[ Lost in the Landscape ]

community outreach

A week­end ago the local branch library was cel­e­brat­ing its 50th anniver­sary. To mark the occa­sion they threw a lit­tle party, com­plete with live music, snacks, things for kids and adults to do, and a few tables of com­mu­nity groups answer­ing ques­tions and giv­ing out information.

The North Claire­mont Branch Library today. (Yes, this is how they spell “Clare­mont” in these here parts–It’s the spawn of England’s Clare­mont with the first name of one of the developer’s fam­ily mem­bers, Claire Burgener.)

The North Claire­mont Branch Library at its open­ing, in 1958. I’ve always like the sim­ple, mod­ern lines of the library, and the clerestory win­dows admit gen­tle, dif­fused light for read­ing. The build­ing has hardly changed, but the neigh­bor­hood around it cer­tainly has.

One of the tables had a rep­re­sen­ta­tive from the Tecolote Canyon Nature Cen­ter that’s located nearby. They had poster­board dis­plays of some of the local wildlife, a list­ing of some inva­sive plant species of con­cern, a small live snake and a lit­tle stuffed fox.

The kids were of course most taken with the crit­ters, and I’ll have to admit I was taken with the fox myself. Twenty years of liv­ing near the canyon and this was the first fox I’d seen. Unfor­tu­nately this brown fox wasn’t exactly mov­ing very quickly in its taxi­der­mied state.

At least I hope some of the adults took the plant infor­ma­tion seri­ously. I’ll have to admit, how­ever, that the veg­etable rogue’s gallery on the sign hadn’t been updated much in recent years. The “most wanted” plant on the list seemed to be Argen­tine pam­pas grass, a posi­tion it’s held for most of the years I’ve looked at these lists. It’s still a prob­lem, but we have a num­ber of other escapees roam­ing the hillsides.

Inside, for almost no money you could pick up Life and Sat­ur­day Evening Post issues from the 1950s, 50-year-old pub­li­ca­tions to mark the fifti­eth anniver­sary of the library. (What proper library event would be com­plete with­out a book sale?) As you might expect, there were lots of Cold War-related arti­cles. And then this stack that caught my eye, includ­ing an issue with the arti­cle, “So you want to hunt uranium.”

If the table out­side didn’t get the atten­tion of the par­ents, a rack of lit­er­a­ture inside might have. Almost all of the top row was ded­i­cated to inva­sive plants, water con­ser­va­tion or drought-tolerant land­scap­ing. Things don’t get much more South­ern Cal­i­for­nia than that.

October 30 2008 04:29 am | Categories: gardening • places | Tags: Clairemont Branch Library • libraries • Tecolote Canyon • Tecolote Canyon Nature Center

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