Restoring the land, one plot at a time

Planting day at the Test Plot on Catalina Island.


Restoring the land, one plot at a time

By   |  Oct. 9, 2024

This is part of an ongoing series of blog posts following up on some of the real-world, community-based work initiated through Pando Days that’s continuing to make a difference. We sat down and talked with Alex Robinson, Associate Professor of Architecture at the University of Southern California, about the ongoing effort to create more Test Plots – a series of urban sites selected for native plant restoration and sustainability stewardship spread across the Southland, in collaboration with community partners.

Pando: Congratulations on your plans to launch another Test Plot project as part of your Pando Days work. It’s very exciting.  

Tell me about Test Plot and how it is developing this year. From your website, it seems that you are staying very busy.

Alex Robinson: Yes, we’re going to do another Test Plot project this year as part of Pando Days, similar to Test Plot: Elephant Hill for a previous Pando Days season. 

Before going any further, tell me exactly what a Test Plot is. You have lots of different instantiations, but what’s the overall Test Plot concept.

Sure. Paraphrasing, Test Plot is an innovative initiative that combines community stewardship, experimental restoration design, and land-based research to build experimental restoration plots on degraded land. These plots explore the gray area between native gardening and ecological restoration, with an emphasis on our role as stewards of the land.

So in 2022 you did a Test Plot project as part of Pando Days at an LA-based site called Elephant Hill. Last year you did a Test Plot project on Catalina Island dealing with water.  For your current Pando Days project, how will this plot unfold?

This TEST PLOT is at the bottom of Mount Washington in a neglected canyon with an absolutely beautiful walnut grove. It’s a wonderful and interesting site. And it is pretty intermixed with the surrounding houses and community, too. 

On the other side of Mount Washington, our partner, Community Nature Connection, has created a native plants nursery in a similar state owned park. Their mission to promote access for communities impacted by racial, socio-economic, and disability injustices, enhances our focus on community stewardship. They are also currently focused on fire resilience. 

We’re working with them to design this plot and will utilize the plants that they collected and grew from plant stock native to Mount Washington. 

For this plot in Rainbow Canyon, we have several key ambitions. First, we aim to research and restore the endemic Black Walnut forest plant community, a unique ecological feature of Northeast LA that has been largely decimated by urban development. Despite its significance, little is known about this community. Second, we plan to address fire resilience, as the neighborhood is located in a high fire-risk zone and subject to annual brush clearance mandates from the city. Third, we seek to improve the canyon’s ephemeral stream, which currently floods streets during storms. Lastly, given the site’s proximity to public transportation, we envision this TEST PLOT serving as a critical platform for future public programs, including educational initiatives.

Wow, that is a lot of work. So, this will be the 10th Test Plot if I am not mistaken. What is going on with the older plots? Are they still alive and well?

Correct. And, with those earlier Test Plots that we have done, we are looking at them in terms of continuity. How are those plots looking now? How will they look a couple years in the future? 

A lot of them have expanded in size, actually. And, people are still tending to and monitoring them. But, they are all expanding in different ways. 

The Test Plots in Elephant Hill and Elysian Park have both gotten a lot larger. The Test Plot in Los Angeles Park now has allied with other types of restoration work ongoing as well. 

We will actually revisit the Test Plot in Catalina [last year’s Pando Days project] soon to conduct a bit more maintenance work. With each instance of Test Plot, they are so unique that the students really learn a lot from their stewardship process.

Can you elaborate on that?

Well, with Test Plot: Elephant Hill, for instance, we are learning a lot about community organization and community stewardship. At Test Plot: Elysian Park, we are learning more about advanced planting and maintenance. At the Test Plot in Catalina, we are going to focus more on monitoring and some hyper-local, native plants concerns.

When these plots continue, where does the responsibility for stewardship go? I know you just mentioned there is some element of it being a learning experience for the students, but what about the more routine maintenance? All the plots are of significant size, if I’m not mistaken. 

One of the main, foundational lessons of the Test Plot series of projects that we’ve launched is that the simplest ingredient to native habitat restoration is labor. If we can create a model that makes it interesting and effective for people to contribute some labor to their local stewardship, anything can get done. 

All the Test Plots are usually a labor of love and, usually, the different stewards associated with each plot organize people and their communities about once a month to put in this work. 

The Test Plot at USC, for instance, is maintained in part by USC employees. But the Test Plot at Wrigley on Catalina Island is maintained by the local steward and the local community. 

The central idea, however, is always the same: to celebrate the labor and to keep those involved continuing to love sustaining these plots. Eventually, we believe this labor should be supported by a paid labor force, but we think volunteer labor will be part of the recipe of ecological restoration.

It is interesting because native restoration is not like you just plant it and let it go wild. It’s more like gardening. If you read the contemporary literature on ecology, it states how we need to almost garden a little bit to maintain that kind of biodiversity. 

Even if you look back to indigenous peoples they say that, yes, that is exactly what they did to our native landscape. Obviously, they did not labor across the whole thing. But, they always practiced management. You know, with humans, there is not really a wild state; there always was some form of management. 

Fascinating. I never had heard that even native plants require stewardship and active management. So how exactly are the communities responding to these Test Plots then? 

I think we are showing that engagement requires expertise, labor, time, and consistency. I think more people are becoming aware of that. 

Also, I think that it is inspiring because it offers communities a way to participate in acting against climate change. It is simple and something everyone can do. That is what is so nice about this project. I think it offers a way to deal with the crisis that is manageable and brings people together to form stronger communal bonds.

I am curious regarding the educational aspect of Test Plot as it relates to your students. How do they react to this work as a part of their academic experience? And the reverse:  how do the communities you work with respond to USC students going in to create these plots? 

It’s definitely different for the students to be having so much direct contact. A lot of the students are interested in working with actual stakeholders, local organizations, and activists. So for them, there is a thrill in actually engaging with these people. They tend to get really animated in having these moments of doing actual work alongside local communities. And generally, the local organizations and activists are also very excited to have the help. 

But it is a form of learning that can only happen by doing. Unfortunately, that is something USC and most other educational institutions tend not to do. For instance, talking about, probing, and observing a landscape can only ever take you so far. When you actually start digging into the soil and planting, you learn something completely different about a place. Similarly, working alongside actual organizations and communities teaches you something about life and the world that does not exist in books.

You sound very Pando through and through! 

Where do you envision Test Plot going – and where do you want to go? 

Well, we want to see our work have more capacity. Already, Test Plot itself has become a non-profit entity, which is a huge step forward. And now, the non-profit is actually being hired to do Test Plots in different places. So we are doing community Test Plots taking on work contracts. 

In terms of scaling, we want to replicate our work. We don’t want to necessarily get “bigger.” But we do want to scale. For us, that means more and more Test Plots that end up being like victory gardens of sorts. We would like to propagate the idea, with resources and labor if necessary, to build these at the community level and then help them be self-sustaining. 

It’s a great vision. We’d like to do anything we can to help you with that.

Thank you. You already are!

Members of the Pando writing team include Rich Binell, Alexi Caracotsios, Amy Goldberg, Rebecca Schmitt, and Eugene Shirley.