Author: Timothy Furstnau

is a writer, artist, and curator based in the Northern Catskills of NY. He is the co-founder of the collaborative studio FICTILIS and the Museum of Capitalism, and author of How It Hurts, a study guide for pain examinations.
All photographs by Timothy Furstnau
Essay

Pace Ranae: Adjusting the Culture of Speed

Timothy Furstnau
January 14, 2023

The first few times I mowed the grass around the ponds where I live, the mower cut more than just grass. I would feel a little thud as I went, and stop the machine to discover underneath the body of a large frog, shredded to pieces. It’d been sitting near the edge of the pond, as frogs do, and didn’t jump out of the way. Once, I could consider it a fluke. But after it happened twice, I started thinking about what I might do to keep it from happening again. 

Slow down. Adjust down the speed setting of the self-propelled mower so frogs might have more time to jump out of the way. Be careful. Inspect more closely the grass ahead of the mower, to see the frogs in time to stop and relocate them. Warn them. Walk round the pond first and try to flush out any frogs before I come through with a giant spinning blade. Or all of the above. But all of the above don’t change much about the situation. They take the tool at hand, the lawnmower, for granted. They don’t see past what is literally right in front of me. 

Other responses involve reconsidering the tool itself. Make pasture. Get goats or sheep or other ruminants to graze the grass instead of cutting it. Go manual. Cut the grass with a non-electric push mower or an antique scythe. My electrical utility purchases energy for grid-connected power through the state’s wholesale market, so the energy here comes, like most, from a mix of sources (in NY currently about 27% hydro, 25% gas, 15% nuclear, 32% from “dual” gas/petroleum facilities, and a little sliver of 2% from wind, solar, and other renewables.) Since plugging in doesn’t wash my hands of dirty energy, these options are appealing.

But all these most obvious adjustments share a problem: they take time. Like so many people, in order to stay afloat economically I can’t currently care for livestock, manually mow a few acres of grass, or slow down the process in other ways. The more I thought about it, that first and most obvious response, the speed adjustment on my lawnmower, seemed an apt metaphor for a larger, more fundamental problem of time: a mismatch of speeds. 

Mismatch of Speeds

To elevate the problem to the level of a concept and coin a term, I’d like to propose pace ranae (pronounced “pah-chay rah-nay”), a suitably pretentious yet catchy term from the Latin for “speed of frogs.” Frogs are already considered an “indicator species” for so many environmental issues, and environmental discourse has a tradition of using frogs metaphorically to refer to the speed of cultural change via the spurious “boiling frog” parable. So frogs may be a worthy namesake for a mismatch of speeds in other contexts and scales. 

Without getting too much here into the theory of speed (via academic concepts like dromology, timescapes, or immediacy, or debates around degrowth and accelerationism), what I mean by pace ranae might best be compared to the Marxian concept of a “metabolic rift” or differential processing of energy and material flows between class society and non-human ecologies. As one cause or effect of it, or one variant to do specifically with the movement of culture, and the ways time is constrained by economic pressures. In this seemingly trivial case, the pace of frog life seems out of sync with my lawn mowing. 

The typical approach for a lawn of this size is to cut down on time and labor costs with a bigger machine, in reckless disregard for non-human life and anything else in its path. The people here before me hired a landscaping crew to cut the grass on riding mowers. These are so large and fast that the operator, perched high atop the machine and wearing protective earphones, is oblivious to the regular amphibicides they commit. 

It’s an approach common to so much production and distribution in a capitalist economy: go faster, scale up. Usually this involves the use of fossil fuels that themselves embody a staggering mismatch of scale and speed, when viewed at geologic time scales.

The gallon of gas it takes to operate a riding lawnmower for an hour or two requires what once was 98 tons, or 196,000 pounds, of prehistoric, buried plant material. The coal, oil, and gas humans burn in one year requires as much organic matter to make as the entire planet grows in roughly 600 years.

One might think something larger and louder might actually scare frogs out of the path, but I wonder. See, frogs have their own options they seem to be considering, at different times or seasons, or perhaps according to species. When danger approaches, a frog’s general strategy seems to be to remain in place, stay as still as possible, and hope to go unnoticed. Which, conveniently, is also their strategy for hunting, or being a danger in their own right to other creatures in the food web. Often they will stay motionless in their spot until you get surprisingly close to them, almost touching, before they retreat by jumping into the water. If you try to creep up, it can begin to feel like a kind of contest between you and the frog or between the frogs themselves, as if they all have ongoing bets with each other about who can go the longest without flinching. Other frogs will let out a shrill cry before jumping, one that sounds not quite human but rather like internet videos of goats yelling like humans.

Challenging Our Culture of Speed

By not questioning the lawn itself, or my desire to maintain it, I was adopting a strategy like the frog’s, remaining motionless in the face of danger, even as it looms closer and closer. When I came into this land, I inherited the problem of maintaining it. And growing up in the culture I did, I inherited an expectation to see well-manicured lawns around houses. Agriculture, after all, from Latin ager ‘field’ + cultura ‘growing, cultivation’ is a kind of culture applied to land. The problem of pace ranae is as much one of culture as it is of the material conditions and technologies of grass-cutting. The problem is not the speed or schedule, but the fact of my mowing; not how or when, but that I mow in the first place. Put another way, it’s not just that I’m doing things too fast. It’s that I’m doing the wrong things. Pace ranae then becomes my name for the insufficiency, the privilege, and the danger, of merely slowing down.

The problem is not speed per se, but asynchrony between cultures. Not just the speed of culture, but the culture of speed.

The frogs, too, have a kind of inherited cultural norm. Since this pond is spring-fed, it is likely that some small body of water has been here for many years. Frogs are known to return to their place of birth to breed, using a variety of visual, auditory, olfactory, and even celestial and magnetic cues. For them it’s habitual, if not instinctive. There is a community legacy here that far predates my own or other human use. 

And there are other alternative community legacies to take into account. This land lies at the fuzzy border of the ancestral territories of three different native nations. It’s said to have been shared among them as seasonal hunting grounds. It’s a cruel irony that what some colonizers of this place appreciated as park-like landscapes of large trees with grassy understories resembling lawns were actually created by the peoples they were displacing, with a tool called fire and a culture of burning, both largely forgotten or still suppressed.

The easiest response would be to do“nothing.” Don’t overthink it. Let nature take its course. The unfit frogs will die and the species will be better for it. This approach is not only scientifically specious but also rhetorically suspect.

Calls for inaction can serve to mask action. The “do nothing” approach usually leaves out the fact that “something” is already being done.

Devoting the majority of land under my control to a monoculture of grass and maintaining it with petroleum-powered machinery is definitely doing something. Though it’s such a cultural norm that this massive intervention on the land seems like nothing.

Creating Symbiotic Ecosystems

What I decided to do, in the end, is something else. A mix of things, actually. For my yard, I let the grasses grow around the edge of the pond, broadening the natural “ecotone” or border habitat between water and terrestrial environments where diverse species find cover. I let some lawn remain, for the time being, for use in my composting, and for walking around the pond with less worry about ticks. But I’m slowly converting other grassy sections of the yard to pollinator gardens and other planting areas. With gradual adjustments, my vision is becoming less fixed to the conventions of “landscape”, and my presence more in step with the pace of the others that are here.

In the road next to my yard, I also started volunteering in the state’s Amphibian Migrations and Road Crossings Project, helping frogs, salamanders, and other amphibians cross roads during the critical Spring breeding season. What sounds like a cliche of Boy Scout do-goodism is actually an important service for conservation science, as participants also collect data on thousands of specimens, both live and dead. For dozens of species, it’s a real-life version of the classic video game Frogger, demonstrating quite plainly the difference in speeds between amphibians and automobiles. I like to think of it as a seasonal ritual, an intentional cultural custom to replace the many hollow holidays I inherit pre-inscribed into the calendar year. Together with hundreds of others across the state, we wait for the perfect warm rainy conditions known as “Big Night,” when countless creatures seize the moment to make their annual journey to ephemeral vernal pools. In an absurd choreography of safety vests and headlamps, we attempt to count them. And yes, sometimes help them cross the road.

In the process—sensing the weather, learning their routes—we become more attuned to place.

And in the community, beyond my yard, I also helped start a tool lending library called Toolshed Exchange. Unlike many tool libraries, our inventory does not include a lawnmower. Our decision not to stock one was intentional, as both a practical appeal to apartment-dwellers and a subtle cultural and infrastructural prod, encouraging our members to reconsider their land use, their speed, and their culture. There’s the old saying that with a hammer in your hand, everything looks like a nail. Without a lawnmower in our local tool library, maybe everything will start to look less like a lawn. 

An idea is also a kind of tool.

Orthodox economists like Milton Friedman are wrong about a lot of things, but he was right when he said that when a crisis occurs, “the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes the politically inevitable.” In what is increasingly being referred to as a climate “crisis,” Toolshed Exchange is an idea of a real sharing economy, of commoning and re-commoming, that we’re trying to keep lying around, ready to be picked up and used. The tool library is part of a larger project called Toolshed, which functions in part as a kind of library for useful ideas.

Timothy Furstnau is a writer, artist, and curator based in the Northern Catskills of NY. He is the co-founder of the collaborative studio FICTILIS and the Museum of Capitalism, and author of How It Hurts, a study guide for pain examinations.
A sorting shelf, ready for papers to be "pigeonholed."
Essay

Categorization of tools & the tools of categorization

Timothy Furstnau
August 29, 2020

Tool categories for the untrained

I was working as a junk hauler when I took on the full-scale renovation of a 100-year-old house that had been vacant and squatted for several years.

There were holes in every wall, graffiti everywhere, non-working plumbing and electrical hazards. The house needed everything. And I didn’t know the first thing about building and construction. But I had access to a steady stream of discarded tools and materials from construction sites, garage cleanouts, and other hauling jobs, which I started collecting to use in the project. I remembered enough of the basics from shop class to know what certain tools were, but I didn’t know how to use hardly any of them.

The organizational system I used to store these things became a kind of running joke of the project, which soon involved the help of some friends and contractors who agreed to work collaboratively, teaching me as they went. It was the way I categorized my tools that everyone noticed. Each tool had a place in a series of crates on shelving in the central room of the house. Scrawled with a sharpie on masking tape was a label for each section:

  • Marking & Measuring
  • Safety & Comfort
  • Bits & pieces
  • Taking Things Apart, which included the subcategories:
    • Cutting & Slicing
    • Sanding & Grinding
    • Pounding & Drilling
  • Putting Things Together, which included the subcategories:
    • Adhesives & tape
    • Rope, wire, & cable
    • Fasteners
  • Painting and staining
  • Cleaning1

Looking back, it doesn’t seem that strange to me. I know how to get by with many of those tools now, though I’m no expert. But I still think of them in those same basic categories. They made sense, and maybe still make sense, for someone who doesn’t know exactly how everything is supposed to be used. And there’s a certain logic to starting with Measuring and ending with Cleaning. To contain a diverse array of objects, the categorical scheme uses a certain abstraction—one which has a childlike naivete that you might even call charming.

And some did. A specialized contractor like an electrician may have trouble fitting what they do into my categories. But some of them, if they were onsite for long enough, would eventually learn it, taking things and putting them back in their boxes without asking me. I even recall getting a compliment or two—though not without a slightly patronizing tone.

Say what you will about the tool storage categories of a home renovating novice. The point is this: whenever someone asked me for a tool, I knew exactly where it was. Though something may seem a little wrong with them, my categories were right for me. Yours might make sense for you, but not for me. And that’s fine—as long as you can find what you need.

Think of pushing a cart down the aisle of a warehouse with large labels hanging from the ceiling and pointing the way to a different set of categories

a person browsing bins full of shiny chrome parts
A customer browses the bins for parts at an American truck stop.

The point is to have some kind of system. Our systems may not even be legible to each other, or even to ourselves, as systems. (Even the lack of a system can have a kind of systematicity.) There’s what we do, and alongside it, always—how we think about what we do. The mental boxes we put things in.

If I can propose a rough categorization that divides what we do into two big boxes, maybe it would be that so much of what we do aspires to some variation on the two top-level categories of that simple tool storage: 1) Putting Things Together, or 2) Taking Things Apart.2 The act of categorizing, of thinking about what we do in relation to everything else we do—seems to accomplish a little of both.

Maybe it’s hard to locate something specific when it’s crammed in together with other things in such large boxes. And maybe there are things that fit equally in both. The categories break down, like the distinction above between what we do and how we think about it. In some of the most gratifying activities, we may experience no distinction between thought and deed, whereas in some of the most despicable actions we may experience a wide chasm between the act and its justification. The boxes themselves are only a tool, and in the end, here is no hard rule here, no overarching system.

The “Big Box” Categories of Home Improvement

Contrast my novice categories with those of a typical American hardware store or home improvement mega-store.

  • Appliances
  • Bath & Faucets
  • Blinds & Window Treatment
  • Building Materials
  • Cleaning
  • Decor & Furniture
  • Doors & Windows
  • Electrical
  • Flooring & Area Rugs
  • Hardware
  • Heating & Cooling
  • Kitchen & Kitchenware
  • Lawn & Garden
  • Lighting & Ceiling Fans
  • Outdoor Living & Patio
  • Paint
  • Plumbing
  • Smart Home
  • Storage & Organization
  • Tools3

Of course, shoppers need to find what they’re looking for, and these tool categories seem to solve certain practical needs of organizing products in physical space. They also seem to be tailored to the needs of one specific industry: housing construction. (Which is itself just the most visible part of the massive “FIRE” sector comprising the related Finance, Insurance, and Real Estate industries.) But in a subtle way, there’s something more being communicated here.

One thing that immediately stands out is the number of nouns in this list. Using the names for tools or parts of a house tends to assume one knows something about the thing to begin with, or in what place it should be used, rather than using verbs and action words to describe what a thing can do, without specifying where it should be applied. Using the tools in my list seems to be able to produce any kind of dwelling one can imagine, but using the tools in the store’s list—the same tools—seems to be destined to produce a very specific kind of home. And that home represents a very specific idea of “improvement.” There seems to be some hidden assumptions.

a handwritten list of English verbs
A list of verbs used by some artists to help “relate to oneself, material, place, and process.” See MoMa.

Theorists in the fields of sociology and pedagogy have long pointed out the ways that the transmission of behavioral norms and values and other forms of socialization occur in educational settings. Their critiques have even coalesced into a kind of shorthand in the form of answers to the phrase “What I really learned in school…” (…obedience to authority, time management and productivity in a capitalist economy, and other important “lessons.”) Marxian theorists have given us the concept of ideology, which philosopher Slavoj Zizek once defined, in a play on the famous obfuscations of Iraq War-era US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, as “unknown knowns,” or the things that we don’t know we know. And the field of social work uses this notion of a “hidden curriculum” that neurotypical members of society automatically learn, but which those on the autistic spectrum and other neurodivergent people need to be explicitly taught.4 In order to make a more inclusive society, we first need to realize what it is we’re silently, implicitly teaching each other all the time.

In the case of the “big box” home improvement stores, the existing taxonomy tends to reinforce a vision of private property and suburban domesticity. It prescribes a certain way of designing a shelter: have your own home, with specific kinds of spaces dedicated to various forms of consumption, labor, and leisure.5 The normalcy of these categories is taken for granted, despite the fact that most of them are incredibly specific, even rare, in terms of how Americans in different places live together now and in the recent past. (Let alone how humans have lived together across the world and across history.) That they are presented to us in the form of products on shelves, as consumer choices that we are free to choose, makes them all the more insidious as subtle commands. Taken as a whole, they begin to form an image of some ideal type—as if you could replace the tagline printed on the bags and buckets of these ubiquitous brands with the simple command disguised as a promise: “How to Be a Proper American Homeowner.”6

cluttered signs hang along a high wall
A display of signs for sale at a local hardware store.

Considering all the social and ecological relations entailed by this picture of American home improvement, we might come up with several reasons to seek out alternatives. And considering the fact that around 40 percent of all CO2 emissions comes from the need for heating and cooling buildings—a need which increases with global warming—other ways of living start to seem less like alternatives, and more like imperatives.

One possibility is to think of tools as public: to share tools, rather than buying them. Toolshed is one of many initiatives that, in its way, is groping in this direction. A tool-sharing program doesn’t necessarily do away with the traditional categorizations of tools. Using concepts that are already familiar makes sense whether sharing tools or buying them. People still have to find what they need.

But what if we envisioned an alternative system that was not merely an exercise in re-labeling? How else could we categorize tools and organize them otherwise? Many people around the world are already using tools and thinking about them differently. (Think of the quote attributed to author William Gibson: “The future has already arrived — it’s just not evenly distributed yet.”) Some of those will be highlighted here.

In a future that is truly “livable”—as the Toolshed slogan has it—what different kinds of tools would we use, and what would we need to invent, to re-invent, or recognize—what would we think of as “tools” in the first place?

Or to put it another way: How can Toolshed gather and share tools in a way that helps people find what they need, as well as what they may not know they need? Or what they had all along without knowing it?

The Four Toolshed Categories

The notes and questions above are some of the thoughts that went into the structuring of Toolshed’s four top-level categories. (There was also a thought or two about convenience.)

Four is a somewhat arbitrary number. It corresponds to the four seasons that are marked here in the Hudson Valley, and in this it aligns with many other quarterly schedules. It also happened to work well as the pace at which our editorial team expected to move across themes. In the end, four is a nice round number that has a tidy feeling of completeness and divisibility to it: it seems to be able to contain ambitious plans like they are being placed into a four-sided box.

The four categories—Food, Shelter, Kin, Magic—correspond to some of the richer and more comprehensive of the categories put forward in various theories of human needs and motivations, stemming from the disciplines of psychology, sustainable development, and other domains. The idea being that tools, whatever else they do, are supposed to satisfy or at least address what has been broadly conceived as “human needs.” (The details of what constitutes each need—indeed what constitutes the category “human”—have been and are still debated, and should continue to be.) From the various frameworks that have been proposed, we arrived at four broad words that seemed most suited to containing the kind of thinking and writing we wanted to do here.

The impetus for this project came following Hurricane Sandy’s devastation of New York City, when the government response focused mainly on top-down design “solutions” that promoted “resilience” and individualistic actions that fit neatly within the existing economic order, rather than more grassroots community organizing and approaches that empowered communities or challenged power relations. This response proposed one very limited set of tools, while ignoring others.

Toolshed’s categories are not by any means mutually exclusive. Most essays and tools published here do not fit neatly into only one category, and there is considerable overlap between them. But for practical reasons, content is assigned to one category, to make it easier to navigate thematically while leaving room for the site’s tags to proliferate in a less compartmentalizing way. We will continue to add tags on a per-post basis, feeling things out as we go.

Categories, and categorical systems, are tricky. The classical binomial nomenclature of Linnaeus, used by scientists since the 18th Century to classify life using Latin names, has proven useful but also problematic, including distinctions for human racial subgroups that seem to create a scientific basis for racism. More recently, there has been a rich history of debate within social movements over whether various categories like Black, woman, queer, etc., can or should be abolished, reclaimed, or repurposed. I won’t settle those debates here, but I will admit my own shortcomings and misgivings. Language is something that is shared—it is inherently compromised. Sometimes I wish some of the words I hear myself using did not come with such unsavory connotations or so much historical baggage. But insofar as each box needs a label—a need which may itself be debated—I use the limited tool of language to give it one.

As one person trying to use the tools I find lying around to help make a future we can hold in common, I know I share a language at least with many others who are connected to me in other ways. To the extent that we may share a vision for the future, if that vision is to match the urgency of the present—that is, if our capacity to Put Things Together is to scale to the consequence of our history of Taking Things Apart—then an alternative aspiration to the big-box picture of suburban castle-building would call for a widespread re-prioritization of human needs that also entails a reorientation to what it is we think fulfills those needs. Perhaps filling certain needs would obviate other needs—to consume, to compete, or to conquer. Think of pushing a cart down the aisle of a warehouse with large labels hanging from the ceiling and pointing the way to a different set of categories:

  • In the “Sharing” aisle: Commoning / Community governance / Co-management / Allocation / Fair Division
  • In a section devoted to “Fixing”: Mending / Repair / Restoration / Remediation / Reconciliation / Reparations
  • Or in a colorful display on “Hacking”: Mods / Workarounds / Jigs / Jerry-rigging / Rasquache / Making do
  • Maybe In the “Thinking” section: Media Literacy / Ideating / Memory / Meta-cognition
  • And imagine what might be in a section devoted to Caregiving, to Play, Emotional Intelligence, or the bins and bins of tools dealing with Communication alone….

What needs to change so that we all can access these kinds of tools just as easily as the tools that are there for the picking off store shelves, endlessly stocked as they are via just-in-time production networks running off extracted petroleum? Or who needs to change? And what, or who, needs to be challenged?

Toolshed was created in part to house such questions—questions being another kind of tool. To make a space dedicated to not only gathering and storing them, but also encouraging their sharing, usage, and learning in the process—adapting, honing, re-working. Its categories might seem confusing at first, but I hope readers can find at least some of whatever it is they need.

Notes

Notes
↑1 Later on, crates were added for Stacking (i.e masonry), as well as Pounding, Drilling, and Lubricating. If one crate got too full with secondhand tools, it warranted the creation of sub-categories.
↑2 Recently, ecological thinking on biodiversity uses a more sophisticated and specialized lexicon to get at something similar, borrowing from physics the concept of entropy, or the measure of “disorderliness” and unpredictability of a system, to analyze the effects of biodiversity on the resilience of ecosystems.
↑3 A breakdown of one large chain’s subheadings under the catch-all category “Tool”: Power Tools: Combo Kits, Drills, Saws, Cordless Power Tools; Hand tools: Tools Sets, Cutting Tools, Wrenches, Sockets & Accessories; Tool storage: Tool Chests, Portable Toolboxes, Mobile Workbenches, Tool Bags; Power tool accessories: Saw Blades, Drill Bits, Batteries & Chargers, Tool Stands; Air compressors: Air Compressors Tools & Accessories, Air Compressors, Nail Guns, Air Tools, Compressor Combo Kits; Automotive: Truck Boxes, Towing & Trailers; Shop Equipment & Lifting; RV Supplies; Woodworking Tools: Table Saws, Routers; Wet/Dry Vacuums: Shop Vacuums, Small Capacity, Medium Capacity, Vacuum Accessories; Welding: Welding & Soldering Tools, Welding Machines, Brazing & Soldering Equipment.
↑4 Similar dynamics have been applied to heteronormativity, racial bias, and other subtler forms of exclusion.
↑5 The assumptions here can get even more specific: have a space dedicated to media consumption, a bathroom with decorative fixtures, a refrigerator capable of storing vast amounts of perishable food, and a system for constantly maintaining the ambient air temperature within a few degrees regardless of location or season—all supposed “improvements” in home design specific to the last half-century.
↑6 We might add the category “man” to this adjusted slogan. It’s no accident that in the hardware stores of a patriarchal society, it’s all the things men do that get recognized as useful in such a way that they are categorized as “tools,” despite the fact that it isn’t only men who build things, who fix things, who work with their hands, and so on. Similarly, feminist art historians have critiqued the gendered hierarchy of Art and “craft.”
Timothy Furstnau is a writer, artist, and curator based in the Northern Catskills of NY. He is the co-founder of the collaborative studio FICTILIS and the Museum of Capitalism, and author of How It Hurts, a study guide for pain examinations.
Photo by Caio from Pexels.
Essay

Garden as shelter

Timothy Furstnau
July 21, 2020

Editor’s note: This is one of a series of Toolshed essays that considers the “garden”– what it has been; what it is; what it can be. These essays were written or commissioned as part of a process of considering the Toolshed Garden space at Basilica Hudson and how to develop it.

The Toolshed garden will be a kind of shelter—as all gardens are.

What follows is a collection of thoughts on some of the ways gardens can be sheltering or have been associated with the arts of shelter, expanding out from the literal spatial structures of plant life, to garden constructions and land use, to more subtle ways gardens can offer psychological and spiritual protection, and even community resilience.

Each of these sheltering capacities provokes a different set of questions that can be asked of Toolshed’s garden.

The connection between both ends of this spectrum is crucial— between the physicality of gardens (e.g. access to actual land or other space to practice gardening) and their more intangible social good. If we limit the celebration of gardening to the personal benefits accrued to individuals—often in the form of wealthy landowners in exurban pastoral settings—we miss a huge part of what gardening means for other communities. Alongside large numbers of people staying at home and suddenly having time to garden, the other massive social change to happen in recent months is the US’s  largest mass movement of people rising up against systemic racism. Though this kind of activity is seldom seen the same way, we might also consider how the cultivation of collectivity and solidarity, of empathy and even rage, can have benefits, for individuals and communities, that are at least as significant as the cultivation of backyard vegetables.

Taking shelter, or making it, is an activity usually done with others. (Even the private “sheltering” practiced during the pandemic is in an important sense for others.)  There’s something counterintuitive in the idea of a personal or single-use shelter, in bunkers and the resulting “bunker mentality.” Shelters seem to assume a certain collectivity, a shared future. So an exploration of some of the ways gardens can be shelter might help to suggest some of the broader potentials in the practice of gardening.

Plants as shelter— The things that grow in a garden provide shelter for other creatures. In obvious ways that are easy to understand—think of an owl living in a tree hollow—and in many subtler ways, some of which we are only beginning to understand.

The structure of diverse rainforests is described using terms that sound architectural and suggest each layer’s sheltering role. The “canopy” layer of the upper parts of trees, full of insects, birds, reptiles and mammals; the “understory” or dark, cool environment under the canopy; and the forest “floor”, where most insects and the largest animals live. This last layer is sometimes called the “cryptosphere” (crypto- from the Latin for “hidden”) because so much of the life here is invisible and still unknown. Here it is primarily trees that make up the architecture for an astounding diversity of other organisms. The plants in a garden do something similar on a smaller scale. 

How might Toolshed’s garden provide habitat for other inhabitants of the Basilica Hudson grounds—both known and unknown? How will these layer upon each other, leaving space for the not-yet-known, and even the unknowable?

Architecture in and of gardens— Some gardens, including the Toolshed Garden that is currently being designed, incorporate constructions for seating, walkways, and shade, like arbors, pergolas, and gazebos. We can also think of the more basic elements of a garden as becoming architectural: foundations, raised beds and other kinds of containment, fencing and other wall-like border elements, structures for support and climbing like trellises and stakes, and so on. Cold frames, or plastic low tunnels or  “polytunnels”, may be installed to protect garden beds from frost and wind. When some gardens get roofs, they can even become “houses” in their own right: an especially high tunnel becomes a “hoophouse” if enclosed by plastic, or if by glass—a greenhouse.

There are also times when the plants themselves become the architecture, as in living walls or hedges grown as boundaries, privacy screens, or wind breaks. Certain species, like boxwood, are particularly suited to this kind of ongoing shaping. When the shapes get less linear and more ornamental, it becomes topiary, a kind of living sculpture. Vining plants can combine with trellises to form semi-permanent walls and archways. And trees like willow can be pruned and shaped into complex structures that grow into their own armatures, as in the “willow palaces” created by German architect Marcel Kalberer and the Sanfte Strukturen group.

large dome formed with living willow branches
Sanfte Strukturen’s “Auerworld Palace,” built in 1998, based on Sumerian bundled reed construction.

The architecture of the “willow palace” is based on an ancient Sumerian technique of bundled reed construction. Which is another way gardens can be architecture: by growing and harvesting the materials that are used to make a shelter—a time-honored tradition, used in many vernacular architectures.

How will the constructed interact with the grown in the garden at Basilica? Which local materials will the garden use, and which will it create?

Gardens in relation to architecture— We might also consider the ways gardens relate to adjacent architecture. Most suburban American houses are surrounded by a specific type of household-scale monocrop garden known as “lawns.” (A 2015 study showed grass is America’s single largest crop, covering an area three times larger than any other irrigated crop, and requiring similar amounts of water and fertilizer.) Parts of a yard may also become a “backyard garden.” In places without yards, container gardens sprout up along building edges, on balconies, fire escapes, and window sills. Some people design lightweight frameworks for existing windows and call it “window gardening.” Some manufacturers make projecting windows with glass on four sides and a bottom platform, and call them “garden windows.” More and more commercial buildings are installing roof gardens or green roofs for their capacity to regulate temperature and hold water, among other benefits. Land devoted to handling runoff from a nearby building can become a “rain garden.” And other types of gardens may be defined by where they occur, like entry areas, courtyards, breezeways. Or by where they don’t occur, as in community gardens or European “allotments” located in clusters separated from housing. 

How will Toolshed’s garden relate to other features of the Basilica Hudson site, and to other nearby buildings? And what about other neighboring infrastructures of transportation, energy, water, and waste (railroad tracks, easements, streets, driveways, parking lots, a large solar array, drainage areas, commercial dumpsters, compost/biogas trailer, etc.) And how will the garden’s design be affected by its own needs for energy, water, waste, storage, and maintenance?

Gardens as landscape architecture— Finally, there is landscape architecture, when an entire landscape becomes planned like a garden, or crafted like a painting. The tradition is often traced back to the English architect William Kent, who is sometimes called the “father of modern gardening.” Much of the way we experience gardens and parks—even what we think of as a “landscape”—comes from the English garden and otherly painterly approaches to land use. Kent once said “Garden as though you will live forever.” The quote has been made the subject of countless inspirational images, in imagery reminiscent of the once-popular “MOTIVATIONS” calendars:

screenshot of image search shows tiled quote posters
screenshot of a Google image search for William Kent’s quote on gardening

Though the informal garden style Kent represents was a kind of revolt against the classical “architectural” style of garden, we might question the privileged origins of this form of gardening among the British and French aristocracy, and find ways to dismiss Kent’s popular sentiment. We might also note the Eastern origins of Kent’s style in something like the aesthetic of sharawadgi which favors organic, naturalistic appearances over rigid lines and symmetry.1 And we could locate alternative lineages of what we call “gardening” among Black, Indigenous, and people of color.

But Kent’s ideas are useful for thinking about the temporality of  gardening, or the scales of time that are implied by a use of space. In a time when human species extinction is increasingly considered a possibility, the quote takes on a slightly more ominous and even radical tone. How fitting, then, that Kent and others often incorporated Gothic ruins into their landscape designs. Indeed, it was Kent who also said this: “(If) a garden is to be a world unto itself, it had better make room for the darker shades of feeling as well as the sunny ones.” In practice, he was said to not be above planting a dead tree in order to achieve a desired effect.

What conditional statement will complete the command of Toolshed gardeners, to garden “as though….” As though life depended on it?

What “shades of feeling” will Toolshed’s garden incorporate? What future will Toolshed’s garden design anticipate? What quantity of living—short of “forever”—will its designs imply? And what conditional statement will complete the command of Toolshed gardeners, to garden “as though….” As though life depended on it?

Shelter for whom, from what?

In recent months, as many Americans have been asked to “shelter in place,” this capacity of gardens has been duly noted. Some of the most widely circulated news outlets offered variations on the theme: The New Yorker’s The Tonic of Gardening in Quarantine, The Washington Post’s The garden has lessons for us in this quarantine, if we are willing to stop and listen, and NPR’s Pandemic Gardens Satisfy A Hunger For More Than Just Good Tomatoes, among many others. One only has to read the headlines to get the gist of the argument. 

Most of these pieces include claims about the mental health benefits of gardening, along with some vision of respite from the hectic pace of modern life or the doldrums of social distancing. One might expect such sentiment to be less newsworthy for publications geared towards people who were already living in the country, or already spending time outside, but even these got into the act: Country Living’s How Quarantine Taught Me to Love Gardening and Outside Magazine’s The Pandemic Has Turned Us All into Gardeners. Perhaps People Magazine’s headline gets it best: Pandemic Gardens Are Trending.

More people getting out and gardening is certainly a good thing. Gardeners may experience different scales of time, connections to nonhuman life, among other hard-to-measure benefits.2 Gardeners may also be contributing to more resilient local food systems, soil health, among other good and worthy things. But gardens—or gardens as shelter—can be so much more.

What got less circulation than feel-good stories on gardening as soulcraft was a longer article written by Ashley Gripper and published by Environmental Health News, a small nonprofit dedicated to driving science into public discussion and policy on environmental health issues, including climate change. The piece’s title contains its own argument: We don’t farm because it’s trendy; we farm as resistance, for healing and sovereignty . (In case the article’s lead photo depicting Black people farming doesn’t indicate to readers the identity of the “we” in its title , the subtitle clarifies: “Farming is not new to Black people.”) Though the piece had been weeks in the making and probably already scheduled for publication, it happened to be released just one day after the protests over the police killings of George Floyd began in Minneapolis—protests which swept the nation in the subsequent weeks. It may come as no surprise that, the major news outlets mentioned in the preceding paragraphs did not release a slew of opinion pieces on how political organizing and public protest is a balm to the soul.

Gardeners may experience different scales of time, connections to nonhuman life, among other hard-to-measure benefits. Gardeners may also be contributing to more resilient local food systems, soil health, among other good and worthy things. But gardens—or gardens as shelter—can be so much more.

In the article, Gripper, a PhD candidate at Harvard whose work explores the impacts of urban agriculture on the mental, spiritual, and social well-being of Black communities, notes the irony that her ancestors, as enslaved Africans on Southern plantations, were essentially forced to farm. Contemporary urban farming is framed as a way to regain ownership over food systems—a way which maintains a continuity with Black postbellum agricultural roots despite brutal terror campaigns, complex migrations, and the longstanding discriminatory policies of the USDA. Gardens, in this sense, can provide shelter in ways that go beyond individual mental health—they provide platforms for survival and resistance.

A garden may be a shelter in the sense of a sanctuary, a place of escape, survival, or rest, and it may be a place of convening, where people come together, culture is generated and shared, and lifeways are protected. 

Shelter and the category of “garden”

These are some literal connections between gardens and architecture. Still, it can be somewhat counterintuitive to think of gardens as shelters. Gardens seem to require the opposite of shelter. They need exposure—to sun, rain, air. When just one of these is provided artificially, through lighting, plumbing, or ventilation, we usually still call something a garden. But there’s a subtle difference that begins to set in the more such inputs are added, and the more permanent they are. So that when all three are built for it, or built around it, in what amounts to its own shelter—a garden begins to seem like something else. 

When does a garden become a farm? A factory? When does a farm itself become a factory farm? When does planting become a plantation? At what point does farming lose its “hobby” status? When does agriculture go from subsistence to traditional to intensive? How deliberate does gathering have to be before we begin to call it agriculture? The answers may have something to do with shelter. 

And these are not trivial questions. They come to bear on who we recognize as our own, as Kin, both geographically and historically—among those who are our neighbors on the land, and those buried under it, in the archaeological record of human culture. A common element of the genocides that have occurred across this continent and across the globe was the unwillingness of colonizers to recognize differences between Indigenous agricultural and land use practices and their own.

These are just some of the considerations that might inform the design of the Toolshed Garden at Basilica Hudson. Regardless of what grows in it, and what shelters these provide, the Toolshed Garden will also be a space that is public. And public space can be another kind of shelter: a protected place for ideas, debate, gathering, and protest. We ask ourselves: what will this garden shelter? Whose survival will the garden support? And in order for that to happen, how—and what—must it become a platform for resisting?

 

Notes

Notes
↑1 The concept influenced Kent and his 18th-Century contemporaries after the publication of Sir William Temple’s essay Upon the gardens of Epicurus and other reports from China. Scholars still debate the term’s cultural and linguistic origins.
↑2 Scientific studies on “nature-assisted therapies” have corroborated claims of the mental health benefits of time spent outside.
Timothy Furstnau is a writer, artist, and curator based in the Northern Catskills of NY. He is the co-founder of the collaborative studio FICTILIS and the Museum of Capitalism, and author of How It Hurts, a study guide for pain examinations.