[ Lost in the Landscape ]

cats, bulbs, corms and tubers

Here’s a pic­ture of our cat Scooter, squinting:

Lovely, eh? She’s def­i­nitely great com­pany in the house or when we’re out­side gar­den­ing. But being a cat, she’ll be around one minute and off doing some­thing else the next, only to reap­pear when you least expect it. Some­thing like bulbs in the garden.

You plant the bulbs in the ground, add some water, and prac­ti­cally for­get about them. Then when they’re ready, they emerge and bloom for a few days or a few weeks. Then they’re not there any­more, long before you get tired of them.

Most of the paper­white nar­cis­sus in the gar­den have already bloomed. In San Diego they mark the start of the long bulb sea­son, with its long suc­ces­sions of nar­cis­sus, cycla­men, freesia, dich­e­lostemma, blom­me­ria, oxalis, ornithogalum, ixia, ranun­cu­lus, home­ria, calla, amaryl­lis, glad­i­o­lus, plus what­ever else that you’d for­got­ten that you’d put into the ground. I never get tired of see­ing them when they come decide to come around around. Some­thing like the favorite cat…

November 30 2007 | Categories: gardening • my garden • rambles | Tags: bulbs • cats • corms • tubers | 1 Comment »

when landscaping fails

Desert Cen­ter, Cal­i­for­nia lies about halfway between Indio and the Col­orado River, halfway between a hot, flat desert town and the Ari­zona bor­der. Unless you need to stop for gas, you pass by it on I-10 at wide-open high­way speeds. It’d be a blur like any other anony­mous desert town if it weren’t for the palm trees.

The huge date palms there grow single-file in for­ma­tions that describe wide cir­cles, V-shapes, or a tri­an­gle that’s many acres across. Trans­planted there by Stan­ley Rags­dale in the early 1990s, most of the trees now have seen bet­ter days. Even for drought-tolerant date palms, irri­ga­tion is essen­tial here in the low desert. The water­ing proved inad­e­quate and many of them died. In their cur­rent state of falling into ruins the trees are visu­ally amaz­ing, the veg­etable equiv­a­lent of the Acropolis.

James SOE NYUN: Palms I, Desert Cen­ter, California

I first went to pho­to­graph the town and its trees in 2003 on a hot, breezy day in April. It was approach­ing noon, and there was no shade other than what a min­i­mal palm trunk could pro­vide. It’s not the sort of light­ing sit­u­a­tion that a lot of pho­tog­ra­phers con­sider accept­able, but for this body of work it was per­fect. Besides, so many of the well-known 19th cen­tury expe­di­tionary pho­tographs of the Amer­i­can West were taken in harsh con­di­tions sim­i­lar to what I encoun­tered. Palms I, above, and Palms II, below form a dip­tych: Imag­ine Palms I on the left and Palms II on the right.

James SOE NYUN: Palms II, Desert Cen­ter, California

There weren’t many struc­tures there next to the inter­state, not much beyond the oblig­a­tory cafe and gas sta­tion. The big sur­prise, though, was an aban­doned school, com­pact, con­structed of brick, and mod­ern in its archi­tec­ture. It had almost no win­dows in the class­rooms except for high cleresto­ries place beneath broad, shel­ter­ing eaves. Not that dif­fer­ent from the schools I attended up in the Los Ange­les area, I thought. In photography–and in paint­ing for cen­turies before it–ruins are often a bit of a cliche, but name me a land­scape pho­tog­ra­pher who hasn’t shot some at some point. I couldn’t resist:

James SOE NYUN: Breeze­way, Aban­doned School, Desert Cen­ter, California

Both the palm trees and the town clearly had seen bet­ter days. Stephen A. Rags­dale, the man who founded the town in 1921, died in 1971. Stan­ley Rags­dale, the one who directed the plant­ing of the trees, died in 1999. With­out their ener­gies, this area of the city fal­tered, and the palms began to fail. The town and these land­scapes shot there func­tion for me like North­ern Euro­pean van­i­tas paint­ings, reminders of life’s strug­gles, its short­ness, and the cer­tainty of entropy. Again, those aren’t tran­scen­den­tally fresh ideas, but to see them par­tic­u­lar­ized in a place that’s strug­gling though still very much alive fas­ci­nates me. Judg­ing by the num­ber of peo­ple who leave the high­way, gas up, then drive slowly towards the palm for­ma­tions, I’m not the only one who’s fascinated.

For more infor­ma­tion on Desert Cen­ter see: Wikipedia / The Cen­ter for Land Use Inter­pre­ta­tion.

For more infor­ma­tion on the large series this images are a part of see: James SOE NYUN: Blue Day­light Project.

November 30 2007 | Categories: art • landscape • landscape design • photography | Tags: desert center • desert towns • James SOE NYUN • palm trees | No Comments »

losing control

I was at the day job, prep­ping for a meet­ing, when John IMs me from home.

Do you want me to plant the pansies?

Inno­cent enough ques­tion, eh? The day before I’d bought 4 six­packs of them, lit­tle white vanilla num­bers that I thought would be good tem­po­rary fill at the front of the new plant­ing bed until I could decide what else to plant and until what I’d planted could begin to fill in. They’d been sit­ting in the sun and get­ting them in the ground would have been a good thing. So I said sure, go ahead.

When I got home they were in the ground, not exactly where I’d envi­sioned them, but attrac­tive. John said some­thing about how 4 six­packs didn’t go very far in the big new bed and how he’d always wanted to do one of those color-zone plant­i­ngs. Big swaths of one color next to big swaths of another. Some­thing big, splashy and com­mer­cial. I groaned a noise that to him must have sounded like agreement.

The next day I get another IM at work. He’s bought more. Lots more. He’d for­got­ten how many plants he’d put in the pre­vi­ous day, so he got a quan­tity that he thought was how much he’d already put in. Instead it ended up being 12 more six­packs. That goes a lot fur­ther than just 24 plants!

So there’s the bed full of the orig­i­nal plain white pan­sies, new dark maroon-purple ones, and another area of new white ones with pur­ple faces. Pan­sies can be okay fillers up close, but spread through­out a gar­den uni­formly between larger plants they begin to look like.….…..well, ever been to the land­fill on a windy day? Lit­tle paper scraps blow­ing every­where? Yeah, that was my first impression.

Note to myself: Breath. Let go. Stop feel­ing like you need to make all the aes­thetic deci­sions. Give it time. They may look per­fectly fine when they grow up in a cou­ple months.

A gar­den is always a col­lab­o­ra­tion, whether it’s just you and the plants or there are oth­ers involved.

November 26 2007 | Categories: gardening • my garden • rambles | Tags: control freaks • flower beds • pansies | No Comments »

extreme gardening

In the late 90s I was for­tu­nate to be part of a show of pho­tog­ra­phy at San Fran­cisco Cam­er­a­work, enti­tled Feed, that cen­tered on our rela­tion­ship with food. One of the artists in the show was one of my pho­to­graphic heroes, John Pfahl, who in the 1970s pro­duced his funny and quirk­ily beau­ti­ful Altered Land­scapes series. In that San Fran­cisco show he was rep­re­sented by images of com­post, Very Rich Hours of a Com­post Pile.

The work that I’d to say a few things about are his doc­u­ments of over-the-top gar­den­scapes, his Extreme Hor­ti­cul­ture series.

John Pfahl: Dr. Wadsworth’s Tree, Chatauqua, N.Y.

These are all beau­ti­ful, color-soaked images, most of them of the sort of gar­dens where “nat­ural” isn’t a word that would imme­di­ately spring to mind. The raw plant mate­ri­als are often gor­geous, but they’re sheared, arranged and manip­u­lated in ways where the hand of the gar­dener or designer is in-your-face obvi­ous. Often gar­dens like that give me the creeps. They and talk to a cul­ture where a country’s Pres­i­dent is often shown on his Craw­ford, Texas ranch, clear­ing brush, like he’s some sort of rep­re­sen­ta­tive of good human­ity bat­tling the evil forces of nature that want to over­run our bound­aries. Most of Pfahl’s gar­dens are testos­terone gar­dens, gar­dens all about con­trol, gar­dens all about dom­i­na­tion. But at the same time, they’re often beau­ti­ful or funny in their over­man­i­cured way.

John Pfahl: Bare Trees and Top­i­ary, Long­wood Gar­dens, Kensett Square, PA

John Pfahl: Espalier Demon­stra­tion, Long­wood Gar­dens, Kensett Square, PA

John Pfahl: Cac­tus Gar­den, J. Paul Getty Cen­ter, Los Ange­les, California

Maybe I’m over­gen­er­al­iz­ing, but the East Coast gar­dens pic­tured seem heavy into shap­ing plants into top­i­aried sculp­tures. It’s a heav­ily Euro­pean thing–Just think of the immaculately-worked gar­dens at Ver­sailles. The West­ern gar­dens seem to show a lit­tle more inter­est in and respect for the mate­ri­als. Plants are placed where the designer wants them, but they seem to be cho­sen more for what they can do in that loca­tion, rather than what can be done to them. The arrange­ments of cac­tus and suc­cu­lents at the Getty, for instance, show clear thought about where the plants were placed. But the plants are allowed more to be them­selves. (And I won­der if that free­dom some­how also trans­lates into free­doms that peo­ple are allowed to have…) Besides, have you ever tried to prune a cactus?

The ten­sion of nat­ural ten­den­cies ver­sus con­trol is one that’s always inter­est­ing to me. Nature often isn’t con­ve­nient, and it’s often never where we want it to be. Scrap­ing a hill­side to put in sub­ur­ban hous­ing and pulling up an errant weed are part of the same con­tin­uum. But where do you draw the line about what’s good and what’s bad? Is keep­ing a gar­den inher­ently bet­ter than bull­doz­ing native scrub to build more mcman­sions? I think the answer is yes, but the ques­tion is a com­pli­cated one. There’s eco­nom­ics, notions of jus­tice, respect for liv­ing things, and all sorts of other things that have to be con­sid­ered. It’s an intrigu­ing ques­tion that resides not far below the sur­face of John Pfahl’s photographs.

November 25 2007 | Categories: art • gardening • landscape design • photography | Tags: J. Paul Getty Museum • John Pfahl • Longwood Gardens • topiary | 3 Comments »

and so it begins

There’s an old fam­ily photo that I think about every now and then. My sis­ter and I are seated at a view­point over­look­ing the lower falls on the Yel­low­stone River. My sis­ter is star­ing into the cam­era and at my mother who took all these early fam­ily pic­tures. And next to her is me, star­ing not at the cam­era but over the rail­ing at some­thing off to the side, not the main attrac­tion of the falls, but some­thing else–maybe the gorge, maybe the river, maybe the clouds and sky and weather. Lost in the landscape.

For me gar­dens can be won­der­ful lit­tle memen­tos of the larger land­scape. Sur­round me with inter­est­ing plants and their inter­est­ing col­ors and tex­tures, and you’ll stand a chance of los­ing me in it. But I’m also inter­ested that these patches and pots of earth are totally faked ver­sions of what lies beyond the gar­den gates and city walls. There’s always a human hand in the gar­den, and I’m inter­ested in what the gar­den reveals about the per­son plan­ning, plant­ing and tend­ing the garden.

And I have lots of other inter­ests that I expect will end up here–art, pho­tog­ra­phy, design, music, pol­i­tics, sci­ence, stuff in the news–and so I expect these notes will ram­ble a bit, some­thing like an old Lady Banks rose grow­ing in many direc­tions from its root­stock. Since the ram­bles and bram­bles grow from the same root­stock, though, I expect they’ll have some­thing in common.

I guess all that’s a bit of a man­i­festo. I don’t want to lay down too many rules, though, because the world is such an inter­est­ing place, even if that world is a small patch of gar­den with herbs for the kitchen or a tiny re-creation of the cos­mos in a flow­er­pot on someone’s apart­ment windowsill.

And so, off we go!

November 24 2007 | Categories: art • everything • gardening • landscape • landscape design • rambles | Tags: my sister • old photographs • why people garden • yellowstone | No Comments »