FUTURE GARDENS 

Where every place is the story of its own becoming

These are a series of works we call Future Gardens that began in 1995, with the Garden of Hot Winds and Warms Rains. The concept of Future Gardens is that every place that has survived heat and drought in its past has present and historical plant species in its history and present that can survive in a heat-stressed future. Local botanists can collect such species, propagate them, and generate the scaffolding for more rapid regeneration of local ecosystems as warming occurs. 

These clusters of species, when propagated in Future Gardens then act as educational scientific experiments, works of art, public gardens and nursery beds of future plant ensembles that have the capacity to regenerate heat-stressed ecosystems far more rapidly than the life web can unassisted.

The Beginning - The Garden of Hot Winds and Warm Rains

Our botanist friends told us the evidence was clear that species were moving, and even dying, as Spring began arriving earlier, and Autumn later, in response to accelerating global warming. So we asked the question: “What would live in the city of Bonn, actually in the middle of Germany, actually in the middle of Europe, if the temperatures were rising and did so to the amount of three degrees?”

In the Garden of Hot Winds and Warm Rains we assumed two greenhouses, each with a temperature rise of three degrees, one with a wetter climate, the other a more desertlike climate. With Dr. Wilhelm Barthlott, we put together a team of student botanists (and one paleobotanist). The idea again began with a question: “Could we, with our small group of experts, put together, as an act of collaboration with nature, two different botanical groupings, each group adapted to temperature rise, one adapted to wet climate and one to dry, designed to be biodiverse, useful to fauna of all kinds, yet harvestable in part by people?” (The harvesting was to be managed so that it preserved the system, with input balancing output.) The answer was “Maybe,” if the population were controlled. But to the question, “Would it be enough?” the answer continued to be “No.” Something was still very much missing