Edinburgh’s Hidden Ecosystem

Process Networks Diagramming: Edinburgh Field Notes

The Quiet Garden, St. Columba's by the Castle, Edinburgh, Scotland

August 18, 2019

Welcome to my field notes from an experiment in Edinburgh, Scotland. I was there to test a new method of ecosystem analysis I’d come up with, and I reprint my unedited field notes here:

The Quiet Garden is perched on the cliff between Edinburgh Castle and the Grassmarket one hundred feet below. It runs the length of the stone church, St. Columba's by the Castle, and the church wall, facing south, makes a warm backdrop to the garden terrace, lending a sense of security and stability. It also makes a very solid barrier to the sounds of the city, hence the garden's name.

The terrace is only about twenty feet wide, and a five-foot-tall stone wall runs the length opposite the church wall. Beyond the wall is a tiered precipice that ultimately drops nearly eighty feet to the nearest building. The garden's two ends are closed in by the church's nave at one end and another ancient stone building at the other. It's between that building and the church that you have to slip through the gate to reach the garden.

Trees large and small fill the garden along with numerous flowers and shrubs. But the ground beneath your feet is flagstone—all the plants are in raised stone beds or openings in the flagstone. The total effect is one of security and serenity, but with a complementary feeling of light and openness. Edinburgh is an old city. In fact, the very spot where I sat, being next to the castle, has been occupied since about 1000 BC. The city has been built up stone by stone since then, and there isn't much in the way of greenery anymore.

So the Quiet Garden was a perfect refuge to escape the noise and hardness of the city. It was also the perfect place to conduct an early experiment in process networks. A perfect balance of "nature" and human intervention, the spot offered an ideal laboratory for an early try at drafting a process network diagram for an unfamiliar place.

I sat down on a wooden bench at one end of the terrace and began to simply take in the ambiance of the place. A professor of mine at Berkeley many years earlier had told me as we stood on a site in the Berkeley Hills trying to assess its vibe, "be a plant."

So I sat in a garden in Scotland, surrounded by plants, trying to be one of them. I can't say I became one with them, but the exercise put me in the right (meditative) state of mind for the seeing process and working toward developing a full-blown process for the place.

As the wind rose up, rattling the branches where I sat, I began to make an inventory of the things around me. That may seem like an odd way to begin a process founded on seeing past objects in the environment to the processes behind them. However, it's better to start with what we know and build from there.

Soon, I had as complete an ‘environmental inventory’ as I was capable of making—a list of 42 'components' I felt had an effect on or in this microenvironment. Ironically, the act of creating a list of the environment's components forced me to become aware of the processes connecting them. That still fountain in the middle of the garden, what might live there, what might it attract?

Once I felt my list was as thorough as I could make it, I laid them in a 'mind map,' each component occupying a circle. These I arranged in a circle, wreath-like, around the page. Then began what to me is the most exciting and fun part of building a process network—connecting the components with processes, each line defining a relationship of some kind between components. Soon, my drawing looked like a bowl of spaghetti. Once my spaghetti bowl of connections was complete, I painstakingly labeled each one. That line connecting the circle labeled "fountain" with the one labeled "birds"? That gets labeled "nourishing"? 

After about an hour, I couldn't think of any more processes. I knew there were more, there are always invisible processes at work, and we'll talk later about how to capture them and include them in your process network. But for now, I was done. By the time I was done, I felt much more aware of how the garden worked as an ecosystem—a vibrant web of cooperation and competition built up of interlaced processes in a dense and vibrant network. I felt more alive too, a part of the system, shaping it and shaped by it in some small way, more aware of both its fragility and resilience.