Mystery of Maintenance

A park is a type of garden, constantly changing but needing close attention to the different systems within its confines. If the people involved in the systems of any given park were to "think like a gardener", then they would be able to work cohesively with one another to sustain the garden.

Walking through London on a day when the sun is out and temperatures skirt close to 30 degrees Celsius, parks are full of people having picnics and sunbathing on the open lawns. Once the people go home, what is left behind is tragic. Empty bottles, plastic sandwich wrappers, crisp bags blowing in the breeze, and bins overflowing, spilling into the sidewalks.

In an interview with Tom Jarvis, Director of Parks at the Royal Parks in London, he said after a record-breaking hot day, “Sadly it seems that people’s new-found appreciation of nature hasn’t translated into caring for their parks, and our park teams were disappointed with the vast amounts of litter left in the parks last night.” (Roach, 2021)

After the picnic crowds left, this photo of Crystal Palace Park could be an image of any park after a warm day. (wise_joe, 2021) Clement laments, “The form of space that can be replicated - an ornamental and expensive commodity - distances itself from the garden in movement all the more, in that it suggests great investment.” (Clement, 2016)

Parks in cities like London have to perform at a certain level to allow people to take them over day after day. Mysterious maintenance workers reset them every night and morning, like a stage performance. These backstage workers are rarely seen as they might ruin the image of a perfect landscape. Kate Orff says, "By smoothing and polishing our representations of the "ideal" landscape, we leapfrog over what really makes them: groups of people working together doing the hard work of digging, planting, weeding, picking up the plastic and debris, pruning, sowing, trimming, and sweeping." (Orff, 2021)

This is historically the way it has always been, though. In 1644, John Evelyn wrote, “What is most admirable, you see no gardeners, or men at work, and yet all is kept in such exquisite order” in his diary after visiting the Luxembourg Palace in Paris. (Evelyn, 1901)

In this way, it shows how nature-deprived people are. People have become accustomed to neat, orderly parks because of how contained and controlled the greenspaces around cities are. This idea goes back to the tension between the landscape and the garden. In this case, these landscapes operate under a masculine agenda to control the visual while people inhabit the space. The people using the park are the viewers, not the gardeners, and to Evelyn’s point, there are no gardeners on-site while the viewers are around, as they would mess up the park’s experience.

A Sunday on La Grande Jatte by Georges Seurat in 1884 depicts the perfect picnic lawn as a landscape, a still moment with a recreational lawn, a lake, and plenty of shade. (Seurat, 1884)

Unfortunately, parks like this have maintainers, not gardeners, which create an environment where everything is acted out through a checklist, not necessarily responding to the needs of the park’s ecosystem.

In the above case, litter and visitors are part of that ecosystem. The visitors are not invited to contribute to sustaining the park because no gardener is present to show them. The gardener's anonymity and hidden labour make up this constructed natural environment.

If the model had a more fluid management process, and the care of a park was unravelled throughout the day, whether people were there or not, people might respect the space more. This would invite them into the show rather than just watching the result. Jamie Lerner did this in Curitiba with a recycling program by using incentives to include people in the process and encourage them to recycle. As people gave their recycling to the city, they would get tickets in return to use at a local food market to buy fresh produce. (Lerner, 2016) While this is not a park example, it does show that programs based on a relationship of give-and-take encourage people to participate. If people are participating, they become part of the garden.