Figure and Ground

This time of year, you’ll see gardeners at nurseries pulling carts of plumped perennials, often one or two each of different species or varieties.  You can also watch walkers now in Vashon’s woods stopping to look at a particular tree or shrub, then walking on to the next one that catches their eye.  Being around individual plants as they begin their spring cycle is an enduring joy.

Evolutionary scientists remark on how good human beings are at this kind of attention to a single item set against a backdrop that we block out to heighten our focus.  You may have noticed the way you view a painting, as an example.  Odds are you take in the whole canvas at a glance, then quickly look for an area of focus.  We’re wired by survival needs to prioritize local over global information.

What’s left out, though, when we follow this instinct alone?  The other great need of ours:  to take in the big picture.  Evolution has also trained us to take in the broader view, discovering patterns in large visual data.  When we can’t make out any patterns, we feel discomfort.  (Being lost in the woods is so intensely discomforting because we can’t find the patterns we need to get back out.)  In contrast, when we can discern patterns in our settings, we often feel excitement and pleasure.

So, as much fun as it is to pick out one individual beauty after another during the spring nursery visit described above, if you want a pleasing garden, you’d be better off buying many specimens (individual plants) of very few species.  This allows you to plant in patterns.  If you buy instead lots of different species of plants, you’ll end up polka-dotting your planting area with them, producing few patterns.

The same principles apply to the pleasures you can get walking through the woods.  As endlessly fascinating as it can be to study, say, the blossom patterns of a single Big leaf maple, you’re losing out if you regard the woods as nothing other than a collection of various specimens.  It can add to the pleasure immensely to look for larger patterns too.

One big-picture item to look for in the woods:  the pattern of settlement—that is, the arrangement of trees, shrubs, insects, and so on, as distinct groups or as a whole.  What explains the way plants and animals have organized your particular setting?  Another pattern worth study is the distribution of forest organisms by age, although detecting age can be tricky, since size, the most obvious data set, isn’t necessarily an indicator of age.  (The trickiness only adds to the fun.)  Studying the forest-floor topography can reveal patterns in what seemed to be random shapes initially.  Biggest pattern of all, with the biggest payoff in pleasure and knowledge:  the overall ecology of the landscape you’re walking.