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In Oregon, Award-winning Campus Experiment Reveals a New Way to Maintain Landscapes

Articles: In Oregon, Award-winning Campus Experiment Reveals a New Way to Maintain Landscapes

Winter 2025 

A healthy landscape system is driven by countless vectors, many beyond human influence. Landscape architect Michael Geffel zeroes in on one of the few factors we can control by leveraging the untapped power of maintenance to regenerate landscapes.

Geffel started focusing on mowing and plant protection while writing his master’s thesis at the University of Virginia. His latest project—the Fuller Initiative Land Lab at the University of Oregon—earned our Top Prize in the 2024 Design Futurist Award for converting a weed-choked brownfield into a public garden and instructional space teeming with life.

Wildflowers & Clarkia at Fuller Initiative Land Lab. Credit: LND LAB

In its second year, the Design Futurist Award collects the most exciting examples of problem solving by visionary designers and regional plantspeople. The Award highlights the “inner beauty” of landscapes built to conserve plants and wildlife, treat our water and soil as precious, and hold the well-being of human beings at the center of our gardened environments.

Winning designs are easily replicable, are modest in size, or have been designed for intimate neighborhood community use. The Top Prize award embodies several of our core themes—Growing for Biodiversity, Drought and Fire ResilienceNature is Good for You, Garden Futurist, and Sustainable Gardening—in an exemplary way.

Geffel realized there was great potential for creatively addressing maintenance problems to save time and money while improving the site’s environment. He oversaw the Land Lab while lab director and professor of practice for the University of Oregon College of Design.

“My research focus is on how landscape architects can work with process more closely, and where I got to was that the establishment phase is an underutilized period in every capital contract—when we work with the landscape just installed,” said Geffel. Since completing the Land Lab, he founded the Portland-based design consultancy firm LND LAB.

Why start with mowing? “It’s the iconic symbol of landscape maintenance,” he said. Unlike standard lawn mowing, where the gardener is simply reacting to unchecked growth, adaptive mowing proactively manages the ecosystem.

For instance, in public works mowing, an annual “maintenance mow” is “really a disturbance event,” Geffel said. When Geffel first started working on the Land Lab site, he estimates it had been receiving an annual mow for 40 years.

Simply by changing “when we mow and the height that we mow, you can shape the entire plant community below the blades,” Geffel told Landscape Architecture Magazine’s Zach Mortice (2019), who dubbed him “Lawnmower Man.”

Fuller Initiative Land Lab Before WAIT. Credit: Michael Geffel LND LAB

An abandoned quarry gets a new lease on life

The Land Lab site, centrally located along the Willamette River in Eugene, Oregon, is a former gravel quarry and landfill that had been sitting vacant awaiting campus expansion. Encompassing the popular Ruth Bascomb Riverbank trail on the Willamette River and near the University of Oregon stadium, the space sees regular foot traffic by urban hikers and gamegoers.

The site’s challenges include its “highly variable anthropogenic soil profile (silt, gravel, exposed rubble, and hardpan)” and geographic location: “exposure to sun and wind, and separation from the water table make growing conditions similar to an oak savanna, the plant community that historically dominated the Southern Willamette Valley,” according to the submission. 

Envisioned as a living experiment in community-based stewardship, the project has developed innovative sustainable maintenance practices that make restoration and establishment of new natural communities more accessible through simple, efficient, and low-cost maintenance strategies.

Fuller Initiative Land Lab - Madia Bloom. Credit: Michael Geffel, LND LAB

Geffel started working with University of Oregon Campus Planning and Facilities Management in 2018 to restore the site using a “drift” machine-mowing technique that allows grasslands to grow undisturbed for years at a time. Since then, a custom pollinator seed mix and “wave” plant-protection fencing has been developed for this experimental landscape. With no water on site, the garden employs drought-tolerant, climate-resilient wildflowers native to the southern Willamette Valley. The meadow bloom has become an annual local event.

With the goals of keeping the blackberry (Rubus armeniacus) down and minimizing fire risk while promoting healthy diversity, Geffel received campus planning approval to expand the project in advance of the 2022 World Athletics Championships.

“The first year, the test was whether anyone would complain,” he said. No one complained, and the experiment expanded.

Pacific Horticulture jury panelists explained this garden “integrates innovative design and material uses, ecological resilience, sustainable practices, and community engagement into an exciting, forward-looking landscape” and delivers a “scalable precedent for other land-based practices by demonstrating how design through maintenance can build meaningful novel landscapes.”

Fuller Initiative Land Lab - Wave Fence and Lathyrus. Credit: Michael Geffel, LND LAB

Drifting in a good way

Drift mowing orders the site into rows to target invasive species more precisely. By identifying and isolating areas of invasive weeds, the technique eventually cut the amount of mowing in half.

“The operator mows every other row, ordering the field into strips based on the width of mower,” Geffel said. “We tried three years in a row with a different angle each year,” eventually revealing swaths of blackberry-free land that could left as grasslands.

LND LAB uses drone photography and modelling through a program called Agisoft Metashape to track the changes. When “it became clear the edges of invasives were more or less stable, we identified areas that were just grassland and didn’t need to be mown any more.”

The mowing serves as signs of human care, which help a nascent meadow look tended, and the cleared areas serve as firebreaks.

Game on

When Eugene won the bid for the 2022 World Athletic Championships—the world’s third largest sports event—with much of the action at the campus stadium, expansion ramped up quickly to get the site ready for its close-up.

The city launched many public projects, including a riverfront bike path and a city water line running through the site. The water line excavation created “massive disturbance of the ground during construction,” which proved to be too much for the grass-dominated native seed mix they’d been using and inhibited the seed mix from taking hold, Geffel said

He worked with ecology faculty to develop a native seed mix of wildflowers, mainly annuals that would benefit pollinators and bloom in time for the 2022 World Athletic Championships at the campus. The biggest reseeding successes was madia (Madia spp.), with sunny yellow flowers. Madia opens in the morning and closes in the heat of the afternoon, but blooms throughout the summer. It mingles with globe gilia, (Gilia capitata), varileaf phacelia, (Phacelia heterophylla), denseflower willowherb (Epilobium densiflorum), and farewell-to-spring (Clarkia spp.), as well as non-native naturalized perennial sweet pea (Lathyrus latifolia), a crowd favorite for its showy magenta blooms.

Fuller Initiative Land Lab - Wildflowers and Fence. Credit: Michael Geffel, LND LAB

Doing the wave

Geffel, along with graduate students Abby Pierce and Masayo Simon, added dune fencing to protect seeds from hungry geese, which conveniently turned out to be more interested in eating grass. Unlike typical construction fencing, dune fencing can be reused. They kept it up along pathways to allay sneakers and sandals.

The fencing, they realized, was quite effective even laying on its side, and has an artistic quality. “It was the shadows, the moiré effect, and the structural integrity it had on its own,” said Geffel.

Calling it “wave fencing,” they created a sculptural installation for the championships—sponsored by Travel Oregon—to represent seven areas of Oregon, from dunes to Crater Lake. The sections can be easily repositioned and reused, and don’t need T-posts to support them, saving significant cost and labor.

“The fences are a great conversation starter on the border between art and utility. Some people see it as sculpture, others see it as a fence and want to know why we were building fences like this,” Geffel said.

Next, they added sheet mulching to expand the wildflower meadows.

“The feedback has been resoundingly positive,” said Geffel. “Most of the questions are about what the field experiment is and what the fences are doing.”

While the previous life of the site was a “dead zone” in summer, “in comparison now there are dragonflies, bumblebees, and crickets. It’s just buzzing with life,” Geffel said.

What’s next

The university has appointed an official stewardship coordinator to the site, and the next phase focuses on planting trees from a range of local ecosystems that reflect the site conditions. “The goal is to prepare a test forest for the Willamette River Natural Area,” he said.

Since its inception, the Land Lab has provided a space for both education and remediation. In 2020, when the department cancelled its annual practicum in Pennsylvania—Overlook Field School—in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, the site “emerged as a way to bring Overlook pedagogy home to campus,” Geffel said. The Department of Landscape Architecture will continue using the space for instruction, while keeping the goals of the Willamette River Natural Area Landscape Management Plan in mind.

Former Lab Director Geffel has now relocated to Portland, where he is working with the Portland Botanical Gardens as LND LAB.

“This type of stewardship is really valuable. It allows design to begin on Day One and be staged,” he said. Looking ahead, “there are many opportunities to work with this essential service of maintenance,” with an eye on the numerous superfund project sites around Portland Harbor. “This was a hard thing to leave. I’m really hopeful something like this can happen with the Portland Botanical Gardens.”

READ ABOUT MORE 2024 DESIGN FUTURIST WINNERS

The Top Prize award embodies several themes in an exemplary way, while Honors and Merit are given to gardens creating the best examples of a single theme. The contest welcomed gardens of all sizes. The judging was blind—the designer and firm names were removed from submissions.

The winning landscapes range from highly designed projects to single gardeners transforming their home or unused community land. Each is rich with inspiration for gardening toward a resilient future.

Read the Article

Resources

Fuller Initiative for Productive Landscapes

Willamette River Natural Area

LND LAB

Portland Botanical Gardens is under development and in the process of securing a site.

Mortice, Zach. 2019. “Michael Geffel is designing landscapes from the back of a Bush Hog.” Landscape Architecture Magazine. June 17, 2019.

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