Archive for March, 2008
So…you think humans are the only critters who farm and garden? Think again. From a Science in Brief column in yesterday’s LA Times comes this about ants:
Study finds ants longtime farmers
Ants took up farming some 50 million years ago, according to researchers who traced the ancestry of farmer ants.
An analysis of the DNA of farmer ants traced them back to an original ancestor — a sort of Adam ant, at least for the types that raise their own food, according to a paper published in the online edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
In the last 25 million years, ants have developed different types of farming, including the well-known leaf-cutter ants. Leaf-cutter ants don’t eat the leaves they collect. Instead, they grow fungus on the leaves and eat the fungus.
Only four types of animals are known to farm for food — ants, termites, bark beetles and, of course, humans. All four cultivate fungi.
If you have online access to that journal, you can read the full article at: http://www.pnas.org/cgi/reprint/0711024105v1. There’s no research on whether ants prefer to create formal gardens or naturalistic ones, though I’d guess aesthetics aren’t hight on their list of concerns.
To that, I’d also add that some ants are also livestock farmers in that they cultivate other animals. Aphids and ants have a symbiotic relationship, with ants tending aphids to share in the sweet nectar they exude. And all last year we had a major ant trail leading from the ground into the grapefruit tree, where ants and scale insects had set up shop on the skins of the young grapefruits. It didn’t seem to affect the grapefruits too much, though we always had to remember to scrub them clean before serving them up. Here’s a link to a related story on ants and scale insects in tropical coffee plantations.
March 30 2008 | Categories: gardening • quotes | Tags: ants • evolutionary biology • gardeners • insects | 1 Comment »
I’ve written about our cat Scooter. A while back I’d bought myself a Sputnik camera, and old Russian roll-film camera that takes two pictures simultaneously, each of them of the same thing, but with separate lenses spaced about the same distance as a pair of eyes. With a special stereo viewer or by making what’s called an anaglyph you can reconstruct the scene giving you a 3-d effect. When I took the camera outside on the first day I had it Scooter followed me out.
Above and below are a couple anaglyphs made from images shot during that session. If you have a pair of red/cyan 3-d glasses you can see the image in stereo. (A red/greed pair will work as well, though not as well. Clear glasses that use polarized light won’t work for teasing apart the separate images in the anaglyph.) I constructed the anaglyphs in a way that would still make sense to viewers without the 3-d glasses, in a way that features the star of each picture…
As much fun as I had outside with the cat I hadn’t bought the camera to take more wonderful cat pictures. George Bush’s Iraq War was chugging along full steam and the notorious pictures from Abu Ghraib had recently surfaced. The world was pissed after seeing them and so was I. Politics seeps into my art in various ways, most of them subtle, but I started a small serious of pieces addressing the Iraq war. Below is one of those works, a 3-d photomontage combining staged elements along with one of the most infamous war images of recent times. It’s a complex response, combining what might look like humor with a seething rage I still harbor towards a war launched by a man who’s now been responsible for more American deaths than the number of those who died in the September 11 attacks in New York. And that’s only a fraction of those who’ve been killed.
James SOE NYUN: Le Can-Can Abu Ghraib.
Technical Details: The original Abu Ghraib image was gently dissected and reassembled into two slightly different images that were then composited to give a subtle 3-d image. The foreground and stage were mockups that I staged and photographed twice with conventional cameras, moving the tripod to the side about four inches between exposures. The “dancing” figures were photographed using the stereo Sputnik camera. Two separate composite images were completed using Photoshop, one reflecting what the left eye might see, the other what the right eye would see. The left image was then pasted into the red channels of the final image and the right image pasted into the green and blue channels. The final work is printed fairly large, at a scale approaching narrative history paintings.
Google “photoshop” and “anaglyph” for a pile of resources on how to make your own anaglyphs.
March 29 2008 | Categories: gardening • photography | Tags: 3-d photography • Abu Ghraib • cats • photomontage • Sputnik camera • stereo photography | 2 Comments »
A lot of nurseries around here tout plants as being hummingbird- or butterfly-friendly. Those little critters are awfully decorative and fun to have around, but the major work of pollination belongs to the bees. For instance the California almond crop supplies something like 80% of the world’s almond exports, and the crop wouldn’t be possible without all the hives that are trucked into the Central Valley about this time of year. According to the Los Angeles Times, farmers now are spending more on renting hives than they are on watering their trees.
A recent article, The Headbonker’s Ball, in Orion Magazine has a great article on the Urban Bee Project, a project headed by UC Berkeley prof Gordon Frankie that’s designed to educate folks about the value of having bee-friendly gardens. Their Urban Bee Gardens site crawls with all sorts of information on the value of bees and what you can do to welcome them into your garden. Some of it’s under construction still, but there’s already lots of useful information there.
One of the cores of the site is a list of plants that are friendly to bees, and the list is broken into spring plants and summer plants so that you can plan a progression of food sources for the little guys. The list is a little Berkeley-centric, though many of the plants on the list would grow plenty of other places. At first you might worry that you’d have to plant oddball ugly plants just to the do the right thing, but incorporating bee-friendly plants requires no such thing. A lot of the selections are really common garden plants, and you probably have a number of them in your garden already: lavenders, penstemons, salvias, cosmos, sunflowers, and the like.
With all the plants out there the list couldn’t possibly list every bee-friendly plant out there.Various thymes, for instance, have a reputation for being major bee party pads. The Berkeley project came to its conclusions by sending people out into gardens and having them count how many bees visited a plant in a certain time period. (Not a bad way to conduct research, eh?) You could do the same. If there’s something not on the list but you notice that the bees like it, why not plant a little more of it? Give the hummingbirds and butterflies some company.
March 28 2008 | Categories: gardening • landscape design | Tags: bees • insects • pollination | 1 Comment »
Shown here with its last flowers of a long season that started last fall is Protea x Pink Ice, a hybrid between the species P. compacta and P. susannae. Although one of the growing guides says this stops at 5-7 feet tall, it’s now pushing 10 or more, egged on by a cool and moist winter.
The shrub is well-behaved, and responds well to gentle pruning. But you grow it because of its flowers, and they’re pretty exotic:
When I get all piney over not having a cold enough climate to properly grow lady’s slipper orchids or produce even a small apricot crop, seriously cool plants like this begin to make up for what I can’t do.
March 27 2008 | Categories: my garden • plant profiles | Tags: in bloom • Protea Pink Ice | No Comments »
Below are instructions on constructing the steel planters I discussed in my last post.
For each planter, you’ll need:
- 5 sheets of 12-guage steel, cut perfectly square (I used pieces 1-foot square)
- disposable welding supplies: either welding wire or steel electrodes
Tools:
- welder
- 90-degree corner clamps (aluminum Pony clamps work well)
- the usual welding protection: welding shield, gloves, sturdy shoes, long sleeves and long pants
Assembly:
- Clamp the sides together in a way that the final bottom piece will be able to slide into the assembly at a slight slant.
- Tack the pieces together using 3 1-inch beads per corner, making sure to leave room for the bottom piece to fit into the planter without running into the welds. Also make sure that two adjacent sides will have their lowest welds a little higher up to be able to accommodate the slanted bottom piece. (You could also use a slightly under-sized bottom panel so you could us it without slanting it, maybe 12 x 11 1/2 or so, depending on how much drainage you want.)
- Slide the bottom piece in at an angle, tilting it a little bit extra to not make the fit too tight, leaving slight gaps for water to drain.
- Tack weld the bottom in several locations.
That’s basically it. It’s a good idea to clean off the oils from the mill using a degreaser or strong detergent. That step will get the rust started. But if you’re anxious to get patina quicker, you can use a weak solution of acid. I used a stop-bath strength dilution of acetic acid from one of my old photo darkroom bottles, but I’ve heard that vinegar (basically acetic acid as well) works just fine as well. Be sure to wear gloves and eye protection, and don’t inhale the nasty fumes! The finish won’t be totally rusty, but it’ll give you a good head start to a nice patina.
A lot of people swear by weak pool acid (aka muriatic or hydrochloric acid), but you’re getting into territory where the materials start to get unnecessarily powerful. You might be in a rush to get more patina faster and think that using strong acid is the way to go. But when the acid gets too strong, it actually removes rust, so staying with something weak and safe is the best way to go. If I haven’t deterred you, though, check out the discussion at Metalgeek for a moderately safe method for the truly impatient.
One little final finesse concerns the use of insulation. Plants in pots often suffer from roots that have to abide wild temperature swings far beyond what they’d experience in the ground. I’ve always felt that metal containers, with their spectacular abilities to transmit heat effectively, potentially could make for some of the most hostile root environments. So I decided to insulate the sides of the pot that would be facing the most intense sun. This heavily canted cube in particular cried out to me for some protection from the extreme heat of the midday rays…and I just happened to have some leftover 1/2 sheet insulation sitting around. So, before I planted the cubes, at least one of the sides got a piece of insulation to moderate the worst of the sun’s heating effects. Here’s a peek inside:
All this is a grand experiment. The insulation may or may not make a difference. I’m sure the cubes will eventually rust out, though hopefully not for ten or more years. In hindsight, priming and painting the interiors might have given the planters a bit more life, but the euphorbias planted in them will eventually outgrow their homes anyway. What in a garden is forever?
March 25 2008 | Categories: gardening • my garden | Tags: finishing steel • how-to • planters • rust | 2 Comments »
This is the result of one of my weekend projects:
It’s one of four steel cubes that I assembled to put in the new raised bed. The sides of the bed are made of sheet steel that’s already weathered to a rich, warm, rusty patina, so I wanted some pots to put in it that were of the same material.
John vetoed my first avant-garde conceptual ideas for arrangements, arrangements that worked with competing systems of geometrical hierarchies, one of them based in part on some of the ideas behind Bernard Tschumi’s postmodernist and highly conceptual Parc de la Villette in Paris. But below is one that I finally came up with that makes us both happy. It has some of the geometrical tensions that I wanted to work with. At the same time, the arrangement of the elements is a little chaotic and whimsical—to the point that none of them sit flat on the ground—a quality that appealed to John.
Each pot is planted with the identical plant material. Euphorbia lambii is placed in the center, pointing as perfectly upright and away from the earth’s core as I could manage without getting out the level, an effect that I’m hoping will point out how crookedly each planter is placed. Creeping thyme will eventually protect the top of the slanted top plane of potting mix.
This is an overview of two of the other containers in the garden space, here in the middle- and background, with part of the new stepping stone pathway:
If you have basic of welding chops and a supplier that will pre-cut pieces fairly accurately, you can make them yourself in an afternoon. You could also make similar containers by screwing the steel plate to little pieces of angle iron. Part 2 of this post provides some basic instructions for the welded version shown here.
March 24 2008 | Categories: landscape design • my garden | Tags: Bernard Tschumi • Euphorbia lambii • Parc de la Villette • planters | 5 Comments »
I love lots of natural-style plantings that I’ve seen, but I also appreciate a sensitive use of geometry. Click here to see a planting of fifteen Pachypodium geayi (Madagascar palms) that I ran across rummaging through the plant files at the davesgarden site. Wouldn’t this be an awesome planting in a modern outdoor space?
The individual plants have an amazing architecture to them, but they’re fairly slow growing. My representative of this species in the back yard is probably fifteen years old and only about five feet tall. The plants in the picture must be fifteen feet tall and have a few decades apiece—not the sort of planting you’d be able to put together in an afternoon’s shopping at the local garden center…
March 22 2008 | Categories: landscape design | Tags: grid plantings • Pachypodium geayi | No Comments »
I just wrote about Robert Irwin’s terrific artwork in the UCSD Stuart collection. The collection has another piece that I like, Alexis Smith’s Snake Path, from 1992.
From the collection’s page on the artist:
Smith’s work for the Stuart Collection alludes to the complex relationship between nature and culture or, in the context of the university, between knowledge and the landscape. Her Snake Path consists of a winding 560-foot-long, 10-foot-wide footpath tiled in the form of a serpent whose head ends at the terrace of the Central Library. The tail wraps around an existing concrete pathway as a snake would wrap itself around a tree limb. Along the way, the serpent’s slightly rounded body passes a monumental granite book carved with a quote from Milton’s Paradise Lost. The snake then circles around a small tropical garden representing Eden. These pointed allusions to the biblical conflict between innocence and knowledge mark an apt symbolic path to the university’s main repository of books. The concept of finding sanctuary within oneself - outside the idealistic and protected confines of the university - speaks directly to the student on the verge of entering the “real world.”
Here’s their official overview picture of the work:
And here are some snapshots from a walk there last week, first a closeup of the hexagonal slate tiles that make up the snake’s “scales”:
…and here are a couple shots of Eden, maybe not exactly “tropical,” as described, but a lush planting that contrasts to the surrounding native vegetation:
The plants in “Eden” are plants that have biblical references or those that somehow look like they’d belong in an eden. In the two pictures above you can see how the Italian cypresses have been pruned in a way that to me recalls some of the plants in the background of Leonardo’s 1470s Annunciation, now at the Uffizi Gallery in Florence:
So…you can study garden books on how to prune a plant—or you can study a painting by Leonardo da Vinci!
March 20 2008 | Categories: art • places | Tags: Alexis Smith • Cupressus sempervirens • eden • Italian cypress • Leonardo • pruning | 3 Comments »
I’ve been watching the seedlings, and now they’re just beginning to bloom: Ranunculus californicus, a.k.a. “California buttercup.”
I bought a plant at a native plant sale maybe ten years ago. The species gows 18-24 inches tall, is drought-tolerant, and stays pretty showy for a couple months in the early spring with bright heads of these simple yellow flowers carried above the delicate and shiny foliage. It self-sowed readily without becoming weedy, so that one plant became a nice handful. That nice handful, however, got run over by a little backhoe a couple years ago when we did a little addition to the back of the house. Where there used to be garden there was just trampled dirt. Now the first ranunculus are back, maybe not exactly where I’d want them, but close enough.
With too many of these native California plants, they show up at native plant nurseries, but when you go out to the wilds you hardly ever run across them. But one of the last times I was hiking around the local San Clemente Canyon preserve, maybe 3 miles away, I looked down and there it was: Ranunculus californica, as happy on the hillside as it was back home in the garden.
March 18 2008 | Categories: gardening • my garden • plant profiles | Tags: native plants • Ranunculus californicus • reseeding | 1 Comment »
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