Harvesting Rainbows Amidst Smoky Skies: The Origin & Intentions of Woollypod Design

I spent the winter of 2019-2020 in my childhood home, reflecting on all of the ecological knowledge I had gained from my experience in Lost Valley Educational Center’s Holistic Sustainability Semester. At first I was energized by the communal life and varied experiences I had in the program, but that wore off and I found myself isolated in my hometown, most of my high school friends off to college. I grew restless and hoped to leave again on a series of adventures I had planned for my gap year between high school and college, but then the pandemic cancelled the first experiences I had planned, and my chance of leaving town seemed further and further off.

To keep myself busy and make use of my gap year somehow, I began to turn to the ecology all around me. I realized that despite spending most of my life in Eastern Washington’s shrub steppe, I knew hardly a thing about its ecology – its native plants and animals, the biotic crust that covered the ground or the lichens that brought vibrant splashes of yellow and orange to the region’s iconic dark basalt. I also was able to see the town and city planning with new eyes, which brought me a lot of frustration; having learned about the possibilities of design of human infrastructure – how plants could be chosen to sustain human life and the life of other animals in tandem, how runoff flows could be directed to grow gardens with minimal input, how beautiful houses could be built of materials as low-carbon as dirt – the majority of the design I saw in the shrub steppe seemed foolish and, worse, destructive.

I found inspiration for my design, solace from that frustration, and connection in a period of profound isolation for many of us in the shrub steppe habitat that had been all around me my whole life. I began to learn the plants of the shrub steppe with the help of some useful guides and decided that I would occupy my time at home with designing a native plant garden to build upon what I had learned at Lost Valley. I went through several design iterations, reworking the designs as I learned more about the native plants of the shrub steppe and their needs (the plant communities list at the back of Ronald J. Taylor’s Sagebrush Country was invaluable for this).

As fall, the planting season, neared, I began to put my designs into action with the help of my parents in the front yard of my childhood home. My first quarter at the University of Washington began, and I spent much of my time drawing for architecture class and worrying about my drawing abilities. However, I devoted most of my extra time to the native plant garden. Smoke from fires raging in habitats throughout the west coast blew into my hometown and lingered for weeks as I dug pits to amend the soil for planting and dug the rainwater harvesting bed in my heritage garden. I remember the long hours spent in that smoky twilight, swinging my pickaxe and shoveling dirt.

Having the power to grow something that feels right when surrounded by a reminder of all that’s going wrong in our society made a lot of difference for me. While the smoky sky that stayed day after day was a constant reminder of the worsening impacts of settler-colonial mismanagement of lands stolen from Indigenous peoples and a warming climate caused by a destructive society that puts profit above our own wellbeing, my ability to grow a garden was a way I felt empowered to live a different way, however small.

I have no illusion that landscape design alone can save the world, or that the large-scale systems of consumption and waste that drive exploitation and wars will be stopped if we all rip up our lawns and plant native plants. But I know that my work can be part of a change toward a more ecological and loving society. I aim to design landscapes that can support the fauna of the shrub steppe, provide space for communities to gather, and educate people about our native habitat, local history, and our ability to have a different, more regenerative relationship with our local ecology.

While the COVID19 pandemic cancelled my travel plans in 2020, I was able to go to many of the places I had planned to visit in 2021, most notably the Southwest US, which is full of design inspiration for the shrub steppe of Eastern Washington (I’ll write more about this trip eventually). One of my favorite places there was the Dunbar/Spring neighborhood in Tucson, Arizona, where Brad Lancaster helped spark a transformation toward rainwater-harvesting, native plant-centric design. Here I saw a community that was actively striving to live more ecologically, but their efforts didn’t begin and end with gardening. Little free libraries dotted the neighborhood, and signs supporting various social causes were visible in many lawns. The Dunbar/Spring Neighborhood Foresters host events to care for their neighborhood as a community, and this includes harvesting parties that bring the abundance of native food to the neighborhood. I hope that my work can mirror that; connected, more impactful because of the ways it exists in community and collaboration with others.

My shrub steppe design journey has already brought me new connections, and I’m glad to be in this native plant community with many other inspiring designers, artists, plant propagators, and plant nerds. When I began to research shrub steppe and dryland ecological design, it was very difficult to find resources about this budding field. I hope that Woollypod Design can make that process easier for people just learning about shrub steppe ecological design (toward that aim I’ve created an extensive list of resources), and I hope to share the results of my own experiments here. I decided to title my blog Seeding Sustainability, mostly to connect it to ‘Woollypod Design’ – however, I hope this blog and platform will be a worthy contribution toward ecological society in the shrub steppe.

As part of my 2021 travels in the Southwest US, I visited the Greater World Earthship Community for Earthship Academy (the topic of another future blog post). There, Earthship visionary Michael Reynolds shared a phrase of his, ‘harvesting rainbows’. I forget exactly how he described it, but to me it envisions the joys of ecological life; we can harvest water and food from the earth, but connection with the earth brings more than sustenance; it brings joy and wonder. The native garden I worked to create in 2020 was a salve to my ecological grief and fear, my own way of harvesting rainbows. I hope my design efforts can cultivate that solace and joy in others through growing our societal connection with our native habitat.