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A story develops through the placement, combination and substitution of events and the other structural elements of character, agency, and place. To substitute one event or place
for another, to leave a gap or to change in some way the order of the sequence, changes the meaning of the story In this manner the structure of a story is homologous to the structure of language and the two axes of signification: combination and substitution (syntagmatic and paradigmatic). Thus, the construction of meaning in both language and landscape is spatial.
Axis of Substitution
woods
garden
bean stalk
fear
That very night in Max’s room a forest grew and grew and grew, until . . . Axis of Combination—placement—sequence—movement
Structuring sequences also structure time, and narrative has been referred to as a language of time A story creates a virtual space in time: what happened yesterday, last year
or in hundreds of years of ecological process. Access to and knowledge of this realm is through some form of narration. Narration time and story time are integral but different. The time represented in a narrative may be one week, a moment or a millennium; but the actual time to tell, hear or read these stories may be just five minutes. Likewise, in landscape the sense of time can be accelerated (installing mature vegetation), frozen (preserving), and modulated in many ways. Nature is often perceived as a “slow event” that can be retold, organized into epochs and summarized. In the Crosby Arboretum thousands of years of ecological succession can be experienced in an afternoon’s walk. The time it takes to walk the trails is the time of narration, whereas the story time is the time of the actual geological and ecological processes.
in landscape narratives the temporal language becomes spatialized, “plotted.” We can analyze not just how stories take place, but the placement of events and the way in which they create patterns of lines, circles, branching patterns, and other forms of plot. These spatial forms of stories vary in complexity, reflecting differences in determinism, choice,_contingency, and chance. Instead of linear structures, authors such as Italo Calvino or Jorge Luis Borges create an experience of time that is simultaneous, embedded, and multiple,
I resembling a labyrinth or the complexities of ecology, rather than a single storyline.
RETELLING THE ECOLOGY OF MISSlSSIPPIiS PINEY WOODS
The sixty-four-acre Pinecote Interpretive Center of the Crosby Arboretum reverses the plot
of cultural narratives of progress by restoring the semblance of an original natural order ..
to a site that had been logged, farmed, and abandoned. Healing, then, is one of the metaphors which structures the plot of the site. This story, however, began by reading the
existing ecological narrative and “letting the site reveal itself. Ed Blake lived on the site for four years and learned how to read plant signatures, such as how big blue andropogon
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