seam between the fabric of everyday city life and that of the industrial waterfront.
This threshold position carries a double significance. Functionally, it makes the site accessible both by foot (from the Heijplaat community) and by water (from the port's channels) — the project's later use of water as the spatial spine of the funeral sequence directly responds to this geographic condition. Symbolically, a site positioned at the city's edge, between land and water, already resonates with the theme of transition
The site once served as a quarantine station — a century ago, sailors suspected of carrying disease were held here, waiting between the city and the outside world. In its historical function, this was, from the outset, a place for processing states of transition — poised between health and illness, entry and exclusion. After the quarantine station was decommissioned, the land sat unused, its buildings gradually falling into disrepair, and spontaneous vegetation began to take over — the site itself already caught in a slow natural succession. This history of abandonment means the site already carried the rudiments of a "cycle of life" before this project's intervention: a function ending, a structure collapsing, an ecology moving back in. This project's design operation layers a human, funerary
spatial order on top of this pre-existing natural process.
The site presents typical brownfield characteristics:
most original structures have been demolished or left semi-collapsed, the ground is broadly covered in concrete and brick paving, and pioneer species (sedum, weeds) have already spontaneously colonized parts of it. This existing condition is the direct starting point for the project's material strategy — the Technosol substrate mix described in section 03 is made primarily by crushing and recycling this existing paving, converting the site's industrial residue directly into the growing medium for the new system, rather than clearing and hauling it away.
Hydrological conditions form an equally critical constraint and design cue: the site sits adjacent to a tidally influenced stretch of river, and its groundwater level fluctuates with the tidal cycle. This places a real limit on burial depth — graves must remain above the water table to keep aerobic decomposition conditions from being compromised by flooding (see the grave structure ). At the same time, the tide is the basis for the natural access-regulating mechanism used in the dock design — turning this environmental constraint into part of the narrative and experiential structure, rather than merely an engineering problem to be avoided.
Given this historical role (a place of transition) and these existing conditions (a brownfield already under natural reclamation, and tidal hydrology), the design's first operation is to turn the site into an island: severing its road connection to the mainland, and excavating the former road into a waterway, so that entry to the site is only possible by water. This operation serves a double purpose — functionally, it marks the boundary between the cemetery and everyday city life; experientially, it turns "arrival" into a passage with ceremonial weight. The waterway also becomes the spatial spine for the funeral sequence that follows.
Julianakerk stands within the site boundary — a ruined church that is itself part of the site's present condition. The church was decommissioned in 2007, though it continued to serve, in part, as a place of worship for the Protestantse Gemeente Rotterdam-Zuid (the Protestant Church of Rotterdam South) until 2011, after which it stood empty. It continued to be used by several Christian communities until late 2016, including as a venue for weddings and funerals. In early 2017, the building was sold to a private buyer — a TU Delft architecture student, who initially planned to use it as a graduation-project subject and to live in it with friends. On 6 August 2017, the church was destroyed by a major fire, its spire collapsing in the blaze, and it has stood in its present ruined state ever since.
IIIS PAT I A L S E Q U E N C E
The eleven nodes that follow are arranged in the order a funeral procession actually walks them, beginning at a ruined church on the edge of the city and ending at the tree ring at the island's centre. This is a single, continuous movement — no shortcuts, no branching paths along the way. The design deliberately compresses it into one route, because grief is rarely a path with forks in it; it is closer to a passage that must be walked step by step, even if the pace along the way is one's own to set. Before turning the page, imagine yourself as that family member: you have just lost someone, and ahead of you lies a road no one else can walk for you.
Before the Journey Begins
位置圖 The funeral begins at Julianakerk — a church ruin left standing after a fire. This project preserves the ruin as it is, freeing the space from any specific religious identity so that it becomes a neutral, weighted place of farewell, able to hold religious ritual, family gathering, or silent companionship alike. Shade-tolerant planting has been designed around the base of the walls, responding to the damp, permanently shaded microclimate that has settled into the corners since the roof was lost; on parts of the wall, climbing vines are left to grow upward, following the texture of the scorched brickwork. Season by season, year by year, the reach of the vines will gradually alter the face of the wall, so that this building's "ruin" is no longer a fixed endpoint, but the first appearance, at the very start of the journey, of the project's central theme: the cycle of life.
Julianakerk — a church ruin left behind after a fire. The roof is gone; light falls straight in through the opening above, and the walls still carry the marks of burning. In the shaded, damp corners, low plants have taken hold; on one wall, a vine has already climbed some way up, clinging to the blackened mortar lines. This space no longer belongs to any one religion — it is simply a quiet, weighted place. Whether it holds a ritual, a gathering, or just people sitting quietly together, it can hold any form of farewell. You can stay as long as you need to.
The route follows a corpse road — the traditional European path for carrying the dead — through the residential greenery of Heijplaat. The planting along this stretch is deliberately arranged as a semitransparent screen: through gaps in the foliage, one catches partial glimpses of the lives of the living nearby, without the view ever fully opening up. This establishes a state of having "not yet left, but already begun to leave," and uses planting density to regulate the distance between the funeral procession and the everyday life of residents.
Leaving the church, the procession follows the corpse road. The route passes through the greenery of the residential area, but the planting is arranged so that you catch only glimpses of the life around you through the gaps — movement between the leaves, a child's voice somewhere, the smell of someone's garden. You are still in the world of the living, but you have already begun to leave it.
Where the route reaches the water's edge, the island comes into view for the first time. The former vertical concrete embankment has been reshaped into a gentle, naturalized bank, planted with willow and reed. The willows here are not merely ornamental — their branches are the material source for woven coffins, forming one link in the material cycle: the vessel that carries the body is drawn from the very place the body is ultimately bound for. The embankment also marks the sequence's first shift in sensory environment — the sounds of the city recede, replaced by wind and water.
Reaching the water, the island comes into view for the first time. The bank is a gentle, natural slope, willow and reed growing at the water's edge — the branches of these willows will one day be woven into a coffin carrying a body; the trees you are passing right now will, someday, become part of someone's funeral. The sounds of the city have already faded; all you hear now is water lapping the bank, and the rustle of wind moving through the reeds. The air carries a damp, watery scent, mixed with grass and earth — the first smell you've noticed on this whole journey.
位置圖 In Dutch, the word for funeral is uitvaart — literally, "to depart, to sail out." In a city built on its port, this etymology gives water-borne burial a natural cultural and linguistic coherence: a funeral, in this sense, is one final voyage. At this node, the procession boards a flatbottomed boat built specifically to carry the coffin, positioned at the bow, with a boatman poling from the stern to control the crossing. Reed and slender tree trunks are planted densely along both sides of the channel, forming an enclosed corridor of branches that narrows the field of view to the vegetation on either bank, the surface of the water, and the island ahead. This narrowing is deliberate — it makes the crossing the most inward-turned, most cut-off-from-the-world moment in the whole sequence.
The moment you step onto the boat, it rocks slightly
underfoot. The coffin is already resting at the bow; you and the others find a place to sit or stand behind it as the boatman poles off from the bank. Reed and slender trunks crowd both sides, almost brushing the water's surface, closing off the world outside entirely — you can no longer see the shore you left, and you still can't see the one you're headed toward. All that's left is the glare on the water, the sound of the hull cutting through it, and, dead ahead, the island's outline slowly sharpening into focus. No one speaks. Only the rhythm of the pole, again and again, carrying you forward.
The dock is the final node before entry to the island, and its design integrates two mechanisms: the transfer of the coffin, and the operation of the tide. At its centre, the dock has a recessed channel shaped to match the hull of the ferry; once the boat is secured, the coffin is lifted by a hand-operated crane and moved onto the island — deliberately manual, so that this last stage of the journey is carried out by the family's own effort. Access to the island is governed by the tide: only at high water is there enough depth for the boat to dock and enter, at which point the dock itself is submerged; at low tide, a set of stone steps is revealed, used for leaving the island. The tide thus becomes a visible, nonhuman-controlled rhythm that defines when passage between the island and the outside world is possible.
The boat drifts slowly toward the dock, its hull settling into the recessed channel, coming to rest. Someone calls out, and the crane begins to move — you reach out, along with the others, taking hold of the handle, pushing slowly. The coffin lifts clear of the boat, hanging in the air, gliding just above the water as if floating on it — the surface throws back its reflection, rippling, breaking apart, and reforming with each movement. You can feel that weight leaving your hands, inch by inch, moving toward the island. At last, it clears the water and comes to rest, steady, on solid ground.
From the dock inward, the island unfolds three landscape zones in sequence: meadow, gravel wasteland, and tree ring. The route is linear and unambiguous in direction, ending at the burial ground at the tree ring's centre. Soil composition varies across different areas of the island, producing a range of growing conditions that allow plants to distribute themselves according to what suits them — building the layered texture of the landscape.
The first landscape zone after arrival is the meadow — open, dense with wildflowers, an existing condition of the site that the design retains. The meadow also serves as the source for funeral bouquets: because the vegetation changes with the seasons, each funeral's flowers carry the particular species and colours of that time of year, folding the dimension of time into the material cycle.
The first thing to greet you is a meadow, open and thick with wildflowers. The bouquet accompanying the coffin was gathered here — different seasons bring different flowers, so every funeral carries the colour and scent particular to its own time of year. Ahead, a tree screen stands in the distance; you'll need to walk toward it, and through it.
Beyond a tree screen at the meadow's far edge lies the gravel wasteland. This area once held industrial buildings; after their demolition, the crushed concrete was mixed back into the ground surface, creating a rough substrate that pioneer species — sedum, weeds — have begun to colonize, still an early stage of succession. The contrast between the meadow's
abundance and this area's barrenness is deliberate: the wasteland carries the site's industrial scars, and its slow natural healing corresponds, experientially, to the unresolved middle stretch of the grieving process.
Once past the screen, the feel underfoot changes first — the softness of grass gives way to the crunch of gravel under your shoes, a sound with every step. The ground lies bare, pale broken fragments scattered across it, with only the occasional stubborn clump of grass holding on in a crack. You stop talking. The air goes quiet, even the wind seems to have dropped. In the distance, a taller, denser ring of trees is just visible.
From the far end of the gravel wasteland, the tree ring appears ahead as a dark, dense, circular wall of trees. This project's route are devied by layer, the meadow, the wasteland, and the tree ring are ea ch a complete unit, and a visitor may stop at any node without the overall experience feeling incomplete; reaching the end is never required, in response to the differing pace of individual grief.
The tree ring is the terminus of the sequence, sixty metres in diameter, formed of two concentric rings of planting. Passing through the outer hornbeam wall, one first arrives at a small altar and resting area — a threshold space before entering the burial ground proper. The outer ring is densely planted hornbeam, clipped into a continuous green wall that fully separates inside from outside; between this wall and the inner ring lies a band of meadow, and the inner ring is formed of columnar elms, Ulmus 'Columella,' tall and narrow, arranged like a colonnade. Their spacing follows the classical Roman proportional system of intercolumniation, drawing the eye naturally toward the centre and producing a temple-like solemnity — an effect that comes from proportion and the trees' own form, not from applied ornament. At the centre, the ground is paved with crushed concrete and brick recovered from the site's original industrial surface; this is the burial ground itself.
A dark wall of trees rises ahead, so dense you can't see through it, closing into a circle. The moment you pass through the hornbeam, you first come to a small altar and resting area — the last pause before entering the final resting ground. This space is sixty metres across; the outermost hornbeam green wall shuts the outside world away completely. Within it, a ring of tall, slender columnar elms stands like a colonnade, drawing the eye naturally toward the centre. The whole space carries a temple-like stillness. At its centre, the ground is paved with crushed concrete and brick, taken from this land's original industrial surface. This is the place of burial.
*Technosol: Soils contain significant human-made artifacts( concrete, asphalt, bricks...) or are sealed by hard man-made structures.
Before being placed in the grave, the body first undergoes a wrapping process: bound in linen, then placed into a woven willow container, packed around with flowers and leaves gathered from the island. This layering of materials serves a practical function — each organic layer accelerates decomposition once the body is in the ground, helping it return to soil more quickly. The materials used in this process — linen, willow, flowers and leaves — are all drawn from the site itself, joining the coffin (willow) and the bouquet (meadow) as further starting points in the material cycle.
Once the coffin is in the ground, decomposition begins at once. The breakdown of the body is driven by the microbial communities already present within it, and their continued activity depends on stable temperature, adequate oxygen, and an appropriate carbon-tonitrogen (C:N) ratio to sustain efficient microbial metabolism. Counter-intuitively, the crushed-gravel hardstanding base at the tree ring's centre — because of its high thermal mass — proves more conducive to decomposition than the cold, low-oxygen soil of a conventional grave.
The grave structure is designed accordingly: the existing hardstanding is broken up and mixed with subsoil sand to form a highly aerated engineered soil (Technosol) layer; the grave itself is dug down into this layer, its walls built up from broken brick to ensure gas exchange and passage for decomposer organisms. Around the coffin, organic material gathered from across the island's various habitats — wood chips, straw, fallen leaves — is packed in layers, forming an alternating stack of carbon-rich "brown" material and nitrogen-rich "green" material. In composting science, the carbon-to-nitrogen ratio for optimal microbial efficiency generally falls between 25:1 and 30:1; too low a ratio (excess nitrogen) tends to release ammonia and produce odour, while too high a ratio (excess carbon) slows the rate of decomposition. This design uses the proportion of wood chips to straw as the means of adjustment, layering the wrapping to approach this target range. Under good conditions, composting is complete within three to five years.
Once composting is complete (roughly three to five years), the family faces a choice. One option is to exhume the remains and place them in an urn — which can either be taken elsewhere, or scattered directly into the tree ring where the grave was, so that the deceased never leaves the island, remaining part of its existing vegetation and soil. The other option is to plant a tree over the grave, allowing the deceased to remain permanently on the island — the tree grows from their remains, becoming a living gravestone. Selectable species are drawn from a catalogue, consisting mainly of fruit trees and small flowering trees, all of whose mature height stays below the outer hornbeam wall, preserving the tree ring's temple-like silhouette. Each species carries its own form and cultural meaning, for the family to choose on behalf of the deceased.
Ilex aquifolium
Cornus mas
Cornus sanguinea
Salix caprea
Juniperus communis
Malus sylvestris
Viburnum opulus
Acer campestre
Crataegus monogyna
Prunus padus
Corylus avellana
Frangula alnus
Sorbus aucuparia
Prunus spinosa
Euonymus europaeus
Amelanchier lamarckii
After burial, the tree ring changes over time. In its early years, the centre remains bare ground, the elms still young, the space open — its sense of the sacred coming from this emptiness. Decades later, the elms mature into a true colonnade, the centre grows dense with vegetation, and the wasteland around each grave gradually fills in as well, the body's resting place absorbed into surrounding growth. By this point, a visitor can no longer identify any single grave; what is being mourned has spread from a specific point into the whole space. This shift from point to field mirrors, at the material level, the diffusion of nutrients: memory of the dead, like the nutrients they provide, gradually dissolves into and nourishes the entire landscape.
nce the tree ring reaches this mature stage, its mode of use opens further: those who wish to be buried here afterward may, instead of occupying a new grave, choose to scatter their ashes directly into the existing tree ring, becoming part of its established vegetation and soil. This option requires no new grave to be dug, allowing the tree ring to accommodate a density of use, within its existing sixty-metre footprint, far beyond what its grave count alone could support — the tree ring's capacity is therefore no longer limited by land area, but by how much matter this ground can continue to absorb and transform.
IVT I M E & S YS T E M S
The tree rings are not built all at once, but opened in phases, tied to use: once one tree ring's graves are full, construction begins on the next, with the former serving as a source of pioneer species and organisms for the latter. The full site will eventually hold eight tree rings. The lifespan of any single tree ring is not determined by grave count alone. Once a tree ring reaches maturity (see the previous section), new users may choose to scatter ashes directly into the existing ring rather than occupy a new grave — a mechanism that lets a single ring's capacity keep extending well beyond what its number of graves could otherwise support, and that opens up a longer, more flexible transitional period between "the graves are full" and "the ring truly stops being used."
The management logic of the wasteland is the inverse of the tree rings'. The rings are driven by death: every burial is a concrete event that advances the ring forward. The wasteland lies outside the rings, receives no nutrient input from burial, and follows its own, entirely separate ecological succession. This succession is driven by a mechanism built into itself: early species (sedum, weeds) take root on the bare substrate, their leaf litter and root activity gradually building organic matter and improving the soil, creating conditions for the next wave of species to establish. Time, not death, is the true engine of this wasteland's succession. Management of the wasteland therefore involves no planting, only observation and occasional, guiding intervention — the concrete guidance this section offers future managers: the manager's role here is always to observe and guide. As succession advances, the frequency and intensity of intervention required gradually decreases, unfolding across four recognizable stages, each requiring a different degree of intervention.
Stage 1: Primary Bare Ground Soil condition: Crushed Technosol substrate, SOC* lower than 0.5%, poor water retention. Dominant species: sedum (Sedum acre, Sedum album), grey hair-grass (Corynephorus canescens), harebell (Campanula rotundifolia), along with various pioneer grasses and weeds — species capable of selfseeding and establishing on bare, nutrient-poor, fastdraining substrate Visual logic: the beauty of this stage lies in its sparseness and starkness. With vegetation cover this low, every individual plant reads clearly: sedum forms low yellow star-points across the gravel surface, grey hair-grass rises in silvery-blue tufted clumps, harebell hangs its blue-violet bell flowers — each standing out against the grey-brown gravel backdrop as an individual specimen rather than part of continuous cover. Management: no intervention is required from the manager at this stage. Only periodic monitoring is carried out — no irrigation, fertilizing, weeding, or removal. *SOC: Soil Organic Carbon, is the measurable carbon component of soil organic matter.
Erigeron canadensis
Centaurea scabiosa
Sonchus oleraceus
Arctium lappa
Cynodon dactylon
Senecio vulgaris
Marchantia polymorpha
Phleum pratense
Salsola kali
Plantago major
Capsella bursapastoris
Stellaria media
Onopordum acanthium
Verbascum thapsus
Corynephorus canescens
Cynodon dactylon
Cirsium arvense
Trifolium repens
Arrhenatherum elatius
Geranium molle
Reseda lutea
Echium vulgare
Artemisia vulgaris
Sedum sexangulare
Atriplex littoralis
Campanula rotundifolia
Poa compressa
Sedum acre
Festuca rubra
Epilobium angustifolium
Artemisia absinthium
Sedum album
Stage 2: Wildflower Meadow (15 years) Soil condition: SOC 1~3% Dominant species: strongly ornamental upright wildflowers such as great mullein (Verbascum thapsus), growing among an increasingly dense grass layer; viper's bugloss (Echium vulgare) and wild carrot (Daucus carota) also appear progressively through this stage. Visual logic: the spatial structure shifts here from horizontal to vertical. Mullein is the undisputed protagonist of this stage — in its first year it forms only a large, silvery-white rosette lying flat against the ground; in its second, it sends up a flower spike reaching up to two metres, its sculptural, vertical presence instantly lending the gravel field a sense of narrative, as if the landscape had generated its own landmark. Viper's bugloss shifts its flower spikes from pink to a vivid blue-violet, forming a colour dialogue with mullein's yellow. Come autumn, the dried umbels of wild carrot hang in the air like suspended birds' nests, extending this landscape's period of visual interest into winter.
Management: the intervention logic at this stage can
be called "stage direction" — the designer does not decide which plants appear, but decides which ones get the spotlight, and does not interrupt the natural accumulation of nutrients, instead using localized physical clearing to actively build spatial difference. In practice, this means: 1. Clearing around showcase specimens: within roughly a one-metre radius of the most visually striking plants (such as mullein), competing neighbours are manually cleared, giving these "lead" specimens enough light and space to complete a full, showy flowering and seeding cycle. 2. Cut material left in place: mown grass is not removed but left to decompose where it falls, keeping nutrients circulating within the system rather than being taken out — consistent with the logic of the tree-ring system, where matter is never removed, only continually folded back into the cycle. 3. Patch-based removal of dominant grasses: while
nutrient accumulation benefits vegetation growth overall, it also tends to let a small number of dominant grasses (certain tall grass species) gradually take over and blanket large areas. To avoid uniformity, the point
of manual intervention here is not to control overall nutrient levels, but to select specific patches and manually clear the dominant grasses within them — actively building a set of small ecological patches across the wasteland with differing nutrient levels and light conditions. Some patches are kept sparse and lean, dominated by upright wildflowers such as mullein; others are left to thicken with grass and transition on their own. This mosaic-style intervention means the meadow stage is not a single, uniform grassland, but a patchwork landscape made up of multiple microhabitats. 4. Spot removal of aggressive invaders: species prone to expanding rapidly and suppressing others — nettles, thistles, and the like — are pulled or cut back locally, to prevent them forming a single dominant stand. 5. Retaining seed heads through winter: seed heads on plants left standing in place can remain into the following spring, providing food for birds and insects and aiding self-seeding.
Crataegus monogyna
Cytisus scoparius
Festuca ovina
Anchusa officinalis
Prunus spinosa
Sambucus nigra
Cirsium vulgare
Echium vulgare
Rosa canina
Spiraea salicifolia
Verbascum thapsus
Centaurea cyanus
Convolvulus arvensis
Ulex europaeus
Verbascum nigrum
Sinapis arvensis
Urtica dioica
Atriplex patula
Picris hieracioides
Viola tricolor
Geranium robertianum
Galium aparine
Reseda lutea
Sedum sexangulare
Geranium pratense
Daucus carota
Achillea millefolium
Sedum acre
Digitalis purpurea
Hyoscyamus niger
Potentilla anserina
Sedum album
Stage 3: Shrubland (15~40 years)
Soil condition: SOC 3~4% Dominant species: strongly ornamental upright wildflowers such as great mullein (Verbascum thapsus), growing among an increasingly dense grass layer; viper's bugloss (Echium vulgare) and wild carrot (Daucus carota) also appear progressively through this stage. Visual logic: Epilobium angustifolium is the key wildflower here — pink-to-magenta spikes up to 1.5m, appearing in broad stands, guided to establish preferentially at gaps along the birch woodland's edge, bridging the height difference between the shrub layer and the woodland margin. Dog rose is guided to climb over deadwood or built structures, giving the shrub an upward, climbing posture. Together: birch supplies the vertical white skeleton, willowherb the sweep of colour, dog rose the climbing texture — a layered mix that feels guided, yet still holds its wildness.
Management: Maintenance cycle shifting from annual to once every three to five years. The focus is no longer "display" but "maintaining structural diversity":
1. Rotational thinning: sections that have become overly dense and are consolidating into a single shrub mass are locally coppiced or thinned, deliberately preserving a mosaic of open glades alongside denser thickets — a single, uniform shrub mass reduces habitat diversity, whereas a mosaic structure offers both open ground and cover for different species to use. 2.Control of dominant species: bramble (Rubus fruticosus), which tends to form large, single-species mats that suppress the regeneration of other shrubs, is cut back locally on a regular basis to prevent it monopolizing space. Birch will almost inevitably become the dominant species at this stage — its light, winged seeds can travel several kilometres, and germinate prolifically once enough organic matter has accumulated on the gravel ground. Its white trunks begin, at this stage, to define clear vertical lines across the scene, making it the single most important aesthetic asset of this phase; but for the same reason it spreads so readily, it must be thinned to prevent excessive density from crowding out the growing space of other shrub and tree species.
3Deliberately retained open patches: even as natural succession tends toward increasing closure, certain patches are actively kept open — these clearings serve both an ecological function (refuge for sunloving species) and an experiential one, continuing the "landscape as legible use-history" quality established in the wasteland stage, so that a walker still feels variation in density rather than entering a uniform wall of shrubs.
Betula pendula
Robinia pseudoacacia
Solidago virgaurea
Galinsoga quadriradiata
Alnus glutinosa
Rosa multiflora
Solidago canadensis
Eryngium campestre
Populus tremula
Pteridium aquilinum
Angelica sylvestris
Echinops ritro
Sorbus aucuparia
Aster amellus
Epilobium angustifolium
Camelina sativa
Ranunculus acris
Trifolium pratense
Calamagrostis epigejos
Sambucus ebulus
Trifolium repens
Euphorbia esula
Agrostemma githago
Fragaria vesca
Cirsium palustre
Hypericum perforatum
Aegopodium podagraria
Stage 4: Mature Woodland (~40 years)
Soil condition: SOC 4~7% Dominant species: Birch and other pioneers continue to mature, and secondary-succession species may naturally colonize depending on nearby seed sources (potentially including oak, willow, and others).ge. Visual logic: The aesthetic core of this stage is spatial complexity. Woodland, grassland, shrub, and open woodland alternate, forming edges (ecotones) where species density — and visual richness — both peak. Light shifts gradually along the woodland edge, from shaded canopy to open brightness; honeysuckle (Lonicera periclymenum) and old man's beard (Clematis vitalba) hang silvery seed heads through autumn and winter, twining among the birch branches and softening the bare winter woodland; in the
clearings, ferns spread low and still, the forest's quietest corners. This complexity of overlapping edges means the mature woodland, even once stable, remains a landscape that keeps rewarding discovery.
Management: This is the lowest-intensity stage of
intervention, but not a zero-intervention one. Left entirely alone, the woodland would trend toward uniform canopy closure, which would actually reduce biodiversity — so a degree of strategic maintenance remains necessary: 1. Maintaining a patchwork of grassland and wildflower meadow: periodic (e.g. every five to ten years) local thinning and cutting deliberately prevents some woodland clearings from being colonized by shrubs or trees, allowing the grassland and wildflower habitats of earlier successional stages to persist in pockets within the mature woodland — so that even at the "mature" stage, the wasteland as a whole still holds the full successional spectrum, from open ground to closed canopy, rather than being replaced by a single uniform woodland type. 2. Systematic removal of dominant species: ongoing local control of species likely to form single-species dominance in the understory (such as overly expansive bramble or certain grasses). 3.Clearing aging shrub growth: some shrub stands age, become woody, and decline in flowering and fruiting capacity over time, and are cleared as appropriate to
encourage understory regeneration — allowing a new round of succession to restart locally. This means that even at the "mature" stage, succession itself does not terminate linearly, but continues to cycle at a small scale.
4. Deadwood retention: standing dead trees and fallen logs are left in place rather than cleared, providing habitat for fungi, beetles, and birds (such as woodpeckers) — one of the most effective, low-cost ways of increasing biodiversity in European woodland management.for fungi, beetles, and birds (such as woodpeckers) — one of the most effective, low-cost ways of increasing biodiversity in European woodland management.
Betula pendula
Quercus robur
Rubus fruticosus
Berberis vulgaris
Alnus glutinosa
Fraxinus excelsior
Rubus idaeus
Corylus avellana
Populus tremula
Pyrus pyraster
Lonicera periclymenum
Cardamine pratensis
Sorbus aucuparia
Carpinus betulus
Euonymus europaeus
Viola riviniana
Diplotaxis tenuifolia
Epilobium hirsutum
Clematis vitalba
Dryopteris dilatata
Sambucus ebulus
Campanula trachelium
Pleurospermum austriacum
Athyrium filix-femina
Valeriana officinalis
Fragaria vesca
Dryopteris filix-mas
Eupatorium cannabinum
Aegopodium podagraria
Pteridium aquilinum