Steyn Viljoen

However, as I crossed the threshold, excitement gave way to disappointment. Instead of feeling connected to the natural world, I found myself strangely isolated within the confines of the glass walls. The minimalist aesthetic that I had admired from afar now felt cold and impersonal up close.

Design is hope made visible.

You can live your life as the result of history and what came before, or you can live your life as the cause of what’s to come. You choose.

When talent doesn’t hustle, hustle beats talent. But when talent hustles, watch out.

When you work only for money, without any love for what you do in and of itself, your work will lac... See more

I have been afraid of trees. I have felt the Earth as my enemy. I did not live in the forests. I lived in the concrete city where I could not see the sky or sunset or stars. I moved at the pace of engines and it was faster than my own breath. I became a stranger to myself and to the rhythms of the Earth. I aggrandized my alien identity and wore bla... See more

That impulse to scour away the messiness that makes life resilient is what many conservation biologists call the ‘pathology of command and control.’

“In the past, jobs were about muscles. Now they’re about brains, but in the future, they’ll be about the heart.”

In 17th century France, the monarchy expressed its royal, God-given prowess through the total subjugation of natural ecology. Wilderness was reduced to clipped hedges, topiary, seriality and flatness. All hail king boxwood.

To garden is to make whole again what has been shattered: the relationships in which you are both producer and consumer, in which you reap the bounty of the earth directly, in which you understand fully how something came into being. It may not be significant in scale, but even if it’s a windowsill geranium high above a city street, it can be signi... See more

Soon our social feeds and search engines will be engulfed beneath a tidal wave of mechanistic mediocrity. It’ll be impossible to sift through it all. People will begin tuning out and retreating into quieter, safer corners of the internet, populated by the small handful of humans they trust.

Following this logic, our brains reward a kept garden because it staves off wilderness, because in the wilderness there is death, and thus by keeping nature controlled and orderly, we keep death away.

Landscape maintenance is, therefore, an exercise of fear.