Left in the hands of nature by residents fleeing Tehran, these ordinary houses have become backdrops for an extraordinary series of photographs by Gohar Dashti, born during the Islamic Revolution.

Dubbed Home, the series is about the power of nature in the wake of human absence. She was inspired to begin the project after returning to her hometown and discovering a single plant on the deck of a neighboring house.

“It had flourished in their absence,” she recalls, “and its neck now curved against its own weight. It had the power to stay there. Left alone, it would eventually consume and conquer the home.” From there, she began to shoot organic scenes as well as staged setups to illustrate the overwhelming forces of nature, extrapolating reclamation based on a combination of reality and imagination.

More about the artist: “Gohar Dashti received her M.A. in Photography from the Fine Art University of Tehran in 2005. After studying photography in Iran, she has spent the last 14 years making the large scale of her practice concerning in social issues with particular references to history and culture through a convergence of interest in anthropology and sociology.”

“She tries with her own means to express the world around her. Her starting point is always her surrounding, her memory, but with her very personal perception of things. She tries to trace her relationship to society and the world in it’s most sensitive way. Her practice continuously develops from life events and connection between the personal and the universal, the political and the fantasised.”

In the Dutch city of Utrecht, 316 bus stops are now planted with flowering greenery, inviting pollinators like bees to stop by and take a blossom break. The Netherlands initiated the project after learning that more than half of its 358 bee species are endangered, but it comes with other benefits, too, like storing rainwater and improving Utrecht’s air quality by capturing fine dust.

Pollinators and other beneficial insects are currently being decimated around the world by habitat loss, herbicides, fungicides and pesticides. Even so-called “safe” pesticides could be accumulating to toxic levels in pollen. The University of Maryland reported that U.S. beekeepers lost 38 percent of their bee colonies last winter alone, and the current administration has upheld market use of weed-killing substances like glyphosate while also ceasing the collection of quarterly data on honeybee colonies.

Though honey bees get the most publicity, they’re just 1 of 4,000 native North American bee species, all of which are threatened. Bumblebees, carpenter bees and orchard bees are among the wild bee species that benefit from plentiful food sources in urban settings, along with other pollinators like monarch butterflies, leaf cutters, wasps, beetles and even bats, mosquitoes and flies (which are also disappearing at alarming rates.)

Their decline is a threat to human food sources everywhere. Pollination is needed for about three-quarters of global food crops, and bringing in domestic honeybee colonies or tiny pollinating drones can’t necessarily replace the benefits of wild insects lost as their habitats are destroyed.

Cities could play a key role in pollinator conservation, according to a recent study carried out by scientists at the Universities of Bristol, Edinburgh, Leeds and Reading in the U.K. Part of this is due to where they tend to be located: in coastal and riparian areas where biodiversity would naturally be high otherwise.

Residential and community gardens can play a major role in attracting pollinators with plants like lavender, dandelions, borage, thistles and buttercups. The study encourages the utilization of public parks, medians, sidewalk strips and other public green spaces for pollinator-attracting plants and mowing less often so they have a chance to flower frequently. It’s also recommended to provide water sources, avoid pesticides and allow for some undisturbed areas where the insects can nest.

There needn’t be such a stark division between even the most modern urban centers and the natural world. At Frontiers, a group of ecologists argue that nature needs urban territory in order to survive, and calls for the creation of more “green infrastructure” like native landscaping, urban farming, access to nature, gardens that reduce flooding in urban landscapes and, in particular, pollinator-focused efforts, using the monarch butterfly as a prime example. The researchers studied the ways in which focusing on preserving the monarch can benefit urban wildlife habitats as a whole.

“Powerful urbanization trends have understandably been accompanied by a sense that nature has been displaced in urban landscapes and can only be found where cities don’t exist. On the one hand, urban life has been characterized as ‘distanced from nature’ accompanied by an ‘extinction of experience’ as people move to urban settings. On the other hand, the conservation community has achieved huge victories in places far from the urban world, and a side effect has been to reify the notion of ‘wilderness’ in the American mind. Large protected areas have “increasingly become the means by which many people see, understand, experience, and use the parts of the world that are often called nature and the environment.”

“Our results add to a growing body of literature showing that metropolitan areas matter for wildlife conservation. Despite being developed, these landscapes have high potential to maintain functional habitat for a variety of species, including migratory and threatened endemic species. Habitat within and between US cities can help connect the dots for monarchs, other pollinators, and birds along migratory pathways from Mexico to Canada and back.”

Individual cities around the world are taking initiative with projects like wildlife corridors, shoreline restoration, massive urban parks and integrated city planning that works with nature. And cities won’t do it themselves, perhaps a resurgence of guerrilla gardening is in order.

Color, shape, texture and structure form the basis for these cairns, mandalas, spiral and hexagons, set against scenic backdrops where the materials were found.

In a tradition often traced back to Andy Goldsworthy, artist James Brunt makes “creates elaborate ephemeral artworks using the natural materials he finds in forests, parks, and beaches near his home in Yorkshire, England,” reports Colossal.

By design and necessity, each of the works is inherently temporary, destined to follow and entropic path back to chaos once left to the forces of nature.

And while all of these works take time, the stacked stone cairns are particularly impressive — and probably the first to fall back apart when left alone.

But Brunt photographs each piece after completion, creating a record that will outlast the work, and sells prints as well.

Street art leaves the city and goes out into the woods in search of a new context without defacing nature thanks to a few massive rolls of clear engineering film. With Moscow-based artist Evgeny Ches’s ‘cellograffiti,’ animals and text loom large between the trunks of trees in temporary installations with a ghostly effect. The residents of the forest often take center stage, including squirrels, polar bears and chimpanzees.

Ches finds it a natural transition (no pun intended) since he likes to integrate the surroundings into each of his works, letting the surface of whatever he’s painting show through instead of painting a background. He notes that using plastic wrap is also a great way for budding graffiti artists to practice.

“Some years ago I saw some guys, who painting on transparent film fixing between, as I can remember, two columns,” says Ches. “The idea to paint on film belongs to French artist Kanos and some time later he and his friend Astro developed cello graffiti. I find this technology interesting and I decided to borrow this idea and use it in my painting. This contrast seems very interesting to me when street art moves to natural environment, and this contrast and harmony at the same time are combined in photo in very unusual way.”

In the video, Chex explains that the first time he tried the technique, he didn’t realize there was a special kind of plastic wrap he could get that offered a large surface, and used about ten rolls of food film instead. Engineering film is better because it’s dense and remains transparent, allowing the viewer to see the landscape behind the paint.

Reddish-brown corten steel compliments surrounding dark browns and lush greens in this Ukrainian forest retreat, its horizontal planes pushing the building out to meet the surrounding trees.

Known for their use of weathering steel, Sergey Makhno Architects wrapped their latest work with a combination of corten and mesh, the latter to foster the growth of ivy, further connecting nature and architecture.

In the center of the house sits a wild garden as well. As temperatures rise, this greenery will slowly grow up and out, fostering building-climbing plants from both the interior and exterior of the structure.

Notably, this is not the design teams first attempt to weave manufactured materials with a natural setting. Certain formal similarities (large stretches of uniform surface, strong geometric rhythms) can be seen in one prior work in particular.

In a lot of ways, this latest work is a more elaborate extrapolation of earlier and simpler models, like the “Rain” house constructed primarily from corten steel and glass with a much simpler layout.