The Red Queen's Latticework

Most gardens, I get it, are foundation plantings, lawn, a few trees, installed by the builder, recently or decades ago, because the Certificate of Occupancy demanded a specific amount of lawn, bushes, trees.
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What I don't get is keeping those certificate-of-occupancy-landscapes.  It is madness, their pruning, mowing, fertilizing (toxic to soil/water/you or you can make a bomb), weed/bug killers (toxic to them & you).  It's the full Monty, RED QUEEN EFFECT.
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Literally.  "Alice never could quite make out, in thinking it over afterwards, how it was that they began: all she remembers is, that they were running hand in hand, and the Queen went so fast that it was all she could do to keep up with her: and still the Queen kept crying ‘Faster! Faster!’ but Alice felt she could not go faster, though she had not breath left to say so.

The most curious part of the thing was, that the trees and the other things round them never changed their places at all: however fast they went, they never seemed to pass anything. ‘I wonder if all the things move along with us?’ thought poor puzzled Alice. And the Queen seemed to guess her thoughts, for she cried, ‘Faster! Don’t try to talk!’ 

Alice looked round her in great surprise. ‘Why, I do believe we’ve been under this tree the whole time! Everything’s just as it was!’

‘Of course it is,’ said the Queen, ‘what would you have it?’

‘Well, in our country,’ said Alice, still panting a little, ‘you’d generally get to somewhere else — if you ran very fast for a long time, as we’ve been doing.’

‘A slow sort of country!’ said the Queen. ‘Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place.

If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that.", from,  Through the Looking Glass. 
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Until I fought through living in a Certificate of Occupancy landscape, the Red Queen, indeed, nailed me, and my small thinking.
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What changed?  I went to the bother of getting another college degree, apparently to learn running faster/smarter kept me in Certificate of Occupancy landscapes.  Crazy.  Time + Money spent learning nonsense?  My heart still hungered for living in a beautiful garden.  Off I went to Europe, no money for it, heart trampling lizard brain.
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Got what I was looking for the first study tour, England, in the first garden.  Will never forget that first epiphany.
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Until that first garden, all my energies & thought processes specified you must stand in the street, looking at the house, to design a garden.  In this madness I was equally complicit with my college professors.
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Realizing, in a moment of intuitive enlightenment, gardens must be designed from inside the home.  Designing your garden from inside the house is more than running twice as fast, it is warp speed, you can feel it. Who's living a Red Queen life now?
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Want the garden, below?  Go inside, start designing.  




Pic, above, here.

The Red Queen is merely an arrow in your quiver, for a Latticework Mental Model.  Oddly, learning the Red Queen effect, drenches everything in life.
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For decades I could not abide topiaried plants, below.  Another madness, with arrogance thrown in.  Too rich, disdain for something I didn't understand.  What is there to understand about topiaried plants?  Easy.  They're easy.  Little maintenance, year round impact.  Another arrow for that quiver called the Latticework Mental Model.  And I thought I was merely learning Garden Design.
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Thanks to Charlie Munger, Berkshire Hathaway, his best way to learn, is with a latticework of mental models, below,
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"Well, the first rule is that you can’t really know anything if you just remember isolated facts and try and bang ’em back. If the facts don’t hang together on a latticework of theory, you don’t have them in a usable form.

You’ve got to have models in your head. And you’ve got to array your experience both vicarious and direct on this latticework of models. You may have noticed students who just try to remember and pound back what is remembered. Well, they fail in school and in life. You’ve got to hang experience on a latticework of models in your head.

What are the models? Well, the first rule is that you’ve got to have multiple models because if you just have one or two that you’re using, the nature of human psychology is such that you’ll torture reality so that it fits your models, or at least you’ll think it does…

It’s like the old saying, “To the man with only a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.” And of course, that’s the way the chiropractor goes about practicing medicine. But that’s a perfectly disastrous way to think and a perfectly disastrous way to operate in the world. So you’ve got to have multiple models.

And the models have to come from multiple disciplines because all the wisdom of the world is not to be found in one little academic department. That’s why poetry professors, by and large, are so unwise in a worldly sense. They don’t have enough models in their heads. So you’ve got to have models across a fair array of disciplines.

You may say, “My God, this is already getting way too tough.” But, fortunately, it isn’t that tough because 80 or 90 important models will carry about 90% of the freight in making you a worldly wise person. And, of those, only a mere handful really carry very heavy freight."



Pic, above, here.

Wow, no foundation planting, below, or now it can be described, plantings at the house once you've become the Red Queen.  I took the pics, below, in England.  Imagine standing in these gardens, at the house, after a lifetime of USA green meatball landscapes.  Liberating.



Pic, above, here.

My heart was seeking these gardens, instead I received an education in life choices and how to change, adapt, grow.  More than 'feel good' words, they've been codified intellectually by Farnum Street, below.



Pic, above, here.
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The Farnam Street Latticework of Mental Models

Psychology (misjudgments)

Biases emanating from the Availability Heuristic:
– Ease of Recall
– Retrievability

Biases emanating from the Representativeness Heuristic
– Bias from insensitivity to base rates
– Bias from insensitivity to sample size
– Misconceptions of chance
– Regression to the mean
– Bias from conjunction fallacy

Biases emanating from the Confirmation Heuristic
– Confirmation bias
– Bias from anchoring
– Conjunctive and disjunctive-events bias
– Bias from over-confidence 
– Hindsight Bias

Others
– Bias from incentives and reinforcement
– Bias from self-interest
– Bias from association
– Bias from liking/loving
– Bias from disliking/hating
– Commitment and Consistency Bias
– Bias from excessive fairness
– Bias from envy and jealousy
– Reciprocation bias
– Over-influence from authority
– Deprival Super-Reaction Bias
– Bias from contrast
– Bias from stress-influence
– Bias from emotional arousal
– Bias from physical or psychological pain
– Fundamental Attribution Error
– Bias from the status quo
– Do something tendency
– Do nothing tendency
– Over-influence from precision/models
– Uncertainty avoidance
– Not invented here bias
– Short-term bias
– Tendency to avoid extremes
– Man with a Hammer Tendency
– Bias from social proof
– Over-influence from framing effects
– Lollapalooza

Business
– Price Sensitivity
– Scale
– Distribution
– Cost
– Brand
– Improving Returns
– Porters 5 Forces
– Decision Trees
– Diminishing Returns
– Double Entry Accounting

Investing
– Mr. Market
– Circle of competence

Ecology
– Complex adaptive systems
– Systems Thinking

Economics
– Utility
– Diminishing Utility
– Supply and Demand
– Scarcity
– Elasticity
– Economies of Scale
– Opportunity Cost
– Marginal Cost
– Comparative Advantage
– Trade-offs
– Price Discrimination
– Positive and Negative Externalities
– Sunk Costs
– Moral Hazard
– Game Theory
– Prisoners’ Dilemma
– Tragedy of the Commons 
– Bottlenecks
– Time value of Money

Engineering
– Feedback loops
– Redundancy
– Margin of Safety
– Tight coupling
– Breakpoints

Mathematics
– Bayes Theorem
– Power Law
– Law of large numbers
– Compounding
– Probability Theory
– Permutations
– Combinations
– Variability
– Standard Deviation and normal distribution
– Regression to the mean
– Inversion

Statistics
– Outliers and self fulfilling prophecy
– Correlation versus Causation
– Mean, Median, Mode
– Distribution

Chemistry
– Thermodynamics
– Kinetics
– Autocatalysis

Physics
– Newton’s Laws
– Momentum
– Quantum Mechanics
– Critical Mass
– Equilibrium

Biology
– Natural Selection

More Models:
– Asymmetric Information
– Occam’s Razor
– Deduction and Induction
– Basic Decision Making Process
– Scientific Method
– Process versus Outcome
– And then what?
– The Agency Problem
– 7 Deadly Sins
– Network Effect
– Gresham’s Law 
– The Red Queen Effect

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No, I never find garden design boring.  Never.  Ironic the Alice In Wonderland gardens are beautiful, not toxic, help heat/cool the home, improve property value, are less maintenance, and better for our health, and Earth's.  Here's the choice, Certificate of Occupancy garden or Alice In Wonderland garden?  

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If you've read this far, go you, I want to give you a treasured trinity of thinkers.  Farnum Street, Wendell Berry, Christopher Alexander. 

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Garden & Be Well,   XO T