[ Lost in the Landscape ]

keep out

Prob­lem: You have a sea­side estate, but between your back yard and the ocean is a busy pub­lic path trav­eled by all sorts of unpleas­ant unde­sir­ables. You want to keep out the riffraff, but you don’t want to spoil the view to the ocean with an unsightly fence. What do you do?

Solu­tion: Here’s some­thing I saw along the Cliff Walk in New­port last week. Basi­cally it’s a lawn that drops off dra­mat­i­cally at the edge. And hid­den inside the dropoff area is this unfriendly fence. It prob­a­bly looks gor­geous from the house, with the lawn seem­ing to stretch to the edge of the rocky shore. But it looks hos­tile as hell from the pub­lic trail.

It’s not exactly a clas­si­cal ha-ha, but close. The orig­i­nal ha-has were basi­cally retain­ing walls that were sunk in a trench, giv­ing the impres­sion that your estate extended to the hori­zon. Cred­ited to the seventeenth-century British gar­den designer Charles Brdge­man, it was used exten­sively and most famously by Capa­bil­ity Brown in his expan­sive Eng­lish coun­try­side gar­den designs.
Photo taken at Cas­tle Ashby, Northants by R Neil Marsh­man under GNU license. The ha-ha is just on the other side of the near tree.

It also is a West­ern take on bor­rowed scenery, the Japan­ese notion of shakkei, “land­scape which is cap­tured alive,” a tech­nique of gar­den plan­ning where you incor­po­rate the view into your gar­den design. So…the British gen­try, the Japan­ese nobles, the gilded Amer­i­cans, they’re pretty sim­i­lar in at least this regard: They all want you to think they have even more than they have.

February 29 2008 | Categories: landscape design | Tags: borrowed scenery • Capability Brown • fences • ha-has • Newport R.I. • shakkei | No Comments »

last Newport post: cameras/semi-mysterious tower

Walk­ing around town when I get breaks between meet­ings I’ve dragged along one of two cam­eras. One is a trusty roll film cam­era that I’ve been using for years, and the other is this embar­rass­ment of a dig­i­tal cam­era, the first dig­i­tal cam­era I bought John when dig­i­tal cam­eras were just com­ing out. I haven’t gone shop­ping to Toys R’ Us lately but I’d guess that it has the same megapixel capac­ity as a My Lit­tle Pony dig­i­tal cam­era today, if they make such a thing. At least it’s not pink. Maybe I should say that it has 1,300 kilopixels–certianly lots more impres­sive than 1.3 megapix­els. And on top of the low res­o­lu­tion it eats bat­ter­ies like crazy. Seri­ously I thought it had died and gone to dig­i­tal cam­era pur­ga­tory until I dropped into the gift shop down­stairs and fed the cam­era five bucks in bat­ter­ies. Might have been a good excuse to finally get myself a real dig­i­tal camera.

Since most of the pic­tures I took were with the film cam­era I’ll have to forgo the imme­di­ate grat­i­fi­ca­tion and wait to see the pic­tures until I get them devel­oped. But here’s one of the ran­dom dig­i­tal shots of a struc­ture located just above the down­town tourist dis­trict. Though it’s called many things, it appears on the map I have as the Old Stone Mill, though it’s doubt­ful that it was ever attached to any oper­a­tion like a mill. In fact, it’s appar­ently a bit of a mys­tery what it is exactly, and a bit of a mys­tery who built it. Appar­ently car­bon dat­ing of the mor­tar dates it to var­i­ous dates, some as late as the late sev­en­teenth cen­tury, some to the early 1400s.

Call me a skep­tic, but just like peo­ple who claim their hotel is haunted, what mys­tery there might be well could be overblown and might have noth­ing to do with real­ity, though it’d cer­tianly be good for busi­ness. There are a lots of web pages where it’s dis­cussed: wikipedia of course; Curt F. Waidmann’s nicely researched The New­port Tower: a Medieval Ruin in Amer­ica; the Red­wood Library and Athenaeum’s page on it; and the more scandal-/mystery-driven page on Unex­plainedEarth. If any of those pages have any author­ity, Wikipedia points to the Red­wood Library’s pages, and I might go with that eval­u­a­tion: The library is located just across the street.

February 23 2008 | Categories: photography • rambles | Tags: cameras • Newport R.I. • Newport Tower • oddities • Old Stone Mill | 1 Comment »

how many seasons?

I’m still vis­it­ing New­port R.I. where it seems like things are on hold. The lawns are mostly brown, the trees largely bare. Some ever­greens seem like they’re wait­ing, like they’ve been wait­ing. A few rhodo­den­drons or aza­leas prob­a­bly could be spec­tac­u­lar, but they’re not going to ful­fill that promise any­time soon. It’s win­ter.



On the plane here I was read­ing the intro­duc­tion to a schol­arly edi­tion of the Sukateiki, the Japan­ese eleventh-century gar­den­ing trea­tise that’s pos­si­bly the old­est book on gar­den­ing in exis­tence in any lan­guage. In a chap­ter on geo­mancy, the authors dis­cuss how the five geo­man­tic elements–wood, fire, earth, metal, water–correspond to the sea­sons. Metal is autumn, water is win­ter, wood is spring, fire is sum­mer, and earth the sea­son that fol­lows, doyo (pre­tend that there’s a macron–a long line–over the con­clud­ing “o”). So…five ele­ments, five sea­sons? That got me thinking.

I spent some of my child­hood in Burma, a trop­i­cal coun­try with weather and sea­sons gov­erned by the mon­soons off the Indian Ocean. (An aside: To see what you can do to stay informed on the awful polit­i­cal mess there, as well as what you can do to help, click here.) There we had a cold dry sea­son, then a hot dry sea­son, fol­lowed by the rainy sea­son. Three sea­sons. When my mother would talk about life in Ohio, with its four sea­sons, with its sea­sons of cold and snow, it all seemed awfully exotic and incomprehensible.

Now, liv­ing in South­ern Cal­i­for­nia, it’s impos­si­ble not to run into some­one nos­tal­gic for what they call four real sea­sons. Except for the occa­sional decid­u­ous tree things stay pretty green. Things bloom in Jan­u­ary. So some com­plain that it’s really just one very long sea­son. Of course, any­one who’s lived there a while can feel the changes: You really shouldn’t plant let­tuce in July, just as you’d prob­a­bly not want to leave your doors and win­dows open most days in Jan­u­ary. Every place has its cycles, only some are more sub­tle than oth­ers. Or do some peo­ple never go out of their houses?

And here in New­port, with the bare trees, the brown lawns, and–just overnight–a cov­er­ing of fresh snow, there’s no doubt. It’s win­ter.

February 22 2008 | Categories: gardening • rambles | Tags: Newport R.I. • seasons • Sukateiki • winter | No Comments »

how to have an important newport garden

I’m on a lit­tle work trip to New­port, Rhode Island, and I’m just back from a long self-guided tour that included the Cliff Walk, 3 1/2 miles of a fairly good ocean­side trail (and a lit­tle boulder-scrambling) that takes you on the pri­vate, ocean-view sides of a num­ber of the town’s larger ocean-front man­sions. Famous among them are The Break­ers, the lit­tle sum­mer home of Cor­nelius Van­der­bilt, and the Astor’s Beech­wood. The homes are def­i­nitely on steroids, and the gar­dens are as well. After look­ing at a num­ber of the out­door spaces, I’ve come up with a sim­ple guide that any­one could fol­low to have their very own deluxe Newport-style man­sion grounds. It’s sur­pris­ingly simple.

1. Begin with a lot. Some­thing about the size of Rhode Island would be a good start.

2. Place the house on the side of the prop­erty far­thest away from the view so that you’ll see your domain stretch­ing out towards the view.

3. Plant lawn over every­thing. If sea­side rocks get in the way, leave them in place, but plant lawn right up to them.

4. Plant a long hedge on the sides along the prop­erty lines with you neigh­bord. If this hedge closes in on your view, then your lot is likely too small. Return to step 1. A hedgerow along the edge of the prop­erty with the view must be con­sid­ered care­fully. Don’t plant one if it would sub­stan­tially inter­fere with the view. Rein­force your hedges with chain link fences. Although often paired with trail­ers and other low archi­tec­ture in the South and else­where, these fences will enhance pri­vacy and be vir­tu­ally invis­i­ble behind the hedges and from sev­eral hun­dred feet away.

Above: The Break­ers, as illus­trated in an arti­cle in New Eng­land Antiques.

That’s pretty much all there is to it. To add inter­est you can try out some of the advanced tech­niques below:

AT1. Plant trees, prefer­ably decid­u­ous ones, in small, nat­u­ral­is­tic clumps towards the edges of your proerty line. Don’t let the trees encroach too much on either your view or the view that peo­ple will have of you. Smaller trees–no more than 20–25 feet tall–can make you prop­erty appear even larger, while at the same time giv­ing it the sense that it’s emerg­ing from some dark wood.

AT2. Insert­ing a for­mal, sym­met­ri­cal gar­den is optional. How­ever, it should never be the major­ity of your prop­erty, and it is best to place it towards the side of your prop­erty. Plac­ing it in the cen­ter will make it the focus of the gar­den and detract from the view beyond, a tech­nique that should only be used when your view is not as desir­able as that of those around you. Remem­ber that there must be more space devoted to a lawn than to a for­mal gar­den. Always.

AT3. Smaller shrubs in the 3–6 foot size may be employed sym­met­ri­cally to accen­tu­ate the for­mal archi­tec­ture of the house or to pro­vide vari­ety by being planted next to a straight-line plant­ing of hedgerow. Be sure to have your gar­den­ers form them into rounded shapes. Let­ting the shrubs grow nat­u­rally is not an option.

Some ran­dom man­sion with shrubs employed to accen­tu­ate the for­mal architecture.

AT4. Per­ma­nent gar­den fur­ni­ture gen­er­ally should be avoided. How­ever, a sin­gle piece, per­haps one small bench may be place far back into the gar­den, enhanc­ing the sense of dis­tance and space.

AT5. Smaller-scale gar­den art may be added, par­tic­u­larly to a for­mal gar­den. Stone urns, cherubs, and veiled goddess-ey char­ac­ters are good choices. Human fig­ures must be life-sized or prefer­ably smaller. Naked fig­ures are to be frowned upon in a New­port gar­den, though the expo­sure of a sin­gle female breast may be employed if done in impec­ca­ble taste. Save the less taste­ful sculp­tures for the back yard of your Mal­ibu estate.

February 20 2008 | Categories: gardening • landscape design • places | Tags: mansion properties • mansions • Newport R.I. • The Breakers | No Comments »

some japanese gardens

I just ran across this cool site, a pic­ture gallery page off of Bow­doin College’s Japan­ese gar­dens home page. Though my gar­den, with its patches of heav­ily assorted plant­i­ngs, gen­er­ally doesn’t have much of a Japan­ese gar­den feel, I have a real fond­ness for the stud­ied nat­ural sim­plic­ity of the Japan­ese gar­den aes­thetic. This site has some amaz­ing gar­dens, par­tic­u­larly around Kyoto, and includes the iconic Ryoan-ji raked sand gar­den, plus 28 oth­ers. Each has sev­eral pic­tures, a map, and intro­duc­tion and a brief bit of history.

One of the artists whose pho­tographs got me inter­ested in pho­tog­ra­phy again in the 1980s was David Hock­ney. I’m not sure of his level of infat­u­a­tion with Japan­ese gar­dens, but he did do this strik­ing piece in 1983, a big pho­to­col­lage of the dry gar­den at Ryoan-ji. It’s a lit­tle hard to see in this reduced pic­ture, but he’s pieced together bits of the gar­den, pieces of the sur­round­ing tem­ple, pil­grims to the site and the black plas­tic con­tain­ers of the film he was using to shoot the scene. And if you look close you can also see his socks.

When he was doing these pho­to­col­lages, the story goes that Hock­ney dropped off his film at the neigh­bor­hood quickie photo place. In this pho­to­col­lage you can see the mis­matched print­ing the place did, par­tic­u­larly obvi­ous in the cen­tral sand area. After Hock­ney made the orig­i­nals, these col­lages were then edi­tioned, using Hockney’s neg­a­tives. The peo­ple mak­ing the edi­tion tried to repli­cate Hockney’s orig­i­nals, which in this case meant going through the headaches of doing an inten­tion­ally “bad” job of print­ing the neg­a­tives, try­ing to match the job the local photo place did for Hockney.

These works don’t have the same vivid col­ors that Hockney’s paint­ings do, but they for sure share some of the same sense of space and time. Inspired by cubism, things don’t fit together per­fectly, but your mind pieces the scenes together in a sen­si­ble way any­way. For me these works are almost like sculp­ture in that regard: You can’t see them all at once. Instead of tra­vers­ing the space around an object, though, your eye moves around the image, giv­ing you a sense of space. View­ing the work–a col­lage of images cap­tured over a cer­tain timespan–engages time in a way a sin­gle pho­to­graph typ­i­cally doesn’t.

February 17 2008 | Categories: art • gardening • landscape design • photography | Tags: Bowdoin College • David Hockney • Japanese gardens • photocollages • Ryoan-ji | No Comments »

expectations

I did a lit­tle nurs­ery hop­ping with John in North County yes­ter­day. Inland North County is still in large part avo­cado coun­try, and in fact they call that stretch of I-15 the “Avo­cado High­way.” And mixed in with the avo­ca­dos are var­i­ous plant nurs­eries, some whole­sale, some open to the public.

The first of two stops was Las Pil­i­tas Nurs­ery, a large cleared lot sur­rounded by sycamores, the south­ern out­post in Escon­dido of a larger con­cern up in San Luis Obispo. Most gar­den cen­ters you go to seem to be packed with easy-to-grow stuff in bloom, plants that whore them­selves at you with seduc­tive blooms and intox­i­cat­ing scents. If you head to Las Pil­i­tas expect­ing that kind of expe­ri­ence, you’ll be seri­ously let down, par­tic­u­larly in off-season.

A lot of the plants this trip were on the smaller side since it was still later win­ter and their stock was liv­ing out­doors, not in a green­house. And the place isn’t not afraid to have big blocks of dor­mant things mixed in with the other stock. Some of the dor­mant things are leaf­less pots of scrappy look­ing twigs. Other dor­mant pots just look like pots of dirt where the twigs have died back entirely. Okay.….so you do have to take it a bit on faith that you’re really buy­ing a plant and not some nice pot­ting mix. But stick the root mass in the ground and you’ll hope­fully have a plant before you know it. Think of it like you’re plant­ing bulbs.

And the plants in their inven­tory them­selves live up to dif­fer­ent expec­ta­tions. Most natives aren’t the high-strung prima donna gar­den plants at the gar­den cen­ters. Some take their cues from the dry sum­mers and go dor­mant in when it’s hot. Other are winter-deciduous. These are plants you take with all their char­ac­ter­is­tics, and you’d prob­a­bly not want to put them where you’d expect to have lush foliage and flow­ers all year round. But there are lots of things that look respectable year-round, along with a few that really are pretty extrav­a­gant all the time. I ended up with a pot of dor­mant twigs–Spi­raea dou­glasii (west­ern spiraea)–three Heucera max­ima (island alum root), and one Car­pen­te­ria cal­i­for­nica (bush anenome).

All that said, the owner, Valerie, is knowl­edge­able, com­mit­ted and pas­sion­ate about her plants. Below are pic­tures of these three plants from the web­site. Bear in mind that the plants I bought were lit­tle 1 gal­lon­ers, though 1 gal­lon­ers that I fully expect to start look­ing more like their pic­tures before too long…

The other stop on the trip was Buena Creek Gar­dens, in San Mar­cos, a totally dif­fer­ent sort of expe­ri­ence. Located on sev­eral acres that have been planted like a small botan­i­cal gar­den, the feel of the place is calm and play­ful, lush and relaxed, where Las Pil­i­tas was more seri­ous and matter-of-fact.

This is one of their demon­stra­tion gar­dens, with some bloom­ing iris and alstrome­ria, with a cordy­line in the background.

Con­nect­ing a cou­ple of their demon­stra­tion gar­dens is this path through a bam­boo thicket.

…and in bloom over one of their sales area was this Prunus species, a Tai­wanese flow­er­ing cherry, I think she called it. The orig­i­nal plant was a shrub, not a tree. So the cool flow­er­ing cherry plant was grafted onto a tree to give this great effect. Unfor­tu­nately the pic­ture doesn’t do the plant jus­tice.

Some of the cool plants in the ground were avail­able for sale, but, darn!, many were not. Still we came home with six or so more plants. Some­times it’s pretty hard to resist some splashy plants, even if you’re try­ing to go with a greater pro­por­tion of natives.

Okay, plants. You’ve been in the ground for at least six hours. Isn’t that enough time for the yard to look just like the demon­stra­tion gardens?

February 16 2008 | Categories: gardening • places • rambles | | No Comments »

weeds weeds weeds

Lots of times I’m glad to be liv­ing in South­ern Cal­i­for­nia where win­ters are mild and things hardly ever freeze. Today’s one of those amaz­ing win­ter days: bril­liantly sunny, warm–and it’s the mid­dle of Feb­ru­ary. But there are down-sides. Thou­sands of them.

What I’m talk­ing about of course are the weeds pop­ping up every­where in the yard. After a wet Jan­u­ary, as the days begin to warm, noth­ing has a stronger life-wish than the seeds that have been lying dor­mant in the soil. So now there are wild patches of grasses, oxalis, spurge, dan­de­lions and all sorts of other green mat­ter mak­ing a break from the cool secu­rity of the earth. Not that I blame them. I’m start­ing to feel moti­vated myself to break out of the heated house and spend some time in the sun­shine out­side. But at the same time I’m start­ing to think a lot about one of the quotes I listed last time, a cou­ple lines by David Cooper:

The life of a seri­ous gar­dener is not one that, as it hap­pens involves some gar­den­ing. Instead, it is one partly define by the struc­tured, reg­u­lar activ­i­ties which are imposed once the deci­sion to grow and to gar­den is made.

In cooler cli­mates, even seri­ous gar­den­ers get unbro­ken weeks indoors to pore over plant and seed cat­a­logs full of more bloom­ing things than you’ll see in any botan­i­cal gar­den. That’s an activ­ity I love doing as well. Today lots of these cat­a­logs are online, giv­ing the smaller grower an oppor­tu­nity to show­case their plants, and the offer­ings are as spec­tac­u­lar as ever. A cou­ple of inter­est­ing ones I’ve been look­ing at lately:

Sar­race­nia North­west (cool car­niver­ous plants)

Las Pil­i­tas (Cal­i­for­nia native plants)

But the weeds wait for no one. Jeez, some­times I won­der if I have the strength to take on a patch like this one, a severely under­loved cor­ner of the gar­den guarded by a spiny pachy­podium and over­run with the neighbor’s ivy:
And then there’s this lit­tle patch of dirt that until recently held some berries that had been over­run with all sorts of inva­sives. I took it down to bare earth a month ago, and the weeds are start­ing up in it already:
But what can you do? Let it go back to nature? Pave it over? For a gar­den with not enough plant­ing space for those amaz­ing plants in those plant cat­a­logs, niether of those seem like rea­son­able options. So…what will I do with my week­end? I’m sure it’ll have some­thing to do with weeding.…

February 09 2008 | Categories: gardening • my garden | Tags: obligations • plant catalogs • weeds | No Comments »

some random quotes

All gar­den­ing is land­scape painting.–Alexander Pope

Plant­ing ground is paint­ing a land­scape with liv­ing thing.–Gertrude Jekyll

Once prop­erly exam­ined, Jekyll’s com­par­i­son looks to be both super­fi­cial and exaggerated.–David E. Cooper

The Japan­ese gar­den designer cre­ates a the­ater for the wind to speak.–Ezra Pound

Any one can cre­ate a pretty lit­tle bam­boo gar­den in the world. But I doubt that the gar­dener would suc­ceed in incor­po­rat­ing the world in his bam­boo garden.–Hermann Hesse

The life of a seri­ous gar­dener is not one that, as it hap­pens involves some gar­den­ing. Instead, it is one partly define by the struc­tured, reg­u­lar activ­i­ties which are imposed once the deci­sion to grow and to gar­den is made.–David E. Cooper

All the above from David E. Cooper’s A Phi­los­o­phy of Gardens

February 04 2008 | Categories: gardening • quotes | | No Comments »

a philosphy of gardens

I’ve just fin­ished David E. Cooper’s A Phi­los­o­phy of Gar­dens, a short, dense book–though read­able as far as phi­los­o­phy goes. In it he tries to fig­ure out what it is about gar­dens that make them mat­ter to us. After prop­ping up some points for dis­cus­sion, he pro­ceeds to demol­ish them, one by one, as being mis­guided or sim­plis­tic. Some of these ideas he jet­ti­sons: gar­dens are impor­tant because they are art, gar­dens are impor­tant because they rep­re­sent nature, and gar­dens are impor­tant because they rep­re­sent a fusion of both art and nature. Mr. Neg­a­tive. See if I invite him to a party.

But he takes those and other ideas to come up a syn­the­sis at the end, that gar­dens rep­re­sent some sort of epiphany. He begins his con­clu­sion with a “Mod­est Proposal:”

…The Gar­den exem­pli­fies the co-dependence of human cre­ative activ­ity and nature… (P. 142)

Then he expands it further:

If The Gar­den exem­pli­fies or embod­ies co-dependence, then, this can­not sim­ply be that between human endeavor and nature, but a fur­ther, “more mys­te­ri­ous” rela­tion. (P. 143)

…and finally concludes:

[G]ardening or cultivation…[is] a prac­tice which, engaged in with an appro­pri­ate sensibility–engaged in “think­ingly,” as Hei­deg­ger would say–embodies more saliently than any other prac­tice the truth of the rela­tion between human beings, their world, and the “ground” from which the “gift” of this world comes. (P. 160)

On his way to the final con­clu­sion he brings in Zen notions of the world, so that this “gift” that he speaks of isn’t nec­es­sar­ily some West­ern, “God-given” the­o­log­i­cal con­struc­tion, but a more uni­ver­sal sense of our place in the cosmos.

Take a look at the book if you’re was in the mood to step into some meta­phys­i­cal goo…

February 01 2008 | Categories: gardening • quotes | Tags: David E. Cooper • meaning of gardens • philosphy | No Comments »