[ Lost in the Landscape ]

old trees and really old trees

Yes­ter­day I attended a basic pre­sen­ta­tion on Geospa­tial Infor­ma­tion Sys­tems (GIS), the tech­nol­ogy that’s behind a grow­ing num­ber of web thin­gies like Google Street View and geo­t­ag­ging on Flikr, as well as a whole new world of dis­play­ing infor­ma­tion in highly visual ways.

One of the more inter­st­ing uses of GIS pre­sented at the ses­sion was by the groundskeep­ers at the UCSD cam­pus. By using the tech­nol­ogy they could mark indi­vid­ual trees on a map. Then the tagged trees poten­tially could be linked to data on species, plant health, size…all sorts of fun stuff.

Last night I did a lit­tle web trawl­ing to see what other inter­est­ing things that might have been done with GIS and plants. It wasn’t long before I ran across the Ancient Tree Hunt web­site in the United King­dom. By using GIS tech­nol­ogy, the site offers you the abil­ity to view maps of the United King­dom with icons locat­ing almost 12,000 par­tic­u­larly ancient trees in the coun­try­side. What’s more, you can get infor­ma­tion on indi­vid­ual spec­i­mens. And you can add the loca­tions of remark­able plants your­self, along with infor­ma­tion on the plants and photos.

The site is a project of the Wood­land Trust, an orga­ni­za­tion devoted to pre­serv­ing the nat­ural Eng­lish coun­try­side. By con­cen­trat­ing on charis­matic megaflora, the Trust gives peo­ple big, beau­ti­ful icons of what would be lost if preser­va­tion efforts weren’t car­ried out. And let­ting peo­ple con­tribute to the site involves them in more active ways than read­ing an arti­cle or donat­ing a few pounds.

Leav­ing GIS and the Eng­lish coun­try­side behind–though not all things British–I wanted to men­tion a news story on the BBC News. Researchers at the Uni­ver­sity of Bris­tol, team­ing with an unnamed Amer­i­can insti­tu­tion (this was the BBC after all), have announced the dis­cov­ery of the largest fos­silized for­est ever found…something match­ing the size of Bristol…whatever a Bris­tol is. Work­ing under­ground in a coal mine near the Kentucky-Illinois-Indiana bor­der, they’ve found suc­ces­sive lay­ers of forests going back 306 mil­lion years into a time when the Earth’s cli­mate was chang­ing from ice-bound to globally-warmed.

Some of the remains are amaz­ingly well-preserved. Pretty cool!

September 11 2008 | Categories: landscape • places | Tags: fossil forests • fossils • geospatial information systems • geotagging • GIS • mapping • Woodland Trust | No Comments »

garden visits

While we were in L.A. we stopped by the houses of John’s cousin and aunt. Here are a few shots of some of their nice plantings.

First, pool­side at Cousin Chris and Susie’s house, was this nice South Seas look­ing com­bi­na­tion of leafy giant bird of par­adise (Stre­litzia nico­lai) with the jewel-tone foliage of Ire­sine herb­stii. The lat­ter plant has a few com­mon names like “beef­steak plant,” “blood­leaf” and–most unfor­tu­nate of all–“chicken giz­zard.” Gross. Who thought up that name?

One of Susie’s sis­ters is a land­scaper who was a final­ist on Home and Gar­den Television’s Landscaper’s Chal­lenge, and it was handy to have her sis­terly advice. But Susie made the plant selec­tions herself.

Then it was off to Aunt Barbara’s. One of her friends had hired a ser­vice that cleared and amended a bed, installed irri­ga­tion and then planted a warm-weather and then a cool-weather assort­ment of plants.

Bar­bara liked the idea of hav­ing lots of flow­ers with­out hav­ing to break her back putting them in, so she had the ser­vice do her own yard. Here are a cou­ple shots of the sum­mer mix, fea­tur­ing zin­nias, salvias, del­phini­ums, celosias, marigolds, por­tu­la­cas, lisianthus, plus some sun-tolerant vari­eties of coleus nearby.

But prepar­ing the beds and plant­ing the plants and installing a water­ing sys­tem isn’t all that’s required to keep these plants look­ing nice. When­ever she has a chance, Bar­bara takes a walk out to her plants and pulls off the spent flow­ers. By her care­ful dead­head­ing, the plant­i­ngs stay look­ing fresh many months after they’re set in the ground.

I’m sure she spends as much time tend­ing the plants as it took to put them in. Still, she’s a gar­dener and enjoys her out­door time. Some peo­ple might call it work, but I don’t think any of us would.

September 10 2008 | Categories: gardening • landscape design | Tags: Aunt Barbara's garden • Chris and Susie's garden • deadheading • plant combinations | 5 Comments »

farewell to tomatoes

Last week­end I pulled up the first of this year’s tomato plants, an Early Girl that had stopped pro­duc­ing. I’m star­ing at Mis­ter Stripey, which has just a few fruits left, and, most sad of all, my main Chero­kee Pur­ple plant, which has flow­ers but not remain­ing fruit. There’s no way the fruit would set and ripen before the weather turns even colder. It’ll be hard, but those plants will have to go soon.

To think, two weeks ago the kitchen cut­ting board looked like this.

But now the only toma­toes on the counter are some a friend gave us at his birth­day party last Fri­day. As I left his house with the bag, I felt like a how a hard­work­ing laborer must feel after he’s laid off after thirty years and has to go on food stamps or some other gov­ern­men­tal assis­tance. It was hard, swal­low­ing my pride, accept­ing hand­outs. But the end of sum­mer has lots of hum­bling moments when the glo­ri­ously gaudy excess of sum­mer sud­denly shuts off.

It was a good time to eval­u­ate the three vari­eties I put in the ground this year. Early Girl was green and unpro­duc­tive most of the year, only pro­duc­ing fruit late in the sea­son and in unim­pres­sive quan­tity. Their fla­vor was fine, cer­tainly bet­ter than store toma­toes, but not as good as a tomato could be. I will not be grow­ing it again.

I trashed Mis­ter Stripey on these blog pages ear­lier in the sea­son for its ram­bunc­tious­ness. When it finally set­tled down and started to pro­duce it ended up being the most pro­lific of the three vari­eties, giv­ing us several-to-many smaller-sized toma­toes sev­eral times a week. The skin was thin and they didn’t keep as well as other vari­eties. Also the insides were very liq­uid, not at all meaty like beef­steak vari­eties; but sliced up on a tomato pizza they were stun­ning with their gold and rose and scar­let col­ors. I don’t know that I’ll grow it again next year, but I’ll save some seed from the one of the last fruits.

And as far as Chero­kee Pur­ple, yes, I’ll def­i­nitely grow it again. (I’ve already saved a small enve­lope of seeds to plant and share.) I’d put four plants in the ground this year. Three were in bad spots for toma­toes and barely pro­duced. The one plant that rated a prime spot did well, pro­duc­ing a vig­or­ous but not crazed green canopy, and the fruits were usu­ally in the ten-to-fourteen ounce range. The fla­vor of these was clas­sic tomato fla­vor, even here near the coast where the tem­per­a­tures barely cracked eighty degrees this summer.

The trick for next sea­son, of course, is to set aside some good spots for Chero­kee Pur­ple and the cou­ple other vari­eties I might try. Empty space in a gar­den? What’s that?

As long as I’m on the sub­ject of toma­toes, I wanted to share Rein­hards Tomaten, an excel­lent Ger­man site with pho­tos of dozens of vari­eties of toma­toes that Hans shared with me this past week. Although there were no pho­tos of the one vari­ety of mine that I was think­ing might have come mis-identified this year (Mis­ter Stripey), there’s a photo of Chero­kee Pur­ple, plus shots of intrigu­ing vari­eties like Black Russ­ian, Tla­colula Ribbed and the wild tomato rel­a­tive Lycop­er­si­con macro­carpum lutea. If only I had more space to grow more of them…

September 09 2008 | Categories: gardening • my garden • plant profiles | Tags: Cherokee Purple tomato • Early Girl tomato • heirloom tomatoes • Mister Stripey tomato • Mr. Stripey tomato • tomatoes | 1 Comment »

my favorite yucky flower

One of my favorite weird plants has bloomed for the first time this year. For much of the year Stapelia gigan­tea grows low to the ground, form­ing a dense suc­cu­lent mat about eight inches tall. But in the sum­mer and fall it perks up and pro­duces these amaz­ing flowers.

The pro­por­tion of the size of the flower to the size of the plant almost reminds you of alpine plants, where the flow­ers start to dwarf the plants they grow on. (Pro­por­tion­ally, imag­ine a rose bush four feet tall pro­duc­ing a rose four feet across…)

The flow­ers are a pale cream-to-icy-green color, with dark rose squig­gly lines run­ning all over them. And the flow­ers are cov­ered with fur.

I could stare into the spi­ral vor­tex of lines at the cen­ter of one of these flow­ers for hours…

And did I men­tion that if you stick your nose into the flower the aroma might remind you of ham­burger left in an unplugged refrig­er­a­tor for a cou­ple days? Although the cam­era scared them away, you can imag­ine that flies find this the most irre­sistible flower. It’s no sur­prise that one of its com­mon names is “car­rion flower.”

The genus Stapelia has other stinky flow­ers, though most with the excep­tion of S. gran­di­flora have much smaller flow­ers. A num­ber of closerly related gen­era in the Stapeliae tribe also have stinky but amaz­ingly intri­cate and beau­ti­ful flow­ers. Hoodia gor­donii, the plant that has become pop­u­lar as an appetite sup­pres­sant, also belongs to this same group of plants.

Grow­ing Stapelia gigan­tea is easy–actually, too easy in Hawaii and Aus­tralia, where it’s con­sid­ered a weed. Basi­cally give it bright light (it might not bloom in shade), pro­tect it from freez­ing, and sup­ply it with light to mod­er­ate water. (It tol­er­ates not being watered for two or three weeks, thanks to its suc­cu­lent stems, but it’s hap­pi­est with some mois­ture.) Mine is grow­ing well in a shal­low clay pot about eigh­teen inches in diam­e­ter, in reg­u­lar pot­ting soil.

If you or some­one you know has a young­ster attracted to crawl­ing, scary bugs, turn them on to this plant. They’ll be a gar­dener for life.

September 07 2008 | Categories: gardening • my garden | Tags: carrion flower • in bloom • Stapelia gigantea | 10 Comments »

more on quilts and nature

Thanks to Linda, I’m hold­ing in my very hands the exhi­bi­tion cat­a­log to the Quilt Visions 2002 show. This is the show that had a bamboo-based quilt design that I really liked. Look­ing through the cat­a­log I found a bunch of other quilts based on nature and things botanical.

It’s beau­ti­ful work, and I thought I’d share some of them with you, along with some of the artist’s com­ments. All the images below are cour­tesy the online exhi­bi­tion cat­a­log at the Ocean­side Museum of Art, where the exhi­bi­tion took place. The words–and fairly impor­tant things like the artists’ names and titles of the works–come from the catalog.

Any bets many of these quilt artists are also gar­den­ers? Enjoy!

Vir­ginia Abrams. In the Jun­gle. 89″ x 48″, hand-dyed cot­tons by the artist, machine pieced, machine quilted.

“The mature dark greens and browns of the jun­gle inter­min­gle with flow­er­ing vines and young shoots intro­duced using impro­vi­sa­tional piec­ing tech­niques. Patches of light fil­ter through to the jun­gle depths.”

Britt Fried­man. Win­ter Tree. 27″ x 34″, printed, painted, machine pieced, direct applique, machine quilted.

“My quilts are meant to con­vey the excite­ment I feel about the nat­ural world. Color, line, and form are used to write a kind of visual poetry describ­ing that experience.”

Robert Leathers. After Angkor. 55″ x 36″, direct applique, machine embell­ished, machine quilted, hand dyed fab­ric by Judy Robertson.

“Angkor Wat tem­ple ruins in Cam­bo­dia are a study in man’s attempt to con­trol nature and nature’s abil­ity to even­tu­ally con­quer. My goal in this quilt is to cap­ture the time­less strug­gle between man and the environment.”

John W. Lefel­hocz. Monet over Money. 50″ x 51″, hand embell­ished, hand quilted, whole cloth.

“What makes a work of art valu­able? Do you look at art dif­fer­ently when you see its dol­lar value? Is art a com­mod­ity? Can the pur­suit of money help or hurt the artist?”

Linda Mac­Don­ald. Stumps to the City. 42″ x 34″, hand quilted, whole top, painted.

“My work is about liv­ing in North­ern Cal­i­for­nia and see­ing and record­ing the changes that are occur­ring due to pop­u­la­tion, liveli­hood, and nat­ural events and dis­as­ters. Log­ging has changed the envi­ron­ment dras­ti­cally. All of the old growth trees are gone except for the few in national parks…The log­ger migrates to an urban area. In this piece, the trees have cre­ated the urban environment.”

Els­beth Nusser-Lampe. Pota­moge­ton. 30″ x 40″, machine pieced, direct applique, machine quilted, machine embroidery.

“In sum­mer­time when you are walk­ing along a stream, you can notice a won­der­ful scene in the water. The run­ning water moves a dense wood of lux­u­ri­ous plants very slowly. When the sun­light is bro­ken at the sur­face, a won­der­ful atmos­phere appears.”

Noriko Endo. Nature in New Zealand. 75″ x 52″, machine embell­ished, small pieces con­vered with tulle.

“When vis­it­ing New Zealand, I was impressed by the beauty of Mother Nature. The sky was so clear and the land was diverse and col­or­ful. The land called out to me. The ver­dant sweep of trees, the wet moss on the tree trunks inspired me to express this in a por­trait of light and shadow… A stroll into the woods with all of its color, light splen­dor, and majesty adds to my well being.”

September 03 2008 | Categories: rambles | | 2 Comments »

the sudoku index

Some things are a good gauge of how busy I’ve been. You can look at deferred gar­den projects–the pock­ets of weed­i­ness, or the spots where my inter­ven­tion is needed to pacify the aggres­sion from one mon­ster plant against all its neigh­bors. Or you can look at the pile of sudoku puz­zles that I’ve saved out of the news­pa­per but still haven’t got­ten to.

Here’s the cur­rent pile. I just did the top puz­zle, an “easy” one dated August 4. Only a few dozen to go…

The unsolved sudokus aside, we did make some time for some gar­den projects. Part of the plant­ing of three coy­ote bushes in the front yard had started to fail. These plants, Bac­cha­ris pilu­laris pilu­laris ‘Pigeon Point,’ were a quick ground­cover, mound­ing to about two feet tall and a dozen feet wide. The plants are native to the area and serve as a nec­es­sary food source to all sorts of local insects. (The most excel­lent Las Pil­i­tas Nurs­ery site gives a lit­tle more infor­ma­tion on this.) And you can just look at the plants them­selves. Crit­ter city!

Here’s one of the many tiny lit­tle flies vis­it­ing the incon­spic­u­ous flowers.

In the world of shrubs they could be con­sid­ered a lit­tle on the short-lived side. These had been in the ground some­thing like fif­teen years, and even with some gen­tle trim­ming spots were dying back and look­ing like his­tory. Saturday’s project was to take out a fifteen-foot wide sec­tion of them in the front yard where they had looked worst.

Well, now, does that look like a swath of bare dirt? Space to put in a few more new plants? Life is good–the sudokus can wait while I research some cool native plants that I’ve never grown before.

September 02 2008 | Categories: gardening • my garden | Tags: coyotoe bush • sudoku • too many things to do | 1 Comment »

botanical fabrics and quilts

One of our fab­u­lous wed­ding presents was the offer to make us a quilt. We could pick the design. We could pick the fab­rics. How gen­er­ous was that?

That got me look­ing at fab­rics in a totally dif­fer­ent way. One of the things I real­ized was how many of the designs had botan­i­cal ori­gins. Here are just a few of the plant-based ones that I found inter­est­ing. Some are fairly real­is­tic, some are so styl­ized that you have to look hard to see the botanical-ness of the inspi­ra­tion. But no mat­ter how abstracted from the orig­i­nal, the gar­den lives on in the fabric.

And after por­ing through all the fab­ric choices there was the issue of the design. There were so many options…traditional quilts, dou­ble wed­ding rings, strip and curves designs, water­color quilts…books and books filled with inter­est­ing designs. And then I ran across the online cat­a­log of the 2002 Quilt Visions quilt exhi­bi­tion at the Ocean­side Museum of Art here in San Diego County.

Liz Axford. Bam­boo Boo­gie Woo­gie I,60″ x 44″, hand-dyed cot­tons, machine pieced, machine quilted. [ source ]

The quilt looked like it wouldn’t be ridicu­lously dif­fi­cult to piece. How­ever, being an art quilt, it had lots of over-the-top labor-intensive details going on with it…stuff that to me looks like there’s hand dye­ing and pos­si­bly hand-printing involved. Unfor­tu­nately, the museum site didn’t list the specifics. And they didn’t even list the artist! I did see the print cat­a­log of this show, and I’ll post the artist as soon as I can research who she was. [Note: Thanks to Linda, I’ve got the cat­a­log in my hands, and I’ve now been able to fill in some of the infor­ma­tion the web­site lacked.] I found it inter­est­ing that the brief writeup in the cat­a­log said that she had been inspired by bam­boo, and that she was a mem­ber of the Inter­na­tional Bam­boo Society–You can really that influ­ence in her design.

For­tu­nately, what I was most inter­ested in was the con­struc­tion method. Commonly-available fab­rics could lend a sense of the orig­i­nal but also take the design into dif­fer­ent ter­ri­tory. I played with dif­fer­ent fab­rics com­bi­na­tions and ended up with a ten­ta­tive first draft selec­tion of thir­teen fab­rics, includ­ing two of the ones pic­tured above. And play­ing with the basic con­struc­tion method and enlarg­ing it I came up with the Pho­to­shopped mockup below.

At this point I’m just play­ing. I sus­pect that almost everyone’s first quilt attempts may not have a lot of sub­tlety to them, and I worry that this is a lit­tle that way. But like I said this is just a work­ing draft that will prob­a­bly change when looked at by a sea­soned quil­ter. What’s fairly easy to do on screen may be ridicu­lously dif­fi­cult in real quilt­ing life. And these are fab­rics thrown together from look­ing at them online. I’m sure that actu­ally select­ing real-life fab­rics will change the result.

But gosh all this is so much fun–You can eas­ily see why quilt­ing is a $3.3 billion-a-year industry!

September 01 2008 | Categories: art • gardening | Tags: botanical designs • fabrics • inspired by nature • quilts | 7 Comments »