Land Has a Direction

The land around your cottage is going somewhere. That's not the same as purpose, which is a human concept, but direction. Momentum.

Indeed, if we don't intervene, most of the land in cottage country will turn into woodland. It was forest first, then the trees were cut down, and now it's becoming forest again. That's the land's trajectory where we live.

The story might be visible seedling by seedling in one season, but it continues playing out in the years to come. It might be so slow you don't see it if you're not paying attention.

Which is why noticing comes first.

There's a slope behind my house that was left bare after a road was constructed a decade ago. First, there were the colonizing plants, what we might call weeds. They specialize in filling open ground, healing it after it was disturbed. Then came the tangles of raspberries: twisted, thorny, impenetrable. Between them, shrubs appeared: elderberry, dogwood. And now maple and birch saplings are getting bigger. In another ten years, the land will be forest. No one designed this. The land was just going where land goes.

This is ecological succession in action. Land moves from bare to covered, simple to complex, open to closed. It's why yarrow appears on bare earth after construction, or maple seedlings pop up on your septic.

The same is happening all around your cottage. Those weeds at the edge of the driveway, they're Band-Aids to the damage caused by backhoe and gravel. Those plants munched by deer are clues to what will survive browsing, helping us choose plants the herbivores dislike. Even the single plant on the most damaged lot tells you where the land wants to go. And just as importantly, a mass of invasive plants tells you when the land's direction has been hijacked.

We can work with this direction or against it. If we plant something that needs constant intervention, it means we're imposing our desires on the land.

If, on the other hand, we allow plants to settle in, to find where they're most at home and to grow together, we're aligned with a system that gets stronger the longer it goes on.

This isn't easy. We like to come with a plan. We know what we want – and we want to have it. There's plants we love and plants our mother loved so we want them where we want them.

But when we impose, we're setting ourselves up for the stress of permanent conflict. We want one thing, the land wants the other. To win, we're going to have to fight. And keep fighting.

This doesn't mean we do nothing and let nature carry on. That's not always desirable around a cottage you live in. Instead, we're doing things that align with the direction instead of clashing with it. Sometimes that means adding something to help it along – because we've already seen where the land is going. Other times, it means holding succession where we want it, perhaps to create a shrubland of serviceberry and ninebark instead of a forest of maple and beech.

So we start with observation. We walk our land and notice where the water collects or where the sun never reaches. We see what's happily growing without our help. We notice what plants are showing up and settling in. We also see where nothing has ever grown.

All these are clues to where the land is going. There's a relief in this. You don't have to come up with a grand story for your property. You don't have to be some kind of movie director. The story is already there, waiting to be noticed. Your job is to see it and decide if and how you want to participate.

War with the land requires stamina. Not only does it demand effort, constantly forcing the land to take a sharp turn, but it makes our emotional relationship with our property painful. There's a noticeable difference here. When we're fighting, we're on edge; when we're collaborating, something eases.

But starting in alignment is one thing. Staying with it is another.