Becoming attuned: the process of learning to care for a garden
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Elaboration of perceptual learning at Matthaei Botanical Gardens
Two weeks into my summer internship tending a section of Matthaei Botanical Gardens at University of Michigan, I realized that my normal methods for archiving life would not apply to this experience. I didn’t crave words, but some other artistic medium to describe what a day of work feels like. But, all I really know how to use is words, so what resulted was a circumlocution of alternative forms of expression in my SubStack drafts:
I see a shortbread with rhubarb curd baked by a volunteer’s husband and I want it drawn in a gentle style. I want a sketch of Horner Woods. No not Horner Woods, I want a drawing of the tree and the picnic tables nestled within the negative corner of the hort hall kitchen. I want to itemize each skill into a pixelated Stardew Valley award for diligent players. I don’t want a short form video. I don’t know if I want images at all. I want to somehow express what it is to cruise in on my e-bike, campus farm gleaming in the distance, birds loud. I want to pass on the seventh sense of weather that I have attained - it does not include predicting the weather but knowing which activity is best suited to it. I want to archive the exact pace and spatial balance of my thoughts while weeding. I want an industrial operations engineering scan of my movements as I try to plant on a woody slope, avoiding the poison ivy and moving a silicon bucket of water between staged plants. I want my muscles to beam from underneath when activated, imbuing a soft glow. It is all so dynamic and it is all so special and I fear that this paragraph written a fortnight into my time there may be the closest I get to an accurate representation.
Before this point, I lived the academic life, which for college-inclined 21 year olds, is the default life. The academic life meant my body moved predictably in classrooms, coffee shops, and gyms. Default movement in a default life made the transition to an environment that demands varied, novel movement shocking. Straight-shot walks along familiar streets to the lecture hall became a 7-mile-long wooded bike ride to a sprawling set of gardens. I had entered a different world, but not as a mere visitor, rather a steward. “Look, don’t touch” signs do not apply to me.
To care for a natural environment, means to be in perpetual physical contact with it. I share responsibility for the Gaffield Children's Garden, which contains crop beds, swaths of flowers and sedges, a trail in the woods, and an abundance of naturalistic play infrastructure. To learn how to plant, weed, water and prune all these jurisdictions, I did not study formally. It was May and we had to get the plants in and the paths mulched before Memorial Day weekend. Because botanical gardens are governed by the seasons and summer internships typically start in late spring, we had no time to read horticultural texts. The only appropriate thing to do was to start with field work. I struggled to express my experience at the gardens with words, because I was undergoing learning that is not achieved textually, or even orally.
When I first arrived, my supervisor would explain how deep to plant a seed, but that is not where the learning occurs. The learning occurs when you feel how small and gentle they are on your hand and how easily they get lost in the dirt, leaving you wondering where to plant the next one. I am aware of taste, sight, sound, hearing and touch in new and distinct ways, but more than that, the sensory information is immediately relevant to the task at hand. It is not sense for sense’s sake, but sense for the sake of engaging effectively and appropriately with my environment. In my rapid account of ways to express a day at work, I was trying to demonstrate the minimal distance between perception and action, to allude to the context that made being physically in-tune an essential part of doing my job well.
The corporeal nature of learning to care for a garden is embodied most explicitly in life-long horticulturalists, who can not help but weed regardless of where they are or what they are doing: the hand plucks a seedling of its own volition, the shovel-knife is pulled faster than a gun in a duel, and the invasive woody falls before the handsaw-wielding expert informs you of the victim’s identity. A true environmental steward is not someone who observes nature from afar, but someone fundamentally attuned to their immediate surroundings. The type of stewardship engaged in is not entirely independent of human intention –to re-wild, to produce food, to create a look– but if you want that intervention to be effective, the person implementing it needs to be aligned with the natural area as it is. Every morning the other intern and I did a sweep of the garden, and a month into the experience, we stopped needing words, because our whole selves, mind and body, knew what to do with whatever information the space offered us that day. There was no need to study, because everything required to caretake existed in our perception and the garden itself. More than that, I didn’t feel compelled to codify the meaning of my experience with a textual archive. The significance of the work does not lie in this piece or any of my notebooks, it lies in the ground and all that grows from it and the people who come to explore what we have stewarded.
Perceiving meaning according to the assumptions of ecological psychology
On a day-to-day scale I am glad I understood the garden in this way: I like to do good work and the fact that I could instinctively reverse a gator down a wooded path assisted with good work. It was also fun and nature is cool. That said, becoming conscious of how humans become attuned to their environment, outside of the internship, has profound implications for how I will perceive meaning in the future.
At the end of my excerpt above, I was scared I would be unable to properly represent the entirety of my experience, that I would fail to archive it as I should. I was so frustrated by the fact that my words could not measure up to the learning and depth of feeling involved in my summer job that I ordered my favorite childhood graphic novel from the library. Upon rereading Lucy Knisley’s visually-expressed account of her relationship with food, aptly named Relish, I was reminded that I do not have her artistic abilities and am not determined to develop similar ones.1 But, why did I feel loss when I realized that I could not capture my experience perfectly, that I had to settle for circumlocution?
One answer for this question lies in my political science coursework, specifically a quote from Michel Foucault responding to critics about his shifting intellectual opinions:2
“I am no doubt not the only one who writes in order to have no face. Do not ask who I am and do not ask me to remain the same: leave it to our bureaucrats and our police to see that our papers are in order. At least spare us their morality when we write.”
According to this vignette, my instinct to record is the little bureaucrat and police man inside of me, demanding that I itemize my life in nicely ordered ways. Supposedly, I want to write because subjects of the modern nation-state are self-disciplining, even down to our internal psyches. I believe there is some truth to this answer, but it feels a bit too cynical for how nice the weather is and not quite complete. To be able to articulate the type of learning I experienced at the botanical gardens, I did not rely on political theorists, I relied on the thinkers relevant to the advocacy side of my position.
My physical caretaking of the Gaffield Children’s Garden (hereby known as GCG), was only part of the larger frame of my official title as “Nature Play Advocate Intern.” We gardened and stewarded according to ecological function, but we did it so we could provide learning opportunities to the, largely, 0-eight year old participants of the space. We reported not to the horticulture office, but the education team, because the garden is designed first and foremost for play. Relying on prominent play scholar Peter Grey, play is a self-chosen, process-motivated behavior which is guided by mental rules specific to the player.3 Someone who is forced to play is not playing, the means supersede the ends, and there is no such thing as a “right way” to play. For instance, under this definition, it would be debatable whether sports can be categorized as play, because they rely on fixed procedures that dictate the flow of the game.
Nature play is aligned with the botanical garden’s mission statement of “positioning humans as active participants within the natural world” both in terms of in-the-moment behavior and implications of that behavior later in life.4 A meta-study published in 2021 found that nature play has outcomes in childhood, which are strong benchmarks for values, attitudes, and behaviors surrounding sustainability in adulthood.5 Put simply, nature play can be a key early childhood behavior in developing a strong connection to nature, and nature connection is associated with pro-earth behaviors.6 As a person generally concerned with the future of the world, I am aligned with a pedagogy that fosters sustainability. More than that, “nature play” has deep intellectual tap roots beyond its socially desirable outcomes that can help us think through human psychology at large.
The roadmap I will be relaying is provided by professor emerita of environmental design, Louise Chawla, who is a leader at the intersection between youth and nature, having worked at the level of city, nation, and world to coordinate sustainability programs focused on the next generation.7 In a lecture with the Stockholm Resilience Centre, she introduces the theory behind her work by asking how do you live well?8 She refers to Aristotle’s answer that developing our human capabilities is the foundation of a good life and equivalent to the act of flourishing. Therefore, play in the outdoor world is what allows children to develop a myriad of capabilities that contemporary philosopher Martha Nussbaum puts as central such as bodily integrity and social affiliation. This framing makes a clear ethical justification for nature play that goes beyond the obvious public good of sustainably minded-people who collectively mitigate climate instability. According to Chawla, engaging in the behaviors that result in a sincere relationship with the earth also leads to The Good Life where you get to experience the full extent of your capabilities.
At this stage of the slide deck, capabilities are understood to be good and nature play is categorized as a means to capabilities, but we are still missing an understanding of human psychology that makes the learning model underpinning nature play coherent. Chawla moves to the next set of clearly elucidated bullet points with her position as an ecological psychologist, following in the tradition of a J. J. Gibson.
J.J. Gibson developed ecological psychology in the mid and late 20th century, when cognitivism and behaviorism and otherisms were in active dialogue with each other about how the human mind operates and impacts people’s behavior.9 Without going too deep into the isms, strict behaviorism denies cognition as a factor in people’s actions. The animal in a behaviorist model acts according to external stimuli: a child that receives candy stays quiet, a mouse will keep pressing the button that gives them a pleasant electric shock, and an adult will return to the slot machine for the inconsistent thrill of winning. We are beholden to stimuli that each make us do this one thing even if we think we are choosing our reaction to the stimulus.10
Part of behaviorism’s approach came from methodological limitations. Behavior was the object of study, because it could be observed, unlike the brain. Cognitivism emerged arguing that we should theorize mental states, even if they can not be as directly studied. A cognitivist may compare the design of the brain to that of a computer. The brain structure itself is the hardware, while the mental processes are the software. These mental processes include the storing, categorizing, and manipulating of inputs into a larger knowledge system. As a consequence of this internal focus, the field moved away from studying behavior and the surrounding environment as fundamental to human psychology.11
This is where environmental psychology comes in, not as a mix of the two approaches, but one that diverges due to its claim that what matters to human behavior is the information provided by our environments, not the behaviors forced upon us by our environments or how information is processed internally. Below is a transcript of how Chawla introduces the framework:
“The world is not a neutral unstructured ground... it’s not just time and space on which we impose our human values and our senses of sensations. That it is a world that’s already full of value, and meaning and structure and what we do is we learn what to detect and what to select… So we detect information directly, this is actually very radical, most psychologists will not say this. They will say that this all goes into our computer up here and gets processed and that’s how we experience the world. But James and Gibson said no… we are born able to detect certain kinds of information and we learn what to select out of all that.”
Chawla’s academically-based, somewhat off-the-cuff articulation, boils down to the most central point of the learning theory at hand: it is, in fact, not all in your head. I came to the gardens without basically any mental representations of horticulture, yet I became attuned. I learned to directly perceive aspects of my environment relevant to my aims. Information about my surroundings entered my mind directly and I acted upon it, without needing to consciously enrich or integrate it. That is not to say that I never formed helpful cognitive associations, but the bulk of learning occurred through seeing, feeling, touching my world just as it is. More than that, I had a choice in how to care and steward, I was not simply meandering around a mine field of stimuli that would trigger xyz response. The garden and the GCG team were in a relationship of sorts, navigating decision points according to prior interactions between us and the tenacious mint, us and the struggling cucumbers, us and storm-instigated gravel washout.12
But beyond illuminating my learning experience, this claim of direct perception unsettled larger beliefs I had about the burden of choice available to us in interpreting our world. A piece of writing that I have treated like gospel since sophomore year of high school is David Foster Wallace’s commencement speech “This is Water.”13 The central imperative to his soon-to-be-graduating-college audience is to “really learn how to pay attention,” because then you will not be subject to the pessimistic unconscious mind that is enabled by a power-hungry society. He calls the tendency to believe all is bad with the world our “default settings.” He describes a hypothetical post-work grocery trip as a career professional to illuminate this facet of human nature, warning the audience that there will be people and things in the store who will seem utterly deplorable in light of your hunger and fatigue. One aggravating character in his story is a mother wearing too much make up screaming at her kid in the checkout aisle. In this scenario, he advises you to imagine her as someone else: a worn out care-giver or bureaucratic saint on her last straw. He acknowledges that this is not likely, but is part of the larger work of considering realities that are not totally miserable.
That said, the consideration of alternative realities is not what I would describe as paying attention. I would describe Foster’s approach as playing pretend, something that can have value, but is maybe not a sustainable response to seeing things in the world that make you sad. It comes from a belief that our modern social environment is fundamentally corrupted by money and power in such a way that our default perception of the world is deeply harmful to our psyches. You can not trust the world in front of you, you can not trust yourself, and you must be disciplined in creating a mental sidebar to reality that is more hopeful, more altruistic:
“The only thing that’s capital-T True is that you get to decide how you’re gonna try to see it. This, I submit, is the freedom of a real education, of learning how to be well-adjusted. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn’t. You get to decide what to worship.”
Foster is not detecting his world and selecting environmental information to act on as a full embodied person. He is enriching his sensory information with images of a counterfactual world to provide some internal peace. He is far from the environmental psychologist who will say that meaning is not something you decide, but find, in the structural conditions of the world around you. I cited Foster’s fable of the hellish consumer-type situation in my high school graduation speech, arguing that during covid, we lost the ability to form meaning out of these seemingly mundane and annoying interactions. The camaraderie created by being in the same building day-in day-out was taken from us, and so I tried to draw attention to the moments when students (who definitely would not have hung out socially) laughed at the same classroom gimmick or indulged in the same silly debate. Although I was sympathetic to Foster in the speech, I realize now that I was more preoccupied with real-life opportunities for socialization than the nuances of cognitively constructing meaning.
Four years after reading This is Water for the first time, I had a friend tell me that I am someone with many mental guardrails. I think guardrails is the right word, because it implies that if they fall, you are bound to careen off into the abyss. I was panicked by my inability to memorialize my experience at the botanical gardens, because I thought that my mind held the burden of subjectively deciding over and over again what is true and good and bad. Writing served as a way to reinforce what is true and good and bad and protect myself from a fundamentally senseless world. I am glad to say that I think I am wrong. Internal vigilance is not the answer. Directing my perception to the things that occupy my day –my job, my relationships, my home– is sufficient for locating a grounded ethics. I need not impose, only be, and embrace the beauty of ecological constraints.
Lucy Knisley, Relish : My Life in the Kitchen. (2013).
Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge (Harper & Row, 1976).
Peter Gray, “#2. What Exactly Is Play?,” Substack newsletter, Play Makes Us Human, April 25, 2023,
“About Us,” Matthaei Botanical Gardens and Nichols Arboretum, https://mbgna.umich.edu/about.
Julie Ernst et al., “Contributions to Sustainability through Young Children’s Nature Play: A Systematic Review,” Sustainability 13, no. 13 (2021): 7443, https://doi.org/10.3390/su13137443.
Louise Chawla, “Childhood Nature Connection and Constructive Hope: A Review of Research on Connecting with Nature and Coping with Environmental Loss,” People and Nature 2, no. 3 (2020): 619–42, https://doi.org/10.1002/pan3.10128.
“Louise Chawla | Community Engagement, Design and Research Center (CEDaR),” University of Colorado Boulder, https://www.colorado.edu/cedar/people/louise-chawla.
Louise Chawla: Engaging Children and Youth as Agents for Sustainability, directed by Stockholm Resilience Centre, 2018, 01:09:17,
Lorena Lobo et al., “The History and Philosophy of Ecological Psychology,” Frontiers in Psychology 9 (November 2018): 2228, https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.02228.
This footnote is not dedicated to a formal source, but Mr. Pastor from high school AP Psychology. I remember the course content to this day, alongside fellow high school alumni. We remain amazed at the consistency and thoroughness of his instruction even as we approach college graduation.
Céleste Codington-Lacerte, “Cognitivism (Psychology),” EBSCO, EBSCO Research Starters, 2024, https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/psychology/cognitivism-psychology.
I want to thank Lee Smith Bravender and Sarah Lee; this articulation would not be possible without our work.
David Foster Wallace, This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life (Little, Brown and Company, 2009).