Le Roy and the Eco-Cathedral
A wilful Frisian garden of stacked rubble, and what it can teach us about self-organisation, emergence and the value of not intervening.
In Mildam, a village in the Dutch municipality of Heerenveen, stands a structure that is difficult to describe. No architect was involved, no building plan lay behind it and not a single stone has been fixed with cement. It is called the Eco-Cathedral, and it could be seen as a living illustration of the idea that order need not always be imposed from above.
Its maker was Louis le Roy (1924-2012), an artist and, as he preferred to call himself, an ecotect. In the 1960s he acquired a plot of just over a hectare. Without a fixed plan he planted trees and seeds there, and then began to dry-stack construction waste from road builders (clinkers, paving stones, concrete blocks) into walls and towers, some as high as eight metres. After that, insofar as a person can manage it, he took a step back. Nature and time would take over the work, and that, in his view, was precisely the intention.
On an information panel beside the site stands a sentence of his that stayed with us and that prompted this piece:
"Let chaos do its work, until the whole forms a complexity that arises of its own accord."
For those who work with complexity science, this is a surprisingly precise formulation. Le Roy was not a systems theorist, but his sentence describes something that has a name in our field: self-organisation.
What the stones do not do
We often assume that structure needs a master builder: an ordering hand that knows in advance what the whole should look like. Le Roy showed in practice that it can be otherwise. He sorted the rubble, stacked and planted, and then let it go. The form that subsequently emerged was not of his devising. It arose from the interplay between the stones, the seeds, the weather, time and the countless organisms that gradually settled in the structure.
In the language of complexity science this is called emergence: an ordering arises at the level of the whole that cannot be traced back to the individual parts and could not have been predicted from them. No one designed the Eco-Cathedral in its present form, and yet it is clearly ordered. The order did not lie in a plan, but arose from interaction. That someone, without cement and without a design, can let such a form come into being makes the concept, in our view, more tangible than many a textbook explanation.
The courage not to intervene
A second aspect set us thinking, and it is somewhat more subtle. Le Roy's most important act was perhaps not the stacking but the waiting. He did not correct nature when it chose a direction he had not foreseen. The moss that grew over the stones, the tree that took root in an unexpected place, the subsidence that made a wall lean: to him these were not errors, but parts of the process. Had he intervened, he would have imposed his own ordering on a system that drew its richness precisely from the room to deviate.
Here the story touches on something that clinicians will probably recognise. In the consulting room the inclination is strong to correct, to adjust and to guide the process towards an outcome conceived in advance. Sometimes that is necessary, too. At the same time, complexity science shows that a complex system does not always allow itself to be steered the way we imagine. Letting go of control, and tolerating a phase in which the outcome is not yet settled, need not then be a shortcoming. It may in fact be a condition for change.
We phrase this cautiously on purpose. It is not a plea for passivity; a person in distress has nothing to gain from a clinician who looks on the way one looks at a garden. It is about a more precise distinction: between steering and forcing, between creating conditions in which something new can arise and imposing a form that the system would not have found by itself. Le Roy took care of the conditions and left the rest to complexity.
Time as an ally
Above all, the Eco-Cathedral asks for patience, on a timescale that feels somewhat unfamiliar to us. The foundation that manages the work thinks in centuries rather than years: the aim is to let the structure endure well into the third millennium, so that as rich an ecological system as possible can develop. Time here is not an obstacle, but rather the actual master builder.
This too can be translated, with some caution, to our practice. Much of what is meaningful in a treatment does not unfold at the pace of the treatment plan. A system needs time to let go of an old ordering and find a new one, and that time does not always coincide with the number of sessions a reimbursement framework allows. The Eco-Cathedral shows that some forms of order cannot be hurried.
A modest conclusion
We do not want to stretch the comparison further than it can bear. A person is not a garden, and psychological suffering is not a pile of stones that can be left to nature. An analogy is not a proof, and the Eco-Cathedral proves nothing about mental healthcare.
A visit does, however, make visible what is sometimes hard to put into words in complexity science: that order can arise without a designer, that letting go is something other than giving up, and that time, when given room, can be a form of care. Le Roy called himself a time rebel. Perhaps mental healthcare, too, can learn something from that wilfulness.