The Nature of Resilience

Happy Spring, everyone! It might not feel like it quite yet, but warmer days are ahead of us.  With spring, a sense of renewal emerges. A state of Mother Nature unraveling, gingerly shaking herself free of winter's skeletons and frost, blossoming into a state of resilient plenitude that once again quiets the slow, dull ache in our cold, weather-weary bones. In typical human fashion, once the heat of summer does finally arrive a couple months from now, we'll be whimsically longing for the cooler days of early spring that we currently take for granted.

Perhaps we got a taste of what’s to come, with the recent unexpected cluster of severe storms that tore through New Jersey earlier this week: mailboxes ripped out of the ground, trees snapped in half, downed lines everywhere resulting in power outages.  Admittedly, the trajectory for severe summer weather doesn’t look great, especially with the notable increase in intensity of storm events along the East Coast and around the Mid-Atlantic region. With our hurricane belt expanding to include our Northeastern cities that have very much not been built to withstand catastrophic natural disasters, it’s critical that we, as horticulturists and landscape architects, work to both mitigate and adapt our urban environments in the best way we know how: by planting plants.

Green urban infrastructure has become a primary focus for landscape architects, especially those in heavily populated, major metropolitan areas that have become void of publicly available green spaces alongside the advent of residential and commercial construction. Unfortunately, urban environments are famously riddled with difficult landscape conditions: nutrient poor, compacted soils, road salts, foot traffic, dog pee, pre-existing structures and utility lines collectively make up the perfect storm for landscapes completely free of plants. It’s a lot easier to ignore these spaces than to acknowledge their potential value, often resulting in bleak patches of cement and concrete cohabitating with the occasional dandelion or plantain weed.

A lack of greenery in these areas ensures that our human inhabited concrete jungles reach peak summer temperatures without sufficient shade or groundcover to absorb harmful UV rays, ultimately resulting in a lower quality of life for residents of these regions.  This absence of greenery has a whole chain of repercussions, in fact – as it turns out, and it seems kind of obvious after you think about it, urban stressors and climate stressors percolate within a feedback loop that has become quite toxic over the last several decades, prompting what is now an urgent response from city officials who are watching climate trends and their trajectory in an attempt to mitigate and adapt to some of the environmental factors: this has been dubbed “resiliency”, which you may have noticed is a very hot trend in the urban landscaping world right now. Between the conversations and information passed around this week at NY Build, the largest architectural event on the East Coast, and next week’s upcoming ASLA NY Chapter symposium, aptly titled “Resiliency Toolkit”, it seems as though resiliency is not only a buzzword, but a critical approach to design for landscape architects moving forward.

In preparation for building your own Resiliency Toolkit, we’re supplying yet another list of plants perfect for reclaiming and rewilding post-industrial and contemporary urban environments where soils are particularly poor, sunlight is particularly harsh, and supplemental irrigation is particularly hard to come by.

Achillea millefolium | yarrow Agastache foeniculum | anise hyssop Andropogon sp. | the big bluestems Andropogon gerardii Andropogon glomeratus Andropogon ternarius Andropogon virginicus Asclepias tuberosa | butterfly weed  Aster oblongifolius | aromatic aster Baptisia australis | false indigo Bouteloua gracilis | blue grama grass Ceanothus americanus | New Jersey tea Cercis canadensis | Eastern redbud Coreopsis sp. | the tickseeds  Coreopsis lanceolata  Coreopsis verticillata  Diervilla lonicera | bush honeysuckle Echinacea sp. | the coneflowers Echinacea pallida | pale purple coneflower Echinacea purpurea | purple coneflower Eryngium yuccifolium | rattlesnake master Hypericum prolificum | shrubby St. John’s wort Ilex opaca | American holly Juncus tenuis | path rush Juniperus virginiana | Eastern redcedar

Monarda didyma | bee balm Muhlenbergia capillaris | Muhly grass Penstemon digitalis | foxglove beardtongue Phlox subulata | creeping phlox Physocarpus opulifolius | ninebark Quercus sp. | the oaks Quercus alba | white oak Quercus rubra | red oak Rhus sp. | the sumacs Rhus aromatica | aromatic sumac Rhus copallina | winged sumac Rhus glabra | smooth sumac Rhus typhina | staghorn sumac Rudbeckia sp. | the black-eyed Susans Rudbeckia fulgida | black-eyed Susan Rudbeckia hirta | black-eyed Susan Solidago sp. | the goldenrods Solidago caesia | blue-stemmed goldenrod Solidago nemoralis | grey goldenrod Solidago rigida | stiff goldenrod  Solidago speciosa | showy goldenrod Schizachyrium scoparium | little bluestem Sporobolus heterolepis | prairie dropseed Yucca filamentosa | Adam’s needle Zizia aurea | golden Alexander