A park and an experiment.

On a regular basis, Liverpool parks become the subject of a news story in which they are referred to as nature, which all sounds good. The only fly in the ointment is that they are not in the least natural. They are carefully constructed artifices, requiring large amounts of human input to maintain them, to cut the grass and put in the bedding plants.

Nature exists in a dynamic state and the appearance of stasis is an illusion caused by the constant regeneration of the population. The only time nature requires deliberate intervention from humanity is when it is correcting some unintentional intervention. Living in a city divorces people from nature and its cycles. Parks don't address that, they are simply another man-made artefact tuned to human needs; they are not natural and never can be.

How do you introduce people who live in cities to the long time scales of nature and its small scale untidiness and large-scale order? One way would be to take an area of land and let it go back to nature via ecological succession, a process that would take well over 100 years to get to any form of stasis, for a human being or a city this is an almost unimaginable time scale. Someone could be born on the day the process began, live a long and full life before it had finished.

To engage in a process over that timescale a city and it people would have to gain from the process long before it finished; the challenge is not to simply let a piece of land to it own devices but to create a project were nature is run untrammelled and yet humanity benefits in a tangible and immediate way. You also need to do it at a reasonable cost.

First, you need to find a site, one that is not being fully utilised and whose productivity is limited. One site in Liverpool that springs to mind is Grants Garden, a former cemetery which even on bank holidays can be left empty. It is, for the most part, a sterile lawn; no one would countenance development on it, so it is free for our experiment.

Simply turning up in early autumn with a load of herbicide killing everything in sight, then building a fence around the entire thing might be the purest way to go about it but it would have several problems.

The most significant one being the loss of amenity, other than standing on the edges looking in it would provide little to the locals. The other is maintenance, which while none is intended for the contents of the park, the boundaries will require access, as the walls that surround the site on two sides would eventually be undermined by tree roots.

The simplest way to do this is to place some form of a path around the walls, separating them from nature, allowing access and forming a protective cordon for the walls, with the added bonus of providing a public access path.

To increase public access, a path could wind between the two ends, with the meanders separated by enough space that eventual the paths would not be visible from adjacent paths. Something like below.

Fencing would be needed to keep people and their dogs from the nature zone but I suspect until litter picking drones are a thing, people are still going to need access to pick up the blown in pieces of litter.

To start the project we could just kill everything in the park and then let it go. While this would be the purest form, it might not be amenable to people. So after our kill off we plant native bulbs like bluebells, daffodils and lily of the valley, but mainly cover the entire area with native wildflowers. Then we throw away the key and sit back and watch. It will not affect the end state to any significant degree.

While planning this, the university produces projects of what the area will look like over the next 200+ years as each succession progresses. The perimeter path and the serpentine one have cameras located on them to provide for the safety of visitors and to allow everyone to observe the progress.

On their birthday the children of Liverpool go to the park to see how it has changed over the last year. Complete their own year logs of the changes as the wildflowers change to perennials, then to shrubs. Providing an insight into the timescales of nature, for others, it would provide a resource for more academic study and eventually an insight into what prehuman land would have looked like. In addition to this provide a series of quiet walks for locals and an area as close to nature as you can get in a city.

Some reading.

The carbon footprint of urban green space—A life cycle approach