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Nornagest comments on Holden's Objection 1: Friendliness is dangerous - LessWrong
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What if particular arrangements of flowers, trees and soforth are complex and interconnected, in ways that can be undone to the net detriment of said flowers, trees and soforth? Thinking here of attempts at scientifically "managing" forest resources in Germany with the goal of making them as accessible and productive as possible. The resulting tree farms were far less resistant to disease, climatic abberation, and so on, and generally not very healthy, because it turns out that illegible, sloppy factor that made forest seem less-conveniently organized for human uses was a non-negligible portion of what allowed them to be so productive and robust in the first place.
No individual tree or flower is all that important, but the arrangement is, and you can easily destroy it without necessarily destroying any particular tree or flower. I'm not sure what to call this, and it's definitely not independent of the trees and flowers and soforth, but it can be destroyed to the concrete and demonstrable detriment of what's left.
That's an interesting question, actually.
I don't know forestry from my elbow, but I used to read a blog by someone who was pretty into saltwater fish tanks. Now, one property of these tanks is that they're really sensitive to a bunch of feedback loops that can most easily be stabilized by approximating a wild reef environment; if you get the lighting or the chemical balance of the water wrong, or if you don't get a well-balanced polyculture of fish and corals and random invertebrates going, the whole system has a tendency to go out of whack and die.
This can be managed to some extent with active modification of the tank, and the health of your tank can be described in terms of how often you need to tweak it. Supposing you get the balance just right, so that you only need to provide the right energy inputs and your tank will live forever: is that Nature? It certainly seems to have the factors that your ersatz German forest lacks, but it's still basically two hundred enclosed gallons of salt water hooked up to an aeration system.