Steyn Viljoen

The lush atmospheric setting Ocean stages invites the listener to build on it with even more connections and associations from their own experiences and to find their own feelings in the images that arise. Some might call this concatenation of elements a “vibe”: something that’s difficult to pin down precisely in words but that’s evoked by a loose... See more

As a writer, I find gardens essential to the creative process; as a physician, I take my patients to gardens whenever possible. All of us have had the experience of wandering through a lush garden or a timeless desert, walking by a river or an ocean, or climbing a mountain and finding ourselves simultaneously calmed and reinvigorated, engaged in... See more

Just as someone with iron deficiency anemia craves ice (“pica”), I crave texture.

We’re more interested in beauty as an emergent property. We want new ways of understanding beauty, and we’re increasingly rooting them in our ethics. We want to encourage the beauty found in the aliveness, or the kindness, or the gentleness of what we do as landscape makers. How things look, in this view, is slightly less important.

Following this logic, our brains reward a kept garden because it staves off wilderness, because in the wilderness there is death, and thus by keeping nature controlled and orderly, we keep death away.

Landscape maintenance is, therefore, an exercise of fear.

“I cannot say exactly how nature exerts its calming and organizing effects on our brains,” the poetic neurologist Oliver Sacks wrote in the dawning years of the twenty-first century, “but I have seen in my patients the restorative and healing powers of nature and gardens, even for those who are deeply disabled neurologically.”

That linear time is a method of colonial control is perhaps the greatest lesson to be learned in the fight to undo the horrors of capitalism. Before imperialists descended on the United States, there were no clocks. No second hands tick tick ticking our lives away. These are constructions that whiteness created to ensure our lives were ruled by the... See more

So, to create something truly alive and nourishing, we must be willing to immerse ourselves in the rich, fertile soil of our own humanity – the depths of our emotions, experiences, and connections to the world around us.