Being new to the field of landscape design, I have been attempting to branch out my investigations into just what makes for an interesting area to pursue professionally. I have become rather adept at using Rhino as a design tool through my architectural studios, using it to recreate precedent studies to scale, and more recently in my class to teach me how to better generate landscape from 2D contour maps. Additionally, mostly through my own interests, I have been exploring the relatively unacknowledged field of permaculture as a means for better designing the home, integrating self-sustainability, ecology, and hard work into a means of better empowering people and their communities. I believe that with Rhino, I may have a tool that will better allow me to investigate permaculture on a more personal level, using either Grasshopper extensions or add-ons to better get a feel for permacultural design that would otherwise take years of experience to fully grasp. 

My interests began after reading a lovely book I found for free online called Sweet Herbs and Sundry Flowers: Medieval Gardens and the Gardens of The Cloisters by Tania Bayard. In it it described in detail how the monastery monks would cultivate a number of gardens: kitchen gardens, flower gardens for their scent, dye gardens, and most interesting to me, apothecary gardens. These gardens allowed the monks to both take care of each other and the community at large, and resulted in hundreds of practical plants being gathered into the relatively contained cloister spaces. This was a practical endeavor that has fallen into obscurity in the modern era, with citizens being able to acquire all their basic needs just by stopping at a local Walmart. While it is great that this is the case (I wouldn’t suggest going medieval anytime soon), it has also led to a complete separation between the consumer and the product. To most, it simply is there on the shelf, without reason to examine how it even got there. Supply-chains and market demand aside, we simply don’t know how to create most of these goods on our own anymore, and seem to be content with that.

I believe that permaculture is a way to teach people to better appreciate the amenities and services we have available to us. Regardless of one’s location, be it deep in rural country, suburb, or even a city, we could all make better use of the land we have. So much of our land is wasted on the sides of roads or turned into a useless green slate on the front lawn. By encouraging permaculture, we can add diversity to the local ecology and provide for more immediate needs to ourselves and our communities, offering alternative sources for healthy foods and beautifying our homes’ land. 

I believe that a tool could be developed through Rhino that can calculate the space needed to properly grow and space out a variety of crops, herbs, and flowers. In fact, I know this is the case; I was informed by my professor, Caroline Westort, that students have made use of programs that could analyze land to better install wetlands to control the flow of water, accounting for the multitudes of plants needed for such tasks. If a program can be made to approximate this, then surely we could have a program that could track the spacing of plant entities given data values that allow for planting placements to be given. Perhaps it could further be advanced to give responses to the validity of growing particular plants together, such as with the Three Sisters method of corn, beans, and squash, and highlight the object clusters in a red or green highlight to show the placement’s validity. This could be done by having the program check against terrain and water layers to see if the placement is too close or steep for consideration, and the plants could be given their own particular layers to keep conflicting species away from one another. I could see each plant entity being given a perimeter around it that clarifies just how much space it requires. Seeing whether or not the program could be made clever enough to understand tricky spaces such as vertical wall gardens or stack terraces is another consideration, but at the very least it should be able to make more obvious traditional farm and garden layouts. 

In order to better understand how to go about this, I will likely need to consult Professor Westort and other student colleagues about how to go about the creation of this tool. I have seen very basic versions of what I suggest in a number of video games, limiting placements based off defined perimeters, so I know it can be done. I may need to use the Unity engine instead, but I believe Rhino will be a better tool overall. Additionally, I will need to gather resources on agriculture and botany in order to better understand what all should be considered, like spacing, soil, water, and lighting requirements. The benefits of being able to grow more plants, particularly for food and medicinal purposes, could have great economic effects and better provide jobs for local communities. I look forward to further pursuing this topic.