[ Lost in the Landscape ]

treefall

I was head­ing back to my desk at work on Thurs­day and noticed a clus­ter of my cowork­ers look­ing out a win­dow. There’s a lit­tle access road right out­side. Usu­ally it doesn’t have a full-grown euca­lyp­tus tree fallen across it, but this day it did.

I don’t have my cam­era with me most of the time, but Declan had his. He was part of the vol­un­teer crew who wres­tled the tree to the curb, but he also man­aged take these shots.

[ View the entire set on Flikr ]

Not much later the building’s safety per­son had issued a warning:

Just a heads-up, lit­er­ally: high winds are blow­ing down euca­lyp­tus branches and trees around cam­pus. About an hour ago, an entire tree broke off and fell across the access road… (Very for­tu­nately, no peo­ple or vehi­cles were in its path.) Until the winds die down, please be sure to watch and lis­ten for break­ing branches and avoid walk­ing through the euca­lyp­tus groves.

The UCSD cam­pus is home to over 200 thou­sand of these trees in plant­i­ngs that date back a hun­dred years, back to a euca­lyp­tus mania when euca­lyp­tus were planted all over South­ern Cal­i­for­nia, includ­ing three mil­lion just a few miles up the coast in what’s now Ran­cho Santa Fe.

If you live in this part of the state you’ve prob­a­bly heard the sto­ries: that the trees are call wid­ow­mak­ers because they drop their branches if you look at them wrong, that they’re just giant non-native weeds that take up valu­able space…bad things like that.

I won­der if the bad rap on the first count is entirely deserved. For sure, some euca­lyp­tus are brit­tle, and there have been three times in the last year alone when I was within fifty feet or thirty sec­onds of being taken out by falling euca­lyp­tus. But with almost a quar­ter mil­lion of them on cam­pus and mil­lions of them in town it’s inevitable that a few of them keel over or fall apart. Are they that much worse than oaks or other trees that peo­ple plant by the millions?

I did a quick and totally infor­mal sur­vey of some head­lines, euca­lyp­tus ver­sus oaks. Maybe the eucs are totally bad news. May they’re not that much worse than other species. What­ever the case, they def­i­nitely can be gor­geous trees.

Shad­ows cast over tow­er­ing euca­lyp­tuses (Euca­lyp­turs kills woman in Old Town San Diego, The San Diego Union-Tribune–Jan­u­ary 8, 2003)

2 killed in ‘freak acci­dent’ : Falling oak crushes pickup on County Line Rd. (Oak tree, The Post and Courier (Charleston, N.C.)–April 16, 2008)

Tree check asked after acci­dent (Euca­lyp­tus kills woman in parked pickup truck, Evening Tri­bune (San Diego, CA)–December 25, 1987)

Man killed by falling tree (Oak tree falls onto pickup truck, News Sen­tinel, (Knoxville, TN) Decem­ber 28, 2008)

$160,000 awarded in Zoo death (Award given to fam­ily of girl killed by falling euca­lyp­tus, The San Diego Union–August 2, 1986)

Girl killed by falling tree at Boy Scout camp (Oak tree, Asso­ci­ated Press, via MSNBC–August 10, 2005)

Half of the inci­dents above involved pickup trucks. Weird. Maybe that’s the deadly com­bi­na­tion: pickup trucks and large trees. Like mobile homes and tornadoes…

January 31 2009 | Categories: landscape • places • rambles | Tags: eucalyptus • falling trees • oaks • trees • UCSD | 4 Comments »

view into the january garden

This is one of the rea­sons why peo­ple live in a Mediter­ranean cli­mate like San Diego, suf­fer­ing the fre­quent 70-plus degree day­time tem­per­a­tures. Here’s the view out the front room win­dow onto this huge, mound­ing pile of bloom­ing aloe. I think it’s A. arborescens, one of the more com­mon species that you see all over town. (There’s a lit­tle epi­den­drum orchid bloom­ing just out­side the win­dow, but who’s going to pay it any atten­tion with the aloe going off in the background?)

A closer look at the flowers…

…and a closer look at the leaves of the aloe (ser­rated edges, much softer than they appear) and the agave (straight edges).

For some peo­ple, it’s not win­ter with­out see­ing snow. For me, it’s not win­ter until I’ve seen the aloe. Okay. I’m ready for spring now.

January 30 2009 | Categories: gardening • my garden | Tags: Aloe arborescens • aloes • seasons • succulents • winter | 3 Comments »

just about to be published

Linda brought by my desk the 2009 Spring cat­a­log of the Prince­ton Archi­tec­tural Press. She really like the photo on the cover, a plant­ing by Andrea Cochran, a San Francisco-based land­scape archi­tect and the sub­ject of a new book, Andrea Chochran: Land­scapes, which is just about to be pub­lished. (The project shown is the Ivy Street Roof Ter­race Hayes Val­ley Roof Gar­den in San Francisco.)

You may recall that Linda is a quil­ter, and the cover design really looks quilt-like in the way it’s put together: blocks of dif­fer­ent plant­i­ngs (not just blocks of sin­gle kinds of plants), all assem­bled together so that one group­ing of plants con­trasts dra­mat­i­cally against another, like one pat­terned fab­ric in a quilt that’s been set against another. In fact the author of of the book describes Cochan’s work as “stud­ies in rep­e­ti­tion and order, orches­tra­tions of move­ment in the land­scape, and ele­ments placed in geo­met­ric conversation”–which almost sounds like the prin­ci­ples oper­at­ing behind many quilts.

Check out Andrea Cochran’s web­site for other exam­ples of her strong, lin­ear land­scape designs.

Thumb­ing through the cat­a­log I ran across another title that made me stop for a closer look, Bam­boo Fences, by Isao Yoshikawa and Osamu Suzuki. The cat­a­log says that the book “pro­vides a detailed look at the com­plex art of bam­boo fence design in Japan, pre­sent­ing these unique struc­tures in over 250 pho­tographs and line draw­ings. From the widely used ‘four-eyed fence’ (yotsume-gaki) and the fine ‘rain­coat fence’ (mino-gaki) to the expen­sive ‘spice­bush fence’ (kuromoji-gaki), these exquis­ite designs impress with their sim­ple beauty, pro­vid­ing plenty of inspi­ra­tion for your own bam­boo fence.

“Author Isao Yoshikawa gives a brief overview of the his­tory of bam­boo fence build­ing in Japan and clas­si­fies the dif­fer­ent designs by type. A glos­sary pro­vides expla­na­tion of Japan­ese fence names and struc­tural terms.”

Of course, fences like this prob­a­bly wouldn’t work so well if your house is in the Tudor or Span­ish taste. Unless of course you want your home to develop a “home store Gothic” look that one writer called the look that sub­ur­ban houses accrue over time as their own­ers buy what­ever strikes their fancy at the local Home Depot, his­tor­i­cal accu­racy and style be damned.

But imag­ine these around a clean-lined mod­ern house. In fact, Richard Neu­tra was known to like his glass-walled homes to look out on a Japanese-styled land­scape. And some of the more geo­met­ric ver­sions might even look amaz­ing behind a land­scape designed the the sub­ject of the first book.…

Above: Images from the book, pho­tographed by Osamu Suzuki.

January 28 2009 | Categories: gardening • landscape design | Tags: Andrea Cochran • bamboo • books • fences • hardscape • Princeton Architectural Press | 5 Comments »

fun with beets

I don’t usu­ally post a pile of recipes here, but Fri­day night I was faced with a nice bunch of golden beets that needed to be used. I made a loaf with the beet greens and then grated and sauteed the beets with a parsnip.

The mother recipes I began with were out of Jean­nette Ferrary’s and Louise Fiszer’s The California-American Cook­book: Inno­va­tions on Amer­i­can Regional Dishes. But since I was miss­ing some ingre­di­ents and had some oth­ers on hand, the final prepa­ra­tions ended pretty dif­fer­ent from the orig­i­nals. Both seemed like good ways to honor ingre­di­ents that are now in season.

John usu­ally only grudg­ingly accepts beets at the table. How­ever, he thought both of these were keep­ers, so I thought I’d bet­ter write them down before I for­get what I did.

If this were a proper food blog, I’d have way­laid the plates on the way to the table before serv­ing them. But the food was long gone before I had a chance to think of that. Maybe I should have posted pho­tos of the dirty dishes after all the beet con­coc­tions had been devoured…

Loaf of Beet Greens

• Olive oil
• Beet greens, tops of 1 large bunch (ca. 3 large beets), includ­ing stems, chopped
• 1 clove gar­lic, minced
• 1 medium onion, chopped fine
• 1 ser­rano chili, seeded, mem­branes removed, slivered
• 3 eggs
• 1/2 cup shred­ded cheese (I used Trader Joes’ Quat­tro Formaggi)
• 1/4 pound good firm tofu, cut in 3/8 inch cubes
• salt
• pep­per
• small sprin­kling of nutmeg

Pre­heat oven to 350. Saute beets, onion, gar­lic and chili in oil until wilted, ca. 5–8 min­utes. Salt and pep­per to taste. Remove from heat.

Mix eggs, cheese, tofu and nut­meg in bowl, and then stir into beet green mixture.

Pour into greased loaf pan and bake 25 min­utes. Allow to set 10 min­utes before serving.

Serves 4

Root Veg­eta­bles in Tequila Lime Butter

• 3 table­spoons butter
• 3 large beets, golden beets pre­ferred, ends removed, peeled and grated
• 1 medium parsnip, peeled and grated
• zest of 1 lime
• juice of 1/2 lime
• 1 table­spoon sugar
• 1 1/2 table­spoons tequila
• salt
• pep­per
• 2 table­spoons minced cilantro to gar­nish (optional)

In a bowl mix together lime juice, zest and sugar. In a saucepan saute beets in melted but­ter over high heat for 3 min­utes. Add salt and pep­per. Add tequila, and then lime mix­ture, and cook for 3 more min­utes. Serve gar­nished with cilantro.

Serves 3–4

January 27 2009 | Categories: rambles | Tags: beet greens • beets • parsnips • recipes • root vegetables | 3 Comments »

blog typography

In response to my post on the inter­est­ing typog­ra­phy of the J.L. Hud­son seed cat­a­log, Philip won­dered whether it would be pos­si­ble to design a blog so that it would look like an older pub­li­ca­tion that was type­set with­out the aid of computers.

There are lots of blog design ele­ments, but one of the most impor­tant is the main text that peo­ple read. Here are a cou­ple attempts at com­ing up with an online typo­graphic style that looks a lit­tle more old­school, more pre-computer.

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, con­secte­tur adip­isic­ing elit, sed do eius­mod tem­por inci­didunt ut labore et dolore magna ali­qua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nos­trud exerci­ta­tion ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea com­modo con­se­quat. Duis aute irure dolor in rep­re­hen­derit in volup­tate velit esse cil­lum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excep­teur sint occae­cat cup­i­datat non proident, sunt in culpa qui offi­cia deserunt mol­lit anim id est laborum.

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, con­secte­tur adip­isic­ing elit, sed do eius­mod tem­por inci­didunt ut labore et dolore magna ali­qua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nos­trud exerci­ta­tion ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea com­modo con­se­quat. Duis aute irure dolor in rep­re­hen­derit in volup­tate velit esse cil­lum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excep­teur sint occae­cat cup­i­datat non proident, sunt in culpa qui offi­cia deserunt mol­lit anim id est laborum.

So do they look on the right track?

This is a greatly con­densed ver­sion of a much more tech­ni­cal post. Click “con­tinue read­ing” below to see the full ver­sion.
con­tinue reading »

January 26 2009 | Categories: art • rambles | Tags: blogging • fonts • typefaces • typography | 6 Comments »

in the greenhouse, or, the dictator’s wife

I was in the green­house Fri­day morn­ing, water­ing some pots of seedlings. It seemed funny for a sec­ond, because out­side the green­house it was rain­ing. If I hadn’t gone in there with the hose that morn­ing, the seedlings would have died in the desert for lack of water.

(Left, a Euphor­bia chara­cias ssp. wulfenii out­side the green­house, bloom­ing away in the rain.)

I used to grow and breed pha­laenop­sis orchids in the green­house. It was gonzo amounts of work to keep up with repot­ting hun­dreds of plants. And try­ing to con­coct an envi­ron­ment that would fool the orchids into think­ing that they were in the low­lands of the Philip­pines instead of the flats of South­ern Cal­i­for­nia wasn’t that easy either. In addi­tion to all the work, the green­house was an energy pig, tak­ing as much nat­ural gas to heat as the entire house.

So, end of orchid obses­sion. End of heat­ing the out­doors and wast­ing all that energy. (The New York Times has a recent piece on a cou­ple who decided to build them­selves a green­house. Their heater hasn’t arrived yet, but they’re already way over budget.)

Now that the trop­i­cal orchid episode of my life has ended the green­house is only heated by the sun via the green­house effect. At this time of year it’s handy to have a spot that will help give young plants a head start on spring. That’s pretty much how I use the green­house now.

And, um, yes, for a place to store gar­den clut­ter. Sort of a gar­den shed with windows…

For­tu­nately the win­dows are an opaque fiber­glass, so all the mess inside is obscured. Maybe even a lit­tle mys­te­ri­ous and poetic. Here are some pot­ted plants as seen from the outside.

As I was water­ing the plants in my lit­tle arti­fi­cial out­door desert I thought back to the 1980s. One the sto­ries from the news that has stuck in my brain all these years was a report on Michèle Ben­nett, the wife of Haiti’s dic­ta­tor, Baby Doc Duva­lier. The cou­ple was bad news all around, and one of Michèle’s vices was that she’d refrig­er­ate a part of the palace so that she and her friends could strut about in the fur coats that they col­lected. (Com­pared to her husband’s bru­tal ways, it all seems pretty minor, of course.)

Mink and fox and chin­chilla coats in Haiti. About as ratio­nal as a green­house full of warm trop­i­cal orchids in San Diego, I thought.

I guess we all want a lit­tle of of what doesn’t come eas­ily or nat­u­rally. But in an age of a grow­ing aware­ness of the need to live greener it’s good to stand back and see what we really need.

January 25 2009 | Categories: gardening | Tags: green living • greenhouse effect • greenhouses • Michele Bennett • orchids • solar energy • watering | 5 Comments »

mostly words

My win­ter pile of plant and seed cat­a­logs con­tains one that doesn’t fit the usual model. Instead of page after page of gor­geous soft-core porno­graphic pho­tos and draw­ings of plants in brawny full leaf and buxom full bloom, the J.L. Hud­son Seeds­man cat­a­log takes the form of a tight 95 pages of black-on-white text and only twenty-five small line draw­ings for illustrations.

This is a cat­a­log all about words. It could well change your expec­ta­tions of what a seed cat­a­log should be. It’s listed as an “eth­nob­otan­i­cal cat­a­log of seeds,” and you can sit down with it and read it like a novel. Most of the seeds descrip­tions come with a sen­tence or two of cul­tural trivia about the plant, mostly about how one of the world’s soci­eties uses that plant. I’ve been find­ing that this is the cat­a­log that I’ve been spend­ing the most time with this year.

In addi­tion to the inter­est­ing cat­a­log copy, you start to notice that the text itself is gor­geous in the way it sits on the page. I was try­ing to place the spe­cial qual­ity it has when I finally noticed on the last page an inter­est­ing state­ment: “This pub­li­ca­tion was type­set entirely with­out the use of computers.”

No com­put­ers? In 2009? So retro it’s avant-garde, like albums released on vinyl. But worry not. They also have an online pres­ence.

This is def­i­nitely a cat­a­log with atti­tude. It’s also a cat­a­log with a pur­pose, a pur­pose that’s well doc­u­mented in a state­ment on their web­site, a pur­pose that’s in line with their self-description as a “pub­lic access seed bank.” You can also start to under­stand the pur­pose when you look at the titles of the brief selec­tion of books offered in the back of the catalog.

One of the works, Inva­sion Biol­ogy: Cri­tique of a Pseu­do­science, has a writeup that includes the state­ment, “We have all heard the breath­less tales of the dan­gers of ‘inva­sive alien species,’ but what does sci­ence say about them? …In all cases… intro­duced species have increased bio­log­i­cal diversity.”

Another title, Eco­fas­cism: Lessons from the Ger­man Expe­ri­ence, gets a long writeup that includes the impas­sioned lines, “Most U.S. envi­ron­men­tal­ists are com­pletely opposed to the aims of fas­cism, but reac­tionary forces have begun to bend eco­log­i­cal themes towards these very ends. Only through knowl­edge may we pre­vent this per­ver­sion of environmentalism.”

Once you under­stand where the cat­a­log is com­ing from, you’ll start to under­stand the almost will­ful atti­tude that would drive them to offer seed of black mus­tard, one of the plants that has taken over much of the local ecosys­tem and has few friends among the plant peo­ple I know. And one of the recent online cat­a­log sup­ple­ments had seed for Arundo donax, a plant that has taken over some impor­tant local ripar­ian habi­tats. Why don’t you just dump plu­to­nium in your gar­den? Hmmmm…Does that make me an ecofascist?

You don’t have to agree with every­thing you see in the cat­a­log, and you don’t have to buy any­thing out of it. But this is one pub­li­ca­tion that’s a must read if you’d like to get your­self think­ing instead of all hot and both­ered over the usual pretty pictures!

January 24 2009 | Categories: gardening • rambles | Tags: biodiversity • ethnobotany • J.L. Hudson Seedsman • plant catalogs • seed banks • seed catalogs • seeds | 7 Comments »

teach wonder

Imag­ine if [kids] knew plants and ani­mals the way they knew brand names and logos, if they knew moun­tains the way the know malls. They would feel like full par­tic­i­pants in the land­scapes they inhabit, hap­pily roam­ing the ridges and creeks in a world that needs their atten­tive­ness… I share with Rachel Car­son the hope that chil­dren be given a sense of won­der so inde­struc­tible that it would last through­out life.“
–Rick Van Noy, in A Nat­ural Sense of Won­der: Con­nect­ing Kids with Nature through the Sea­sons, quoted in a book review by Brian Doyle in the cur­rent issue of Orion.

January 23 2009 | Categories: landscape • quotes | Tags: children • education • Orion Magazine • Rick Van Noy | No Comments »

visualize your blog content

A lot of blogs these days–including this one–have tag clouds in their side­bars. These highly visual dis­plays of tags the blog­ger has sup­plied give you a good sense of the kinds of top­ics the blog cov­ers. And they give you a sense of how often the top­ics get discussed.

These do a nice job of dis­play­ing the words the blog­ger thought would be impor­tant, but they some­times miss the big pic­ture that you could get by turn­ing an entire post into a cloud, some­thing using all the words in the post, not just the ones sup­plied by the blogger.

One of the inter­est­ing things I saw in the cov­er­age of Barack Obama’s inau­gu­ra­tion was an Asso­ci­ated Press visu­al­iza­tion of his inau­gural address using an online tool to ana­lyze the fre­quency of the words he used. (Per­haps the AP’s analy­sis was based on one at Free Gov­ern­ment Infor­ma­tion.) Then the story went on to com­pare it with a visu­al­ized ver­sion of George Bush’s 2005 inau­gural address.

I used the same tool, TagCrowd, to re-visualize the same Obama speech. TagCrowd picks the most fre­quently used words and assigns dif­fer­ent sizes to them. As in a reg­u­lar tag cloud, the big­ger the visu­al­ized word, the more times it was used.

But instead of com­par­ing it to Bush’s address, I visu­al­ized Lincoln’s Get­tys­burg address, since peo­ple seem to com­pare Obama and Lin­coln. You can see how lan­guage has shifted over one and a half cen­turies, as well as how dif­fer­ently the men use words.

Inter­est­ing, huh?

Then I thought, why not try visu­al­iz­ing some blog posts by turn­ing all the words in blog posts into clouds? Would the results between posts be that dif­fer­ent? And would they dif­fer much from the tag cloud in my left sidebar?

The first post­ing I ana­lyzed is a recent one, “greener gar­den­ing prac­tices,” from Jan­u­ary 7:

How would that gar­den­ing post com­pare with one of my older hoity-toity art posts? This is the cloud derived from “gar­dens, phone­booths, poet­ics and old maids,” a post from Jan­u­ary 21, 2008:

Pretty dif­fer­ent clouds, I thought. (And sorry for the typos on “Cochise!”) The dif­fer­ent sub­jects resulted in dra­mat­i­cally dif­fer­ent vocab­u­lar­ies and dif­fer­ent word emphases. Also, over the last year, I’ve been try­ing to sim­plify my writ­ing for the web–not at all dumb­ing it down, but adapt­ing to how peo­ple read text on a screen ver­sus text in a book. That prob­a­bly con­tributed to a dif­fer­ence between the two posts.

Try TagCrowd. Com­pare old posts with new posts, or posts about your gar­den with those about your friends or trav­els. Or pick just one text you like to see what the repeated words tell you.

I think you’ll dis­cover some inter­est­ing things!

January 23 2009 | Categories: art • gardening • quotes • rambles | Tags: Abraham Lincoln • Barack Obama • blog posts • blogging • speeches • tag clouds • TagCrowd • tagging • tags | 6 Comments »

talking trees

If a tree talks in the woods and no one’s around to hear it, does it make a sound?

Tues­day morn­ing I had my choice of places to view the tele­vised inau­gu­ra­tion of Barack Obama or ways to hear the audio feed. Work­ing as I do on the UCSD cam­pus, there were rooms in libraries, radios at cof­fee stands and indi­vid­ual lap­tops that were all play­ing the cer­e­monies. The most unusual venue I could pick from was to hear the inau­gu­ra­tion broad­cast through the speak­ers of lead-plated euca­lyp­tus trees that were installed over twenty years ago as part of the campus’s Stu­art Col­lec­tion.

Left: The tree in the instal­la­tion that plays music.

The work is Trees by artist Terry Allen, and was con­structed from three euca­lyp­tus that either had died or had to be removed to make way for new con­struc­tion. The dead trees were cut into big chunks, dipped in wood preser­v­a­tive, reassem­bled, and then cov­ered with small sheets of lead attached nails. What was the artist’s intent? The Stu­art Collection’s descrip­tion offers this explanation:

One could walk through the grove sev­eral times before notic­ing Allen’s two unob­tru­sive trees.  Not only do these trees rein­vest a nat­ural site with a lit­eral sense of magic but they implic­itly make con­nec­tions between nature and death and the life of the spirit.  It is not sur­pris­ing that stu­dents have dubbed this area the “Enchanted Forest.”

At the entrance to the vast, geo­met­ric library the third tree of Allen’s instal­la­tion remains silent — per­haps another form of the tree of knowl­edge, per­haps a reminder that trees must be cut down to print books and build build­ings, per­haps a dance form, or per­haps not­ing that one can acquire knowl­edge both through obser­va­tion of nature and through research.

Right: The tree in the instal­la­tion that recites poetry.

On Tues­day, the tree that ordi­nar­ily recites poetry and the one that typ­i­cally offers songs and music were ded­i­cated to an audio feed of the Pres­i­den­tial inau­gu­ra­tion. The orga­niz­ers had high hopes, pre­dict­ing “hun­dreds of stu­dents” would show up for the event. But for the few min­utes I could spend there, I counted just about a dozen peo­ple and two dogs (well-behaved ones, attend­ing with their own­ers, not dogs doing their thing on the trees…).

Left: The “bark” on the mute tree, show­ing the nails hold­ing the lead plates, as well as the list of cred­its of the peo­ple who worked on the project.

Left: The mute tree, as seen from the library entrance.

The spe­cial pro­gram­ming wasn’t the eas­i­est sell that morn­ing. The inau­gu­ra­tion was already a huge event.

I’ll have to admit I had a hard time pay­ing atten­tion the the art event myself. You could feel change in the air. And even talk­ing trees in a for­est weren’t enough to get peo­ple to stop.

January 22 2009 | Categories: art | Tags: Barack Obama • eucalyptus • presidential inauguration • recycling • Stuart Collection • Terry Allen • trees • UCSD | 4 Comments »