Our terrarium is an assembly of intersecting landscapes, jumbled constructions linking urban, suburban, rural. Each are a construct and serve to square up with property lines, functionality for extraction, organizing population, creating a fragile politic of control and freedom. Liberty is manufactured and fueled by a volatile function formula of fear, hope, us, them, other. Around our house is kentucky bluegrass, a flag of indignation laid over like a blanket of comfort. It is a grasp at control in an effort to keep the wild at a distance. Our incessant pruning and weeding is a choreography of homogenization and radicalization towards familiarity and the mundane. While we punctuate these vistas with monuments small and large it is the landscape itself that is performative, creating oppositional horizons.

You could catalog a library full of offenses, but a prime example of this arbitrary oppression is illustrated in the corporate manifestation of asphalt, cement, mulch, delicate trees buttressed by wire and wooden stakes. A metaphor for the industry at the edge of its lot, false promises of new fortunes. It pushes down, keeps our wilder tendencies from seeping up to the surface. But it also erodes and that is the only promise that will outlast the guarantees of office space. Its minute fissures allow for life to find its home again, veins and arteries of green and silverish brown. And this landscape, the landscape of failed capitalism, is as refreshing and edenistic as we get, undeserved as it is.

The micro-delineations that neighbors perform resetting their own lines of visual interest, are carried out as if there were some difference to be made between the asphalt lined driveways leading to buildings with polygonal roofs. It is as if their choice of non-native species that looked best from a room inside one of those buildings was of any use at all to an organism that is clearly looking toward an existence without the nuisance of humanity continually mucking things up. This of course not to say that mucking things up is unnatural, it is however a condemnation of a species that claims to know better. Ownership, were it not otherwise a vile concept, would at least offer an efficient, if not necessarily always equitable path toward a future that contained humanity. Stewardship is more agreeable in most instances, though it too may be used as reflection of a vision that does not come from the land itself. Nothing is permanent though one need not look past vinca major or kudzu to understand what newness can mean to nativity.