Beyond Illusions by Brett Gilman '24.5

WORDS AND PHOTOS BY BRETT GILMAN '25

Iam constantly surprised and enthralled by nature’s unending ability to amaze, particularly in the realm of native plants and pollinators. I first learned of the Ecotype Project, a stewardship and research initiative dedicated to the safeguarding of local native wildflower seed, in my senior year of high school. Dedicated to pursuing my passion and curious about how I could make my own impact, I decided to apply for an internship. My task was to meet and interview many of the key stakeholders (farmers, nurserymen, botanists, non-profit organizations) involved in the initiative to learn how they do what they do. This allowed us to make protocols for each stakeholder archetype, and the replication of these models is the goal of the Ecotype Project as part of a budding native plant movement in the Northeast.

Each week, scientists from the Connecticut Agricultural Station visit the home-base farm of the Ecotype Project. At this farm, rows of wildflowers are grown to create living seed banks, and these scientists perform pollinator surveys on these plots each week as they bloom throughout the year. While shadowing this process, I observed luminescent pink blooms of Swamp Milkweed. As waves of bumblebees and butterflies buzzed about, I watched a minuscule one-millimeter hoverfly circle the bloom, bouncing from leaf to leaf, but never going for nectar. This was extraordinary.

A few days later, I was sitting on my front step watching the new blooms of Black-Eyed Susans in my front yard when a hoverfly appeared. It circled the bloom, bouncing between the leaves of abutting plants. I watched it, followed it, and photographed it. All of a sudden, a female hoverfly landed on the bloom. The two became entangled, and they zoomed off to a nearby shrub leaf. At that moment, I realized I had just observed the behavior that the scientist had explained to me back at the Swamp Milkweed. Male hoverflies emerge earlier than the females, and they employ a mating strategy called patrolling that involves circling new blooms and waiting for females. I was absolutely fascinated and thrilled that this extraordinary event had taken place right outside my door, all because I had planted the right plant in the right place, and had opted not for ornamental and sterile traditional plants, but instead for native plants fit for these majestic wild pollinators.

It strikes me that strangely, the outdoor spaces that we so often inhabit do not emote this same sense of magic. The ecological wasteland commonly known as the lawn is devoid of all life that is not human. A tyrannical monoculture of fescues reigns over a silent terrain of shallow nothingness: no fluttering, no buzzing, no wonder. It is a place of quick feet, where frenzied brains zoom about, their masters more closely connected to a screen than the Earth below. Yet, they are outside as they walk on blades of grass. But turf is deceptive like that. Although green in color, it is a false idol, an extension of the erected, an element of materiality more so than of carbon. Born of the Anthropocene, the lawn has no place in a truly green future.

Lawns are pervasive forces of degradation. They cling to the land like ticks, feeding drunkenly on liberally-applied synthetic inorganic pesticides and fertilizers. More than 40 million acres of U.S. land are clothed in some form of lawn, an area nearing in size to the entirety of New England. This magnitude makes lawns the single most irrigated crop in America- one that is in so many ways entirely useless. Lawns serve to divorce what few habitat patches that remain from each other and in doing so, divorce humans from the natural systems that sustain us. By weaving native plants back into the matrix of suburbia, we can foster a landscape that facilitates the dispersal of wild bees and soften a mindset of resistance to the wild. All land, not just farms, preserves, and parks, is integral to the survival of wild native bees. Given the fact that low-resistance landscapes encourage greater dispersal of wild species between fragmented lands, ignoring the lawn as a site of regeneration is no longer an option. The idea of a lawn must cease to be a concept that is culturally upheld and reinforced, and instead must be culturally stigmatized. Our human-made landscapes must work to regenerate and promote the beautiful complexity of life’s systems of fertility. Land is meant to thrive.

However, getting rid of the lawn is no easy task. It’s one that requires carefully dismantling the intricacies of a widely-adored lawn culture. It is not enough to randomly scatter native wildflower seeds and hope that these divisions will reform. We must sow a worldview where land is viewed no longer as a commodity but is instead respected and protected as a shared space of community. In the grand scheme of the climate crisis, “[…] protecting and valuing the earth’s ingenious systems of reproducing life and fertility of all of its inhabitants, may lie at the center of the shift in worldview that must take place if we are to move beyond extractivism.” In order to safeguard the systems of the wild, we must restore a sense of community grounded in a connection to the land and work to renew a perspective that sees humanity as part of the interconnected web of all things, tasked with the duty of regeneration.

And yet I find myself asking, how do we transform the world that we have now with the world that is needed? In the context of a crisis with a deadline, this question needs to be answered, and in one way or another, it will have an answer.

It is time for a new garden aesthetic, a new social contract with the land, one that values the ecological systems that sustain us and bring us in closer dialogue with the land and each other. By matching plant to place, we can foster a unique spirit of place that connects people to each other through the land and builds community around native plants. I envision landscapes featuring intentional and highly-designed patterns of native plants where engaging juxtapositions of these flowers’ structural forms are valued for their beauty in all seasons. The white bells of Foxglove Beardtongue billow like sails floating on an early July breeze, these columns paired so nicely with the vibrant orange umbels of butterfly weed. With the fall comes a new palette of rich golden oranges and browns, where structure takes the stage in a performance of light and movement: the seedpods of that butterfly weed now a warm brown with a tint of blue, decorated with a shower of the delicate wispy blades of wavy hair grass. Seeds will be cherished as public goods rather than exchanged in the extractive tradition of commodification, and the process of pollination will be beautiful in its own right. I seek the creation of landscapes that encourage a more intimate dialogue with the land, where curiosity and imagination are renewed in commonplace and electrifying explorations of the wild and it's magic. In this movement to reconnect our fragmented landscapes and to fortify our green corridors, we must make apparent the cultural values that invisibly wove a norm of ecological and social rift into the tapestry of life. Let’s reimagine the ecology of our landscapes and renew a sense of hope and possibility. At night upon my pillow, I sense sleep on the horizon as a familiar friend reaching out his hand. Peacefully, I drift away into a world of adventure, of quiet serenity in a landscape of native plants. I enter a land anew, where plumes of fantastical blooms dance in the wind, hearty seed heads are illuminated and adorned with crowns of early evening gold, bumble bees and birds enjoy a well-endowed landscape, and where hoverflies flit from bloom to bloom. These secrets of a hidden world are known only to those who humble themselves before the most awesome magic of the Earth. I see a landscape of acceptance, connection, humble and virtuous ignorance, emancipated sensibilities, and expanded imagination. I dream of rolling back the lawn and rewilding the landscape, but it is no fantasy.