Every autumn, SALA MLA students enroll in the Trees and Shrubs in the Landscape course taught by Douglas Justice, an associate director of UBC Botanical Garden. Trees and Shrubs is a rigorous rite of passage, consisting of weekly plant walks and memorization of more than 200 plant names, families, and attributes. We sat down with Douglas to discuss his career at UBC, and his relationship to horticulture and landscape architecture.
How did you come to teach at SALA? What excites you about teaching emerging designers?
When I was an undergraduate in the 1980s, I was studying horticulture. I took a course called Woody Plants in the Landscape with Peter Wharton, a curator at the UBC Botanical Garden.
I was hired at the Botanical Garden, and took over the teaching duties of that course, offered in the newly minted graduate Landscape Architecture program. When it first started, it was an unrestricted elective, so people from all kinds of faculties took it. It was more about just teaching people what plants were in the landscape, less about any sort of design considerations.
I very quickly adopted the course as my own, and brought my own biases to it. Most of what motivates me to teach is that I want people to understand what happens to the plants that they actually specify. Three key things:
- Whether the plants people want are what they can actually get.
- Whether what people plant, turns out to be what they hoped for.
- If not, how do they fix that? Substitution is as critical as the initial choice.
At the same time, I teach people how to recognize plants. My feeling is that if people don’t understand how to look at plants, they’re never going to be able to make the decisions they need to make about them. You have to be able to recognize what you do or don’t want.
I grew up with a landscape architect who talked about these issues all the time. We didn’t go out and throw a football around. We talked about plants and about what was appropriate and what wasn’t. That’s definitely the lens through which I see the world.
Trees and Shrubs Lecture on a Sunny Friday Morning
What surprises you the most about the field of landscape architecture?
There’s a clear deficit in knowledge. What I find frustrating about that, is that it’s actually easy to overcome, through gaining a few plant identification skills and hanging around in places where plants are labeled. You can look at plants, or at books. The biggest influence on my own writing has probably been my desire to help people to understand why things look the way they do. I think that comes out to some degree in my teaching. Like when I talk about texture, the arrangement of leaves or branches or that kind of thing, I’ll try to explain why it occurs.
A problem with landscape architects is for the most part, they don’t have an opportunity to revisit that information. Once you get sucked into the system, you’re too busy to be engaged in a way that’s going to help maintain plant knowledge. When I look at European landscape architects, there’s often a more concerted effort to maintain that discussion. I think that’s incredibly important because without a knowledge of plants, what’s a landscape architect? Everybody else can do all of the things that a landscape architect can do, except that they don’t know about plants. If a landscape architect doesn’t know about plants, I don’t think they’re very useful.
Consider it the other way. If you don’t recognize all the plants in the landscape, then you don’t realize potentially how much diversity there actually is. European gardens have almost a 300-year lead on the West Coast. Here, it’s a very young culture. Those of us who are teaching are fighting that. Sometimes it’s great to embrace that youth, because you’re not burdened by the baggage of a foreign design history. I see it as a question of the presence or absence of a historical design perspective. It can be frustrating, but I also find it quite exciting, because you can introduce new things to people. New things can be exciting.
About the ‘native plant’ craze; how you feel about this emerging belief in native planting being key?
It exists to a greater degree here than places like Europe. In Europe you’ve had 300+ years of people moving plants, going all the way back to the Silk Road. There’s an understanding that exotic is not necessarily bad. The issues surrounding invasiveness are quite different because everything is interconnected on the Eurasian continent. There’s less isolation, which means that a lot of the issues that make plants invasive, that is, a lack of natural biological controls, is less prevalent there. Flora, fungal, and insect life are contiguous.
It would take 100 years of succession before we could get back to something that looks like a natural environment. People see invasive weeds and unsightly landscapes and think, wouldn’t it be better to have a native, perfect, “pristine” landscape?
When you look at the plants that people are trying to grow in certain native landscapes, many of them are just not well adapted to the kinds of environments that we’re creating; on slab, irrigated, not irrigated, too hot, too sunny, no real soil, people blowing away all the organic matter on a regular basis. Maintenance crews I refer to as the “mow, blow, and go” people are also contributing to an aesthetic loss. All of those things contribute to this mess that we’re in. Even if it was perfect, and there was less disturbance, we still wouldn’t really have sufficient diversity to create the kind of sustainable landscapes that everybody’s looking for. So I think there’s a disconnect that we have. Yes, I think we should probably be growing more natives. But there’s a third issue: what is really native?
If it grows on Grouse Mountain, and it doesn’t grow below 1500 meters, is that a native plant in Vancouver? I would argue that it’s not. But my point is often misunderstood. We just don’t understand the genetics of many plants. The Douglas fir that grows here has a different set of genes than the Douglas fir that grows 500 kilometers away. They’re still Douglas fir. But once you start mixing those things up, it’s no longer the same. People talk about restoration, or native gardens, and they really don’t have any idea of just how disturbed our landscapes are. A lot of the biodiversity that we have is non-native. Most of the worms in our soils here are European. They’re not North American. There are very few North American worms. How many other invertebrates are there that we don’t know anything about?
Douglas lecturing in UBC Botanical Garden
Can you share some of the horticultural or botanical research or travel you’ve done throughout your life that has been particularly interesting or influential to you?
I’m very fortunate in having had parents who looked at and talked about the landscape wherever we went. We were always identifying plants, changes in the landscape, changes in the flora, studying what was significant. This helped me develop an eye for plants, for recognizing plants and appreciating their differences. In my early 20s my dad and I traveled to Southeast Asia for four weeks on a kind of botanical expedition. We were just looking at stuff, things that I had already studied in books and could recognize.
Since my teens, I’d studied plants and landscapes. To then travel and see what the cloud forest is like, or the subalpine zone in Borneo, the lowland tropical rainforest in Malaysia and Thailand. I still remember those experiences like they were last week. I got the bug. Really, I’m very, very fortunate. I’ve been to a lot of places: northern South America, the Mexican mountains. All over western Europe, India, China, Japan.
In all of those places, even when doing cultural activities, I’m still looking around for and studying plants. That trip to Southeast Asia really lit a fire in me. Secondly, I spent a year in England, where I worked as a gardener in Windsor Great Park. I was 34 and had a lot of preconceived ideas that I needed to cast aside. I wanted experience that year as something completely new. That was pretty significant. If I go to England now, I try to spend at least some time at Kew Gardens because it’s one of the biggest collections of woody plants in the world. Great Dixter is also always worth a visit. I think that landscape architects need to understand what’s happening in horticulture. Who’s at the forefront of horticulture? That bleeds into design. What Fergus Garrett is doing at Great Dixter, promoting biodiversity, I think, is very much leading the charge. Dan Pearson is a similar figure.
Are you a design enthusiast? Whose work do you admire?
That’s a much harder question. If I see good design, what I’m generally noticing is the use of plants. But I am so lucky, in having the opportunity to meet the principals of firms like Estudio Ome, to walk around the UBC Botanical Garden with them. The Estudio Ome folks were interested, and interesting people with really great ideas. It seems to me, they’re not encumbered by more traditional attitudes. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. It’s just that when traditional attitudes hold you back, then it’s a problem.
Douglas Justice is associate director at UBC Botanical Garden, and an adjunct professor in the School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture at UBC. He also teaches in the Faculty of Science, and the Faculty of Applied Science. His expertise includes but is not limited to botany, taxonomy, garden plants, maple trees, and rhododendrons.