I’ve been visiting the area under these fig trees at Stones Corner for over 25 years. It started when my children played in the shaded playground. Now, so much later, it is where I spend some time while waiting for my mother to finish church on Sundays. What links the two are a pair of large fig trees: the shade, habiat and food “services” they offer other things. The figs teem with activity: cicardas, wasps, parrots and people are all attracted. There is some human design here, since the trees were planted, probably 50 years ago. But there are plenty of mutually benefiting relationships that are either natural (the fig-wasp symbiotic relationship) or arose serendipitously over the intervening years (fig-shade and children-play). We need to approach the design of technological-organic systems with careful thinking. For example, the design needs to evolve and remain contingent on unexpected relationships that form. Such long-term and fuzzy thinking is difficult when political arrangements focus so much on defined and short-term imperatives.