[ Lost in the Landscape ]

final thoughts on the getty

The gar­dens of the Getty Museum for sure are among the most pho­tographed botan­i­cal spots in Los Ange­les. After the first of my recent Getty notes Cousin Jenny in South Car­olina sent me some of the pic­ture she’d taken there on her last trip out in June. I liked them and thought I’d share some with you.

Here’s an abstrac­tion of plants that she did.

And here are some suc­cu­lents she cov­eted. Since she lives where it’s wet­ter than South­ern Cal­i­for­nia, grow­ing many suc­cu­lents out­doors would be a real stunt. We’ve e-mailed back and forth a lit­tle about how it’s always the plants that you can’t grow eas­ily that are the ones you often drool over. These are easy plants here where you don’t have to worry about them rot­ting in the wet ground. But South Car­olina? A lit­tle trickier.

And she also was inter­ested in some of the hard­scape details. The Cen­tral Gar­den has these big boul­ders cemented into the water­course that descends into the lower pool. They can help to break the force of run­ning water dur­ing our occa­sional storms. But, hey, they look cool.

And here’s her shot of the lower Cen­tral Gar­den with its clipped aza­leas. I’ve never seen the plants in bloom but I’m sure it’s quite the sight as this abstract top­i­ary doo­dle goes from green leaves to rosy red flowers.

“Always chang­ing, never twice the same” is the phrase that the Getty uses on their web­site to describe the Robert Irwin-designed Cen­tral Gar­den. But any­one who’s at all a half-observant gar­dener could tell you that that’s a char­ac­ter­is­tic of any gar­den that isn’t made out of astro­turf and concrete.

In this gar­den the aza­leas bloom and the plane trees drop their leaves, but it really isn’t the place you go to see the sub­tle shifts of a sea­son. Most of the other plant­i­ngs are heav­ily man­aged. To me it’s more about human-managed change than about the sea­sons and cycles of life and regen­er­a­tion. Things are as care­fully staged as the store win­dows at Bloomingdale’s. Once a plant starts look­ing scrappy, it’s outta there like summer’s deck shoes. It’s a beau­ti­ful gar­den, for sure, but it’s try­ing to do dif­fer­ent things than many other gardens.

Peo­ple often talk about how a typ­i­cal vis­i­tor arrives at the Getty. You park you car down on the flats, in a garage or more remote lot, depend­ing on the vol­ume of vis­i­tors. Then you have the option the walk up the hill about a mile or take the tram. (I’ve never seen any­one on foot.) The archi­tect, Richard Meier intended the visit to be a spe­cial pil­grim­age. Ascend­ing slowly up the hill, your visit takes you from the com­mon world to the shin­ing acrop­o­lis on the hill.

That hill­side that you ascend has been replanted with the head-high native plants that pop­u­late the nearby area. Once you get to the top, most of the plant­i­ngs shift to more “dec­o­ra­tive” plants from around the world. To me it could eas­ily be inter­preted that the local veg­e­ta­tion isn’t wor­thy of a place like the Getty, just as most of the “cul­ture” con­tained in the museum walls comes from dis­tant times and dis­tant places.

But the Getty, despite being estab­lished to enshrine ancient to early mod­ern art­works, has an active pho­tog­ra­phy pro­gram, and they also show a num­ber of estab­lished liv­ing artists, even some from South­ern Cal­i­for­nia. While most of these artists get their show­ings mainly out­side of their main gal­leries, there’s the occa­sional breach of the hal­lowed walls. For instance, last week­end, a video piece by South­ern Cal­i­forn­ian Bill Viola was run­ning in the North Gallery along­side Euro­pean sculp­ture that was cen­turies older.

And, sim­i­larly, while most of the plant­i­ngs at the Getty come from places beyond South­ern Cal­i­for­nia, I was pleased to see that the plant­i­ngs of trees right at the front entrance was made up of local sycamores. With their beau­ti­fully cut leaves and won­der­fully mot­tled trunks, these trees can stand up to any­thing else that was planted on the grounds. It’s a state­ment of local pride, just like show­ing the work of some of our great local artists. Good going, Getty!

August 30 2008 | Categories: art • gardening • landscape design | Tags: hardscape • J. Paul Getty Museum • Jenny • native plants | 1 Comment »

some hardcape ideas to borrow

As promised here are some ran­dom notes on hard­scape details at the Getty Museum that I found pretty cool.

The traver­tine tiles that make up most of the out­door paving are laid out in a fairly ran­dom pattern…except for this checker­board spot near the front entrance. I liked how the lit­tle pocket of order sud­denly dis­solves into randomness.

And here large tiles con­trast with smaller ones. By includ­ing a num­ber of smaller, darker tiles at the edge of the tran­si­tion, you notice the dif­fer­ence in scale more than if the were uni­formly the same color.

I liked the spikes of walk­way inter­rupt­ing the green plane of the lawn. Even on a smaller scale this could be fun in a loca­tion where you could view it from above.

Okay, this next detail is prob­a­bly beyond the scope of your aver­age DIYer, but I liked the con­trast of smooth and raw, machined and nat­ural. In this case the saw-cut stone by the walk­way con­trasts beau­ti­fully with its rougher edges.

And this one, too, might be a lit­tle unre­al­is­tic for my back yard, but I really liked it. This is a big pedestal that was built for a Henry Moore’s sculp­ture, Bronze Form. The base is a wide slab that’s been travertine-tiled. A water source on top pro­vides a shal­low sheet of water, maybe about a quarter-inch deep, that crosses the top of the base and dis­ap­pears into a groove at the edge. I thought of it some­thing like a side­ways foun­tain, with water going hor­i­zon­tally instead of straight up…

August 29 2008 | Categories: landscape design | Tags: hardscape • J. Paul Getty Museum • travertine • water features | No Comments »

some plant ideas to borrow

Last weekend’s Los Ange­les trip included a short stop by the Getty Museum in Brentwood.

I’d posted ear­lier about their exhibit fea­tur­ing botan­i­cal illus­tra­tions by Maria Sibylla Mer­ian that con­tin­ues through the end of August. It was a com­pact, intense show with art­work by Mer­ian and her con­tem­po­raries, along with exam­ples of some of the ear­li­est illus­trated botan­i­cal books.


Unfor­tu­nately it was one of those thou-shalt-not-photograph exhi­bi­tions, so I had to be con­tent with snap­ping these two for-sale prints in the kiosk out­side the gal­leries. Mer­ian was inter­ested in plants, but even more so in the crit­ters that live in them. Here you see var­i­ous creepy crawlies cavort­ing with the plant life.

When vis­it­ing a place like the Getty it’s easy to get over­whelmed with the sheer unap­proach­able­ness of every­thing you see–the Acropolis-like site, the billion-plus dol­lar con­struc­tion bud­get, the irre­place­able art­works. But look­ing around the grounds there are all sorts of cool details that would be at home in a back yard plant­ing or patio project.

Here are some of the plant­i­ngs that I thought were cool. Some were in the Robert Irwin-designed Cen­tral Gar­den, oth­ers were around the museum grounds that were designed by the land­scape archi­tec­tural firm of Olin Part­ner­ship. (The best piece I’ve run across on the Web about the less famous gar­den plant­i­ngs was in, of all places, The Aus­tralian Human­i­ties Review.)

Many of the shady plant­i­ngs under­neath the plant­ing of Lon­don plane trees use light-colored foliage to make the plants pop in the shade. It’s a tech­nique that you read about a lot–but it works won­ders. Here’s a nice com­bi­na­tion of light-color suc­cu­lents.


Again in the shade, here are some plants with green-and-white var­ie­gated foliage, includ­ing a New Zealand flax.


And the last of these shade pic­tures, a plant­ing fea­tur­ing a chartreuse-leaved oxalis species. John thought it looked a lit­tle ane­mic, but I thought it was pretty cool.


Out of the shade, a plant­ing of con­trast­ing foliage col­ors can be a great accent. Here the plant­ing avoids green alto­gether, and com­bines plants pre­dom­i­nat­ing with red and yel­low tones, includ­ing the “Sticks of Fire” clone of the evil pen­cil tree.


In a gar­den with a large num­ber of dif­fer­ent plants it helps to have zones with less con­trast. Here a long, curv­ing row of pink crape myr­tles were bloom­ing over an extended bed of var­ie­gated soci­ety gar­lic bloom­ing with their lavender-pink flow­ers.


Mass plant­i­ngs don’t have to go into rows or grids. Here’s my favorite plant­ing on the entire prop­erty, a seem­ingly ran­dom arrange­ment of golden bar­rel cac­tus. The arrange­ment is infor­mal, but it’s as much a prod­uct of human inter­ven­tion as some­thing that’s overtly geo­met­ri­cal. The Robert Irwin-designed Cen­tral Gar­den draws most of the vis­i­tors, but this area is the most spec­tac­u­lar to my eyes.


If you have a billion-dollar view most peo­ple decide to chop down all the plants between you and the view. Here, the almost-transparent, unob­tru­sive, but still dra­matic spent flower stalks of these var­ie­gated cen­tury plants (Agave amer­i­cana ‘Mar­ginata’) actu­ally helps com­plete the view, giv­ing focus to what would be a run-of-the-mill spec­tac­u­lar view of the West Side of L.A. The actual flow­ers on these sculp­tural inflo­res­cences died months ago, and the stalks are actu­ally black and not green. But they’re cool as all get out–So why not leave them be?


Plant­i­ngs soften a lot of the hard geo­met­ri­cal edges. Here some pros­trate rose­mary cas­cades over the hard edge of the traver­tine wall.


And here, the baby’s tears grow­ing between the rough traver­tine squares soft­ens the tran­si­tion from human hard-edged geom­e­try to the softer forms of the vin­ing Boston ivy.

Next post I’ll share some of my favorite details from the hard­scape around the Getty.

August 28 2008 | Categories: gardening • landscape design | Tags: foliage plants • J. Paul Getty Museum • plant combinations • shade • shade plants | No Comments »

roadside flora

We’ve just returned from a cou­ple of days in L.A. The drive up and back isn’t one of the great scenic routes on earth, and for the most part it’s not par­tic­u­larly inter­est­ing botanically.

The plant­i­ngs of trees along I-5 and the 405 over 150 miles mostly draw from tried and true Cal­i­for­nia plant sta­ples like palms and euca­lyp­tus, with stands of Ital­ian cypress and occa­sional pines con­cen­trated in the more res­i­den­tial areas. They’re attrac­tive enough and gen­er­ally drought-tolerant choices, but the rhythm of palm, palm, euca­lyp­tus, palm, cypress, palm, euca­lyp­tus, palm gets a lit­tle rep­e­ti­tious over the course of two and a half hours (if traf­fic is moving).

A new kind of tree has been appear­ing over the last half dozen years, how­ever. With the recent growth of cell phones, there’s been an explo­sion in how many cell tow­ers you see–More bars in more places trans­lates into more cell tow­ers in more places. The providers have occa­sion­ally tried to hide the tow­ers by try­ing to make them pass as trees–usually with pretty com­i­cal results.

To keep myself amused on the trip I shot a few pho­tos of road­side trees. See if you can spot the cell tow­ers in the grid below. (Answers are at the end of this post, but I don’t think you’ll need the answer key.)

Give up? The cell tow­ers are the far right in the top row (fake palm), the first in the third row (fake…er…what is that sup­posed to be? a red­wood? road­side in South­ern Cal­i­for­nia?) and far right in the third row (plain vanilla cell tower). At least the cell tower trees are drought-tolerant.

August 25 2008 | Categories: landscape design • places | Tags: cell phones • cell towers • drought-tolerant landscaping • Interstate 405 • Interstate 5 • Los Angeles • Orange County • roadside plantings • trees | 1 Comment »

two plants talking

Here’s a pic­ture from the week­end of a cou­ple of plants inter­act­ing aes­thet­i­cally, a dark rose clone of naked lady, Amaryl­lis bel­ladonna, with Mex­i­can feath­er­grass, Nas­sella tenuis­sima (bet­ter known as Stipa tenuis­sima). I par­tic­u­larly liked the lines on the petals of the lilies echo­ing the wispy lines described by the stems of grass…

August 21 2008 | Categories: my garden • plant profiles | Tags: Amaryllis belladonna • Mexican feather grass • Mexican feathergrass • naked ladies • Nassella tenuissima • plant combinations • Stipa tenuissima | No Comments »

brown is in

Maybe I was inspired by the gar­den designs of Piet Oudolf. Maybe I was inspired by my recent trip to see things turn­ing brown in Los Peñas­qui­tos Pre­serve. Or maybe I’m just a lit­tle busy and/or slacker-ey in the dol­drums of summer.

What­ever the rea­son, I’ve decided to let the flow­er­ing heads on a lot of plants do their nat­ural thing and turn brown, to see what they look like. These are all exper­i­ments that I might develop into some­thing a lit­tle more fin­ished look­ing at some point. And all this is tak­ing place in the front yard, where appear­ance is every­thing. What will the neigh­bors say? Hope­fully they have a sim­i­lar sense of adventure.

The plant on the top of this pic­ture is a spi­raea I bought fif­teen years ago. This is before I started my plant data­base, and the label is long gone. I’m still work­ing on research­ing the species. Even the Cal­i­for­nia native Spi­raea dou­glas­sii likes a lit­tle bit of water, but this one in the front yard gets very lit­tle in the sum­mer. It’s even sur­vived six weeks or more with no irri­ga­tion. It doesn’t look the pret­ti­est that way, but it survives.

Here it is con­trasted against the almost-white foliage of com­mon dusty miller, Senecio bicolor subsp. cineraria, a plant usu­ally sold as an annual. But it’s hung on for well over five years in this tough spot. Looks pretty good most of the year, too.

Another plant with light-colored foliage is San­tolina chamae­cy­paris­sus, also called laven­der cot­ton, ground cypress, and a few other things. I like the swoop-ey rhythm of the dried flower heads and stalks. This is one of those plants I really hate in bloom. The yel­low against the gray foliage for two weeks in early sum­mer is unfor­tu­nate. And the flow­ers smell creepy, too–something between bad med­i­cine and paint remover. At least the plant stays a nice mound of gray­ish foliage most of the year.

And the last plant in this lit­tle gallery is some basic laven­der, con­trasted against the brown-red foliage and seed heads of red feather grass, Pen­nise­tum setaceum ‘Rubrum’. Some peo­ple dead-head their laven­der, both to lengthen bloom-time and to keep the plants tidier. I like the pointil­list bits of laven­der with the gray-green foliage and the brown of the dead flow­er­ing heads.

I’m not pos­i­tive that dead­head­ing the spent flow­ers off the laven­der does much to keep the plant bloom­ing: It looks good win­ter through about now, and then starts to slow down as my water­ing slows down. The san­tolina blooms once a year, dead­headed or not. And the spiraea…well, the thing that would perk it up the most would be some more water and not vig­i­lant remov­ing of its spent blooms. Poor plant. It had the sad for­tune of end­ing up in my yard as its adop­tive home. San Diego isn’t surf and fun and sun­shine all the time…

August 20 2008 | Categories: gardening • landscape design • my garden • plant profiles | Tags: deadheading • drought-tolerant landscaping • dusty miller • lavender • Pennisetum setaceum 'Rubrum' • Santolina chamaecyparissus • Senecio bicolor • spiraea | 2 Comments »

mending wall

I don’t mind many gar­den chores—watering, prun­ing, tidy­ing, planting—but other tasks are so unpleas­ant I can put them off for days or years. Deal­ing with hard­scape is one of those unpleas­antries, par­tic­u­larly when it’s labo­ri­ous main­te­nance and not a cra­tive act. And that was the story of much of the last two weekends.

My neigh­bor­hood dates to the very early 1950s, and it was the first in San Diego where a devel­oper cut and filled a hill­side to install a sub­di­vi­sion. Some lots—particularly on the fill side of the street—are flat from the front curb to the back fence. But many others—and mine is one of them—slope emphat­i­cally. I haven’t hired a sur­veyor to scope it out, but I’ve fig­ured that the front and back of the prop­erty dif­fer some­thing over twelve feet in ele­va­tion over 120 lin­ear feet. An addi­tional slope behind the house ele­vates the folks behind us another six to eight feet.

In Mend­ing Wall Robert Frost dealt with the arbi­trary social spaces that some walls define. But with­out the series of lit­tle retain­ing walls on my lot the walls serve to keep some of gravity’s effects in check the whole hill­side would end up on top of the neigh­bors down below.

Unfor­tu­nately, one of those walls had been list­ing con­sid­er­ably, partly with the help of a nasty pen­cil tree euphor­bia and some errant ivy roots. My solu­tion: Why not try using the hydraulic and bumper jacks that we’ve had sit­ting in the garage to see if we couldn’t get the wall to stand­ing back at 90 degrees? Then it’d be a pretty sim­ple mat­ter to pour con­crete at the base of either side of the wall to sta­bi­lize it for the next quarter-century.

The hydraulic jack help­ing to push the wall back up.

The bumper jack used for this project.

It’s com­mon to call some­one a jack of all trades (no pun intended), and it’s usu­ally meant as a com­pli­ment. But my work on this project made me think of the “…and mas­ter of none” part of the phrase that most peo­ple don’t think about. Yes, I did man­age to get the wall back to upright. Yes I did man­age to do it with the jacks. And yes, pour­ing con­crete around the base of the wall has kept it firmly upright.

But I did how­ever end up hav­ing to replace a small sec­tion of the wall, and that’s where the mas­ter of none part comes into play. You will notice I have no pho­tographs of that patched wall. Trust me. It’s ugly.

Since no one will believe any­thing these days until they’ve seen a pho­to­graph of it, how­ever, maybe you won’t real­ize how ugly the patch really is and con­tinue to think that I’m this resource­ful gar­dener who’ll tackle any­thing and do it with spec­tac­u­lar results.

If you’ll believe that, let me give you a cut­ting of this cute lit­tle pen­cil tree euphor­bia that’s guar­an­teed to stay a cute lit­tle well-mannered plant…

August 19 2008 | Categories: landscape design • my garden | Tags: hardscape • Robert Frost • walls | 5 Comments »

figs!

Figs are among my favorite fruits, but they’re also among the fruits that are usu­ally sad, unripe dis­ap­point­ments when you get them from a store. To help make up for that deficit we put in a ‘Brown Turkey’ fig tree over ten years ago.

Figs excel in the warm parts of the Mediter­ranean where they orig­i­nate, but given cool sum­mers they can sulk and not do par­tic­u­larly well. ‘Brown Turkey’ and ‘Osborn Pro­lific’ were a cou­ple of the vari­eties listed as doing well with less heat. Here in coastal San Diego ‘Brown Turkey’ has turned out to be a great choice. The plant is bear­ing now, pro­vid­ing us–and some of the neigh­bor­hood birds–with tasty brown-purple-black fruit.

Last season’s crop ended being a puny one, so John chopped the tree back by a third. Figs pro­duce two crops–an early one on last year’s wood and a larger, later one on this year’s. Prun­ing the tree sac­ri­ficed most of the first crop. But this sum­mer has made up for what few figs we’ve had so far this year.

Another fac­tor with its crop could be its water­ing sched­ule. Where the tree was placed–in the tough love bed behind the studio–it gets plenty of sun, but some­times only gets sum­mer water every three to four weeks. Figs are listed as being drought tol­er­ant once estab­lished, but at the same time they’re listed as enjoy­ing being watered. The plant def­i­nitely perks up after a good drench­ing so we know that could be part of the story. But it’s nice that there’s a plant that will pro­vide at least some­thing edi­ble with­out too many gal­lons of the lower Col­orado River poured on it!

August 18 2008 | Categories: gardening • my garden | Tags: Brown Turkey fig • figs • fruits | 4 Comments »

chairs: style vs. comfort

Here are notes that on a small hand­ful of chairs that we’ve tested. Most are in the style-fetish school of mod­ern fur­ni­ture design. With the excep­tion of the first model, all are chairs that we’ve tested at the bizarrely-named retailer, Design Within Reach. (“Within reach?” Oh really?) Most, how­ever, can be had a num­ber of places, bricks-and-mortar and online.

Look­ing at our expe­ri­ences I think you’ll get to see why it’s always a three-bears, “this one’s too large/small” expe­ri­ence for us when­ever we go shop­ping for any­thing we have to share. Wish us luck. Maybe some­day we’ll find seat­ing we can agree to want to spend the money on. And look­ing at some of these prices, you might feel com­pelled to microchip your lawn furniture.

Seat	Price	Com­fort: Me (5′ 10″ 160#)	Com­fort: John (6′ 9″ and big-boned)	Notes on Comfort	Style Notes
Anony­mous Home Depot chair pur­chased sev­eral years ago Comfy Cheap Chair	about $12	B–	A–	Nice molded back. Good for a taller/larger per­son; basi­cally tol­er­a­ble for me	C: Noth­ing fab­u­lous, but is a sim­ple, fairly neu­tral mod­ern design
Bellini Chair Mario Bellinia	$130	A–	D+	Form-fitting and very com­fort­able for a smaller-to aver­age per­son; not sturdy for heav­ier sitters	B+: It’s almost the plas­tic ver­sion of the clas­sic Mario Bellini “cab chair,” updated from–and curvier than–the 1970s model
Hud­son Side Chair Hud­son Side Chair	$640/$1315	A–	B	Another tai­lored chair for an average-sized per­son; can make a larger per­son feel huge; stead­ier than the above seat; may get hot in the sun, but being alu­minum will dis­si­pate heat quickly	A-: A clean, ver­sa­tile design by Philippe Starck, avail­able in brushed or pol­ished alu­minum, also comes with arms–for more $$$; a good indoor/outdoor model–we have a cou­ple counter-height ones of these in the kitchen
Sil­ver Col­lec­tion Arm­chair (from Design Within Reach) Sil­ver Col­lec­tion Armchair	$1000	D+	B	Extremely deep seat screams out for a back cush­ion for all but the tallest sit­ters; pro­motes poor pos­ture for us aver­age size persons	B-: A fairly undis­tin­guished though fairly clean mod­ern design; I thought the finial-looking feet to be pretty dorky
Bub­ble Club Armchair Bub­ble Club Armchair	$680	F	C–	I’ve been test-sitting this chair for years, hop­ing it’ll mirac­u­lously become an even tol­er­a­ble fit; absurdly deep seat, not even comfy for some­one 6′ 9″	A: Another Starck design, I really dig the looks of this, even with it’s echoes of pre-modern styles I don’t usu­ally swoon over; the fairly mas­sive front con­trasts amus­ingly with the hol­low back; the design makes me smile, but the fit makes me wince
Aero Chair Aero Chair	$160	D–	F	We both detest chairs with no lum­bar sup­port, and this has that fatal flaw; even I found it a tad wobbly	B-: Sim­ple, ser­vice­able design for when you want some­thing that doesn’t scream atten­tion to itself; DWR rec­om­mends tak­ing this chair in when­ever it rains to pre­serve the fin­ish; Uncom­fort­able and high main­te­nance! At least it stacks and weighs next to nothing
Ronde Arm­chair Ronde Arm­chair	$100	C–	D	It looks more com­fort­able than it actu­ally is; the arm­rests are great unless you want to put your arms on them; John found it flimsy and confining	B: Light and attrac­tive. Another light­weight stack­ing chair

August 17 2008 | Categories: landscape design • rambles | Tags: garden furniture • seating • shopping | 2 Comments »

for a good cause

I’ve donated one of my pho­tographs to an auc­tion to ben­e­fit Yosemite Renais­sance, the orga­ni­za­tion that now over­sees the Artist-In-Residence pro­gram at Yosemite National Park. The piece below is from when I was in the park dur­ing 1997–98 as part of the program.

James SOE NYUN. Hetch-Hetchy Reser­voir from O-Shaughnessy Dam, Yosemite National Park, 1997/2007 (from the Blue Day­light Series). Archival pig­ment print [ click to enlarge ]

The auc­tions is a great oppor­tu­nity to add to or start your art col­lec­tion and help out a deserv­ing orga­ni­za­tion at the same time. The res­i­dency pro­gram is cur­rently on hia­tus as they work to upgrade a cabin that will be used by artists. The orga­ni­za­tion is count­ing on this auc­tion to help with that effort.

All auc­tion art­work will be view­able (if it’s not there already) at the auc­tion page off the main Yosemite Renais­sance home page, where you can also place bids online. Or if you pre­fer to view and bid on the work in per­son, they’ll be on exhibit at the Ansel Adams Gallery in Yosemite Val­ley Wednes­day and Thurs­day, August 27–28. Recep­tion and the live auc­tion will be on Thurs­day from 6 to 8 p.m.

August 16 2008 | Categories: art • photography | Tags: auctions • James SOE NYUN • Yosemite • Yosemite Renaissance | No Comments »