[ Lost in the Landscape ]

“garden art”">“garden art”

Set in the fake for­est of UCSD’s euca­lyp­tus groves is one my favorite art­works. Robert Irwin’s Two Run­ning Vio­let V Forms was installed in 1983 as part of the cam­pus’ Stu­art Col­lec­tion of site-specific out­door art. The piece, like much of the artist’s out­put, is a sub­tle pres­ence that takes a while to absorb.

Here’s how you might encounter it, approach­ing on a path through the trees:

The piece is pretty unas­sum­ing and is almost not there. Stain­less steel posts raise two V-shaped runs of a tight blue-violet col­ored chain-link mesh up into the tree canopy. That’s basi­cally all there is to it, mate­ri­ally at least, which of course would be basi­cally say­ing the same thing as a Mark Rothko paint­ing is a piece of stretched cloth with some paint applied to it.

Once you add some light, the magic hap­pens. Depend­ing on where you stand and depend­ing on how the light hits it, the piece’s pan­els are either almost trans­par­ent or absolutely opaque. What looks trans­par­ent sub­tly dark­ens and col­ors what you view through it. The pan­els that appear opaque accept shad­ows of the sur­round­ing branches grace­fully.

Move around the work and things change. What starts out trans­par­ent turns opaque; what begins as opaque dis­solves into a blue-violet vapor. Vis­its dur­ing sunny weather end up being sub­tly dif­fer­ent from those on over­cast days. Like the liv­ing trees around it, the piece responds to the weather and its surroundings.

To the gen­eral pub­lic Robert Irwin is now prob­a­bly most famous–to me unfor­tu­nately so–for design­ing the Cen­tral Gar­den at the J. Paul Getty Museum in LA. It’s a beau­ti­ful and inter­est­ing gar­den, but not one that shows off what he does best. The Getty web­site talks about the gar­den as “always chang­ing, never twice the same,” which any gar­dener would say about their own gar­den. But it also is a descrip­tion I’d apply to the piece at UCSD.

It’s inter­est­ing that the Run­ning Vio­let V Forms, from 20 years ear­lier than the Getty gar­den, also has a botan­i­cal ele­ment. The Stu­art Col­lec­tion descrip­tion men­tions that “[p]urple flow­er­ing ice­plant, echo­ing but not match­ing the color of the chain link, is planted under the fence.” When he was work­ing on the Getty gar­den, Irwin was quoted declar­ing him­self not to be a gar­dener, and of his work­ing with plant con­sul­tants to com­plete the design. This is where bring­ing in a plant con­sul­tant at UCSD might have resulted in a dif­fer­ent art­work. Today, the ice­plants live on only as one or two lit­tle mounds that almost never bloom. You wouldn’t take them to be inten­tional parts of the art­work. Planted in the fairly deep shade of the under­story, these sun-loving suc­cu­lents live out a mea­ger exis­tence, deprived of the very light that gives life to the art­work high overhead.

March 17 2008 | Categories: art • places | Tags: Robert Irwin • site-specific art • UCSD | 1 Comment »

some spring wildflowers in the fake forest

I wrote a bit on find­ing dich­e­lostemma in the fake for­est of UCSD’s euca­lyp­tus groves. Here are a cou­ple more shots of some of what’s bloom­ing there, cour­tesy the win­ter rains:






Where are we? Cal­i­for­nia? Aus­tralia? The wild­flow­ers say one thing, the trees another…

March 16 2008 | Categories: places • rambles | Tags: eucalyptus • in bloom | No Comments »

a fake forest

Last time, I wrote about going to the euca­lyp­tus groves at UCSD to look for wild­flow­ers. I’ve always been fas­ci­nated with these areas of the cam­pus. Boston ivy grow­ing on brick build­ings might define the look of cer­tain East Coast schools, but here it’s the euca­lyp­tus trees.

At first your eye fol­lows the trunks on these trees, in the sum­mer cov­ered with beau­ti­ful exfo­li­at­ing bark, up to the high branches and out to the weep­ing branches that come back towards earth, often with vivid red col­oration on the stems, con­trast­ing with the slen­der gray-green leaves. Indi­vid­u­ally the trees are strik­ing, and grow­ing together they give the impres­sion of a light, sunny for­est. Pay some atten­tion to how they’re planted, how­ever, and the ini­tial impres­sion of pris­tine nature falls apart. Below I’ve taken a pic­ture and drawn black lines that accen­tu­ate the rigid rows that were used to plant the “for­est.” Not so nat­ural after all. South­ern Cal­i­for­nia, home of the sim­u­lacra man­u­fac­tured in Hol­ly­wood, the fake fea­tures of Dis­ney­land, and the arti­fi­cially buxom women of West-Side L.A., does it again.

You prob­a­bly know that the trees are native to Aus­tralia, and may know that down under they’re some­times called “widow-makers” because of their ten­dency to drop their branches onto peo­ple. You may even know their his­tory in South­ern Cal­i­for­nia, that they were planted by the mil­lions as part of var­i­ous get-rich schemes in the later 19th and ear­lier 20th cen­turies, with promises that they’d grow wood for rail­road tres­tles or ocean piers, or that they’d yield essen­tial oils with all sorts of mirac­u­lous prop­er­ties. A great arti­cle in the Jour­nal of San Diego His­tory goes into some of their fas­ci­nat­ing past.

The plant­i­ngs that remain through­out South­ern Cal­i­for­nia are beau­ti­ful stands. The occa­sional grove even har­bors monarch but­ter­flies on the migra­tions. (An area of the UCSD groves used to be alive with mon­archs dur­ing the win­ter in the ear­lier 1980s, but I haven’t seen more than the occa­sional monarch since then. Too bad, for sure.) But these groves of perfectly-aligned trees for me talk about cul­ture and nature, and of the ways acci­dents of his­tory shape how the world looks today.

March 15 2008 | Categories: landscape • places • rambles | Tags: eucalyptus • forest • UCSD | 2 Comments »

into the wild

A cou­ple posts ago I men­tioned dich­e­lostemma bloom­ing in the gar­den and I was think­ing that they were prob­a­bly also bloom­ing wild in the nat­ural spaces around me. I took a lunchtime walk through one of the semi-wild areas on the north part of the cam­pus of the Uni­ver­sity of Cal­i­for­nia, San Diego. The area has been set aside as a nat­ural pre­serve, although “nat­ural” in this case is actu­ally a canyon of native plants mixed in with some ear­lier 20th cen­tury plant­i­ngs of euca­lyp­tus. Fake as it may be as a gen­uine South­ern Cal­i­for­nia chap­ar­ral ecosys­tem, the edges where the grove meets the scrub starts to take on more native flavors.

There had been heavy rains this past Jan­u­ary, fol­lowed by occa­sional wet peri­ods, so the ground was still moist in spots. The weather was now turn­ing warm, sunny and spring-like. Grasses were grow­ing exu­ber­antly. It wasn’t long before I started to notice occa­sional flow­ers in the under­story. Although the spaces under the euca­lyp­tus prove hos­tile to most flow­er­ing plants other than the occa­sional also-imported black mus­tard, the blue dicks were pretty con­tent to be there, a sin­gle plant here, big rafts of them there.


A flow­er­ing head of Dich­e­lostemma cap­i­ta­tum, mixed in with the grasses and euca­lyp­tus


A larger stand of them, with their lit­tle flower heads raised up two feet or more in the dap­pled shade

I was tuned in to what I was see­ing, but in the back of my mind I was aware that back in my gar­den the same species of plants was also bloom­ing. Back home the blue dicks are part of a long con­tin­uum of “spring­time” flow­ers that begin with the first nar­cis­sus in Octo­ber and con­tinue into a num­ber of plants that have yet to bloom. But in the wild areas of South­ern Cal­i­for­nia this is it. Spring is short and–in a wet year like this one–intense, orgias­tic. As the weather warms the rains will stop. The grasses will die out and the flow­ers will fade out. Soon the long brown sea­son will begin. But in the fic­tion­al­ized nat­ural world of my gar­den, spring will be here for sev­eral more months. I’ll enjoy it for sure. But some­how it seems a lit­tle wrong.

March 14 2008 | Categories: landscape • my garden • places • rambles | Tags: blue dicks • Dichelostemma capitatum • eucalyptus • spring • UCSD | 2 Comments »

shading a greenhouse

A few years back I wrote an arti­cle for The Grow­ing Edge mag­a­zine on a fun green­house shad­ing sys­tem that I’d devised using ply­wood sheets cut into inter­est­ing shapes. I was traps­ing around Google Books and ended up googling myself. (Admit it, you google your­self too!) What should run across but the arti­cle I wrote, reprinted in a “best of” anthol­ogy. You can click here to see the entire arti­cle reprinted in the book.

The reprinted arti­cle has my shop draw­ings but doesn’t have the pho­tos of the com­plete project. So here’s an idea of what it looked like when I was done:

As a post-postscript to the project, if you do attempt doing this, use wider rab­bets than shown in the arti­cle. It lets you attach the indi­vid­ual shade pieces more securely than I’d shown. Oth­er­wise the pan­els start to fall apart as the pieces swell in response to wet weather–nothing you want to have hap­pen after invest­ing some time in mak­ing your pan­els! As cool as it looked, my under­engi­neered pan­els only last about 3–4 years. Using wider rab­bets and ply­wood thicker than the min­i­mal quarter-inch stuff would have made them last much longer.

March 12 2008 | Categories: my garden | Tags: greenhouse shading • greenhouses | No Comments »

everything’s red and orange and yellow

I was look­ing at a bed in the front yard the other day and noticed every­thing bloom­ing in it right now is in var­i­ous com­bi­na­tions of red, orange and yel­low:

Freesia hybrid

Epi­den­drum ibaguense hybrid


Gail­lar­dia pul­chella


Linaria retic­u­lata ‘Flamenco’

Okay, okay, I some­times do have a com­pul­sive side when I decide where to plant things…

March 10 2008 | Categories: gardening • my garden | Tags: epidendrums • freesias • Gaillardia pulchella • in bloom • Linaria reticulata | No Comments »

casual vegetable gardening

Some things I put in the ground exactly where I want them. Other things I put in once and let nature take care of the rest. Way back in the Pale­o­zoic era I’d bought some red romaine let­tuce plants. There were more than we could eat, and a few went to seed. They looked a lit­tle unkempt, but the lit­tle yel­low finches loved the seeds and made a ruckus in the yard as they fed on them.

After the next rains, tiny let­tuce plants began to sprout all over. The plants that were in rea­son­able spots I let grow, and the baby greens from them were as tasty as the red leaves were great to look at. I let a few of those go to seed again, and the cycle started all over. Here are a few plants from the cur­rent crop, pro­vid­ing a nice red coun­ter­point around a green rosemary:

Veg­etable gar­dens so often seem to be dis­ci­plined, mil­i­tary spaces with their per­fectly aligned rows of exactly the same plant, one after another. Instead of that, why not plant the veg­gies like they’re an exten­sion of the gar­den? And why not let some of them go to seed and repop­u­late themselves?

March 09 2008 | Categories: gardening • my garden | Tags: lettuce • reseeding • vegetable gardening | 5 Comments »

blue dicks

Dich­e­lostemma cap­i­ta­tum, in bloom in the gar­den now:

My plants come from a native plant sale ten years ago, and they’ve mul­ti­plied in the front yard, through both divi­sion of the bulbs and self-sowing. In a wet year the flow­er­ing stems may rise up two feet, and lit­tle clus­ters of laven­der blos­soms for a cou­ple of weeks. Though mostly stems, the plants in bloom are sur­pris­ingly strik­ing. Out of bloom, there’s so lit­tle to the plants that they almost van­ish out of sight.

I haven’t been out to the local canyons this sea­son, but I’m sure the blue dicks (really, that’s what they call them!) are mak­ing their pres­ence known. Even if you don’t devote your whole yard to natives, hav­ing some exem­plary ones around con­nects you to your envi­ron­ment. You know that if some­thing is bloom­ing in your yard it’s bloom­ing in the wild lands around you. You feel a part of some­thing much larger than your own gar­den. On the other hand, with things like hybrid petu­nias or mod­ern roses, well, they might look pretty, but they don’t root you in the same way. They don’t give you that same sense of place and belonging.

March 08 2008 | Categories: my garden • plant profiles • rambles | Tags: bulbs • Dichelostemma capitatum • native plants | 2 Comments »

scorched earth gardening

After my last post I did more research on con­trol­ling Eng­lish ivy. Beyond the commonly-quoted advice to spray with her­bi­cides, or to attempt the mechan­i­cal removal that is occu­py­ing me these days, I saw an inter­est­ing idea for a new but as-yet-untested bio­log­i­cal con­trol Noth­ing imme­di­ately use­ful, unfor­tu­nately. And then I started to see tech­niques that could only be dreamed up by peo­ple like me who’ve been spend­ing too much time fight­ing off Hed­era helix.

From the folks at the Uni­ver­sity of Cal­i­for­nia, in a dis­cus­sion of ivy, comes:

Pre­scribed burn­ing: An extreme method that has been used with some suc­cess is to burn ivy plants and resprouts with a blow torch at reg­u­lar inter­vals; the energy used by the plant to regrow will even­tu­ally be depleted. Obvi­ously, this approach requires con­sid­er­able caution.

And from Organic Land Care.com comes:

Another more dras­tic method has been to use a blow-torch to repeat­edly blast the plant with a hot flame. By repeat­edly expos­ing the plant to high heat, this method is intended to exhaust the H. helix of its energy so that it is unable to mul­ti­ply or pro­duce berries for repro­duc­tion (Reichard, 2000).

So…fatigued of doing things the old-fashioned way, I went to the garage and got the blow­torch. After aim­ing the flame at some ivy leaves they began to writhe and smoke in a most sat­is­fy­ing way. Soon the leaves started to burn, which sur­prised me since ivy is one of the plants that shows up occa­sion­ally as a rec­om­mended plant for firescap­ing. As the leaves burned, some of the dead grasses around them started to catch fire. Just a lit­tle more heat and I’d have had a lit­tle brush­fire started. Hmmmm. Maybe it’s not such a good idea, I started to think, look­ing up at a wood fence not more than two feet away. Damn, it felt good, but I ended the exper­i­ment right then and there–it prob­a­bly wasn’t a good idea to burn down the neighborhood!

March 07 2008 | Categories: gardening • my garden | Tags: blowtoches • ivy • prescribed burning • weeding • weeds | 1 Comment »

vegetable plutonium

In my more active anti-nuke activist days one of the more com­pelling argu­ments against nuclear power was that some of its byprod­ucts were so long-lived that they would remain lethal for longer than human civ­i­liza­tion has existed. Plutonium-239, for exam­ple, has a half-life of some­thing like 24,000 years, and even a tiny par­ti­cle of it could prove dan­ger­ous to a person.

I was think­ing about that dur­ing my weed­ing exer­cise this week­end, deal­ing with a neglected cor­ner of the gar­den where the neighbor’s Eng­lish ivy had crossed over and under the fence and set up a stand that had spread 20 feet or more into my yard. In the course of its inva­sion, it had con­tributed to a low brick retain­ing wall being pushed over.

The wall the ivy helped push over

I hate to use stuff like Roundup in the yard, but I tried it on the ivy a cou­ple weeks ago. Some of the weeds around it shriv­eled to brown ghosts of them­selves, but at best the ivy showed a lit­tle burn­ing around the edges of the leaves. I’d tried Roundup­ping the ivy before, with sim­i­lar min­i­mal results. Ivy really seems like the thing that wouldn’t die. Some online sites have guide­lines on how to get rid of the stuff, but none of them seem to guar­an­tee easy con­trol. (A cou­ple of the sites I looked at: South­east Exotic Pest Plant Coun­cil Inva­sive Plant Man­ual and the Plant Con­ser­va­tion Alliance’s “Least wanted” pages.)

I wasn’t look­ing for­ward to the alter­na­tive of dig­ging it out by hand, but dig­ging it out by hand was the chore that ate my week­end. And it’s a chore that’ll be occu­py­ing at least a cou­ple more. The job is extra-awful in that even a lit­tle piece of ivy run­ner left in the ground could grow roots and set up a whole new colony. You have to be sure to dig down the foot or so that the run­ners can travel at, and you need to be sure that you’ve rid the patch of all the alien ivy life forms before you move on to the next spade­full. It’s like veg­etable plu­to­nium in that any lit­tle bit left in the ground could prove dan­ger­ous for future gen­er­a­tions. Nasty, evil stuff.

Here you can see the pro­por­tion of dirt to ivy roots…

If my mantra of my teen years was “No nukes!” the mantra of my cur­rent gar­den­ing life has to be “No Ivy!” Frank Lloyd Wright was famous for his quote that went some­thing like, “Doctor’s can always bury their mis­takes. Archi­tects can only plant ivy.” Well, friends, doing that would be the great­est mis­take of all.

March 03 2008 | Categories: gardening • my garden • quotes | Tags: herbicides • ivy • plutonium • weeding • weeds | 2 Comments »