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Editor's note: Hello friends! Today's story is the second in our four-part series, A Stronger Town. The series explores various "patterns" that Boise has that make it a vibrant & beautiful city, and considers how those patterns might be expanded and improved. The first story looked at Boise's promenades. Today's story looks at Boise's countryside. This series is written by Amanda Patchin. Enjoy!

In the first story of our series, A Stronger Town, I introduced architect and theorist Christopher Alexander, who set out to design spaces where people feel at home, at ease, and truly alive.

In Alexander's book, A Pattern Language, he writes extensively about the human desire for green spaces, for contact with nature, for the touch of the soil and the sight of trees. Quoting another author, he writes: “Physically and genetically, we appear best adapted to a tropical savanna… for thousands of years we have tried in our houses to imitate not only the climate, but the setting of our evolutionary past: warm, humid air, green plants, and even animal companions… it is evident that nature in our daily life should be thought of as a part of the biological need.”

He goes on to argue that while cities are the necessary foundation of our culture, our need for the countryside cannot be ignored because it is crucial to our well-being.

Alexander suggests design policies that leave the countryside and the city interlaced, like extended fingers of mile-wide stretches. While that design pattern sounds healthful and lovely, it’s a bit late in Boise’s development to try and re-engineer such a thing. Although, keeping the need for countryside in mind, development could still privilege the preservation of fragments of countryside within it.

Though imperfectly preserved, we do have access to the countryside here in Boise – and to a remarkable degree for a city of Boise’s size. The cultivation and preservation of that countryside is something we can focus on as a community.

What counts as countryside?

Countryside comes in a number of forms. Alexander considers countryside to be any kind of cared for and productive land.

Managed wild spaces and farmland are equally “countryside” in his taxonomy, and this makes sense to me. A meadow with cattle grazing or a hillside with deer grazing both fill some primal aesthetic desire to see and feel nature’s presence. An orchard or the Boise National Forest both offer the happy presence of trees, though in a different form.

Alexander calls parks “dead zones” and believes that their manufactured nature is a form of sterility, where the land cannot thrive and nothing grows without constant intervention and inputs. While parks are not exactly considered countryside to him, they are open and green, and much better than uninterrupted subdivisions, commercial development, and streets upon streets.

The natural world in Boise

Boise is particularly welcoming to lovers of the natural world. While the city sprawls out to the west, it is still relatively contained on the North, East, and South sides.

To the north are foothills, the Boise Mountains, and the wide stretch of the Boise National Forest. The eastern edge of town has more foothills, the river stretching out from Lucky Peak Reservoir, the Black Cliffs, Robie Creek and Rocky Canyon, and then more mountains.

To the south, Pleasant Valley reaches toward the Owyhee Desert and then the Owyhee Mountains. And, even to the west, where Meridian, Nampa, and Caldwell string out along the freeway corridor, there are rich tracts of countryside. Some is desert, but much is farmland, full of orchards, vineyards, mint fields, and onion farms.

Even within city limits, the Boise River creates a long corridor of natural space – bounded, yes, by both developments and parks – but also preserving along its banks the wildness of trees, blackberry brambles, herons, kingfishers, and leaping fish. While we are not always within a single mile of the countryside as Alexander would wish, Boiseans are rarely more than a ten minute drive or a fifteen minute bike ride from some kind of natural space.

In addition to the river and the system of parks and trails strung along it, other parks offer a welcome gateway from the city's edge to the wild world. Camel’s Back Park abuts the foothills and a web of trails lead the adventurous from the green lawn and tamed play structures away into ponds, sandy escarpments, and dozens of miles of up and down through the hills.

The city website lists over ninety parks and reserves in Boise alone! Some of the parks I didn’t know about until reviewing the list for this article: hidden gems enriching their neighborhoods quietly.

In addition to the parks, there are also many “reserves” listed. The reserves are a remarkable resource for deepening one’s connection to the countryside. Rather than developed parks, The Foothills East Reserve, Hulls Gulch Reserve, the 322 acres of the Polecat Gulch Reserve, the 1320 acres of the Stack Rock Reserve, and the Bethine Church Trail, all offer protected natural spaces with minimal management and easy access.

It is easy to spot native plants, sit on rocky outcrops, picnic with the wildlife, and absorb the sun and fresh air in all of these bits of countryside.

Alexander would suggest that we do a bit more to cultivate them, ensuring that they were good places for foraging and that all the people of the city felt a responsibility to care for them.

I do not know if such a land ethic is possible to produce quickly, but it is the land ethic of Japan and of Norway, where all natural spaces are considered to be under the care of the general public who must cultivate and preserve it even as they have the right to use it freely (so long as they do not harm it).

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City of trees

One way Boise invites the countryside into the city is in the privileging of trees in Boise City developments. This means that you are never out of sight of a tree in our town, no matter where you are. Some of them are pretty unhappy trees – crammed into a narrow square of sidewalk or contorted by the power lines that loom overhead – but trees they are, green, growing, and often full of birds and squirrels. (Read more on this in our story about Boise's trees.)

Given the developmental history of humanity, it is natural that we would like the sight of trees, however, studies have shown that we more than simply like them – the sight of a tree satisfies the mind in a way that demonstrably increases intellectual function, creativity, and happiness.

According to Annie Murphy Paul’s The Extended Mind, students perform better on tests when allowed to look out windows that frame trees rather than other buildings. Workers are happier in their jobs if they can see trees from office windows or enjoy breaks in spaces where trees overhang benches and tables. Something about the fractal patterns of the branches and leaves satisfies our love of variation within order, and the sense of life from a growing plant enhances our sense of connection to the earth.

Farms & parks for everyone

One of Alexander’s ideas for improving the city’s connectedness to the countryside is to make parks more like farms and farms more like parks.

Through public policy and cultural custom, it is possible to open farmland to picnicking and to walking. People must have a strong sense of respect for the farmer’s work to do so, and farmers must also have a strong sense of the human need for natural spaces as well. Likewise, planting fruiting trees and bushes within park spaces requires that the people of the city appreciate the care needed for those plants and for city policy to privilege the nurturing of harvestable food. (There is currently a somewhat aligned effort underway at Spaulding Ranch.)

Parks as open spaces for play do not have to preclude parks as places for growing forageable foodstuffs. Certainly, food is sometimes messy. Apple trees will drop unpicked fruit onto the ground, but is a bit of decomposing fruit really a problem? The picked apples will nourish children, the unpicked ones will nourish birds and bugs and the soil! All that would need to change is our expectations. A richer, more fruitful natural world will support both ecological and communal health.

Create your own countryside

Alexander does not, at least in his discussion of the countryside, address the possibilities for homeowners to cultivate the feeling of countryside within their neighborhoods. However, I believe this is an easily available way for us Boiseans to make our homes, neighborhoods, and city, more hospitable to the human spirit and to all forms of life.

Every scrap of yard is a potential bit of life. A border planted with native wildflowers, a lawn replaced with garden beds, a fruit tree drooping pears or cherries over the fence, a hazelnut bush turned into a wide hedge, a little milkweed encouraged along the driveway, can help the landscape feel more interesting, more varied, more alive!

Butterflies, bees, and ladybugs, as well as a myriad of other less identifiable species, will enjoy any flowers that bloom. You, any children wandering around, the squirrels, and chickens if you have them, will eat any fruit, berries, or seeds that are available and safe to eat. The raspberry canes in my backyard are always a favorite with whoever stops by, and even a finicky child will be delighted by a sour berry if they get to pick it themselves!

The countryside can be “developed” as countryside within the city. Thinking of it as a component of good city design instead of as the opposite of the city will help us keep the vibrancy, the sense of wholeness, the beauty of Boise alive.

Thanks for reading!

With love from Boise,

Marissa

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Today's story was written by Amanda Patchin. Amanda has a monthly-ish newsletter where she shares her booklist, selections from her fiction, and updates on what books she has for sale in the Zed Bookshop.

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