[ 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 | 3 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.

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.

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 »