The stories we tell
Abode’s Landscape architecture expert Tony Milne, of Rough and Milne Landscape Architects, muses on the role of storytelling in design.
English filmmaker Sir Ridley Scott once said, “I’m a yarn teller. My job is to engage you as much as I can and as often as I can”.
As landscape architects, we have an excellent opportunity to play the storyteller, to develop a narrative, to engage, to educate and to create a meaningful design response. To enrich a design, it needs a story – a collective and inclusive story.
I wrote last time of hanging the calico-wrapped Christmas puddings. The puddings are something I have made for the extended family since Nana’s passing in 2006. It was the Christmas prior that I received an invitation to join her in the making of the plum duffs. Perhaps she felt it in her bones.
We made the duffs with one ear to the night trots from Addington on the wireless, and one eye on the Black Caps playing Australia. The well-worn teaspoon, crockery cup and pot from that evening are still in use today. Within this mix of seasonal fruitiness, there is a story.
The fact that some years they are moist and others a little dry, well that's another story. A yarn also resides in the new home of my good friends Shakey and Carmel Hooper. Shakey is an arborist and pretty handy with a chainsaw, but it is the unexpected centrepiece in their lounge that hints at the delightful story sawn through the interior of their home.
Attached with dowel to an internal wall, is a substantial slice through the trunk of a magnificent Sequoiadendron giganteum or redwood. Not your typical piece of art, it was born of a lumberjack’s frustration. Each time he drove past this former giant of our city, at that time standing naked on a city street, he couldn’t bear to see such nobility brought to its knees in favour of an unresponsive architectural form.
One day he stopped and politely suggested he could finish the task. Carefully felled and now painstakingly pieced together on the wall, the lumberjack is only too happy to share his story. But he doesn’t need to, and those that know Shakey, they would know that his usual modus operandi is typically to exercise a strict economy of words. Less is always more.
The growth or ‘annual’ rings draw you in, you can count 130, and you realise this cross-section could tell a tale or two. The distance between the rings suggests a lot more than 130 years of life. A little like chirology, there is plenty of meaning behind and between the lines.
To explain, the cambium of most trees growing in temperate climes, generally ‘awaken’ with the new growing season to form a growth ring of wood and bark. The closer the lines, the tougher those years. A time of survival rather than sustained growth. The further apart, a time of majestic growth. And one should always be wary of a possible false ring.
I found myself counting back, trying to reconcile the pattern of the rings with my memory. Could there be a correlation between the years of close growth rings and the slightly drier plum duffs? Perhaps, I suggest, the blame for my poor baking skills could fall to the prevailing environmental conditions.
Who would have thought a slab of a tree trunk could elicit such an engaging yarn; a yarn that is specific and responsive to the viewer. There is a skill in being able to articulate a meaningful design response. Who needs an HB pencil when you can use a chainsaw?
The silence of the Sequoia slice speaks volumes if one stops to ponder, read and listen.
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