Rebuilding Resilience from the Ground Up: Lessons on Community from Plants

The front yard of a client: A community of plants that fit the conditions of this specific environment, fostering function, habitat and beauty. Nature is in the driver’s seat. 

We loved having Research Fellow Giri Sharma with us over the summer. Giri is an MFA candidate in Design for Sustainability at the Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD).  He approached us in the spring to learn about the approach, process and findings from the work at Indigenous Ingenuities, towards his master’s thesis: “Selling Native Polyculture”. His aim is to build a business case that embraces polyculture in the suburban lawn context to rebuild suburban resilience and provide people with a means of building sustainability in their local neighborhoods.

Giri is a guest contributor to our Field Journal series, and has provided the following reflection and perspective on building and supporting community.

Rebuilding Resilience from the Ground Up: Lessons on Community from Plants

As fundamentally social creatures, community has always served as our place of strength and comfort. Before agriculture, hunter–gatherer bands relied entirely on communal reciprocity for the benefit of the whole – sharing food, caring for children collectively, and protecting the tribe from predators and threats. Ancient agrarian cultures thrived on communal irrigation, harvest rituals, and shared grain storage. Indigenous nations organized themselves through kinship networks, ceremonies, and shared stewardship of land. Europe saw a rise in craft guilds and monastic orders through the Middle Ages, built around collective learning, skill–sharing, and service. In response to the fracturing of traditional bonds through rapid urbanization in the Industrial Age, people rebuilt community through mutual aid societies, labor unions, and neighborhood associations. And now, in the Digital Age, we seek to recreate belonging through both physical and digital modes – social media, forums, online collectives, and open–source collaborations. Regardless of era, we build networks not just to share data, but to share care, support, and belonging.

Interestingly, in their own but very similar ways, plants foster and rely on community for strength, comfort, and collective resilience. The diversity that comes with community allows plants in a polyculture environment (multiple types of plants in a given space) to partition resources efficiently. With each having their own preferences in root depth, amount of light, and type of nutrient uptake, no species dominates in a healthy ecosystem – shared abundance replaces competition. Like neighbors with different gifts and skill sets — teachers, builders, caregivers — plant species collaborate to create conditions for mutual survival. Even internally, plants can be seen as colonies rather than individuals; with their cellular structure and modular design, regrowth and resilience are enabled when faced with loss or crisis. Healthy plant communities steward soil health by building and promoting ecosystem functions like water filtration, air purification, stronger soil structure, and improved water retention. When plants thrive in a healthy community, a balance is fostered through symbiosis and driven by biodiversity between the communities under and above the soil. Rather than one plant stabilizing an ecosystem, it’s the collective functioning that creates stability, resilience, and sustainability.

Regardless of species, it’s clear that community is fundamental to survival and growth. Both ecological and human resilience are born from and sustained by interdependence – through cooperation, diversity, care, and ongoing exchange. In a time when it feels like there are constant crises and ruptures, perhaps we can take a few notes from the plant community on how to repair and rebuild.

I’d argue that the fractures we see in our world today are mirrored in our built environments. The isolation of people echoes the isolation of the plants we cultivate in the verdant desert of manicured, monoculture lawns across American suburbia. Healing begins at the smallest scales – in the ways we tend our environments, our streets, and our soil. And so, if our lawns mirror our values of control and uniformity, they can also become mirrors for care and cooperation. The suburban landscape could be where reconnection quietly takes root.

Suburbia offers an interesting canvas for restoring community. Designed around separation – of people from each other, and of landscapes from their ecosystems – our suburban environments trade resilience for control. The monoculture lawn reflects this trade–off: uniform, contained, and dependent. Rebuilding suburban resilience means restoring the key characteristics that both human and plant communities share – diversity, cooperation, and care for shared environments.

After spending a summer involved with them through a research fellowship, I’ve seen how these traits come alive through the work of Indigenous Ingenuities, located in Doylestown, PA. They are a landscape architecture firm that follows a design+build model, where the same team stays with a project from first sketch to last planting – and often for years afterward through maintenance and care. In addition to a thoughtful and intentional approach to design in accordance with the ecology of each project site, Indigenous Ingenuities looks to utilize local materials and craftsmanship – in essence, building a localized Community of Practice restoring sustainability in both land and relationship for landscape architecture.

In their work, the landscape becomes more than a backdrop – it fosters an active, living relationship between people and place. What Indigenous Ingenuities is modeling in Doylestown is bigger than landscaping; it’s a blueprint for how communities everywhere might begin to rebuild resilience from the ground up.

So where might you start? Reconnection can start small – in how we observe, how we tend, and how we share. Go to a local trail or nature refuge and take five minutes to notice the local life thrumming about. Plant a couple native species where grass once grew. Learn the names of plants and trees in and around your yard. Talk to a neighbor about the birds or bees you’ve seen, or about your planting successes (and failures). The work of rebuilding suburban resilience isn’t distant or abstract; it begins right outside our doors, with what’s right in front of us.

Works Cited

Books

• Adrienne Maree Brown. Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds. AK Press, 2017.

• Yuval Noah Harari. Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. Harper, 2015.

• Stefano Mancuso & Alessandra Viola. Brilliant Green: The Surprising History and Science of Plant Intelligence. Island Press, 2015.

• Robin Wall Kimmerer. Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants. Milkweed Editions, 2020.

Academic Papers

• Crews, Timothy E., Wim Carton, & Lennart Olsson. “Is the Future of Agriculture Perennial? Imperatives and Opportunities to Reinvent Agriculture by Shifting from Annual Monocultures to Perennial Polycultures.” Global Sustainability, 1 (2018): e11.

• Bardgett, Richard D. & Wim H. van der Putten. “Belowground Biodiversity and Ecosystem Functioning.” Nature, 515 (2014): 505–511.

• Spangler, Kaitlyn, Roslynn Brain McCann, & Rafter Sass Ferguson. “(Re-)Defining Permaculture: Perspectives of Permaculture Teachers and Practitioners Across the United States.” Sustainability, 13(10), 5413 (2021).

• Beckwith, Brenda R., Eva M. Johansson, & Valerie J. Huff. “Connecting People, Plants, and Place: A Native Plant Society’s Journey Toward a Community of Practice.” People and Nature, 4(6) (2022).