[ Lost in the Landscape ]

jacaranda

Sun­day I went down to San Diego’s annual Art­walk street­fair down by the cool water­front in the Lit­tle Italy neighborhood.

This has been a seri­ously bipo­lar spring, alter­nat­ing chilly peri­ods with intensely hot ones. This week­end was one of the hot ones, and peo­ple were milling about slowly, check­ing out the stalls of art. But almost every­one seemed to be more inter­ested in the stands offer­ing cold drinks.

I talked to one of my pho­tog­ra­pher friends down there who had a dou­ble booth and has been pretty suc­cess­ful there in years past. “Peo­ple are mostly look­ing this time,” she said.

I guess I was one of the look­ers too, for the most part. After get­ting my fill of the art, the one sight that really caught my eye was this jacaranda tree in bloom over an orange back­hoe near where I’d parked my scooter:

I don’t see eye-to-eye with Jerry Sanders, the mayor of San Diego, but this is one thing we agree on. It’s his favorite tree, and one of mine. It’s Jacaranda mimosi­fo­lia, a South Amer­i­can native that’s well adapted to areas with­out much in the way of frost. The leaves are ferny and del­i­cate and the plant’s pretty well behaved in the U.S. (It’s con­sid­ered an inva­sive pest, how­ever, in South Africa and Queens­land, Aus­tralia.) In the spring it turns into this, an explo­sion of pur­ple flow­ers that rain down on cars and side­walks below. Messy as all get out but a pretty exul­tant mess! Yet another plant that’s too big for my yard…

April 29 2008 | Categories: art • plant profiles | Tags: Artwalk • in bloom • Jacaranda mimosifolia • spring | No Comments »

the dark side of lawns

I was thumb­ing through The Amer­i­can Lawn, edited by Georges Teyssot, a col­lec­tion of thoughts on the phe­nom­e­non of Amer­i­can lawns by eight con­trib­u­tors. It’s a wide rang­ing col­lec­tion of essays look­ing at the place of lawns in Amer­i­can cul­ture since colo­nial days. One of the pieces, “The Elec­tric Lawn” by Mark Wigley, has a cou­ple of quotes that inter­ested me in my cur­rent dis­en­chant­ment with all things turf-related.

On lawns and power relationships:

While ren­der­ings for clients may show the lawn, and man­u­als of draw­ing tech­nique may describe the ways in which it can be rep­re­sented, the draw­ings with which archi­tects com­mu­ni­cate to them­selves and other archi­tects leave the lawn out. It is assumed that wher­ever there is noth­ing spec­i­fied in the draw­ing there is grass. The lawn is treated like the paper on which the projects are drawn, a tab­ula rasa with­out any inher­ent inter­est, a back­ground that merely clears the way for the main event. Yet the lawn is always pre­cisely con­trolled, whether by the archi­tect or land­scape designer. Lawns are all about con­trol. The green frame is far from neu­tral or inno­cent. What is left out of the pic­ture often rules the picture.

And a look at 50s green-lawned utopia gone bad:

The deadly lawn­mower is the star of the dark side of sub­ur­ban life. Take Stephen King, the high priest of sub­ur­ban gothic. In his 1985 film Max­i­mum Over­drive, a pass­ing alien space­ship causes all the machines on the planet to turn against their operators–insulting, taunt­ing, tor­tur­ing, and then killing. A young boy rides his bicy­cle down the mid­dle of a generic sub­ur­ban street. Lawns pass by on either side. The only sign of trou­ble is that the auto­matic sprin­klers uncan­nily respond to his presence…A blood-stained lawn­mower lurks behind a tree, idling, wait­ing. When the boy finally stops, it roars to life and chases him down the street…

Well, I didn’t see that movie, and Leonard Maltin rates it a bomb: “Stu­pid and bor­ing.” Maybe a cou­ple of inter­est­ing takes on sub­ur­bia, but noth­ing for the Net­flix queue…

April 28 2008 | Categories: gardening • landscape design • quotes | Tags: lawnmowers • lawns • Mark Wigley | No Comments »

turf battle

When we moved into the house twenty years ago one of the first things we did was to take out the front lawn. South­ern Cal­i­for­nia is a desert, and it seemed like the envi­ron­men­tally sen­si­tive thing to do. And besides, there are piles of inter­est­ing drought-tolerant plants, and replac­ing the lawn let us sam­ple some of the neat plants from South­ern Cal­i­for­nia and around the globe that don’t require con­stant water­ing. Although it doesn’t look its absolute best with no added water, most of the front yard has endured most of the mid­dle of sum­mer with no rain or water­ing. The back yard, how­ever, has been a dif­fer­ent story.

For the longest time the lawn area was some­thing like thirty feet square after you sub­tracted space devoted to walk­ways, a green­house, a deck, a shade bed, and a big zone for veg­eta­bles. The lawn, scrappy-looking much of the year and noth­ing I had any inter­est in main­tain­ing, was John’s indul­gence that I lived with grudg­ingly, know­ing that his Snap­per lawn­mower from his yard main­te­nance busi­ness days thirty years ago wouldn’t last for­ever. Even after we pushed into the back yard with a room addi­tion a cou­ple years ago, reduc­ing the lawn to less than half its orig­i­nal size, John was still attached to the green waste­land, still insist­ing it was worth his trou­ble to maintain.

Then, three weeks ago, it finally hap­pened. The engine on the Snap­per died, and John decided he didn’t want to replace it. An ad on Craigslist and a day or two and the mower found a new home, some guy with a lawn busi­ness who has other Snap­pers and wanted this one for parts.

I took the mower’s death as a sign from Gaia that it was time for the lawn to go. John took it as a sign that he needed a new machine. So the com­pro­mise was a battery-powered mower that didn’t have nearly the same pol­lu­tion pro­file as the old Snap­per. Bet­ter would have been a corded model, some­thing that would use the power directly and not waste it charg­ing bat­ter­ies. Bet­ter yet would have been a nice push model that uses noth­ing other than human umph. But I at least feel bet­ter that we’re cut­ting down on green­house gases. And at least the lawn is a low-water Saint Augus­tine, so it’s not gob­bling up the water other turf options would require.

Shop­ping for the mower then started to push another of my but­tons: boy­cotting items man­u­fac­tured in China. Every model we looked at was made there. I have noth­ing against the Chi­nese peo­ple, but its gov­ern­ment sup­ports repres­sion in Tibet and Burma (aka Myan­mar) so that I try to avoid buy­ing stuff made there when­ever pos­si­ble. (The Chi­nese Embassy knows I’m doing this, if they read their let­ters.) I lost that one too. Dang, it’s hard doing any­thing else some­times. Sarah Bon­giorni has a book, A Year With­out “Made in China,” in which she recounts her attempts for her fam­ily to go a year with­out pur­chas­ing any­thing made in China. She had so much trou­ble she could write a book about it.

Some talk­ing points and data on the pol­lu­tion from lawnmowers:

Lawn mow­ers and other machines with engines under 25 horse­power now account for 7 per­cent of California’s smog-forming emis­sions from mobile sources, the equiv­a­lent of more than 3 mil­lion cars, accord­ing to the Cal­i­for­nia Air Resources Board.–San Diego Union

Low-horsepower machines account for at least 10 per­cent of the nation’s smog-forming pol­lu­tion, which has been linked to res­pi­ra­tory and heart dis­ease, accord­ing to the EPA. A sin­gle lawn­mower emits as much pol­lu­tion in an hour as 50 cars dri­ving 20 miles.–Washington Post

As an exam­ple, mow­ing grass with a gaso­line pow­ered lawn­mower causes as much pol­lu­tion as oper­at­ing a car for 13 hours.–Senator Dianne Fein­stein cit­ing the EPA study

And…the good folks at Envi­ron­ment Canada have a nice online cal­cu­la­tor that lets you see a close approx­i­ma­tion of how much your mower pollutes.

April 27 2008 | Categories: gardening • my garden | Tags: china boycotts • electric lawn mowers • electric lawnmowers • lawn mowers • lawnmowers • pollution | No Comments »

calla lily displacement

Here’s a recently reworked piece, Calla Lily Dis­place­ment, from the Destruc­tive Test­ing photo series I started ten years ago:

Believe it or not this work sprang from a dis­com­fort I had with the doc­u­men­tary photo tra­di­tion, where the pho­tog­ra­pher is often con­sid­ered an invis­i­ble pres­ence, and where pho­tog­ra­phy is a neu­tral and even benign tool with which to view of the world.

Destruc­tive Test­ing is a group of still life images doc­u­ment­ing var­i­ous gen­tly destruc­tive acts against botan­i­cal mate­r­ial. In these actions, I was inter­ested in ques­tion­ing that neu­tral­ity by point­ing out the pres­ence of the pho­tog­ra­pher. At the same time I wanted the image to still be a beau­ti­ful one, some­thing that bal­anced the destruc­tive­ness with qual­i­ties we expect from images we want to have around us.

(And yes, I wanted to do a calla lily pic­ture that wasn’t like the tens of thou­sands of them that have already been done…)

April 24 2008 | Categories: art • photography | Tags: calla lilies • Destructive Testing • documentary photography • James SOE NYUN • Zantedeschia aethiopica | 1 Comment »

those arrogant humans…

Are gar­den­ers more hum­ble peo­ple? Do we know things a lot of oth­ers don’t or believe in things oth­ers choose not to believe? Here are a cou­ple thoughts for Earth Day, the first one a soft feather bed of a quote, the sec­ond one a bed of nails.

Human beings–any one of us, and our species as a whole–are not all-important, not at the cen­ter of the world. That is the one essen­tial piece of infor­ma­tion, the one great secret, offered by any encounter with the woods or the moun­tains or the ocean or any wilder­ness or chunk of nature or patch of night sky.–Bill McK­ibben in an inter­view with Susan Salter Reynolds, in the Los Ange­les Times Book Review, April 13.

If wildlife species are to become extinct, that will be regret­table. But any lit­er­ate per­son knows that extinc­tion is the way of evo­lu­tion, and is in the fun­da­men­tal flow of life. How­ever, man is dif­fer­ent. If man is not immor­tal, then there is no pur­pose or mean­ing in his exis­tence. Which in turn would mean no pur­pose or mean­ing in the uni­verse. The human immor­tal­ity imper­a­tive is absolute and rad­i­cal. That is why wildlife con­ser­va­tion has never been per­mit­ted to move to the ques­tions of ulti­mate value. There is no place for an ulti­mate non­hu­man value in our west­ern meta­physics, because of neces­sity, the human inter­est is the cos­mic inter­est. That is what it is all about. Wildlife is an “exter­nal­ity.” — John. A. Liv­ingston in The Fal­lacy of Wildlife Con­ser­va­tion, in The John A. Liv­ingston Reader (2007: 101).

April 22 2008 | Categories: gardening • quotes • rambles | Tags: Bill McKibben • ecology • evolution • John A. Livingston • natural world • why people garden | 1 Comment »

altruistic plants?

It’s dis­ap­point­ing to put together a pot of sev­eral seem­ingly matched plants–even of the same species, only to have most of the plants dwarfed and out-competed by one of their pot-mates. Some­times you want to throw your hands up and quote Rod­ney King, “I just want to say, you know, can we all get along? …I mean, we’re all stuck here for a while. Let’s try to work it out!”

A study pub­lished last year by McMas­ter Uni­ver­sity biol­o­gist Susan Dud­ley sheds some light on the phe­nom­e­non. She found that sib­ling plants of the same species coex­ist nicely when grown in the same pot, being gen­er­ally con­sid­er­ate of each other as they pro­duced their root sys­tems. But in con­trast, plants of the same species that were “strangers” to each other pro­duced highly com­pet­i­tive root sys­tems that didn’t show the same level of cooperation.

“Though they lack cog­ni­tion and mem­ory, the study shows plants are capa­ble of com­plex social behav­iours such as altru­ism towards rel­a­tives,” says Dud­ley in the McMas­ter Daily News. “Like humans, the most inter­est­ing behav­iours occur beneath the surface.”

Accord­ing to the report, the study was done with one species, “sea rocket (Cak­ile eden­tula), a mem­ber of the mus­tard fam­ily native to beaches through­out North Amer­ica, includ­ing the Great Lakes,” so its effects might be dif­fer­ent with other species.

But the next time you assem­ble a con­tainer plant­ing it might be inter­est­ing to see if cut­tings of one plant or seedlings from the same clones develop a more coop­er­a­tive liv­ing arrange­ment than wildly dif­fer­ent clones taken from the entire veg­etable dias­pora of the same species.

Image from:USDA-NRCS PLANTS Data­base / Brit­ton, N.L., and A. Brown. 1913. An illus­trated flora of the north­ern United States, Canada and the British Pos­ses­sions. Vol. 2: 196.

April 21 2008 | Categories: gardening | Tags: Cakile edentula • plant competition • potted plants • sea rocket • Susan Dudley | 2 Comments »

smaller echiums

In addi­tion to the spec­tac­u­lar Echium can­di­cans, you can occa­sion­ally find some smaller exam­ples of the the genus. Because of the eco­nom­ics of the plant nurs­ery indus­try, where peo­ple tend to buy stuff that’s in bloom over just about any­thing else, and because these plants have a rel­a­tively short–though spectacular!–blooming (read “saleable”) period, you don’t often see plants of them avail­able. But seeds are a lit­tle eas­ier to come by.

The J.L. Hud­son cat­a­log a lit­tle while back had four echi­ums avail­able, includ­ing can­di­cans (which there is listed under its fas­tu­o­sum syn­onym). Of the oth­ers, E. wild­pretii is occa­sion­ally sold in other seed list­ings, some­times as “Tower of Jew­els.” The plant is a beau­ti­ful rosette of long gray leaves the first year, about eigh­teen inches across, then in the sec­ond (edit, June 3, 2010: or third) year the plant shoots straight up six to ten feet with a con­i­cal tower of dark rose to carmine-red flowers.

Echium wild­pretii, grow­ing wild on the flanks of the Pico del Teide, a dor­mant vol­cano, on the island of Tener­ife. Photo by Grombo, from Wikipedia. [ source ]

My yard, at 60-some by 120-some feet, is maybe a lit­tle larger than typ­i­cal lots in town, but it’s still not huge. A plant that grows like the sky­scrap­ers downtown–narrow but tall–makes a lot of sense for gar­dens like mine, so I bought a big packet of wild­pretii seeds. Here are the baby pix of the fuzzy lit­tle guys, at some­thing like four weeks old:

A lit­tle more warm weather–if it ever comes back–and they’ll be ready for the gar­den, ready to grow for a year in prepa­ra­tion for an out­ra­geous flow­er­ing next spring. You don’t think a cou­ple dozen or more of these rock­ets going off at once would be too much, do you?

From the Hud­son list­ings I also got some seeds of E. rus­sicum, sim­i­lar in color to wild­pretii and also a bien­nial, but some­thing that’s more on the scale of a typ­i­cal gar­den bor­der. Enor­mous and fab­u­lous is cool, but some­thing that plays well with oth­ers should be nice to have around.

April 19 2008 | Categories: my garden • plant profiles | Tags: Echium wildpretii • echiums | 2 Comments »

pride of madeira

For the last three weeks Echium can­di­cans (a.k.a. “Pride of Madeira”) has been bloom­ing around town. Here’s a plant­ing up at UCSD.

For eleven months it’s a some­what open, woody shrub with rosettes of long, nar­row leaves, of a soft grayed green color. Then in spring it puts up these out­ra­geous cones of blue, laven­der or magenta. The shape of the cones can be a lit­tle rounded towards the tip or fairly pointed. The plant can grow three to five or more feet tall, and twice as wide.

Many other species in the genus Echium are bien­ni­als. They put out a rosette of leaves one year, and bloom them­selves to death the fol­low­ing year, often in a wild dis­play of flow­ers. But can­di­cans tends to be much more long-lived. So far it hasn’t made itself a big pres­ence in res­i­den­tial gar­dens, maybe because of its lar­gish size. But peo­ple are start­ing to plant it more in their gar­dens. It looks nice much of the year, puts on an insane dis­play for a month, is well adapted to Mediter­ranean cli­mates down to zone 9 and doesn’t require much water. What’s not to like? Okay, okay, it’s not the small­est spec­tac­u­lar plant out there.

I keep look­ing at plants and the one or two blank spots in the yard. Maybe one of these days I’ll make room for it.

April 18 2008 | Categories: plant profiles | Tags: drought-tolerant landscaping • Echium candicans • pride of Madeira | 4 Comments »

virtual garden tour

It’s high spring in South­ern Cal­i­for­nia and time for the annual gar­den tours. The Cal­i­for­nia Native Plant Soci­ety offers one, as do a lot of neigh­bor­hoods, includ­ing my own.

Rather than pony­ing up the fees and fill­ing up the gas tank this past week­end I decided to make up my own gar­den tour. Online.

I’m not espe­cially smit­ten with Hol­ly­wood celebri­ties, but thought that might be an inter­est­ing start­ing point. I ran­domly pulled up one of the pile of web­sites with addresses of celebri­ties, then went to Google Maps with the address in hand. And Google Maps has that con­tro­ver­sial fea­ture to actu­ally view at street level what you find on a map. The street view isn’t imple­mented for much of the coun­try, but it hap­pens to be in place for prac­ti­cally all of Bev­erly Hills. How convenient.

So…what does Madonna’s front yard look like? What might that tell me about her as a per­son and about celebrity in general?

First off, let me say that the Google fea­ture indi­cates that the addresses shown on the screen are only approx­i­mate. So this might not actu­ally be Madonna’s front yard. But assum­ing that it is, I guess I felt a lit­tle let down. The yard is really green. Lots of green. Some­how I thought the gar­den would be a lit­tle more…exotic? Out of con­trol shrub­beries and lurid stat­u­ary maybe? But it does say she likes her pri­vacy. No sur­prise there.

Then I went over to Mia Farrow’s.

More of the pri­vacy thing, again. But the yard seemed a lit­tle more welcoming–probably some­thing to do with the steps lead­ing up to the front wall. And I felt really good that she recycles.

Next was the late Charleton Heston’s pad, which didn’t look like the one in Michael Moore’s Bowl­ing for Columbine. Either he’d down-sized or I was knock­ing at the neighbor’s.

Nice, con­ser­v­a­tive land­scap­ing. Pri­vate, but not hos­tile. You know that tres­passers would be shot, so there’s no need for higher hedges.

And on to Jay Leno’s:

Walls again. And more hedges. These neigh­bor­hoods have abnor­mally high hedge counts for South­ern California.

Then over to Bette Midler’s.

It’s a lit­tle hard to see the yard, but it looks like it’d be a nice place to unwind with the divine Ms. M and some martinis.

Maybe the most sur­pris­ing was Har­ri­son Ford’s.

Like, where’s the killer fence and the yard for the guard dog? And the birch trees make the house look like it’s on the wrong coast. It’s nice enough, but makes me think he’s not much of a gar­dener. Or maybe this one’s for sure the wrong house. Dunno. Unfor­tu­nately, online, you can’t be the obnox­ious stalker fan and go knock­ing on the front door. I might just have to leave these peo­ple to themselves.

April 17 2008 | Categories: landscape design • rambles | Tags: Bette Midler • Beverly Hills • Charleton Heston • front yards • Google Maps • Google Street Views • Harrison Ford • hedges • Jay Leno • Madonna • Mia Farrow • privacy | 1 Comment »

words without pictures

I’ve been look­ing at WORDSWITHOUTPICTURES, an inter­est­ing online jour­nal and dis­cus­sion space hosted by the Los Ange­les County Museum of Art. True to its name, the site is a big pile of words with­out a sin­gle pic­ture, an action that’s par­tic­u­larly will­ful since the topic of the site is pho­tog­ra­phy! Actu­ally, since the real rea­son for the site’s exis­tence is crit­i­cism and dis­cus­sions about pho­tog­ra­phy, the deci­sions to sup­press the imagery might actu­ally be appropriate.

Even with­out pic­tures, the site is no visual slouch. Designed in just black and white, using three fonts in com­pelling, graphic ways, the site calls to mind Bauhaus, De Stijl and Con­struc­tivist exper­i­ments fil­tered through con­tem­po­rary web stylesheets. What can you do with a few hor­i­zon­tal bor­ders mixed with hel­vetica, times and cour­rier using bold font weights and –1 to –3 let­ter spac­ing? Take a look!

And yes there is a gar­den con­nec­tion with all this. There was a recent inter­view with Char­lotte Cot­ton, the new Cura­tor of Pho­tog­ra­phy at LACMA and the main per­son behind the site. In it, the inter­viewer described her apart­ment in a build­ing in the Wilshire Dis­trict near the museum, an apart­ment that was dec­o­rated taste­fully as you might expect. But the apart­ment also included a col­lec­tion of car­niv­o­rous plants!

April 16 2008 | Categories: art • photography | Tags: art criticism • carnivorous plants • Charlotte Cotton • photography criticism • typography • web design • Words Without Pictures • WORDSWITHOUTPICTURES | 1 Comment »