Nature Walk Workshop–Yiming Lei, MLA24

Starting in July, I have been working with Bazi Garden to conduct a series of nature walk workshops with local communities and scholars; here is the most recent one:

We went to a mountain in Mengzi, Yunan, which is located in Southwest China. During the whole journey, we walked from the local agricultural land into the semi-ancient forest to learn about the transition of the local ecologies, as well as the impact of agriculture on the original landscape.

Throughout the whole journey, we have also been collecting plants for future herbarium makings; here are some images of the local plants and creatures:

Nature walk workshops have been a huge part of the RISD Landscape department, especially during our plant and ecology class, and after graduation, I started to understand the value of this process more and more: on the one hand, nature walk workshop is one of the few media that can seamlessly combine all of our senses to learn about local ecology, one the other hand, the whole process can help the participates to memorize and personalize the knowledge that’s learned in a unforced way.