ON THE HILLS AND FARMS THAT FLANK BOTH SIDES OF OTAGO HARBOUR can be found many old stone walls, including on our place, along the old north road overlooking the harbour.
Our stone walls date back to when the first family to farm here, some 140 years ago, set about clearing the land and, needing fencing, made the stone walls to keep stock in. But this process did not start with building the walls, but with felling the forest.
Each of the stones that make up these walls was once wrapped up in the roots of a living tree, before someone felled the tree, and then prised the roots out of the ground with a horse or bullock. Some of the timber was milled, but most was burnt. Then the rocks would be piled up, with those most skilled at stonework rolling, lifting and carefully stacking them on top of each other to form the edge of the fields, which were then sown with grass for pasture.
While today these walls may appear static and silent, it’s easy to sense the very animated and social way they came into being. I imagine the worn hands that held every rock, and the myriad of conversations that surrounded them—discussions about the wall’s direction, its construction and how best to negotiate the challenges of fitting each rock together to make the wall.
Once, a delivery truck nudged the end of one long wall, knocking out some rocks. The resulting gap revealed several beer bottles, likely from a round of drinks to celebrate the completion of this section. I wonder who these people were, and the things they discussed. It is only the wall that now carries that memory.
While we might see a stone wall solely as a physical object, it is equally the expression of a living process in which people and landscape have made their way together. This landscape and these early farmers are part of a dialogue in which both are emerging.[1]
Thirty years ago, when it was my turn to live here, the place was quite run down. Highly marginal as a farm, it had eight cattle, fifty sheep, a flock of feral turkeys, a cattle pen and a small disused milking shed. There was also a large shed clad entirely in flattened 44 gallon drums, no doubt accumulated from when a defunct quarry across the road had still been operating. But rather than agricultural potential, it was the regenerating forest, a spur of old rimu, miro, kahikatea and tōtara, and the views out to Otago Harbour that drew me in.
I sold the animals, removed the old fences and sent the rusted steel Waratahs and wire off to the recyclers. Only the old hand-split tōtara posts were kept.
Elsewhere, I left the land alone. The grass grew, and through it came a rapid invasion of gorse and broom that made a third of the land an impenetrable spiky thicket. Further away from the house, on the steeper slopes, a canopy of native forest had already begun returning, and it was here, with a grubber and handsaw, I spent a lot of my time cutting rough walking tracks through the regenerating forest.
If building the stone walls made up one set of conversations with nature, then these tracks began another set. Their purpose was not to change the forest, but to provide a path into it. I found the passage of time to be the most powerful dimension, as the layering of many walks along those trails allowed me to imperceptibly sense the changes in the land as seedlings grew to what is now a six-metre-tall and still growing canopy, where once it had been a grassy paddock.
Thirty years on, many of the stone walls have been surrounded by broadleaf, kānuka and fuchsia, and now the occasional mataī seedling has emerged to shade out the gorse. Trees are again grabbing hold of these stacked stones, stones that had once before also been buried in the soil. At first they support each other, but already in places the roots are finding weaknesses in the stonework, and in time the walls will topple.
At Stanydale, in the Shetland Islands, is an old stone ruin. Three thousand years ago it had been a temple, and it is possible to work out the rooms and spaces and where the posts stood to support the roof and its extensive beams.
However, this was not a structure brought to the landscape. Rather, the landscape formed it. Its rooms arose out of spaces dug from the ground, its low walls emerging from the stacking of rocks, and the roof crafted from timbers cut from the surrounding forests that once covered these islands. Landscape was the very thing out of which this place of shelter, community and worship had been generated. The architecture wasn't placed on the landscape. Rather, the landscape and the architecture were one and the same.
I had visited the Shetland Islands to stand where my great-grandfather’s family had lived. Entering the derelict stone croft where he had been born, I found it hard to imagine how this one room could have been home to such a large family. Rather than a building, though, it was the hearth that had been the heart of this place. Fed by peat, a partly decaying mix of bog plants that is cut from the soil and left to dry, I was told that for over 200 years the fire in this room had never gone out.
Fire, peat and the bare stone walls of the croft had together witnessed the passage of generations working this land and drawing water from the brook. By the end of the 19th century, this place could no longer sustain the family, as poverty and a lack of prospects forced them to abandon Finegard and travel to Aotearoa New Zealand’s South Island, almost as far away as it is possible to go.
But nature’s social dimension is not limited to past heritage. It can also be an explicit part of the design processes in contemporary landscape architecture and architecture.
Peter Zumthor’s Bruder Klaus Field Chapel in Mechernich, Germany, took multiple seasons to make. Completed in 2007, it drew on construction techniques known by local farmers. Selected trees from the nearby forest were felled and tightly stacked to fill the building’s core. Then a simple formwork was built around these timbers, with tie rods extending through the timber stack to keep the formwork intact and prevent the weight of wet concrete from causing it to burst. Concrete was mixed from the sand and gravels found nearby, then poured in stages, with each layer setting before the next was added.
Once all the concrete had been placed, the formwork was removed to reveal a beach-like ebb and flow of pour lines from each mix of concrete. Then the central timber core around which the concrete had been wrapped was set on fire, with the gap at the top working as a chimney. The tiny chapel space is the remaining void in the building’s centre, a calm reflective space whose walls carry the form and memory of the neighbouring forest.
But the trees and gravels of the chapel create more than a physical space. They also construct its social form, directing the ways the community and local monks gathered and shaped the material to make and now use the chapel. Here landscape and nature are integral to both the chapel’s provenance and ongoing life.
Landscape’s presence extends beyond specific buildings such as these. The clothes we wear, the food we eat and products we use always have landscape and social dimensions. While supply chain processes and the commodification of goods may have removed our capacity to know the specific landscape and communities that the flour in our bread, the cotton in our clothes or the copper in our phone has come from, every piece of our material world has its roots in specific landscapes and waterscapes and the social interactions embedded in them.
Permeating this material world is an orchestra of movements, interactions and discussions that are continuously taking place between nature and people. Tim Ingold uses the analogy of a guitarist and the impossibility of separating the instrument from the hand that plays it and the sound being created. Each are inseparable. While sight makes it easy to break a landscape up into a set of discrete physical objects—a hill, a field, a valley, a river, a path, a tree, a house—it can make us blind to the powerful and always ongoing conversations taking place between ourselves, nature and landscape, and out of which our material and social worlds are generated.
I am sitting in the kitchen of our home writing this, at the threshold between the old building that the first farmers built and the extension we built in 2006. The walls of the old house are made of stone, whose stucco we stripped back to reveal the pieces of rock that had been gathered from the land and skilfully stacked to form the perfectly true two-foot-thick walls. The macrocarpa shelterbelt beside our house was planted by these same farmers. After 120 years of growth, these trees had become giants and in 2002 we felled half of them and had them milled to make the 225-millimetre-square posts, beams and rafters with which to renovate the house and build the extension.
In this house, we are not only surrounded by the tangible presence of the people who built the house and planted the trees, but also by the very landscape in which the trees and all who have lived here have grown older in. It’s all part of an ongoing natural process. Our hands, which cut the macrocarpa timber, made the framing, and lined and roofed the extension, have been added to the hands that built the original house. Our feet walk on the same floorboards and across the wooden hearth of the house’s back door, worn down several centimetres and made smooth from the many thousands of footfalls made before ours, and upon which others are yet to fall.
Like music, this home, this landscape, the stones and timber and the hands and voices of us all are wrapped up in this place. They cannot be separated. This is a place of native forest and stone walls, of farming and milking cows, of shearing sheep, making tracks, and a time now of native forests returning to the land. A place where landscapes and people are changing and being changed together.
