Let me start with a piece of advice: New hiking boots plus old, thin socks can be a painful combination!
Yesterday I tagged along with a group of hikers that I’d done a trip with a couple years ago. The destination this time was a cluster of four survey benchmarks along the U.S.-Mexican border. One of them appeared on the map as “Bennie.” The others quickly got tagged as “the Jets,” after the old Elton John song.
Some hikers prefer leisurely strolls over flat, carefully maintained paths. This group isn’t made up of any of that variety. At one point on the hike, while we were crossing a broad, flat, sandy valley, one of the core members apologized to me. “Our hikes are are usually a lot more uphill than this.”
That was what I recollected from the last trip I’d taken with the group. But I’m not in the same condition that I was for that earlier hike. Yesterday, thirteen and a half miles of travel—which included climbing up the slick face of a dry waterfall, two stubbed toes and five blisters on my feet—was adventure enough for me!
Here are some of the hikers, including Parasol Patsy, who set a high standard of looking cool and casual in the wilds.
Say “desert” to anyone and they’ll probably think of cactus. This is the California barrel cactus, Ferocactus cylindraceus. It proved to be a common presence all along the trip whenever we climbed above the dry stream beds.
The next image shows the hillside terrain, complete with barrel cactus, cholla cactus (Cylindropuntia sp., in the center, front), and—most dramatic to the left—ocotillo, Fouquieria splendens. Almost anyone who has hiked in these areas knows that a common name for some cholla cactus species is “jumping cholla,” a piece of urban legend deriving from the fact that the plants can break apart into little bits anytime anyone as much as touches the plant. The little barbs hold on to your clothing or your skin and work themselves into your clothes or your skin, taking a piece of the plant with them. It only looks like they jump. (Anyone looking for an idea for a horror movie?)
The ocotillos were leafing out, a sure sign that it’s rained in the area recently. The plants can grow and shed their leaves several times each year in response to rainfall. Some were developing buds at the ends of their stems in preparation for the outrageous flowerings of tubular orange-red blooms that these plants are capable of.
Another sure sign of recent rains was this massive desert lake, in the heart of Davies Valley. Few plants grew in the immediate area, letting you know that these desert plants prefer occasional sprinkles of water rather than wallowing in it.
This being the desert, signs of lack of water were all around…
A trip to this area gives you the feeling that the border between the U.S. and Mexico is a purely arbitrary one. Gosh, there isn’t even a welcome sign or a border fence in these parts. How rude.
These are two views into Mexico from the promontories we climbed on the trip. Occasional pieces of discarded clothing, abandoned empty water bottles and—weirdly—a frying pan let you know that this was an area that was used for border crossings. On this late-December day temperatures reached the mid-sixties, perfect hiking weather. Border crossings done at other times of the year, when the temperatures would be over 110, would prove a lot more dangerous.
Any trip to the border regions isn’t complete without an encounter with the U.S. Border Patrol. This was out first contact, a flyover by an agency helicopter. Later, at the end of the hike, as we were packing up our cars, we were visited by agents in two SUVs. For officers who don’t know what to do with the desert it must be a dusty, tedious job. I like to think that attending to a group of tired hikers was a fun break in their routine.
The visit by the Border Patrol was a fitting end to the trip. This only looked like a trek through unspoiled wilderness. The truth is that this is an area that’s complex with political intrigue and history, and where the tensions of economic survival coincide with issues of basic human endurance and survival.
I try hard to find landscapes that to me feel pure and untouched by the ways of humanity. But a trip like this tells you that such a place doesn’t exist.
John and I spent the holidays at his aunt’s house in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Northridge. Christmas at her house is a family affair, but with family dispersed around the country, it’s not always as raucous as it sometimes has been. This year we were thrilled to have a big contingent of immediate family, including Jenny and her mad scientist husband from South Carolina. Past readers of this blog might recognize Jenny’s name as a sometimes contributor of photos and comments. It was great seeing you, Jenny! (And Joe too!)
Friday, on our return home, John and I stopped by the Getty Center for an exhibition of the photographs of Carleton Watkins (more on that show in a future post). To visit the Getty without taking in its gardens would be unthinkable, and we spent more time outdoors than we did in the galleries.
It had rained the previous two days, clearing out the garbage in the air. The views from the hilltop were spectacular. Here you can see the skylines of Century City in the foreground against downtown in the distance.
This is the view to the southwest, across Santa Monica Bay. The distant land mass (straight ahead and to the right) is Catalina Island, forty-plus miles away.
The visit last Friday was the first time we’d visited the gardens of the Getty Center during the winter. The Robert-Irwin-designed Central Garden advertises itself as “always changing, never twice the same,” so this would be a good chance to see it during a time that was less pornographic with flowering plants.
Still, there were flowers. This is the core planting of clipped azaleas in the central water feature. In fact this was the first time I’d been there when the little mazes were showing any flowers. In addition to the blooms, the foliage of one of the two azalea varieties darkens and reddens in the cooler winter weather, making the planting appear to be comprised of interlocking rings of different plants.
If you click on the image to enlarge it, you’ll see that the plants could stand a little bit of clipping. The azaleas are little floating islands in the water, so keeping them trimmed involves a little more than strolling over them with hedge clippers.
John’s aunt volunteers at the museum, and once she’d asked one of the groundskeepers how they trim the plants. At first he mimed getting in a boat and rowing to the azaleas. Then, after pausing for effect, he grinned and said that the water was really shallow, and that they actually just donned some waders to do their work.
Aside from the azaleas, there were just a few other things in bloom: bougainvilleas, brugmansias, roses, eryngiums (sea-hollies) and some winter bloomers. Most of the interest came in the form of foliage and stems.
Here are some details from the plantings that emphasize color, form and texture, most of it best appreciated at close distances. Some of the color combinations rant toward the monochromatic. Here gray succulents contrast with the black leaves of Ophiopogon planiscapus.
This one featured yellow and green.
The foliage here tends more towards the bronze end of things.
In this composition, the silver-leaved Dichondra argentea is being slowly out-competed by the red oxalis (probably a red-leaved form of O. pupurea). Once the weather warms, the oxalis will die back, letting the dichondra regain its dominance.
Some of the color combinations were more varied.
Some plantings ran towards the chaotic. Like, don’t you think the blue aster-ey bits in this planting (lower right) are a little too over the top? I think the light gray leaves would have added a nice contrast to this combination. But the flowers… Gild the lily, why don’t you?
But, hey, it’s all taste isn’t it?
In a nod to the season, several specimens of browned late-season grasses moved dramatically in the strong midday winds. Before you go getting any ideas that this was a planting in the heightened naturalistic style of the New Perennials garden designers like Piet Oudolf, the grasses were single plants of contrasting species, placed in pots placed along the walkway.
In this last photo, in contrast to the preceding pictures of winter grasses, two plants with somewhat grass-like forms belie the fact that it’s winter. To the left is the restio, Chondoropetalum elephantinum, and the right is variegated society garlic, Tulbaghia violacea.
Some garden designers would like you to be able to know exactly what season it is by looking at the plants in the garden. Following this philosophy you should be able to set your calendar by looking at the garden. But what gives away the fact that it’s winter in this photo are the two visitors, bundled up against the cold. Looks like winter to me!
Here are a few pictures from yesterday that felt like they belonged together. They’re made using different techniques, but in the end they’re all about emphasizing lines in a photograph.
The first are photos of shadows of crape myrtles, cast around noon onto a closely cropped lawn.
The next is of branches against a white wall, shot with a wide lens aperture to limit the amount of the image that is in focus.
And the last of dark branches in shade in front of light-colored ones in sunlight. I was using the dark branches to create lines that break the picture into little pieces, like the dark seams that you find on stained glass.
Photographs can be about showing you what something looks like. It’s something photography can do better than images made with any other art.
But photographs can also be about making an image that’s interesting to look at, even if you might have a hard time figuring out what the thing in the photo is. Sometimes the photographs turn into fascinating puzzles. (Harry Callahan and Frederick Sommer did this brilliantly.)
I make no claims that the photos rise to that challenge, but that’s what I was thinking of when I took them.
Saturday night John’s wind ensemble had a concert in San Diego’s signature Balboa Park. The park was decorated up for the holidays with strings of lights, a secular Santa with sleigh and reindeer, and a decidedly un-secular row of nativity scenes.
In the last couple of years most of the incandescent lights got replaced with LEDs—Rah, green! But the wattage on everything seemed a little low this year. There were even a few thousand feet of light strings that were left in the “off” position. Maybe the city (which has been on economic hard times for several years now) decided not to splurge on running more lights. Or maybe they were trying to make a statement that you can decorate for the holidays without draining the power grid.
Whatever the case, the displays still did a pretty good job of fighting off that human fear of the dark at the same time they let you know that Dorothy, you’re not in November anymore. Here are some pictures I took with John’s little digital instamatic.
Entering the park…
Palms and Christmas trees in the foreground, the Organ Pavillion (with the “world’s largest outdoor organ”) in the background…
Another take on the palm and Christmas trees…
Accidental no-tripod holiday light effects…
The park has a couple of kid-scaled climbable sculptures by the late artist Niki de Saint Phalle, who used to live in town. These are extremely popular with the little Gen Z’ers. Art that you can touch and climb all over—What a concept!
Here’s one of her fun, slobbering creatures…
And finally: El Cid (left, on horseback) vs Santa (right, in sleigh).
And you know what that means…only four years to go until 12-21-12, the Mayan End of World, as baktun 13 comes to its close!
Apparently the Mayans didn’t have Hallmark stores where they could buy themselves new calendars…maybe something light and fluffy with kittens or puppies or blooming daffodils on it…
At least the Mayans were in tune enough with their environment to end their calendar on the shortest day of the year. For those of using this Gregorian calendar: Where’d we ever get this December 31 end-of-the-year nonsense? What does December 31 have to do with the natural world? The Gregorian calendar is a boondoggle invented by several centuries of committee meetings if there ever was one!
Suggested soundtrack: R.E.M.’s “It’s the End of the World as We Know It.” Or, for a viewing suggestion: Wim Wenders’ epic film, Until the End of the World (which happens to use the R.E.M. song).
Burned, boiled, scraped with a rasp, doused in acid, or left alone? What’s the best way to germinate manzanita seeds?
The first manzanita seedlings
I’d begun a little kitchen experiment over two months ago to see which technique would give the best germination for the Mexican (or pointleaf) manzanita, Actostaphylos pungens. As of a couple days ago, the winner is: scraped with a rasp.
Here are the first two tiny seedlings that breached their seed coats and made it up to daylight. I’d filed down through into the hard seed coat on the seeds of this batch, letting moisture reach the embryo inside, and to make it easier for the new plant to emerge. (In gardener-speak the process is called “scarification.”)
I’ll post more results as the other seedlings emerge. If they ever emerge. This is not one of those instant gratification, buy-it-at-the-home-store-and-stick-it-in-the-ground experiments…
Southern California gets fall foliage colors too. If there’s a single tree that we can point to it would have to be the southern sweetgum, Liquidambar styraciflua. You see planted all over, so much that you might call it a cliche—But how can you can something so satisfying a cliche? To me it’s one of the comfort foods of plants, especially now that the weather has turned cool and thoughts turn towards winter.
Liquidambar Leaves
My own associations with the plant go back years. My mother planted a tree of the clone ‘Burgundy’ in front of the Los Angeles-area house where I spent many of my childhood years. The tree produced red to purple leaves in the fall, depending on the weather conditions, and proved to be a favorite backdrop for a number of family Thanksgiving pictures. When my parents retired to Oceanside, my mother started a sapling in from of the new home.
The plant is planted so much you might almost think it’s a native. But instead it hails from the American South—some compensation for their alligators and mosquitoes. In some locations it has escaped into the wilds, but seems to be much less of a problem than many other plants.
Liquidambars at UCSD
This is a planting at the UCSD campus, photographed this week between rainstorms. The plants began coloring up a month or more ago. Unlike aspens or maples or other plants with amazing autumn foliage, some liquidambar clones can hold on to their leaves through much of the winter. In fact, there was a year where big stands of it still had dark purple foliage hanging on the branches, even as the new growth was emerging in the spring.
What a weird year that was, a sign that sometimes we seem to escape having a genuine winter. But we do get autum. And liquidambars are the proof.
Parts of my garden look like floral red light districts, with wild, come-hither plants that beg shamelessly for your attention. I do appreciate a binge of excess every now and then, but often find myself coming back to one of the most humble plants in the garden, the green rose, Rosa chinensis viridiflora.
A few bloggers have been posting posts on what they consider to be their signature plant. (Thanks to Tina at In the Garden who got the discussion going.) It’s hard to pick just one, but I’d have to say this plant, the only rose in the garden, is high on my list. It’s nothing super-flashy, but I find it quietly interesting. And the plant has an intriguing history.
I did a post on the green rose over a year ago. I won’t repeat all the details from the first post but you can see my notes here.
The picture I had at the time to accompany the post, however, was pretty sad unless you want an instructive photo of what it looks like when it suffers one of its rare attacks of powdery mildew. To compensate for that earlier ugliness, I took these greatly improved photos of it this past weekend, when I noticed that the plant was looking extra-nice.
Even when the plant is in full bloom—which is much of the year—it’s easy to walk past it. A shameless hussy it’s not. But a rose with only sepals and no petals? A rose that goes back at least to the early 1800s and maybe earlier? Now that’s interesting!
I was still in bed yesterday when by birthday celebration began. John brought in a little stack of presents and set it down next to the cat. If you’ve lived with a cat you can guess how much help she was as I began to open the packages—attacking the packages, shredding the wrapping paper as soon as I pulled it off the presents…
Several of the packages contained chocolate. (John how did you know I love chocolate?) This year they were all from Chuao Chocolatier an artisanal chocolate company here in San Diego County that is beginning to get wider distribution. One of their specialties is creating chocolate with spicy/hot flavor notes.
Chuao’s new treat this year is this Firecracker bar, which combines dark chocolate, salt, chipotle peppers and “popping candy.” You put a tiny piece in your mouth and the flavors just start to explode. And then the popping candy starts fizzing and cracking, activating your tongue to experience the flavors even more intensely. It’s a brilliant piece of molecular gastronomy coming out of a chocolate shop.
If you saw the film, Chocolat, it was exactly this combination of chocolate with a heady spiciness that won over much of the town’s population to the unconventional ways of a newcomer. Unfortunately here ways proved too unconventional for some of the population, and she was driven from town. In the same way, this chocolate bar won’t be for everybody.
After the presents, there was coffee, then breakfast with the Sunday paper unfolded before us. Being mid-December, it occurred to me that it might be time to begin thinking about getting holiday cards out to everyone. Maybe we needed to do one of those form letters this year, I thought. After all there was a wedding last June, and there was other big news most of the card list needed to be apprised of. But being a birthday day I wasn’t successful in getting motivated.
Two days after my birthday, after the chocolates have been put on their shelves and all the wrapping paper recycled, it’s John’s turn to celebrate his birthday. A lot of you saw the recent conjunction of Venus, Jupiter and the moon in the night sky. That’s pretty much how it feels to have December birthdays: John’s and my birthdays are the two little planets, and then there’s this gargantuan moon of Christmas that dominates the scene.
My birthday sunset
Unfortunately, clouds last week ate up the view of the conjunction, but the sky for my birthday was one of the better ones this month. Another spicy present!
Holiday lights
But Saturday night we did some holiday partying after my gallery opening. I had John’s little pocket camera, so there was no tripod to keep the picture still.
Rotating tree
It didn’t help that the tree last night was on a revolving stand, though the revolving going on in this photo was the photographer being less than successful in keeping the camera still…
So, little by little, we’re working on getting into the holiday spirit. And now I know what special chocolate some of my spicy-food friends need in their stockings!
Last night was the official opening of the exhibition I’m in at the Cannon Gallery in Carlsbad, but the nice gallery folks had a little breakfast event for the artists earlier in the morning.
It rained lightly both heading north and back. Since rain is such a rare event in these parts, I got out my camera.
I-5 in the rain
These two shots are of the windshield on the way back. Don’t worry—John was driving. The first is with Interstate 5 in the background. The second is while we were being passed by a truck.
Passing Truck, Rain
The Breakfast Spread
Starving Artist’s Plate
They’d set up a nice breakfast spread for us. With the meal being served at ten in the morning, however, we were all starving artists. We dispatched the edibles in almost no time.
My photographs in the exhibition
And then it was finally time to go inside and preview the exhibition. Here’s my wall in the exhibition. Tonight there’ll probably be a few hundred more people at the opening, so it won’t be so easy to document the exhibition view.
Landscaping Around the Gallery and Library Complex
The gallery itself is part of the complex that houses the Carlsbad Public Library. Landscaping there is a mix of native sycamore trees and exotics—spiky sedges, biomorphic hedges and myoporum for groundcover. Like the library and gallery complex, it’s modern without trying to be particularly avant-garde. Nicely done, I thought.
The Overhead Screen
Running around the perimeter of the buildings is a screen wall that is set several feet from the main walls of the complex. Joining the two are these overhead screens cut out of patinated metal. The branches on the screens curve in arabesques that reminded me of Art Nouveau, but the triangular frames give them a geometrical edge that joins them comfortably with the architecture.
Isn’t it a shame most people are so busy looking down they never notice the branches—or artwork—overhead?
