There are plenty of names for shades of blue: azure, cerulean, indigo, cobalt, ultramarine, sky, and navy. And then there’s even the special synthetic intense ultramarine shade that artist Yves Klein patented under the name “International Klein blue.”
A visit to a nursery, however, seems to come up with only a short list of plants having flowers that are truly, intensely blue. Among the more common plants pansies, delphiniums, periwinkles and cornflowers would qualify. But decades of breeding attempts with roses and phalaenopsis and cattleya orchids have failed to produced anything other than pale mauvey or lavenderey colors, mainly because those plants don’t produce the necessary blue pigments in the first place.
There are laboratory subjects that have been genetically modified to carry the genes to produce blue pigment, and they’re producing flowers that are knocking on the door of being blue. For a flower to be blue, however, in addition to having the right pigments, the pH of the petals has to be absolutely correct. Otherwise you get pinks or more of those close-but-no-cigar colors like lilac. (If you’ve played with altering the color of hydrangea blossoms or making litmus paper change from pink to blue you’re already familiar with the controlling effects of acidity. Of course the big difference is that you can accomplish hydrangea color change without going into the lab.) The basic genetic modification process creeps me out a bit, and genetically-modified carnations are sensibly banned from Europe.
Fortunately the sage genus, Salvia, contains a number of species with flowers that require no genetic manipulation to achieve their amazingly blue colors. I’ve devoted a corner of my garden to three of them: ivy-leafed sage, arrow-leafed sage, and gentian sage.
The three species compared, left to right: Salvia patens ‘Oceano Blue,’ S. cacaliaefolia, and S. sagittata.
The ivy-leafed sage,Salvia cacaliaefolia, is a robust grower, four to five feet tall and as big around as you’ll let it get. I’m starting to call it the “walking sage” because it can set down roots where the fairly lax stems touch the ground. It also sends up new stems from runners, though these don’t wander too far from the plant. Rambunctious, yes, but the plant has been easily controlled with the help of Mister Pruning Shears.
As its common name would suggest the leaves are a little ivy-like, triangular, three inches in length, and a pleasant medium green color. The spaces between the paired leaves can approach eight or nine inches, making the plant look a little stemmy and informal, but I find the mounding plant to be graceful and attractive.
Before the flowers open the buds develop an intense, almost indigo-blue shade, about as close to International Klein Blue as you’ll find in the garden. The buds open to clean blue flowers, fairly simple tubular affairs that are about and inch and a quarter long. What the flowers might lack in size and showy complexity they make up with their sheer profusion. The plant went into the ground November 18 of last year, and it’s never been without flowers except for when the sprinkler or heavy rains knocked them off. Hardiness reported to Zone 9.
The arrow-leafed sage,Salvia sagittata, grows smaller than the previous species. So far, for me, the plant is maybe two feet tall and three wide, with the inflorescence adding a foot to the height. True to name, the leaves are shaped like an arrowhead. They easily attain six inches in length, and have an attractive light, almost lime-green coloration. Towards the end of the season the plant can lose its lower leaves and get leggy, so you might want to plant something small and mounding near the plant to disguise the stems. (I’ve planted some lime thyme.)
The flowers are about the same size as those of the ivy-leaved sage, and take the form of small tubes with one petal modified to form a frilly little “skirt”–a handy platform for insects to land on. (If this were an orchid, the flower part would be called the labellum, the “lip.”) The blooms float on thin, dark stems that make them look like exotic little butterflies hovering over the plant. Their color is a vivid medium blue color, a main-line blue so pure it doesn’t need a fancy name. Peak bloom runs from May to late fall in San Diego. Considered a tender perennial, probably hardy into Zone 9.
The gentian sage, Salvia patens, is the newest addition to my garden. The clone I chose is ‘Oceano Blue.’ So far the plant is about 30 inches tall and 15 wide, definitely the most constrained of these three species. Leaves are oval-to-pointed (“ovate”), medium-dark green, and about two inches long.
The flowers are almost identical to arrow-leaved sage in color–an intense medium blue–but the flowers are huge by contrast, exceeding two inches in length and height. The petals have a distinct formation that makes me think of a crab claw. I haven’t grown it through the warmest months, but it has a reputation for slowing down in its floriferousness, something I’m beginning to observe. Hardiness reported to Zone 8.
And what about the common bedding plant Salvia farinacea ‘Victoria Blue,’ the mealy cup sage? It can be a great plant, particularly in warmer, less humid climates and seasons when powdery mildew isn’t an issue. The flowers, however, range more towards blue-violet, not a pure shade of blue. So if you’re a blue purist, fuggedaboutit.
I’ve been reading parts of The Afterlife of Gardens, by John Dixon Hunt, a book on gardens that comes at the subject from an interestingly different take. Where most books on gardens discuss the design aspects of gardens, and many books on gardening talk about plants and their needs, this volume tries to be a “reception study,” using a technique prevalent in analyses of literary texts “by exploring how sites are experienced, often through a longue durée of existence, change and reformulation.” It’s definitely an academic work, maybe one better suited to the late autumn months when the garden outside is tucked into its winter bed than this time of year when you want to be out in it, experiencing all the outrageous pleasures it has to offer.
One of the early chapters bears an intriguing title, “The Garden as Virtual Reality,” and it’s a look at some of the ways how gardens achieve their meaning. Here’s a snippet:
…I want to pursue the idea of the physical garden itself as a virtual reality. For one way of thinking about landscape architecture is to emphasize the way in which it affords visitors many of the same opportuniries as do sites on a computer screen: digitally, the visitor may choose his or her route, clicking on the mouse and opting for a variety of different paths, different experiences, different associations and ideas. Visiting a real site entails much of the same process, although now the“mouse” is a person’s deliberate or instinctive selection of routes and meanings withing the one territory… This kind of visitation of a real garden also involves constant interaction of the subject and object, since the exploration of a real landscape is by no means a passive activity; even a small urban square requires us to “get to know it,” with its elements directing our growing acquaintance with its potential as a space to inhabit.
In this way all good landscape architecture also manages to project a sense both of reality and of virtuality. There is the palpable, haptic place, smelling, sounding, catching the eye…; then there is also the sense of an invented or special place, this invention resulting from the creation of richer and fuller experiences than would be possible, at least in such completeness or intensity, if they were not designed. Like cyberspace, a designed landscape is always at bottom a fiction, a contrivance–yet its hold on our imagination will derive, paradoxically, from the actual materiality of its invented sceneries.
In talking about visiting places virtually it’s easy to get caught up in our totally cool advanced state of technology and forget that this sort of visit-by-proxy has been going on for ages.
Homer’s Odyssey gave listeners accounts–albeit mythical–of distant worlds and peoples. In The Persian Wars Herodotus gave readers a more accurate travelogue of places they would very likely never encounter on their own.
The visual arts have always played a strong informational function in this way. Topographically-motivated paintings–works done with varying degrees of verisimilitude–go back to the early days of representation, and gained a high level of polish by the time of the Dutch landscapists such as Albert Cuyp, Salomon van Ruysdael and Jan van Goyen. Paintings by Canaletto, in addition to being snazzy souvenirs for wealthy travelers on the Grand Tour, gave viewers perspectively accurate renditions of an exotic Italy. And the list goes on…
Canaletto.Venice — Grand Canal
Looking South-West from the Chiesa degli Scalzi to the Fondamenta della Croce, with San Simeone Piccolo. c. 1738.
Oil on canvas — National Gallery, London, UK.
[ source ]
When photography came along its main-line link to reality and reputation for truthfulness kicked up the perceived value of its artifacts as ways to know the world. When the photographic stereoview took the already hyper-real photograph and rammed it into three dimensions people found it revelatory. Millions of stereoviews flooded the market, and you could take virtual vacations to most of the known world: Egypt, South America, Europe, the American West–all over.
Here are a few of my handful of 1870s eBay stereoviews of places in the west I’m particularly interested in. If you’ve never practiced “free viewing”–basically letting your eyes relax to the point where the left eye focuses on the left image and the right on the right one–give it a try with these. The process might be easier if you click on the image to enlarge it. You know that you’re on the right track when you start to see three images, the left one on the left, the right one on the right, and the stereo composite in between.
(Remember the “Magic Eye” pictures from the 1990s? Those posters of seemingly random piles of pixels where some sort of cheesy 3D image would suddenly come to life when you got your eyes to relax just so? If you could make those pop, you’ve got the idea behind stereo free-viewing down.)
This first is a basic Carleton Watkins view of Yosemite Valley:
And this is a shot of Lamon’s cabin, the “first” structure built in Yosemite Valley. (I doubt the Native Americans inhabiting the Valley lived alfresco year round, however…)
A Southwestern montane forest photographed by Timothy H. O’Sullivan during the 1873 Wheeler expedition, one of the great Western surveys:
And finally a shot of Kanab Canyon taken by William Bell during the 1872 Wheeler expedition. But wait! What the hell is in this picture? In the finest tradition of using Google Maps to find accidentally recorded images of naked people, could this be? A naked man?
Yeah, tourism and voyeurism, hand in hand, even back then…
Don’t you love it when you talk about two separate things and then something happens that forces an unexpected convergence of the two? Earlier I was doing some Google Street View sightseeing of celebrity gardens. And I’ve posted a few notes (12) and photos from my recent Yellowstone trip.
Thanks go to Peter, who the other day pointed out that Google now has added ten parks and recreation areas to Street View, including Yellowstone! So you want to see what the view is along Yellowstone’s Firehole Lake Drive? Just drop into Street View to find out. Of course, like all things virtual, it lacks something of the actual. How will you smell the lodgepole pines or get a whiff of the sulfur fumes rising from the springs?
While Street View is a great tool and can let you get a low-res look at places you’d never visit, it’s really just a presentation tool for canned photography. The views are updated periodically, yes, but the periods span many months. What you’re looking at today is soooo yesterday, and in some ways it feels so Web 1.0.
Web cams offer a complement to Street View and can provide an immediacy the former tool lacks. In fact, if you’re interested in the Old Faithful Geyser and Upper Geyser Basin at Yellowstone, there’s a recently installed web cam at the attraction, with images updated at intervals of less than a minute.
Street View does a nice job of conquering space, giving you the freedom to move around a map and see what there is to see from different locations, and web cams can conquer time by giving you almost-immediate, up-to-date views of things as they’re happening.
What’s the next killer app? What will conquer both space and time?
Will all cars have cameras and GPS installed and then have the images beamed to some central location for real-time descriptions available to anyone on the web so that you can see what things look like right now? And if that happens, who will be the central location serving up the images? Google? The Department of Homeland Security?
Maria Sibylla Merian (1647–1717) is the subject of an exhibition at L.A.‘s Getty Museum running through August 31. A German entomologist and painter of the natural world, Merian produced a number of amazingly detailed and wonderful illustrations for her books. The Metamorphosis of the Insects of Suriname, her major work, presents work deriving from two years of illustrating and collecting she and a daughter she did in South America. (That trip sounds like it must have been an amazing story: a mother and her daughter, selling everything they owned, to leave Europe to do science in the wilds all the way across the world–all that circa 1700…)
Maria Sibylla Merian.A plate taken from Metamorphosis insectorum Surinamensium [ source ]
The book has great images of bugs–as you might imagine. But she portrayed the bugs in symbiosis with the plant world around them. As a consequence, the botanical images are also amazing.
Maria Sibylla Merian.A blue honey creeper on a thistle, copulating snails below [ source ]
There are a number of new and used books by Merian, as well as several original paintings or engravings, available through AbeBooks. These are important works, so to buy an original illustration or early edition might set you back a couple of bucks…
A topic that’s making its rounds these days is the practice of guerrilla gardening.
It can take different forms, but what’s being talked about most are “seed bombing” and stealthily taking over neglected public spaces.
Richard Reynolds in London has just released a book, On Guerrilla Gardening, and that’s causing a lot of the buzz. The hiply “criminal” nature of what he’s doing has given Reynolds a certain aura. Even Adidas is trying to tap into it with a proposal for an advertising campaign. Think of the “edgy” caché that Shepard Fairey developed with his “Obey” campaign of guerrilla-applied posters featuring Andre the Giant. In addition to now doing signage for the Obama campaign, Fairey has taken that celebrity and channeled into an art and marketing career. Reynolds is poised to do something similar.
In addition to London the practice is happening all over: Berlin, New York, Long Beach in California–lots of places. In Long Beach, for instance, someone recently named in an article only as “Scott” has been beautifying neglected traffic medians by planting them with attractive landscaping. What’s really to his credit is that he weeds and otherwise maintains the spaces, and he’s been doing this for ten years, more than twice as long as Reynolds.
In the same article, Ramon Arevalo, Superintendent of Grounds Maintenance for Long Beach, has said that he has no problem with “Scott’s” illegal activity. “If you want to do this, my advice is to contact myself or the council person. We want to partner with people who care about where they live.”
That sounds like the seed bomb for a whole new program cities could develop. Why not partner people who want to grow living things with governments in possession of butt-ugly patches of untended land?
Here in San Diego there are several beautification programs in and around the city where artists are invited to decorate the mundane electrical utitility boxes that populate street corners and front yards. Hundreds of boxes have sported interesting new paintjobs as a result. Why not do something similar with those dead zones spread throughout most cities by getting people to participate in beautifying their surroundings by planting gardens in neglected spaces?
And–here’s a radical idea–why not pay them something to do it?!
Earlier I posted a couple of my tourist pictures of Idaho’s Shoshone Falls, the “Niagara of the West.” I’ve just begun to scan and print the negatives of the large-format work from the trip. Here are three from the falls:
Viewpoint at Shoshone Falls, Snake River, Idaho:
Shoshone Falls Park:
Parking Lot at Shoshone Falls Park:
Interestingly, in the pile of newspapers John had saved for me from while I was away, was a book review in the L.A. Times of Ginger Strand’s Inventing Niagara. Interestingly too, in browsing for the book on the web I noticed that it has two different subtitles: “Beauty, Power and Lies,” as well as the more provocative “How Industry, Commerce and Art Conspire to Sell (Out) a Natural Wonder.”
I’d lamented that the Niagara of the West had been despoiled and exploited to an unseemly theme-parkness, and in this long quote in the review Strand has similar things to say about the Niagara of the East:
Manicured, repaired, landscaped and artificailly lit, dangerous overhangs dynamited off and water flow managed to suit the tourist schedule, the Falls are more a monument to man’s meddling than to nature’s strength. In fact, they are a study in self-delusion: we visit them to encounter something real, then observe them through fake Indian tales, audio tours and IMAX films… We hold them up as an example of unconquerable nature even as we applaud the daredevil’s and power-brokers who conquer them. And we congratulate ourselves for preserving nature’s beauty in an ecosystem that, beneath its shimmering emerald surface, reflects our own ugly ability to destroy. On every level, Niagara Falls is a monument to the ways America falsifies its relationship to nature, reshaping its contours, redirecting its force, claiming to submit to its will while imposing our own on it.
Reviewer Tim Rutter, as much as he likes a lot of what Strand has to say, ends up finding the writing of the book to be tiring and frustrating. In that most post-modern technique now turning into cliche, the author’s process of writing the book plays a starring role in the book. When well done it can still be interesting, but in this example Rutter didn’t think that it was. Take that pronouncement under advisement, but it still sounds like the book is a worthwhile read.
Manny Farber, one of San Diego’s treasured local artists, had a new exhibition at Quint Contemporary Art in La Jolla (actually just a neighborhood of San Diego, but don’t tell that to the La Jollans). The title of the show is “Drawing Across Time,” and features works on paper Farber executed in the garden of the home that he shares with fellow artist Patricia Patterson.
Manny Farber.Drawing Across Time (details). Mixed media on paper, 9 7/8 x 22 3/8 inches.
Lively diagonals animate the horizontal-panoramic-format mixed-media works, and space swirls around with the garden viewed simultaneously from different vantage points. His earlier work, such as the one below, share a similar sense of space, but being closer to drawing than painting, the work is freer, looser and more immediate. And of course be sure to add two and a half decades of thoughtful development to the equation.
Manny Farber.Sam’s Bunch, 1980–81. Oil on canvas, 43.7 x 52.2 in.
When I’d heard years ago that a lotus seed from China had germinated after laying low for 1300 years I was pretty amazed. That was from seed collected in 1982 when Shen and Miller at UCLA sprouted a number of seeds that were radiocarbon dated to be anywhere from 95 to 1288 years old, plus or minus a few years.
Studies of the lotus plants grown from the old seeds showed that all were abnormal, a fact that the scientists attributed to radiation-induced mutations that occurred as a result of naturally-occurring radiation in the soil where they were found. The date palm–which has been dubbed the “Methusalah tree”– however, has been growing spunkily since it was sprouted in 2005, and is now five feet tall. If that palm doesn’t take the cake in the more-heirloom-than-thou plant contest, I don’t know what would!
Okay, okay, I’ll admit it. Despite a certain resemblance to the classic “Martian popping thing” available at Archie McPhee’s, it’s actually the final two leaves on a Pachypodium geayi, a succulent and spiny first-cousin to the better known plumeria that is such a fragrant staple in Hawaiian leis.
Kept moist, and during the cooler and wetter parts of the year, the plant is a spiny column ringed with a rosette of long gray-green leaves. Drop the watering, and the plant goes into defensive mode, dropping its leaves and making like a cactus. Where we have it, in the back of the back yard, it gets to dry out along with the rest of the drought-tolerant plants, so we get to see its “cactus” behavior most of the summer and into fall. When the water starts up, the leaves come back and it’s happy again.
This species can produce pendant cream-colored flowers with reflexed petals. They’re not the most spectacular bloomers in the Pachypodium genus–P. lamerei could be confused for a plumeria if it weren’t for the spines on the plant.
This plant is about ten years in the ground and is coming up on four feet tall. Mature plants will get triple or quadruple the height of this teenager. More water would help it along, I’m sure, but in my yard it gets what it gets.
