EL LARSON
Often the approach to design involves impressing our will onto the land while Studio Petrichor is defined by themes of relationship, co-creation, reintegration. Can you tell me how you both got to this place?
LEIGH ADAMS
This is a fire story, ‘the life after fire.’ My first life after fire started 46 years ago in the Mojave Desert with a massive fire destroying my property while enormously pregnant with my first child. I envisioned coming out on weekends so he could do things that are normal for kids to do that you can't do in town, and learn about nature firsthand. We hadn't built a cabin, the land was too beautiful, and then there was the fire – it was so devastating, but we still camped there.
The scene looked like a post-apocalypse landscape with burnt out Tim Burton-style trees, a black and white image on my beautiful, green high desert landscape. The manzanitas, the pine trees, the Joshua trees – everything was just ash, and I couldn't let myself go down a hole and affect my pregnancy. So I used karate skills and pregnancy weight and I cut, chopped or kicked down every standing burnt up cholla, juniper and manzanita. My hunting dog brought in rocks as gifts, sometimes so big that her hind legs went up in the air as she walked. Soon after, I had an almost 10 pound baby boy.
Within two months, I was taking him to the desert and began arranging the charred things I'd kicked down and broken off so the debris wouldn't just be a ghost of what had been there. I arranged the branches and stones in patterns honoring the plants that had been. The dog had offered the rocks, so I incorporated them, and I did “Andy Goldsworthy” – before he went to school and became Andy Goldsworthy.
Thirteen years or so passed, we had built a cabin because we weren't afraid of destroying the wilderness anymore, and a close friend and neighbor in the desert offered to fly me to our land one weekend. Soon we were flying over an incredibly beautiful desert that looked like an irrigated farm. There was a stark divide between where I'd created my patterns from charred plants and, unwittingly, returned carbon to nourish the soil. Blowing debris (more carbon) was trapped and attracted animals to make their homes. There was carbon, feces and urine, and more water that built up in those areas. The manzanitas, the junipers, baby pines, and the Joshua trees had re-sprouted. Not where I didn't do it, but where I did.
I reverse-engineered what I had done. I learned the physics of temperature differential and all the things that cause moisture to condense out of the air, capillary action of the plants, of the wood – all of it came together. And then I learned about hügelkultur and realized that's what I had done. It's not an artificial form, it's biomimicry at its finest.
The test came 20 years later with the next firestorm. The fire came up the valley, just as it had done before, split at my land and went around my cabin, not burning it because of the greenery that was there. Everybody else's place was gone. One neighbor's house was saved from the fire splitting around my house.
SHAWN
I'd been trained in modern-day landscape architecture and design. Growing up, I was exposed to lawns, mowing and weeding – collectively we are conditioned through very control-based practices. Leigh had to continue to loosen me up, “Go sit in the mulch. Go sit in the mulch.” “I'll sit in the mulch when I'm goddamn ready,” and when I finally did – oh, my god.
I was living in Studio City at the time and saw Altadena on a Theodore Payne garden tour. I said to my husband Robert, “Oh my god, I love it here.” Altadena was always on my mind, nowhere else. And the universe just found us there, we got the first house we ever looked at. I was made aware that we are in a high risk fire zone, so I would sit out in the front yard and contemplate. I know our prevailing winds are coming from the northeast, moving southwest, very powerful winds. So I imagined fire on those mountains multiple times. Six years ago, I was already preparing for this.
Leigh came over and we started to collaborate and play with hügelkultur. We buried some wood in the front, and the hügel was all right angles, and straight lines. And she's like, “Can you just add a few curves to it?” Begrudgingly…Okay, I'll add a couple curves.
LEIGH
My mission on the planet is to warp the Roman Grid.
EL
What are some of the most critical landscape elements or design features you recommend for ecotone areas that will support residents and natural habitat, both in general and in the wake of the recent fires?
SHAWN
I'm listening to what all these different resources are saying about fire and “fuel modification.” You mean vegetation modification, you mean nature modification. That's essentially what they're saying, right? Nature modification plans. How about “Nature Collaboration Plans?”
LEIGH
The ideal is a living system where there's water harvesting and the collaborative hügelkultur next to it, feeding one another, taking care of one another, and that system grows over years and years. The mycelium growing from the hügel goes into the bioswale and vice versa – what we call collateral advantage. Not just the benefits of the hügel or the bio swale, but both, and the mycorrhizal fungi spread those benefits all around. Fruit trees that have been there for 20 years are suddenly doing very well. They're getting nutrients and moisture from this system.
SHAWN
Hügelkultur makes sense, and is part of a much larger story and system. It’s replicating what would happen in a flood plain, or forest. I harvest water to support the massive trees on the property, and plant native plants. Of course, the taller plants are going to be towards the periphery, and the shorter plants closer to the house, generally following the ‘fuel modification' plan with the exception of the five-to-seven-foot gravel setback around the structure. I planted coffeeberry and other plants right up against my house, but there are certain plants like grasses that are dry, not full of water, that you wouldn’t plant near the house. We also had an 85 year old podocarpus right up against the north east side of the house that the insurance company wanted us to cut down.
During COVID we held workshops doing Shou Sugi Ban charring and built fences with the intention that it would maybe be fire resistant, weatherproof, bug resistant, and water resistant. We put up roof sprinklers, and were starting to think about the whole system because the house was ill prepared. The fences that aren't Shou Sugi Ban were ill prepared. The remodeled office/ garage (just eight feet from the house that burned) and Shou Sugi Ban fence were barely touched by the fire. Our property is an example of what it can look like to slow fire down. It didn't stop the fire, but the garden is in full bloom. The roof sprinklers wet down the mulch, they wet down the plants.
Could there be community groups saying, “Hey, it's that time of the year. Make sure you keep the mulch off of your roof and out of your gutters, and remember to move it around your garden. Give everything a good soak.” You can see that it becomes a community responsibility and not a government responsibility, and within that community, it takes a group of 10 people to say, “Hey, you got your shit in order?” Because your neighbor who doesn't, could impact the fact that your house burns a fence causing a domino effect: burning fence meets house, burning house, burning fence, burning house.
What if fences were hedgerows? Welded wire mesh in post and beam style fencing so the hedges could grow through, and you have beautiful hedgerows that support pollinators and birds, and are still fire adapted.
There's no need to redesign Altadena. And there is an opportunity to regenerate Altadena. There is a need to design better houses and better property lines and connectors, and there's a need for education and empowerment and encouragement. Those are the needs. And that is why I feel like we're here. All of this has led up to this next chapter of post-fire awareness, “Perspectives from within the firestorm,” and what it could mean to be an Ecotoner. Whether it's Altadena, Pasadena, La Cañada, the Palisades – wherever you live at the Urban Wildland Interface, there's a sacred responsibility to collaborate with the elements. The land, the fire, the water – all of it.
LEIGH
This place had water. There were thousands of people living here with water until our roadways and our construction cut things off, blocked them, stopped the flow, then sped up the river to get rid of the water. There's so many things we've done that interrupted the natural living systems that were here.
SHAWN
All of those plants and geologic formations have taken millions of years to be put in place, evolved in place, emerged in place – whatever you want to say. But they were slowing the water down. Now we build streets – speeding water up. We build houses – speeding water up, and slowing down the natural processes. So looking back at our landscapes, we harvest water off the roof. Is it possible to harvest off the street? In certain situations with Parkway Drains, it’s absolutely slowing the water down, keeping it in the ground for the plants, the trees, most importantly, and large shrubs, that are potential ember stoppers. I came to Altadena for the trees.
EL & LEIGH
I came to Altadena for the trees.
SHAWN
And trees are being destroyed as we speak. People think vegetation is the enemy. When you think about the wild edge of the urban-wildland interface and it meets fence line and lawn, and you multiply that times thousands along that edge, it is asking for fire to come and take. Whereas if we start to mimic what is happening just over that fence in the most basic form, slowly but surely that trickle-down effect is going to start feeding the soil, help water infiltrate and build up good tree canopy – those oaks and the deodar cedars, the pine trees that were singed but are standing.
Those Italian cypresses are torches just waiting to ignite. Their arms are upright, they drop their branches and debris collects. My husband saw one of those go up – in three minutes it was gone. It's not the vegetation that's the enemy, but it's specific vegetation we want to look at.
LEIGH
We keep being told how trees are catching homes on fire, and in our experience, it's exactly the opposite. It depends on the tree and hydration, but Shawn has video of a tree in front of his house being burned by the burning house, not the other way around.
SHAWN
So to encapsulate it from A to Z – you look at what's going on in the greater environment, in the natural environment, and you seek to apply what is working in the natural environment to people's yards in some way.
EL
Can you share more about the responsibility of living in the ecotone/ wildland-urban interface?
SHAWN
If Los Angeles started on Bunker Hill, there was an ecotone right there. If there was one house in the woods, there's an ecotone – you cannot escape it. You can push it further away through sprawl. You can decimate the nature that was there, the wild that was there, but you're just pushing. How far is Nature going to let you push before she sends reinforcements?
There's a fear of nature that has been residing with humanity for long enough that there are folks who have only known the urban environment. When we teach a class, it's like, “Are we here to learn how to design a regenerative garden because we're scared of climate change, because we're scared of biodiversity loss, or do I fucking love sage?” We (ecotoners) are the buffer, we are the bridge. We have the potential to care for and be the access point from urban to wild, because people want to come up to the wilderness and then go home, but when they pass back through us, there's a forgetting that happens.
LEIGH
We marvel at nature while hiking and on vacations in wilderness or ecotones, and we marvel that we see this beautiful scape. Then we come back home and see the land divided up into little blocks of private land saturated with water, when we could have that same beautiful greenery right here without stealing water from everyone else to keep a lawn and exotics alive.
SHAWN
Where's the disconnect? As soon as we leave the ecotone and GO into the wilderness we're like, “Oh, it feels so good. I'm getting my fitness” and, “Oh, there's a pretty plant. It’s so gorgeous out today.” But then we go home and “Oh, my lawn is looking really brown right now. I have to water it.” We love nature ‘there,’ but not ‘here.’
LEIGH
Birds, pollinators, supporting nature, is not what we're doing in dominant culture. That is where we (Studio Petrichor) come from, supporting living systems.
Going back to what made us feel that these right angles and straight lines are imposing control and showing that we're in charge, as Shawn says, it's definitely a fear based thing. Those right angles make great photographs for the designer or architect who walks away and is not part of a living system.
A question for the world, how much control do you need? Do you need that much control that you make shrubs look like suppositories and loaves of bread? Isn't that giving away a clue as to what your problem is, a rectal cranial inversion?
SHAWN
Failure to honor water, soil, fire, the elements; measuring our work by the end product of the control, the building, the ‘stuff.’ If I were to grab two or three landscape architecture magazines, any of them – all you see is control and covered up nature. Even the ones that call themselves ‘habitat restoration,’ you won't see too many of those on the cover because they don't show enough design. They don't show enough manipulation.
How many times has Pershing Square been scraped and redesigned? How many times have we done this over and over and over, versus, “We can remove this asphalt, schools. Let's remove this concrete. Let's break it up and let's see what happens, and break up more, fragment it, and allow the water to return to the soil and see what happens.”
EL
When you begin to host events and workshops again, what type of programming are you most compelled to offer?
SHAWN
Rather than doing a formal 10-person workshop, through our non profit Poly/Ana, we’d like to get funding to do landscape design classes where those affected by the fire who want to work with their land while their house is being rebuilt can design their garden. We’ll show you how to do it with your body, a piece of paper, taking photos and doing it with your community – having conversations and saying, “Can I get a group of people to do this at my house?” All right, let's give you the template to do that.
We had a Landscape Architecture student here today interested in doing a summer internship, so we did a 15 minute somatic hydrology study with her.
EL Please explain somatic hydrology, because I know what somatic is, and what hydrology is.
SHAWN
Using your body and your senses to follow water. I'm writing this curriculum thinking, “Oh, this is going to sound so stupid.” And people are like, “Oh my god, I can't believe this makes sense.”
I said, ”let's follow the water – where is the water going? In grading and drainage you learn about ridges and swales. Where are the ridges and where are the swales?” We're going through the process and you could see the wheels turning.
EL
And that follows what we're talking about with the Roman grid versus curves. So again, controlling versus working with. Following water, what is the nature of water? What is the natural action of water?
LEIGH
It flows!
SHAWN
If we need to incorporate some right angle piping or drainage patterns in here to get it back to the curve, then so be it. But the way this house was situated, seeing the topography is higher across the street, and moving down towards the Arroyo. Water is naturally running right to the front door. And the way that the lawn has thatched up over here basically created a lake after heavy rain. We absolutely need to relieve this watershed and move it to the back, right?
LEIGH
It was great to see people who hadn't done that with us before just be stunned – she wanted to make notes or drawings – I said, “No, feel it. Where does the water flow?” She had no idea what we were talking about, she had no frame of reference for feeling what the water does. Feel – it doesn't make right angles, it doesn't make straight lines. It flows. It's a dance, it's not a drawing – it's grace and movement. That's what water is naturally, that we have confined to pipes and lines, and gutters and drains that show we have control over this space.
SHAWN
You're expected to look at a topographic map. The surveyor brought me this plan, I said “So you believe that these topo lines are completely accurate on site?” This is a great tool, you want to bring it to the site, and you also want to mark these conditions that don't match. The water is flooding right here, there's a ridge that's not noted, we might just cut this down a little bit, or maybe that's where the rain garden goes.
EL
Again, that’s this idea of relationship. Because if you're just looking at a topo map, your relationship is with that piece of paper instead of looking at the land and seeing what's actually happening there.
LEIGH
What we're trained to do by dominant culture is to accept a plan, impose that on the land and change the land in order to fit this plan. And yet, we need to start with the exact opposite. What does the land support and how does it support it, and how can we move within that framework to create a better site for both a living space and a garden space?