[ Lost in the Landscape ]

out of darkness something blooms

I had a few CDs cross my desk that were recorded by a San Diego new music col­lec­tive called Trum­mer­flora. Their name sounded inter­est­ing, but I didn’t think another thing about it. Then in the book­let of one of the discs I read its definition:

Trum­mer­flora, or rub­ble plants and trees, are a spe­cial phe­nom­e­non unique to heav­ily bombed urban areas. The bomb acts as a plow, mix­ing rub­ble frag­ments with the earth, which often con­tain seeds dor­mant for a cen­tury or more. These seeds come to light and those that can live in this new and spe­cial earth grow and flour­ish.
–Helen and New­ton Harrison

So some­thing beau­ti­ful comes to light through acts of unspeak­able destruc­tion. Sud­denly I though that it was an amaz­ing word and a con­cept that holds out some hope that some­thing good can come out of the worst of sit­u­a­tions. Of course, this is a par­tic­u­larly tainted kind of good­ness, a sort of good­ness that you accept because the alter­na­tive is so much worse.

Trawl­ing around the web as I write this I couldn’t find other ref­er­ences to this word other than in the con­text of the musi­cians or the quote from the Har­risons. Did the Har­risons coin the word? (Of course, just becuase search engines don’t turn up some­thing, it doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist! (Or in this increas­ingly vir­tual word, maybe that’s exatly what it means?)) Or did the word spring to life–maybe in Germany?–after the dev­as­ta­tion of World War II?

Helen and New­ton Har­ri­son. Breath­ing Space for the Sava River, Yugoslavia, 1988 (detail). Pho­to­col­lage, text, maps. [ source ]

This whole notion of bring­ing life back to waste­lands has been one of the major themes of Helen Mayer Har­ri­son and New­ton Har­ri­son, the artists respon­si­ble for the quote in the first place. As a cou­ple they taught at the Uni­ver­sity of Cal­i­for­nia, San Diego from 1969–1993, and dur­ing this time I had the chance to see sev­eral of their exhi­bi­tions around town. Here’s a descrip­tion of their work­ing method in Bar­bara Matilsky’s 1992 book, Frag­ile ecolo­gies: Con­tem­po­rary artist’s inter­pre­ta­tions and solu­tions, quoted on a Green Museum page.

After first­hand study, research and inter­views with ecol­o­gists, biol­o­gists and plan­ners the artists cre­ate a pho­to­graphic nar­ra­tive that iden­ti­fies the prob­lem, ques­tions the sys­tem of beliefs that allow the con­di­tion to develop and pro­poses ini­tia­tives to counter envi­ron­men­tal dam­age. They exhibit their doc­u­men­ta­tion in a pub­lic forum–a museum, library, city hall–to stim­u­late dis­cus­sion, debate, and media atten­tion. By com­mu­ni­ca­tion to the pub­lic the prob­lems that con­front a frag­ile ecosys­tem and the ways in which the bal­ance can be restored, they exert pres­sure on the polit­i­cal sys­tem and rally pub­lic opin­ion in an attempt to avert eco­log­i­cal disaster.

So, while the New­tons would be pleased to see trom­mer­flora grow and thrive, their greater sat­is­fac­tion wouldn’t be achieved until we come to an under­stand­ing of the sys­tems that brought about the orig­i­nal destruc­tion. And if the projects became so suc­cess­ful that they’d anni­hi­late the need for its the artwork’s own exis­tence? I doubt the New­tons would mind, but I won’t be hold­ing my breath that we get there any­time soon.

Read fur­ther: The New­tons in their own words.

June 30 2008 | Categories: art • landscape design • places | Tags: ecology • environmental restoration • Helen Mayer Harrison • Newton Harrison • Trommerflora • words | 1 Comment »

celebrating summer–medieval-style

Ah sum­mer, the sea­son when the meadow blooms and the stag farts! Here are some sprightly words cel­e­brat­ing the sea­son we’ve just begun. They’re the lyrics to a bouncy lit­tle ditty circa the year 1260 that most stu­dents going through music his­tory courses will have have run across. If your Mid­dle Eng­lish is about as bad as mine, I’ve pro­vided a translation.

You can sing it all by your­self, but it’s designed to be four-part round that you sing over a two-part ground. If you’re tired of “Row, row, row your boat” as the only round to sing at sum­mer camp this might be just the ticket. Below is the music (click it to enlarge). And if you want to sing along, click here for an mp3 file [ source ].

Sumer is icu­men in, tran­scribed from the ca. 1260 man­u­script by Bla­hedo, used under a Cre­ative Com­mons Attri­bu­tion Share Alike 2.5 license [ source ].

Warn­ing: Once you lis­ten to it a few times–and maybe even sing along–it gets to be one of those “It’s a Small World” ear­worm tunes that you’ll have a hard time get­ting rid of.

Find out more.
And if anyone’s read­ing this in the South­ern hemi­sphere, here’s Ezra Pound’s win­ter par­ody. (I guess he wasn’t par­tic­u­larly fond of winter.)

June 29 2008 | Categories: rambles | Tags: music • seasons • sumer is icumen in • summer | No Comments »

mistaken identity?

Sum­mer in my gar­den began offi­cially on Wednes­day, June 25 at approx­i­mately 6:35 p.m., when I held in my hands the first ripe tomato of the sea­son. Here’s a shot of the fourth tomato, from yes­ter­day. Seems like a cou­ple of large two-legged mam­mals invaded the gar­den and ate the first three…

I’ve said a cou­ple unkind words against the moun­strously vig­or­ous Mr. Stripey, but that’s the vari­ety that bore first this year. The fruits so far have been small, about three ounces, sweet and extremely mild, with a very thin skin. The color is a rich, medium yel­low, with dark rosy-red flush­ing to the fruits both inside and out. So far they don’t gush clas­sic tomato fla­vor, but they’re still the best toma­toes I’ve had since last autumn’s farmer’s markets.

The fact that this is the first vari­ety to bear this year con­fuses me a bit. Mr. Stripey is usu­ally listed as being a large, beef­steak, late-season tomato, bear­ing 80–85 days after being set out. Some sources men­tion that the vari­ety often sold as Mr. Stripey is actu­ally the smaller-fruited Tigerella, and sev­eral sites list their plants with both names. How unhelp­ful is that? If I can judge by pho­tos of both vari­eties, mine looks much closer to the true Mr. Stripey, even though the fruit is small. What do you think?

A cou­ple Mr. Stripey images on the web:
[ source ]	[ source ]
Ver­sus a cou­ple Tigerella images on the web:
[ source ]	[ source ]

Most sources list Tigerella as also being a late-bearing vari­ety, so mis­taken iden­tity would have had lit­tle to do with my see­ing the fruits towards the start of tomato season.

The thing that con­fuses me most about the iden­tity of the toma­toes in the gar­den is the fact that Mr. Stripey sits about four feet away in the bed from the hybrid Early Girl. I planted the hybrid on the same day as Mr. Stripey, mainly to get some early toma­toes and to get a head start on sum­mer. The Early Girl label says it should bear 50 days from being set out, and that’s been a rea­son­able esti­mate based on my past expe­ri­ence grow­ing it. This sea­son, even though Early Girl has a half dozen fairly nicely-sized fruits on its branches, they’re all still as green as the leaves. Fifty days from being set out? Not even close.

So, instead of con­clud­ing that Mr. Stripey came with the wrong label, I’m start­ing to won­der if I don’t have an impos­tor try­ing to pass as Early Girl. Maybe some dis­grun­tled Home Depot employee switched the tags? Or their sup­plier decided a red tomato is a red tomato and no one’s going to know the dif­fer­ence? This wouldn’t be the first time I got some­thing other than what the label said.

Even though there’s a cer­tain amount of vari­a­tion from plant to plant–it’s prob­a­bly a lit­tle unfair to eval­u­ate an entire tomato vari­ety with just one plant–I doubt that the vari­a­tion would explain the dif­fer­ences I’ve seen. Time for CSI San Diego. Time for some back­yard DNA testing…

All that said, I guess I’ve made a strong case for buy­ing seed from a rep­utable grower–and then care­fully label­ing the seedlings!

June 28 2008 | Categories: my garden • plant profiles | Tags: Early Girl tomato • labeling plants • Mister Stripey tomato • Mr. Stripey tomato | 4 Comments »

“eucalyptus autumn”">“eucalyptus autumn”

The Japan­ese lan­guage has many poetic names for the sea­sons. One phrase that I’ve found par­tic­u­larly beau­ti­ful is take no aki, or “bam­boo autumn.” It refers to the period in mid­dle– to late-spring when leaves of some bam­boos turn yel­low and fall from the plants. In addi­tion to the gor­geous built-in poetic anal­ogy, I like how the phrase grounds a spe­cific por­tion of the sea­son by invok­ing a nat­ural process that pre­sum­ably would have been under­stood by a good por­tion of the population.

When I take my lunch break dur­ing the week and head to the gym, I fol­low a path that takes me by a small clus­ter of euca­lyp­tus trees planted in a patch of lawn. Sev­eral of the trees have beau­ti­fully smooth trunks which are cov­ered with a del­i­cately mot­tled sil­very bark. Once a year, usu­ally late in spring or early in sum­mer, the bark exfo­li­ates, drop­ping off in small chunks that reveal the sur­prise: a bumpy, pale ocher layer of new bark under­neath.


Another of the trees drops larger, thin, brit­tle sheets of red-brown bark, reveal­ing a deli­ciously pale icy green below.

Many euca­lyp­tus species have bark that exfo­li­ates, as do many other trees, such as the sycamores that con­gre­gate in the moister areas of the local canyon bot­toms. So…why shouldn’t we have a name for when that hap­pens? Why shouldn’t we come up with ways to reat­tach lan­guage to nat­ural processes and the world around us? Why not refer to this awk­ward tran­si­tional spring-summer period we’re in as “euca­lyp­tus autumn?“


(Okay, okay, if you must quib­ble, not all of the 740-plus euca­lyp­tus species shed their bark. And those that do, don’t do it at exactly the same time. But I vote for any­thing that grounds us more securely in the cycles of the world. And lan­guage, being such a fun­da­men­tal com­po­nent of our exis­tence, seems like a great tool to use to accom­plish the goal.)

June 26 2008 | Categories: plant profiles • rambles | Tags: bamboo autumn • exfoliating bark • seasons | 2 Comments »

when a hotspot heats up

This morning’s LA Times had a cover story on a ground­break­ing study that offered some pretty dire pro­jec­tions for the future of California’s 5,500-plus native plant species should the cur­rent global warm­ing pro­ceed apace.

The find­ings by sev­eral sci­en­tists affil­i­ated with uni­ver­si­ties in Cal­i­for­nia and beyond were just pub­lished in PLoS ONE, one of the rare online sci­en­tific jour­nals that allows every­one access for free. Here’s the abstract of the article:

The flora of Cal­i­for­nia, a global bio­di­ver­sity hotspot, includes 2387 endemic plant taxa. With antic­i­pated cli­mate change, we project that up to 66% will expe­ri­ence >80% reduc­tions in range size within a cen­tury. These results are com­pa­ra­ble with other stud­ies of fewer species or just sam­ples of a region’s endemics. Pro­jected reduc­tions depend on the mag­ni­tude of future emis­sions and on the abil­ity of species to dis­perse from their cur­rent loca­tions. California’s var­ied ter­rain could cause species to move in very dif­fer­ent direc­tions, break­ing up present-day flo­ras. How­ever, our pro­jec­tions also iden­tify regions where species under­go­ing severe range reduc­tions may per­sist. Pro­tect­ing these poten­tial future refu­gia and facil­i­tat­ing species dis­per­sal will be essen­tial to main­tain bio­di­ver­sity in the face of cli­mate change.

The authors (Loarie, et alia) say that the cur­rent species that can travel quickly from one gen­er­a­tion to the next could move their ranges north­ward or uphill in response to warmer, dryer weather. That gives some hope for species as a whole, par­tic­u­larly those that have seeds that can travel on the wind or eas­ily hitch a ride in the tire tread of a Hummer.

Left: Ancient bristle­cone pine at Nevada’s Great Basin National Park. Photo on Gorp [ source ]

But what does that bode for indi­vid­ual plants like the ancient bristle­cone pines that you find on moun­tain­tops through­out the Great Basin, plants where some indi­vid­u­als are mag­is­te­r­ial home­bod­ies that have been esti­mated to be nearly 4,000 years old? Unfor­tu­nately, those sin­gle plants that were adults in Roman times and saplings in the days of Egypt’s Amen­hotep the First will face a less cer­tain future.

The authors offer hope that habi­tat preser­va­tion could help com­pen­sate for the forces of global warm­ing. Still, I worry. How good a job have we done in the past to pre­serve habitat?

June 25 2008 | Categories: landscape | Tags: bristlecone pines • global warming | No Comments »

no bad plants?

I’ve killed my share of plants when my pride in being able grow some­thing got in the way of com­mon sense. And then there are cases where the plant gets the seri­ous upper hand.

One exam­ple of the sec­ond sit­u­a­tion is of a pen­cil cac­tus, Euphor­bia tiru­calli. (Notwith­stand­ing its com­mon name it’s not a cac­tus at all, and instead belongs to the genus that brings you the perky hol­i­day poinsettia.)

Some­one gave John a lit­tle cut­ting. It looked cute. Why not put it in the ground? A lit­tle bush with pencil-shaped leaves would be fun.

Sev­eral years later its cute­ness wore off as it matured into a seri­ous large shrub, ten feet tall. At some point John tried to prune it and got some sap into his eye. There are reports of tem­po­rary blind­ness for at least three days as a result of the sap, in addi­tion to fre­quent reports of extreme skin irri­ta­tion. For­tu­nately John’s sit­u­a­tion wasn’t so dire, but it was extremely painful. That wiped out almost all of the plant’s cute­ness points, and when its roots started to push over a retain­ing wall, that was it. It had to go.

I tend to be gen­er­ous in my eval­u­a­tions of the value of var­i­ous plants. There are spe­cific niches in spe­cific ecosys­tems for every species. When pulled out of an appro­pri­ate con­text and thrown into an grossly inap­pro­pri­ate one, how­ever, plants can respond in two ways. Either they can die–not good for the plant. Or they can take over the way this euphor­bia did–not good for the new envi­ron­ment or grow­ing situation.

Last Fall I got out the pruners, lop­pers and ax, cov­ered every bit of exposed skin that I could, then started to take the thing down. The plant eas­ily filled up the back of the pickup with wet suc­cu­lent plant parts ooz­ing sticky, milky juices.

The local land­fill has a greens recy­cling pro­gram. But they took one look at the evil load and directed us to the dump side of the facil­ity. As a result, a cou­ple mil­len­nia down the road, some archae­ol­o­gist will try to make sense of our cul­ture by pick­ing through a pile of bro­ken wash­ing machines, rot­ted sofas, dis­col­ored pizza boxes and pieces of a mys­te­ri­ous plant with pow­ers to blind and incapacitate.

Nine months later the plant is seri­ously set back, though not entirely dead. My energy flagged before I could get the stump out of the ground, and every now and then the plant tries to come back to life. I’ve since seen shade-tree sized spec­i­mens of the species in West Hol­ly­wood, so I’m con­vinced I got to the plant before it was too late. I’ll just keep at the regrowth until the plant decides to give up the ghost.

Halfway across the yard, in a lit­tle clay pot, sits another vari­ant of this species, the red form that’s been given the clonal name ‘Rosea,’ and is com­monly known as “sticks of fire.” It’s sup­posed to be a lot less vig­or­ous. It’s not sup­posed to get much over six feet tall. It’s sup­posed to lack the same amount of chloro­phyll and have less of that life force than its green big brother. But I’m skep­ti­cal. That plant isn’t going to get to live out­side of its pot. Ever.

Talk­ing to one of the mem­bers of the local cac­tus and suc­cu­lent soci­ety, he thought that was for the best. The red vari­ant hasn’t been around for more than a few years. No one knows its pos­si­ble even­tual size. As far as its even­tual sup­posed six foot height? “I’d be very skep­ti­cal,” he said.

Behind him, planted in the ground just a few dozen yards away, was one of the red forms of the plant. It was already five feet tall.

June 25 2008 | Categories: my garden • plant profiles | Tags: Euphorbia tirucalli • pencil cactus • sticks of fire | 3 Comments »

beautiful decay

Here’s another recently com­pleted image in my Destruc­tive Test­ing series, “Com­par­a­tive Wilt Test.”

James SOE NYUN: Com­par­a­tive Wilt Test: Oenothera, Osteosper­mum, Oxalis. Dig­i­tal pig­ment print, 16 x 20 inches.

The orig­i­nal pho­tos were taken in the late 90s, and my orig­i­nal inten­tion was to print them sequen­tially so that you could see the wilt­ing in process. I tried that, but then decided it wasn’t inter­est­ing enough. Recently I decided to revisit some of the neg­a­tives using Pho­to­shop. I ended up super­im­pos­ing five of the orig­i­nal images and used dif­fer­ent kinds and degrees of trans­parency for each layer. I like this result much bet­ter, though I could also see this turn­ing into a stop-motion video at some point.

The image memo­ri­al­izes a pseudo-science exper­i­ment I con­ducted to see how three dif­fer­ent flow­er­ing plants would behave when cut off the mother plant, lashed to some sup­ports, then allowed to wilt over the course of sev­eral days. The vic­tims in this case are three plants in the gar­den I was hav­ing some ill feel­ings towards: Mex­i­can evening prim­rose (Oenothera spe­ciosa), free­way daisy (Osteosper­mum fru­ti­co­sum), and Bermuda but­ter­cup (Oxalis pes-caprae).

My prim­rose prob­lems went back to a packet of “wild­flower seed” that I’d pur­chased as a sou­venir at the Grand Canyon in the early 1990s. The pic­ture on the packet was appeal­ing: del­i­cate pink flow­ers on a dainty plant. And they were wild­flow­ers! At first I was thrilled that the sprin­kling of seed I applied to some des­o­late ground in the front yard started to ger­mi­nate. I was even hap­pier when there was that first extrav­a­gant first flow­er­ing, with dozens to hun­dreds of the papery, soft pink flow­ers cov­er­ing the plants so you couldn’t see the bar­ren ground anymore.

Okay, if you know the plant, I can tell you’re laugh­ing and know where this is headed… But as I soon found out, as pretty as it is, this is one aggres­sive plant, reseed­ing tena­ciously and spread­ing quickly by putting out dense webs of under­ground run­ners. More than ten years later, I’m still pulling at the stems that con­tinue to come up in that bed. And even though they’re wild­flow­ers, they’re not native to San Diego. For­tu­nately for the local ecosys­tem, they haven’t escaped from the bed where I naively gave them the gift of life.

Plant num­ber two, the free­way daisy, had sim­i­lar issues. It started out life as a tiny plant in a four-inch pot but soon spread like a demon, swal­low­ing up a num­ber of lit­tle annu­als that stood in its way. At least the plant didn’t reseed much, and the stems, though they can some­times set down root, were easy enough to control.

The final plant, the Bermuda but­ter­cup, is a com­mon and obnox­ious weed over much of coastal South­ern Cal­i­for­nia. Dur­ing its peak bloom in the mid­dle of spring the perky yel­low flow­ers over the attrac­tive clover-ish leaves are a nice sight. But once you have it, you’ll prob­a­bly have it forever.

June 24 2008 | Categories: art • my garden • photography • plant profiles | Tags: Destructive Testing • James SOE NYUN | 1 Comment »

all stems

Speak­ing of cut flow­ers, I often think that the most beau­ti­ful part of what’s in the vase isn’t nec­es­sar­ily the blooms. Pho­tog­ra­pher Lee Fried­lan­der, whose work often exhibits a droll-to-bratty icon­o­clas­tic bent, did a book just a few years ago that was titled Stems. (The Photo-Eye online book­store uses the Book­Tease fea­ture that lets you take a look at some of the images in the book.)

As you might guess from the title, it’s almost exclu­sively pho­tos of plants in vases where the flow­ers have been cropped out of the pic­ture. It’s a lit­tle will­ful, for sure, but I think many of the images are really beau­ti­ful. See what you think…

June 23 2008 | Categories: art • photography | Tags: cut flowers • Lee Friedlander | No Comments »

sage as a cut flower

In the past I’ve occa­sion­ally cut flow­ers from the gar­den, only to have them wilt imme­di­ately and dis­in­te­grate into a pile of organic mat­ter on top of a table I wanted to look nice for com­pany. Last week­end I was trim­ming back the ivy-leaved sage, Salvia cacali­ae­fo­lia. At first the stems went into the greens recy­cling can. But they looked too pretty there and I won­dered how well they’d do as cut flow­ers. So into the house they came, mak­ing a big, infor­mal bouquet/science exper­i­ment for the din­ing table.

The ver­dict? The flow­ers looked great through day three, with only the occa­sional flower falling off the stem. Then after that the ends of the stems where the flow­ers live started to droop. By day five, although the leaves still looked per­fectly pre­sentable, the flower ends were totally wilted, blooms had dropped off the stems, and there was a dry, black, gran­u­lar some­thing or another (pollen? seeds?) lit­ter­ing the table sur­face. Time for the greens recy­cle bin.

That was no worse than the lifes­pan of many of the more clas­sic cut flow­ers, so I’ll be treat­ing myself to vase-fulls of ivy-leaved sage the next time I cut it back.

June 22 2008 | Categories: gardening • my garden | Tags: Add new tag • cut flowers • ivy-leaved sage • Salvia cacaliaefolia | 4 Comments »

near pandemonium

Ear­lier today John and I headed over to Bal­boa Park to the plant sale that was being held to ben­e­fit the local Mas­ter Gar­dener pro­gram. We got there 20 min­utes before the door opened and there were already dozens of peo­ple there. To avert a dan­ger­ous rush at open­ing time–you know how rabid and out of con­trol some of those plant peo­ple can get when faced with inter­est­ing plants at whole­sale prices!–they were lin­ing every­one up and hand­ing out num­bers.


Once the doors parted it was every gar­dener for him– or her­self. There were tables of herbs, native plants, peren­ni­als, drought-tolerant plants, orchids, “unusual plants,” suc­cu­lents, trees, all of them donated by the Mas­ter Gar­den­ers them­selves as well as a num­ber of local growers.

We walked out the door with half a flat of var­i­ous green crit­ters, some fairly com­mon (a cou­ple more gauras to sup­ple­ment those in the gar­den) as well as some we hadn’t seen before. John scored what was prob­a­bly the oddest-looking plant in our lit­tle instant col­lec­tion, a lit­tle plant of the paper spine cac­tus, Tephro­cac­tus artic­u­la­tus var. paprycan­thus. In the end I guess it’s not that uncom­mon a plant to the local suc­cu­lent spe­cial­ists, but for us it’ll be that new weird won­der in the pots of suc­cu­lents out back.

June 21 2008 | Categories: gardening • my garden | Tags: Master Gardener program • plant sales | No Comments »