[ Lost in the Landscape ]

hedges that i actually like

I’ll have to admit that I’ve never been a huge fan of hedges, partly because I’ve never lived in a house that had one of those clipped contraptions that straddles the lines between gardening, architecture and sculpture.

But then I ran into the work of the Belgian landscape designer Jacques Wirtz who uses hedges in surprising, interesting ways. He’s a major figure in Europe, but isn’t well documented in general garden books. The image to the left is from, as you might imagine, a book called The Wirtz Gardens, which appears to be the only work currently out devoted to his work. The current bookseller prices start over $150 and quickly go up to several times that—At this point this is probably a book for collectors only!

The cover image here shows hedgework that flutters somewhere between typical hard-edged pruning and more asymmetrical Japanese styles (like “cloud pruning”). For an even better example, if you have access to Making the Modern Garden by Christopher Bradley-Hoyle with Mark Griffiths, check out page 174 for a drop-dead gorgeous double hedge. In case you don’t have a copy nearby, let me do my best to describe it: A curving brick walkway steps gently down a slope; immediately on either side of the walkway are evergreen cloud-pruned evergreen boxwoods that look bulbous and deliciously amoeba-like; behind the box hedge is a small space, and then behind it is a taller hedge of deciduous beech that’s been clipped in a more traditional, hard-edged style, with the edges mirroring the curve of the walkway. The contrast of the organic shapes against the geometric, and the perky light green of the boxwood against the twiggy green-and-brown background of the beech is amazing. This is one hedge design that plays up contrasts between plants rather than aiming for a typical hedge hegemony of making every plant give up its individuality and conform to some master gardener’s plan.

And finally, a hedge from a private residence [ source ] that’s featured on the master’s website. A hedge that isn’t all about order and conformity—Sign me up!

November 30 2008 | Categories: gardening • landscape design | Tags: beech • boxwood • hedges • Jacques Wirtz | 2 Comments »

why garden?

Forgive this long letter; I don’t have time to write a short one.
—George Bernard Shaw

Blotanical is asking garden bloggers to answer a simple question this month: Why do I garden?

But there’s a catch: The answer has to be SMS-sized, 160 characters or less! The brief answers are quick and easy to read. To write one is not.

Here’s my attempt:

I garden in order to glimpse nature’s processes and rhythms, because my garden takes care of me at least as much as I take care of it, and because all our gardens matter more than we’ll ever know.

PS: If you don’t know Blotanical, you should. It’s a great online community of international garden bloggers that has recently surpassed the thousand-blog mark. If you figure several years of experience for most of the bloggers, you could consider that the site gives you easy access to several thousand years of combined gardening experience—plus all the bloggers’ great stories! Gardeners are the best people, and this site will prove it.

November 29 2008 | Categories: gardening • quotes | Tags: philosphy • why people garden | 9 Comments »

drip irrigation not a water conserving thing?

“Policies aimed at reducing water applications can actually increase water depletions… Conservation programs that target reduced water diversions or applications provide no guarantee of saving water.”

These controversial statements are part of the abstract of an article by Frank A. Warda and Manuel Pulido-Velazquez that was recently published in the current Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. The study mainly looks at agricultural water use in the Rio Grande Valley, but some of its ideas and findings have relevance for our little backyard farmsteads. This is an open-access article, so you don’t have to have some magical levels of access to be able to read it online for free.

November 29 2008 | Categories: gardening | Tags: water conservation • water use | No Comments »

a retail landscape

Here’s a post in commemoration of today, Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving when the holiday shopping season gets going in earnest.

When one of Southern California’s first Ikea stores opened at the Tustin Marketplace in Orange County twentyish years ago I was excited. I’d been oversaturated with the cheap, ugly department store merchandise that was available in my budget range at the time, and the simple and rational Ikea designs wafted in like a breath of Nordic oxygen.

The buildings of the Tustin Marketplace were different from anything I’d seen at the time. They were huge and painted in intense colors of the earth. Although the architecture shared some of the color sensibilities of postmodern architecture of the 1980s, it was nothing like what was being done in suburbia at the time. The central landscaping was also distinctive: geometric, spiky, sculptural. Once again, this wasn’t straight out of the rulebook for how you do landscaping for a suburban shopping center.

I had seen designs by the Mexican architect Ricardo Legorreta in architecture magazines, and the complex in Orange County reminded me a lot of his work. Little did I know until fairly recently that he actually was responsible for designing the complex. On my last trip up to Los Angeles I made a point of stopping by the stores on the way home. Unfortunately, the Tustin Marketplace hadn’t aged gracefully.

The Ikea was long gone. One of the main roads into the complex dead-ended at a stark earth-red wall, easily forty or fifty feet tall, that bore the ghostly remains of where a Linens ‘n’ Things store sign had been removed. I’ve never visited the pyramids of either Egypt or Central America, but this is how I imagine it would feel: overpowering, desolate, scaled to some overinflated sense of human self-importance.

It was late on a Sunday morning and most of the remaining stores were just opening up. It’s the time of day when you’re confronted with the acres of blank, blank, blank asphalt that make up so many of this country’s retail landscapes. This is land that lies barren and unused for fifty weeks out of the year and only springs into use for those few and intense days of holiday shopping.

But not everything was overwhelming bleakness. The parking area next to the food court sported this dense grove of palm trees. The space made me think of the agricultural groves where dates are grown Indio, south of Palm Springs, in their sense of graceful geometry overhead and shelter from the elements. Pretty good for a retail parking lot, I thought.

A few of the geometrical landscaping details remained from the original design. In the first of these, the original sloping lawn had been replaced by one of the artificial lawn replacement products out there. It looks real enough when you’re zooming by in a car, but even with its hype of looking better than Astroturf, it’s nothing I’d want to have to stare at from the windows of the house.

And here, in the parting shot of the shopping center, a row of white monoliths marks the transition from the parking lot to the public street beyond.

So, is the Tustin Marketplace a great example of architecture or landscape design? I’d argue no. Even though it’s right on Interstate 5, I wouldn’t go out of your way to visit it anymore unless you need a snack or bathroom break from the freeway. But the complex was different in its day, and I give it points for that. Additionally, the landscaping didn’t require much water to sustain it.

Interestingly, Ricardo Legoretta was behind the late 1980s redesign of Pershing Square in Los Angeles, one of the city’s historic open spaces and a past gathering point for a diverse mix of the population. Several years ago I attended a conference at the Biltmore Hotel, which is located on the square. Even at that time Legorreta’s huge slabs of concrete that had been painted purple looked hostile and dated. Pershing Square was another of the architect’s public spaces that hadn’t aged gracefully. There’s now talk of replacing the design with something else.

November 28 2008 | Categories: gardening • landscape • landscape design • places | Tags: architecture • Black Friday • drought-tolerant landscaping • retail • Ricardo Legorreta • shopping • suburbia • Tustin Marketplace | 2 Comments »

glad for the rain

When I left work on Tuesday I was carrying an umbrella and feeling a little duped. The weather service folks had predicted a big storm to begin that day, but I ventured out into an almost cloudless early evening.

A friend of a friend is a physical oceanographer down at Scripps Institution, and the word from him was that this weather system had pulled into the atmosphere more moisture than any storm over the last five years. So according to him as well as the weather service, this was going to be a big one.

The rain finally began in earnest yesterday afternoon, coming in squalls and downpours rather than a continuous drizzle. A little before five this morning we got the biggest deluge so far that caused a loud roar that woke up everyone in the house. And it’s still raining now. It’s one of my favorite forms of entertainment, and in fact I have one of the doors open right now so I can hear it better.

So, today, a day when people acknowledge the good things in their lives, I’m counting the first serious rain in many months as one of my many fine and beautiful things.

Here’s wishing all of you a great holiday!

Now I’d better get off the computer and get the dough rising for the afternoon bread…

November 27 2008 | Categories: rambles | | No Comments »

reclamation

The house behind us has a back fence that is about fifteen feet behind our rear fence. Between the two is a no-man’s-land of unmaintained iceplant, ivy and whatever else has escaped from the adjacent gardens. In some neighborhoods this might be the location for a back alley. But with lot of the back house rising six feet over ours, the land is too sloped to accommodate much more than a narrow concrete culvert to drain the slope behind us and keep the infrequent rains from inundating all of us below.

We have a gate that leads into this space of ambiguous ownership, but I’d never spent much time back there until a recent project to repair the fence.

I looked with contempt at the thick mat of iceplant. Botanical shag carpeting, I thought. Every ignored space in town is covered with it. It does next to nothing to provide habitat for the local fauna. Although it’s often planted to stabilize a slope, its weight can actually pull the slope down more than hold it in place. Yes, it’s very drought-tolerant, and it’s serviceable in some situations. But the plant for me usually represents a colossal failure of the imagination. We can do better than this.

I just happened to have two pots of seedlings of the native sacred datura, a.k.a. toloache, a.k.a. Datura wrightii. The plant easily grows six or more feet across, and I realistically had no space for it in the garden around the house. The lightbulb over my head came on.

It’s amazing what ten minutes with a trowel, a watering can and two pots of plants can accomplish. In this second photo, lower right, is one of the datura seedlings that I inserted into the thatch under the iceplant.

I must admit that after planting them I forgot to water them for almost a week of dry weather well into the eighties. Expecting to see carnage, I was surprised to instead see the plants looking at least as happy as they were in their seed pots. I gave them another drink of water, but that may be all they’ll require from here on out. Starting next spring, I’m hoping to bee able to see their amazing morning-glory flowers from my deck, unfurling at dusk to greet the night.

From my last walk in the local wilds I came home with a napkin folded around the seeds of another plant I previously didn’t have room for. I’m thrilled. I’ve got a whole new plot to garden.

November 25 2008 | Categories: gardening • my garden | Tags: Datura wrightii • drought-tolerant landscaping • guerrilla gardening • native plants • toloache | 2 Comments »

snowflakes and insects

Snowflakes? What does this San Diego guy know about snowflakes?

Maybe a couple things—at least if we’re talking about the cut paper kind.

I’m sure it was an elementary school project at some point, folding sheets of paper, then cutting through the different layers with scissors, and then finally unfolding the paper to reveal an intricate paper-lace snowflake. I thought it was magic the way one nick with the scissors, cutting through multiple layers of paper at once, multiplied into many identical little removals all over the snowflake. And I still kinda think the process is magic.

I was reminded of those paper snowflakes when I saw this gorgeous photo Jenny sent me of a canna leaf that had been munched by some garden beastie. It looked like the leaf was still developing when the bug burrowed a hole from the outside towards the stem. When the leaf unfurled, the insect damage unfurled along with it, creating these uniform, rhythmic little cuts in the leaf.

Pretty artistic insect, no?

November 21 2008 | Categories: art • gardening | Tags: cannas • insects • Jenny • snowflakes | 4 Comments »

the quilt’s progress

I wrote earlier about Linda offering to make a wedding gift of a quilt for John and me. I got word last week that all the squares were completed, and Sunday I stopped by to consult on their arrangement.

Here’s how the quilt looked in its near-final version as it was all laid out on her living room floor. Come on everyone, tell Linda how gorgeous her quilt looks!

Linda likes to live with these arrangement decisions before stitching things together, and we had fun moving a few blocks around, fine-tuning the arrangement. On the table in front of the quilt you can see the rough mockup I did of the quilt after scanning the fabrics and playing a morning with Photoshop. It ended up being a great way to pre-imagine how things would look. The blocks are in different places, but the overall quilt looks a lot like the early sketch.

The design is based on a quilt by Liz Axford that was exhibited in the Quilt Visions quilt show in 2002. Entitled “Bamboo Boogie-Woogie,” that quilt was an abstracted take on bamboo stems.

Speaking of bamboo, it was an interesting bit of coincidence that the night before I’d attended a concert by the Hillcrest Wind Ensemble, a band that John sometimes plays in. The venue was the Neurosciences Institute in La Jolla, a nice piece of architecture by Billy Tsien and Tod WIlliams, with striking landscaping done by the San Diego County firm of Burton Associates. The grounds feature this amazing long rectangle filled with golden bamboo that must be my favorite single planting of bamboo anywhere. (The planting is even more impressive by day, but that’s not when I was there…)

The bamboo connection goes even further. The architects of the Neurosciences Institute designed an exhibition at the National Building Museum devoted to concrete as a building material. Part of the space included these forests of steel reinforcing rods, rebar, that are used to strengthen concrete. At least to my eyes the installation bears more than a passing resemblance to the bamboo planting at the Neurosciences Institute. Or am I just delusional? (This photo by Frank Oudeman [ source ] )

But back to quilts…

Linda’s house, like the home of many quilters, is a one-person quilt show, with lots of great examples of her work. I’m a pretty visual person and I can always look at more cool things. It so happened that the Quilt Visions quilt biennial was happening up the coast at the Oceanside Museum of Art. That was an obvious extension to the afternoon if I ever heard of one.

Some museum exhibitions allow photography in the galleries, others don’t. Unfortunately this was one of those no photography ones. You’ll have to take my word that the show had a few drop-dead spectacular art quilts, as well as several that spoke quietly and revealed their secrets slowly as you looked ever closer at them.

It’s the sort of show that will either inspire you to take up quilting or to intimidate you into giving up all hope of ever making anything beautiful out of fabric and thread. Even though I have a Y chromosome and quilting isn’t typically a guy thing, I think I ended up being inspired. Now, someone please give me a few months of free time so that I can start up yet another obsession…

And here’s one final picture. The museum was part of a civic center complex designed by the architect Charles Moore. The very comfortable, human-scaled buildings take their design clues from Irving Gill, San Diego’s most daring architect of the early 20th century. Gill used the Spanish-inspired arches of this region and stripped them down to their essential geometry: tradition and history meets modernism.

Part of the complex is the Oceanside Public Library, and here’s the pond in front of it. Sorry, no more bamboo, but what a terrific way to plant palm trees, each on its own little geometric island…

November 20 2008 | Categories: art • gardening • landscape design | Tags: bamboo • Billie Tsien • Burton Associates • concrete • National Building Museum • Quilt Visions • quilts • Tod Williams | 1 Comment »

the new spring

Autumn: It’s the new spring.

At least that’s seemingly the case for those of us in Mediterranean climates. With our dry summers and moist winters, the plants best adapted to our climate come close to taking the summer summer off, and then use the onset of cooler, wetter weather to start thinking about getting growing again. Some of the shrubs in the local canyons drop some or all of their leaves in response to drought stress, and most of the wildland annuals disappear not long after the last rains. Our long brown season of summer could almost be confused with the depths of winter in other areas.

Left: Coreopsis gigantea in its defensive, leafless summer mode.

Reading the recent blogs from those other climates, I’m noticing that people are starting to withdraw from their gardens, holing up with some favorite plants transplanted into pots to overwinter indoors. These gardeners are thinking about sitting down with plant catalogs and looking ahead to the holidays, and then to warmer days and the reemergence of their gardens.

[caption id=”attachment_2032” align=”alignleft” width=”300” caption=”Garden after autumn thinning and transplanting”][/caption]

Here in San Diego, however, I started off September by transplanting plants around the garden, readjusting plant spacing and color relationships.

Left: Some of the garden before and after autumn thinning and transplanting.

I planted dozens of little pots of seeds of plants that I want to grow this fall and next year: giant coreopsis, datura, buckwheats from the Channel Islands, mallows from the desert, millet for the birds and some South African restios for a spot in the garden where the original plants haven’t aged gracefully. It’s a frenzy of activity of the sort that people in other climates would associate with late winter and early spring.

All summer, the patches of earth that get almost no supplemental water stay brown and virtually weed-free. Once the rains return, the weeds begin to claim the universe and the weeding chores begin again.

Fortunately, a layer of mulch makes a world of difference in keeping down weed seedlings. Unfortunately, areas where you want to sow wildflower seed can’t be mulched at all if you want the little seeds to germinate on their own. To keep down my workload, this year I’m isolating the wildflower patches to just a couple spots, around a couple little trees that will drop their leaves for the winter. We’ll see how well that works out…

A few spots in my garden don’t have to abide by strictly Mediterranean water requirements. There’s a small herb and vegetable garden that gets moderate doses of water year-round. A new raised bed harbors some tropicals that get to stay moist, as well as some other selections that need a little help with the water. This is the part of the garden that gets to experience summer along with the rest of the world. So the task of weeding never completely comes to an end, although it’s greatly localized to these spots that get watered one to three times a week.

All in all, this 2% of the Earth’s land mass that experiences this Mediterranean climate (the region around the Mediterranean Sea, western South Africa, parts of the Chilean coast, western Australia, and much of California) has its own seasonal cycles that don’t sync up easily with the rest of the world. Gardeners in other areas might not understand us. Forgive us if we have this glaze of anticipation coating our moods these days. Even as we worry about weeds and increased garden chores, fall is here, and it’s the emergence of a whole new season in the garden.

November 16 2008 | Categories: gardening • my garden • rambles | Tags: fall • Mediterranean climate • seasons • spring • transplanting • weeding • weeds | 6 Comments »

protest weather!

Today was a national day of protest against discriminatory initiatives that were approved by voters on election day. California just barely passed its Proposition 8, and that slap in the face against civil rights has stirred up a community in ways that haven’t been seen since the Rodney King police brutality protests of the 1990s.

[caption id=”attachment_2118” align=”alignleft” width=”300” caption=”The starting point in Balboa Park”][/caption]

I joined a small protest last weekend, and this morning I headed over to Balboa Park for what was promising to be a much larger parade and rally.

If you don’t know the park, it’s pretty much the equivalent of San Diego’s front yard, and is one of the great civic parks in the US. Many of the city’s museums and zoo are there, and it’s a great communal gathering place for everything from family picnics and pickup volleyball games to big civic events like Earth Day celebrations and the starting point for today’s Prop 8 protest march.

There were people everywhere. Thousands of them! This front yard was getting pretty crowded fast. You couldn’t have asked for a better November day: sunny, warm (even hot), light breezes that helped keep you stay cool but didn’t blow signs out of your hands.

We got going a little before 11:00, and followed route that took us through downtown and over to the County Administration Building, where many of us were married over the last five months. People honked and waved and were amazingly supportive. People were on their condo balconies, waving. Service workers at the hotels came out on break and shouted their support for us.

Here you see the parade heading into downtown. The marchers were whooping it up at this point. Part of it was the enthusiasm. Part of it was an appreciation for the first sign of shade on the parade route.

There were a lot of people. (Yes, that’s marchers extending all the way into downtown.) The local paper’s story says something like twenty to twenty-five thousand.

And here’s the end of the parade and the site of the rally. One of the parade chants went: What do you want? Equal rights! When do you want them? Now! But I will admit that at this point some of us were substituting “lunch” for “equal rights…” Protesting is such hard work!

But all in all a magnificent showing, an amazing day, and a great affirmation of community and support.

Anyone who thought things were concluded by the mob-discrimination on election day are so wrong. How do you stop positive energy like this?

November 15 2008 | Categories: rambles | Tags: democracy • gay marriage • Proposition 8 • protests • rallies | No Comments »