[ Lost in the Landscape ]

carnivorous plants in action

I’ve had a cou­ple recent posts on insects. While I’ll on the sub­ject it looks like there’s a whole sub­cul­ture of insect snuff films on YouTube. Notice that the “no ani­mals were harmed dur­ing the film­ing of this video” assur­ance appears nowhere on any of these videos… Here are a cou­ple show­ing droseras in action:

You can read up on how the insides of the sar­race­nia pitcher plants are lined with hairs that point down­wards, into “the drink,” mak­ing escape almost impos­si­ble for small insects. Or you can see it for your­self:

And what col­lec­tion of car­niv­o­rous plant videos would be com­plete with­out one show­ing a venus fly­trap doing its thing:

March 31 2008 | Categories: gardening | Tags: Dionaea muscipula • drosera • insects • pitcher plants • sarracenia • sundews • venus flytraps • videos | 1 Comment »

ant farm[ers]

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 »

garden cat and abu ghraib in 3-d!

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 »

in defense of bees

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 »

protea pink ice

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 »

steel cube planters, part 2

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:

1. Clamp the sides together in a way that the final bot­tom piece will be able to slide into the assem­bly at a slight slant.
2. 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.)
3. 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.
4. 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 »

steel cube planters, part 1

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 »

geometry

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 »

the snake path

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 »

return of the native

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 »