Difference, relationship and the possibilities between living things

In a previous post, What if Evolution Selects Relationships, Not Just Organisms?, I explored a question that has become increasingly important to my thinking: what if some of the forces shaping life are found not only within organisms, but in the relationships between them?

Lately, I have found myself looking at gardens differently.

I have always loved gardens, from grand botanical gardens with their labelled specimens and carefully designed collections to old gardens, community gardens, medicinal gardens, overgrown corners and forests pressing against cultivated spaces. I am particularly drawn to places where the boundaries soften, and it becomes difficult to tell where human intention ends and nature begins.

During my travels in India, I found myself fascinated by gardens that seemed more vernacular, more entangled with everyday life, more visibly co-created by people and ecological processes. They raised questions I have carried home with me, and I have since realised that what interested me most was not the perfection of the garden, but its relationships.

A Garden Is More Than a Collection

We often describe a garden by listing what grows there: trees, flowers, herbs, ferns and grasses. Yet each of those lives alters the possibilities available to the others.

A tree changes the soil beneath it while its canopy creates shade and alters temperature and moisture. Fallen leaves become food for fungi and microorganisms; birds arrive, insects shelter beneath the bark, seeds are carried elsewhere, and roots encounter other roots beneath the ground. The longer we look, the harder it becomes to regard any one organism as entirely separate from the community around it.

Gardeners have understood something about this for generations through companion planting. We see it among herbs and vegetables, around fruit trees and throughout traditional food gardens, where one plant may attract pollinators while another provides ground cover. Aromatic herbs may influence the insects visiting neighbouring plants, flowers provide food and habitat for beneficial insects, taller plants create shade or shelter for more delicate ones, and different root systems occupy different layers of the soil.

Around a fruit tree, what first appears to be a collection of separate plants can begin to function more like a small community. No single plant needs to perform every role because its strength comes partly from the relationships surrounding it.

This brings me back to the question I explored in The Living Field Hypothesis: what if relationship itself is an evolutionary force?

The Living Field

The Living Field Hypothesis began for me with a deceptively simple observation: living things evolve among other living things, within networks of influence that extend far beyond the individual organism.

A flowering plant and its pollinators influence one another. Plants interact chemically with organisms around them, fungi form intimate associations with plant roots, animals carry seeds across landscapes, and microorganisms alter environments in ways that make different forms of life possible. Life changes life, and over sufficiently long periods, relationships can change what living things become.

This led me to wonder whether we have placed too much emphasis on the individual organism when thinking about evolution. Some of its most interesting activity may occur between organisms, through relationships that alter survival, opportunity, behaviour and the possibilities available to generations that follow.

Perhaps relationship is more than something that happens as life evolves. Perhaps relationship helps shape the pathways evolution can take. These questions have begun changing the way I look at gardens.

Diversity Creates Possibilities

We can see another side of relationship when diversity disappears.

Imagine an area planted predominantly with a single kind of plant. An insect that feeds upon it discovers an abundant food source and begins to multiply, while the surrounding landscape may provide too little of the shrubs, grasses, nesting places or protective cover needed by the small birds and other creatures that would ordinarily prey upon those insects.

The presence of the insect is only part of the story. Something has happened to the relationships surrounding it. The food remains abundant while some of the connections that once helped keep the living system in balance have disappeared.

This is why diversity means far more than counting the number of species occupying a particular place.

Diversity creates possibilities.

One plant feeds something while another shelters it. Another flowers at a different time, extending the season during which food is available. One creates shade while another protects the soil. Birds, insects, fungi, microorganisms and plants enter into relationships that no gardener could completely predict or design in advance.

When difference disappears, therefore, we may lose more than species. We lose possible relationships, and as those relationships disappear, the whole system may become more vulnerable.

This is one of the ideas that fascinates me most about the Living Field. Diversity may matter partly because difference allows more relationships to become possible.

Who, Then, Creates the Garden?

We usually credit the gardener with creating a garden, yet the closer we look, the more crowded the authorship becomes.

A gardener may plant a tree, while fungi establish relationships with its roots without instruction. A pond may be deliberately created, while dragonflies discover it for themselves. A bird carries a seed into a forgotten corner, rain provides the conditions for germination, a neighbouring tree changes the available sunlight, insects arrive, fungi enter the soil, and someone walking past decides to leave the unexpected seedling where it is.

Years later, a tree may stand where nobody intended one to grow.

Who created it?

Perhaps creation itself was distributed among many participants: the gardener, the bird, the rain, the soil, the fungi, the neighbouring plants, the insects, the seasons and the seed itself. What eventually became the garden emerged through their relationships.

This helps explain why I am increasingly drawn to gardens that retain a little wildness. A perfectly controlled garden can be extraordinarily beautiful, but something else happens where control loosens slightly and the landscape begins answering back. Human intention remains present without becoming the only creative force.

The large gardens I had the pleasure of walking through in India seemed to embrace this kind of co-creation. They retained that essential ingredient of wildness, leaving room for all those other participants to exercise an agency of their own.

The garden was allowed some authorship of its own.

Human hands shaped these places, while still leaving room for other lives and processes to participate in what the garden became. They suggested a different relationship with landscape, one in which human creativity could exist alongside the creativity already unfolding within the living system.

It brought me back to an idea I explored in The Pattern Beneath Things: Art, Pattern and the Living World. The patterns that fascinate me in art and nature are rarely isolated objects; they emerge through connection, repetition, response and relationship.

Perhaps gardens allow us to see something similar unfolding before us.

Nature is participating.

We Grow in Different Parts of the Garden

There is another reason the metaphor of the garden has stayed with me, because it offers a beautiful way of thinking about human difference.

A rainforest plant develops within conditions very different from those of a desert plant. A waterlily occupies another world again, while a fern and a rose each flourish through their own relationships with soil, water, light and surrounding life. Their differences arise partly because they grow in different parts of the garden.

Perhaps we can extend the same generosity to ourselves.

We are born into different countries, cultures, languages and families. We inhabit different bodies and bring different abilities and disabilities, interests, temperaments, professions, experiences and ways of understanding the world.

We are different because we grow in different parts of the garden.

Perhaps we have sometimes misunderstood the importance of those differences. Human difference is often discussed as something that must somehow be accommodated before harmony becomes possible, while a living garden suggests something far more interesting.

A healthy garden gains possibilities through difference.

In fact, difference may be precisely what allows richer relationships to emerge.

One person notices what another overlooks. One carries knowledge another has never encountered. One creates, another cultivates, another teaches, another protects, another questions. Different experiences allow us to see different parts of the world, while relationship allows those perspectives to encounter and influence one another.

None of us can occupy every part of the garden or see the whole of it alone. Difference and connection can exist together, and perhaps this is where belonging becomes something deeper than sameness.

Perhaps belonging is what becomes possible when difference remains connected.

This idea also lies beneath much of my fictional world of Fantaeryn, where the restoration of the Living World depends increasingly upon relationship rather than domination. In The Five Great Turnings of Fantaeryn, I explored the movement from separation and dissonance towards another kind of becoming. The more I write that world, the more I recognise how closely its questions echo the ones I find myself asking of our own.

What Becomes Possible Because You Are Here?

Life in Solution — Flowers suspended in oil. Photograph by Carol Walden.

Life in Solution is part of my Photographic Art Collection and is available as a fine art print.
View the artwork and available prints.

All of this has led me towards another question.

We are accustomed to asking what an organism is, what it does, where it belongs and sometimes what purpose it serves. The Living Field invites another way of looking:

What becomes possible because it is here?

A tree makes shade possible, while a flower makes a particular relationship with a pollinator possible. A fallen branch becomes habitat; a fungus enables exchanges beneath the soil; a small bird nesting among dense shrubs may help keep insect populations in balance; and a herb flowering beneath a fruit tree may bring a pollinator into the garden that would otherwise have passed it by.

Every presence changes the possibilities available to the whole.

Perhaps we can ask the same question of ourselves.

Our value does not have to depend upon becoming more like everybody around us or proving ourselves according to a single measure of usefulness. Our particular presence brings another set of experiences, perceptions, capacities and relationships into the living systems we inhabit.

That idea has begun to connect many strands of my life that once seemed separate: my art, my writing, my fascination with plants and animals, my travels, my interest in human belonging, the world of Fantaeryn, and my continuing exploration of the Living Field.

Perhaps they were never separate strands at all. Perhaps I have simply been looking at the same pattern from different places in the garden.

It is a pattern I keep returning to: The world is made not only of living things, but of relationships between living things.

And that leads to another question, perhaps the other side of the first: What may cease to be possible when something is removed?

This brings to mind what is often called the butterfly effect: the idea that a small change within a complex system can have consequences that ripple far beyond the place where the change began. In a living system, when we remove one participant, we alter more than that single life. We alter the relationships connected to it, and those changes may in turn affect other relationships extending outward through the living system.

Think of a tree. Before we cut it down, perhaps we should ask what else might disappear with it. What birds nest among its branches? What insects live beneath its bark or visit its flowers? What fungi associate with its roots? What creatures depend upon its fruit, seeds, shade or shelter? And what other lives depend upon those creatures?

The tree does not end at the edge of its bark.

I found myself thinking about this often in India, and particularly in Mumbai. Here is an enormous, bustling metropolis, dense with buildings, roads, traffic and millions of people, yet trees and plants seem to find a place wherever an opportunity presents itself. I would see a crack in the concrete and, astonishingly, a tree growing from it. The tree had been allowed to remain, and so had the crack.

That small detail fascinated me because it revealed such a different response to the unexpected arrival of life. Where I live, that seedling would very likely be pulled out or poisoned and the crack repaired. The surface would be restored to what we intended it to be.

But what happens when we allow life to alter our intentions?

The seed that finds a crack in the concrete does more than become a tree. In time it may create shade in a hot climate, shelter insects, offer a resting place to a bird, catch fallen leaves, hold moisture and introduce new relationships into a place where none of those possibilities existed before. The crack itself becomes an opening through which the living world can participate.

Perhaps this is what captivated me about the gardens and streetscapes I encountered in India. Human life and the rest of the living world did not always appear so carefully separated. There seemed to be more room for the unplanned, for something else to arrive, take hold and become part of the place.

And this returns me to the question at the heart of this essay: what becomes possible because something is here, and what may cease to be possible when it is removed?

Every living presence extends outward through relationships. Remove one participant and the ripples travel through that web, altering possibilities we may never have known were connected to it. Allow another to remain, even a tree emerging unexpectedly through a crack in the concrete, and an entirely different set of relationships may begin.

Once we begin looking at the world this way, even an ordinary garden becomes something extraordinary: a place where difference creates possibility, relationship creates resilience, and life continually participates in the creation of what comes next.