[ Lost in the Landscape ]

robie house planters

On my recent Chicago visit I had the chance to stop by Frank Lloyd Wright’s land­mark 1909–1911 Robie House in the Hyde Park neigh­bor­hood. Unfor­tu­nately the foun­da­tion that runs it was in the mid­dle of a major ren­o­va­tion inside. Even through we were on an archi­tec­tural tour the only way to view the inte­rior on this day was stand out­side and peer inside through the stained glass windows.

Ooh… (Look­ing inside, off the sec­ond story porch into the nearly fin­ished space…)

Uhhh… (The ground floor, still in the throes of renovation…)

Once we got that out of our sys­tem we had to con­cen­trate on the exte­rior of the build­ing and the gar­dens. I could think of worse things to have to do.

A pair of side gates opens up to an auto court with a small gar­den on the side. It was win­ter and the plant­i­ngs weren’t any too spec­tac­u­lar this time of year, but the hard­scape details were worth a close look.

The thin, wide bricks of the house and gar­den walls all fea­ture this neat lit­tle detail: The mor­tar between the courses is the typ­i­cal light mor­tar color, but the hor­i­zon­tal spaces between the bricks uses a red-colored mor­tar. The effect is that you notice hor­i­zon­tal bands and not the indi­vid­ual bricks. The house swoops side­ways towards the hori­zon, and the walls do the same, cel­e­brat­ing the ever-expanding hor­i­zon­tal prairie that makes up the Midwest.

Sev­eral of the cor­ners of the porches fea­ture these styl­ized urns. Instead of the chubby Roman mod­els, Wright has designed them to swoop side­ways just like the house and walls do.

And there are sev­eral of these planters that explode with color in the sum­mer. But now…well, not so green. The story goes that Wright designed these planters with­out drainage–something that comes as no sur­prise from an archi­tect who was obsessed with form over func­tion and noto­ri­ous for cre­at­ing houses with leaky roofs and sus­pended ter­races that sagged under their own weight.

As I reviewed the pho­tos from the Robie House, though, there’s one thing that starts to gnaw on me. Though it doesn’t look huge, it’s still some­thing like 9000 square feet if you count the out­door ter­races. All the out­door spaces seemed squeezed in there. Was this a space-intensive urban use of a small lot? Or was it a hundred-year-old McMan­sion? Even if that, it’s pretty cool as McMan­sions go…

February 28 2009 | Categories: art • gardening • landscape • landscape design • photography • places | Tags: architecture • brick • Chicago • concrete • Frank Lloyd Wright • garden walls • planters • Robie House • walls | 8 Comments »

lurie garden in february

I’m not sure what I was expect­ing out of Chicago’s Lurie Gar­den in the mid­dle of February.

The core of the gar­den is a space con­cen­trat­ing on peren­ni­als planted by Piet Oudolf, and the win­ter gar­den was defined by what peren­ni­als do in the win­ter. Even though Oudolf has selected plants that main­tain strong pro­files into the win­ter, the gar­den looks like it’s seen bet­ter days. But really, that’s the out­look that the designer brings to the gar­den: Things change. Plants grow, bloom, die back. (Oudolf’s book Design­ing with Plants, after all, even has a chap­ter called “Death.” What feel-good gar­den book would even dare to acknowl­edge such a thing?)

The path through the heart of the gar­den was off-limits—I guess they were wor­ried about peo­ple slip­ping and falling on the frozen walk­ways. Still, you can expe­ri­ence the garden’s perime­ter with the Chicago sky­line behind it. There you see the died back remains of last year’s growth: tall, dark spires of fox­glove rel­a­tives (prob­a­bly Dig­i­talis fer­rug­inea or parv­i­flora); light brown clumps of var­i­ous grasses; del­i­cate, expres­sive cur­tains of bur­net (San­guisorba offi­cianalis alba).

No gar­dener can begin to know every plant on earth, so I’m depend­ing on my iden­ti­fi­ca­tion on the garden’s ter­rific plant list that you can find online and on what I know from Oudolf’s books to be some of his favorite plants. (Actu­ally, the Plant Life of the Lurie Gar­den pages have not only plant lists, but pho­tos and cul­tural tips on most of the plants in the gar­den. It got to be one of the most impres­sive online guides to a garden.)

Although prob­a­bly most famous in the gar­den com­mu­nity for the peren­nial plant­i­ngs, the Lurie Gar­den was actu­ally over­seen by Kathryn Gustafson (with other mem­bers of her firm, Gustafson, Guthrie, Nicholand) with input from artist/set designer Robert Israel. Gustafson con­tributed the over­all land­scape design, while Israel is cred­ited with the “con­cep­tual review,” sig­nalling that this is a gar­den of ideas as much as it is a gar­den of plantings.

The cen­tral gar­den fea­tures two sec­tions, a “light plate” and a “dark plate,” rep­re­sent­ing tec­tonic geo­log­i­cal forces. (Kustafson’s office is in Port­land, Israel is based in Los Ange­les. Both are loca­tions where peo­ple think more about geo­log­i­cal move­ment than they do here in Chicago.) Pro­tect­ing the gar­den on two sides is this giant arma­ture that will mature into a hedge that rep­re­sents Chicago as the city of “broad shoul­ders,” as made famous in Carl Sandburg’s 1916 poem, “Chicago.”

With Oudolf’s plants now retreat­ing into the ground or only defined by ghosts of them­selves, it’s Gustafson’s con­tri­bu­tion that you notice most in the mid­dle of win­ter. The curi­ous struc­ture of dark steel with dark metal cables looks like a zoo pen con­tain­ing tightly planted alter­nat­ing blocks of dif­fer­ent arborvi­tae vari­eties and decid­u­ous horn­beam and Euro­pean beech. One of the decid­u­ous trees is inter­est­ing in that it that holds on to its leaves through the win­ter. As the year pro­gresses, I can see the decid­u­ous plants leaf­ing out at dif­fer­ent times, reduc­ing the con­trast between the ever­greens and the broadleaf trees.

The effect of the caged green­ery is an odd effect, for sure. Any clipped hedge talks about the con­trol of nature, and to put nature in a cage like this, like a botan­i­cal zoo, rein­forces that almost vio­lent act. It’s not a “pretty” effect, and I’m not sure I love it. But it catches my inter­est and rein­forces this as a gar­den of ideas.

In the end I guess my reac­tion to the Lurie Gar­den in Feb­ru­ary is sim­i­lar to what I feel when I hold a dor­mant bulb. I can appre­ci­ate the thing in its cur­rent state, but it’s the hope and knowl­edge of what it can do that really keeps me inter­ested. It’s not really fair to try to give it a fair read in the mid­dle of win­ter. Too bad I won’t be back every cou­ple of months to check on its progress.

If star­ing at died-down peren­ni­als and caged shrub­bery isn’t your cup of java, all you need to do to cross the street to the Art Insti­tute of Chicago. There you’ll find all sorts of amaz­ing art­work cel­e­brat­ing warm, green land­scapes, includ­ing this lily pond by Monet…

…and this Tahit­ian land­scape by Gaughin.

Paint­ings and so much of what humans do is all about per­ma­nence and things not chang­ing. We pur­pose­fully make things that resist change, whether it’s paint that doesn’t fade or Twinkies that will prob­a­bly remain as edi­ble in three decades as they are today. The gar­den across the street cel­e­brates what does change.

Give the gar­den just a few months. The peren­ni­als will be spec­tac­u­lar once spring gets going. And the “hedge” will fill in over the next decade and read more like a hedge than a zoo exhibit.

When you’re vis­it­ing the Lurie Gar­den you’ll be just a few dozen steps from Frank Gehry’s brawny new shell for pops con­certs on a lawn cov­ered by this lat­tice trel­lis structure.

And then there’s this sculp­ture by Anish Kapoor titled “The Cloud Gate”–which the locals have dubbed “the bean.” It’s major fun to walk around its con­cave and con­vex sur­faces that give you this cool, dis­torted reflec­tion of the skyline.

With its con­vex exte­rior and con­cave inte­rior, this is art­work that will make you look fat, a fact that this self-portrait can attest to…

I’m not sure whether it was inten­tional, but the Gehry band­shell and the Kapoor sculp­ture and the shoul­der hedge of the gar­den all fea­ture steel–a mate­r­ial that makes pos­si­ble the sky­line that rises around them. Chicago with­out steel? Unthinkable.

And now, Chicago with­out the Lurie Gar­den, the Gehry band­shell and the Kapoor Cloud Gate? Unthink­able, as well.

February 27 2009 | Categories: art • gardening • landscape design • places | Tags: Anish Kapoor • architecture • Art Institute of Chicago • Chicago • Frank Gehry • hedges • Lurie Garden • Millennium Park • Piet Oudolf • steel | 5 Comments »

chicago winter fling

It’s win­ter here in Chicago alright. There wasn’t much snow on the ground when I arrived, but a quick look at the leaf­less trees and a quick duck out­side didn’t leave any con­fu­sion that it’s any sea­son other than win­ter. I’ve been pretty busy attend­ing a con­fer­ence, but I did man­age to take a lit­tle archi­tec­tural tour the other day with some of the other conferees.

Here’s a nice house in the Hyde Park neigh­bor­hood as seen from the bus. Notice the wintry-looking bare trees. Brrrr, cold, said the Cal­i­for­nia blogger.

Though nice, the house isn’t a major archi­tec­tural land­mark. How­ever, as of last month, it became an impor­tant his­tor­i­cal one: This is the non-White House res­i­dence of Barack Obama. Actu­ally, it’s the side of the house. The road on the front side has been sealed off by the Secret Ser­vice.

That in part sums up the expe­ri­ence of vis­it­ing here in the win­ter. There’s a lot of stuff that would be really interesting–if only it were open. Or you see stuff that’s maybe not look­ing its best.

Still, there are at least a cou­ple blog­gable things I’ve run across that I’ll be post­ing after I return home. If only this were May, when the gar­dens are look­ing more extrav­a­gant and the gar­den blog­gers will be con­ven­ing for their Spring Fling…

February 21 2009 | Categories: gardening • places | Tags: Barack Obama • Chicago • Hyde Park • seasons • winter | 4 Comments »

that’s sooooo 1970s

A house down the street has had a contractor’s truck parked out­side of it for a while now. The owner said she’s remod­el­ing the kitchen and bath. Not any time too soon, accord­ing to John, who dur­ing our last time in the house noticed that those rooms oozed the stuff that 1975 was made of: fab­u­lous 70s mod­ern appli­ances, wood­grained formica, beige tile floors. There’s noth­ing wrong with any of these mate­ri­als, but the rooms looked like they were sealed in a time cap­sule, an easy thing to hap­pen to rooms that are so expen­sive to remodel.

Some gar­dens around town seem to have the same aura about them. You sense that the gar­den was planted all at once–probably by a pickup truck landscaper–from what was avail­able and fash­ion­able and con­sid­ered reli­able at the time. Decades later the plant­i­ngs will look untouched–the same plants in the same places (often planted too close together or too near a house). Things might be pruned a lit­tle, or there might be a mature row of some­thing with a miss­ing plant. But oth­er­wise untouched.

I tend to think of gar­dens as evo­lu­tion­ary projects, espe­cially when they’re in the hands of curi­ous gar­den­ers. It’s always a bit of a shock to see one of these botan­i­cal time cap­sules. Com­mer­cial plant­i­ngs seem to be the worst offend­ers. Here, to the right, is a lovely pair­ing of melaleu­cas with ice­plant at the local EZ-Lube that seems pick­led in about 1983.

So which plants shout that they’re from a cer­tain decade? I tried to sort that out based on what you see in South­ern Cal­i­for­nia. (Other cli­mates will have their own char­ac­ter­is­tic plants.)

This is just a quick and impres­sion­is­tic draft that’s based on when plants were cheaply avail­able and most pop­u­lar, not nec­es­sar­ily when they were intro­duced. Many of them are still com­monly avail­able today and are hardy, worth­while choices for the gar­den. Oth­ers have turned out to be inva­sive dis­as­ters that have prompted nurs­eries to stop car­ry­ing them.

I’m sure I’ve mis­placed a few plants by a decade or two. You must have addi­tions of your own!

1960s

• Hol­ly­wood Twisted Juniper (Junipe­rus chi­nen­sis ‘Toru­losa’). “Hol­ly­wood” and “twisted” some­how seen to go together nicely… My mother cov­eted them, and I still think they’re pretty wild and crazy plants. Of course in the 1960s and 1970s, the junipers were a lot smaller than this.
• Ital­ian Cypress (Cupres­sus sem­per­virens). The house my par­ents pur­chased in 1968 had two lit­tle plants of these flank­ing a win­dow. When we moved out of that house they weren’t so little…
• Arborvi­tae (Thuja sp.)
• Japan­ese Pit­tospo­rum, Japan­ese Mock Orange (Pit­tospo­rum tobira)
• Japan­ese Gray-bark Elm, Japan­ese Zelkova (Zelkova ser­rata). These go back years, but there were lots of street plant­i­ngs in 1950s and 1960s suburbs.

And speak­ing of zelko­vas, my neigh­bor­hood had hun­dreds of them as street plant­i­ngs. Even­tu­ally they began lift­ing the side­walks, and then grew up into the power lines. One by one the own­ers took out the trees. Then, the city took out the power lines and put them under­ground, about the same time they repaired the side­walks. We have a few of the trees left.

1970s

• Ole­an­der (Ner­ium ole­an­der), shown here in a free­way plant­ing down the hill from me. They’re hardly ever planted any­more. Although drought-tolerant, they can get bad scale infes­ta­tions. The nail in the cof­fin for this plant, though, was the fact that they’re poi­so­nous if ingested or burned.
• Natal Plum (Carissa macro­carpa)
• Ice­plant (var­i­ous species), some are con­sid­ered inva­sive in South­ern California
• Var­ie­gated Japan­ese Euony­mus (Euony­mus japon­i­cus ‘Aureo-marginatus’)
• Melaleuca, Paper­bark Tree (Melaleuca quin­quen­ervia), now on the fed­eral inva­sive plant list and the scourge of many states

Here’s a tran­si­tional 1960s-1970s plant­ing at the bank down the street. More twisted junipers, paired here with natal plum.

1980s

• Foun­tain Grass, Green Foun­tain Grass (Pen­nise­tum setaceum), the Cal­i­for­nia Inva­sive Plants Coun­cil lists these as “Invasive–Do Not Plant–Invasive” (hmmm, they might be inva­sive…) on their web­site.

  Photo by Car­olyn Mar­tus from the Cal-IPC site [ source ]

• Red Foun­tain Grass, Pur­ple Foun­tain Grass (Pen­nise­tum setaceum ‘Rubrum’)–I still have three in the front yard and love them. Unlike the above, they’re ster­ile and don’t sow them­selves every­where. [ Edit June 11, 2010: The red foun­tain grasses are def­i­nitely not ster­ile, though they still are far less inva­sive than the green ver­sions of the species. It’s best not to plant these any­where where thye might escape. ]
• Aga­pan­thus
• Euge­nia, Aus­tralian Brush Cherry (Syzy­gium pan­ic­u­la­tum). These make tidy, fine-leaved clipped hedges. But when the euge­nia psyl­lid hit in 1988 plant­i­ngs every­where started to look awful. They dis­ap­peared from the trade.
• Indian Hawthorn (Rhaphi­olepis indica)
• New Zealand Flax (Phormium sp. and hybrids)

1990s

• Mex­i­can Feather Grass (Stipa or Nas­sella tenuis­sima), now quickly mov­ing onto many people’s lists of obnox­ious if not inva­sive plants. I started with two and now have half a dozen. I’d have thou­sands if I didn’t pull out a cou­ple dozen seedlings every week! This is the park­ing strip of a neigh­bor a few blocks away who prob­a­bly put in one or two plants herself.
• Laven­ders (Laven­dula sp.)–I still have one of these.
• Blue Fes­cue (Fes­tuca ovina glauca)–and sev­eral of these…
• Kan­ga­roo Paw (Anigozan­thus sp.)

2000s

• ???????

  What plants will the future decide define the Bush decade? What sturdy plants are the nurs­eries offer­ing that will run their course as peo­ple get tired of them or the plant’s inva­sive poten­tial are revealed? For one, I’m see­ing a lot of Cordy­line aus­tralis. I like these a lot, but they sud­denly seem to be planted every­where, many in loca­tions where they look good as two-foot ado­les­cents but will quickly out­grow their spots. And there are cheap queen palms (Sya­grus roman­zof­fi­ana) going into the ground everywhere.

  I’m sure there are dozens more.

February 19 2009 | Categories: gardening • landscape design | Tags: heirloom plants • invasive plants • popular plants | 15 Comments »

wordless wednesday: soft-focus heliotrope

February 18 2009 | Categories: my garden • photography | Tags: heliotrope • Heliotropium arborescens • Wordless Wednesday | 6 Comments »

glass tiled garden wall

If I gave out awards to my neigh­bors for beau­ti­fy­ing their pub­lic spaces, this house would def­i­nitely win one of them.

This is their gar­den wall right next to the front side­walk. It’s topped with attrac­tive lat­tice­work, but what’s spe­cial is the tile below. Gray field tiles give way to a cen­tral area of col­or­ful glass mosaics. Glass tile has been catch­ing on for indoor use, but it can make a most excel­lent state­ment outdoors.

If there’s a down-side to this project, it’s the dis­con­nect between the hard­scape and the green mate­ri­als. You can see that the horse­tails have already started to spread through­out the strip. Within just a few years you won’t be able to see the glass tiles. And that cute lit­tle agave planted up against the wall. Yikes! That’ll be a big mon­ster before you know it, fight­ing it out with the horse­tails in a mess of planting.

My advice? Lose the agave. It’s a beau­coup spec­tac­u­lar plant, espe­cially when it blooms. But this is just about the wrongest place to put it. And lose the horse­tails, too. Their upright geom­e­try has always appealed to me, but they spread like syrup on a pancake.

Southern-hemisphere restios are start­ing to become more com­monly avail­able, and they have a strik­ing ver­ti­cal archi­tec­ture that would be a wor­thy replace­ment for the horsetails–visually between a grass and a horse­tail in appearence, depend­ing on the species. A cou­ple clumps of it in front of the wall would let you see around and through the plants, and the plants wouldn’t stray far from the base of the leaves.

Two good choices for this spot in the three-foot range: Chon­dropetalum tec­to­rum and Tham­no­chor­tus bach­man­nii. The first is get­ting to be avail­able many places. (The photo to the left is from San Mar­cos Grow­ers, who dis­trib­utes it to nurs­eries.) The second…well, I’m grow­ing some from seed right now as I write this…

February 17 2009 | Categories: gardening • landscape design | Tags: equisetum • garden walls • glass tile • hardscape • horsetails • restios | 6 Comments »

autopiary

Speak­ing of top­i­ary, this is the clipped hedge of a neigh­bor down the street. Another neighbor–one who hap­pens to design cars–thought it looked a bit like some vin­tage vehi­cle or roadster.

Well, now that you men­tion it…

February 16 2009 | Categories: gardening | Tags: hedges • topiary | 4 Comments »

gbbd february blooms

May Dreams Gar­dens has been host­ing the Gar­den Blogger’s Bloom Day for a while now. This is my first go at it, with a big sam­pling of what’s bloom­ing in the back yard gar­den right now. Sev­eral of the shots are of the same plant, so it might seem like there’s more in bloom than might first appear: When life gives you fewer flow­ers, you look at each one closer!

In the pho­tos above are:

• Ranun­cu­lus Tecolote (white)
• Oxalis pur­purea (white form)
• Oxalis, ran­dom self-sown hybrid
• Salvia nemerosa ‘Snow Hills’
• Aly­sum that has self-sown from a plant­ing 15 or more years ago. The orig­i­nals were white and pur­ple. The new ones come all-white, or mix­tures of white and purple
• African daisy (arc­to­tis hybrids)
• Blue-eyed grass (Sisy­rinchium bel­lum)
• Solanum pyra­can­thum
• Ces­trum fas­ci­c­u­la­tum ‘Newellii’
• Mother of thou­sands (Kalan­choe dai­gre­mon­tiana)
• Pro­tea Pink Ice
• Melam­podium Derby
• Aeo­nium species
• Your basic calla lily (Zant­edeschia aethiopica)
• Euphor­bia lam­bii, in bud
• Euphor­bia chara­cias subsp. wulfenii
• Mizuna, escaped from a veg­etable gar­den plant­ing 10+ years ago
• Alpine straw­berry
• Hopi red dye amaranth
• Heliotrope
• Bird of paradise
• Epi­den­drum orchids (red, orange)

I have a few cool Cal­i­for­nia natives begin­ning to flower in the front yard, and I’ll post more of them soon.

February 15 2009 | Categories: gardening • my garden | Tags: flowers • Garden Bloggers Bloom Day • gbbd • in bloom | 15 Comments »

clippers run amok

A cou­ple of topiary-related reports dropped into my con­scious­ness over the last few days.

First, I think it was hort.net that passed on a sight­ing of a road­side veg­e­ta­tive for­ma­tion that resem­bled a giant chicken. The photo was pub­lished in the Tele­graph, and was pur­port­edly a nat­u­rally occur­ring plant in Cam­bridgeshire that had man­aged to grow itself into a sorta-chicken shape. [ source ]

I could swear it was the Eng­lish sub­species of the chicken that I posted on a cou­ple months ago, a local top­i­ary cre­ation in the Pacific Beach neigh­bor­hood here in San Diego:

And then I was read­ing an inter­view with Yelp.com’s local San Diego’s man­ager. When asked what his favorite weird thing on Yelp was, he piped up that it had to be this gonzo bit of top­i­ary in the Mis­sion Hills neigh­bor­hood of town. Although it’s only a few miles from where I live, the house is a lit­tle off the beaten track, and I’ve never been by it.

This pic­ture is by Amy C., off the Yelp site. [ source ]

And for a more immer­sive and inter­ac­tive look, check out Google Street Views.

Or bet­ter yet, visit the house at 3549 Union Street. I’ll be pay­ing a visit soon myself. There will be pictures.

It’s such a great mish­mash of geo­met­ri­cal shapes and gun­slingers and real and imag­ined crea­tures, and as it stands it’s a great piece of folk art. (Could it be inspired by the top­i­ary at Long­wood Gar­dens in Pennsylvania?)

But I could hav­ing all sorts of fun with the basic idea: maybe using sev­eral kinds of plants, or refin­ing the shapes into more def­i­nite forms and lay­er­ing a more fanat­i­cal sense of order that you see in a lot of top­i­ary. But what­ever you do it’d be a shame to lose the sense of humor and barely-controlled chaos of the original!

February 14 2009 | Categories: gardening • landscape design | Tags: Cambridgeshire • San Diego • topiary | 6 Comments »

green immigrants

Here are a few more selec­tions that you might find inter­est­ing from Amer­i­can Per­cep­tions of Immi­grant and Inva­sive Species: Strangers on the Land, by Peter Coates, pub­lished in 2006.

Before Colum­bus brought seeds and cut­tings along on his sec­ond voy­age to the West Indies, North Amer­ica was home to less than 1 per­cent of the world’s total com­ple­ment of cere­als, starches, fruits, and vegetables.

Today, the only crops of sig­nif­i­cant com­mer­cial value native to the ter­ri­tory that became the United States are cran­berry, blue­berry, pecan nut, sugar maple, sun­flower, and tobacco–a fact that offers elo­quent tes­ti­mony to the great ser­vice that has been duly ren­dered by a sting of public-spirited Americans…

No Amer­i­can pub­lic ser­vant since [Thomas] Jef­fer­son deserves more credit for trans­form­ing the for­eign into the com­mon than David G. Fairchild. In his capac­ity as agri­cul­tural explorer in charge at the Sec­tion for For­eign Seed and Plant Intro­duc­tion from 1898 until 1928, Fairchild brought the navel orange to Florida and Cal­i­for­nia from Brazil and over­saw the intro­duc­tion of Italy’s seed­less grape and China’s dry land pis­ta­chio. His most notable con­tri­bu­tions, how­ever, were in the intro­duc­tion of the Chi­nese soy­bean and…the tree that became an essen­tial prop of Wash­ing­ton, D.C.‘s mon­u­men­tal land­scape, adorn­ing the Tidal Basin: the Japan­ese flow­er­ing cherry tree.

Fairchild’s encoun­ters with the infa­mous vine that “ate the South”…left him some­what chas­tened. He first came across kudzu about 1900 while tour­ing Japan, where this wild, semi­woody peren­nial was fed to live­stock. In his auto­bi­og­ra­phy he recalled a visit to a “kudzu enthu­si­ast” in Chip­ley, Florida, who was renowned for singing its praises as a for­age crop in the early 1900s, despite his neigh­bors’ dis­trust. “When­ever I think of that night’s talk with the kudzu pio­neer,” recalled Fairchild, “I have a spe­cial feel­ing of pride in what might be called our Amer­i­can will­ing­ness to try some­thing new, whether it be a new for­age crop, a new food, or any one of a thou­sand new, machine-made gad­gets.” Fairchild, who con­fessed that “per­haps I have an undue pas­sion for the new,” retained his faith in kudzu for quite some time, despite its pro­cliv­ity to spread at will. By the late 1930s, how­ever he was express­ing his grow­ing reser­va­tions in print. The seeds he brought back from Japan and planted on his prop­erty in Florida “‘took’ with a vengeance, smoth­er­ing every­thing they got onto, and pretty soon we became alarmed. Feel­ing that the kudzu was too much for us, we began to cut it out.”

Fairchild finally returned home, so to speak, in 1946, when invited to make his selec­tion for the “My Favorite Tree” guest col­umn in the jour­nal of the Amer­i­can Forestry Asso­ci­a­tion (the nation’s old­est con­ser­va­tion orga­ni­za­tion, founded in 1875). After men­tion­ing a string of exotic also-rans, but dis­card­ing them as unsat­is­fac­tory, he recalled that he had seen his first grove of Cal­i­for­nia coastal red­woods (Sequoia sem­per­virens) fairly late in life, at a time when he was still besot­ted with exotic Asi­atic promise: “A feel­ing of utter paral­y­sis over­took me and the pas­sion for plant­ing trees, my puny lit­tle trees, any­where, became distasteful.”

The sto­ries in the book are great, and the social com­men­tary is com­pelling. Unfor­tu­nately, every now and then a botan­i­cal clinker drops into the book’s pages, such as the one that fol­lows the quote on red­woods imme­di­ately above, where the author waxes, “Though the red­wood is only really found in Cal­i­for­nia (there is a tiny patch in the most south­west­erly cor­ner of Ore­gon), it is arguably more Amer­i­can than any other tree in the United States inso­far as it has no rel­a­tives, near or dis­tant, in any other coun­try.” Like, um, what about the Chi­nese dawn red­wood (Metase­quoia glyp­tostroboides)?

Okay, this isn’t a book you read for the botany, but it’s a wor­thy and thought­ful work on plants and the human con­di­tion, per­fect for late win­ter read­ing as you con­tem­plate the impend­ing bloom­ing of your cherry trees.

Although it’s pri­mar­ily about bio­log­i­cal immi­grants to North Amer­ica, Peter Coates points occa­sion­ally out that the immigrant-carrying boats sailed both directions:

The native oaks of Britain and the United States were greatly admired by J.C. Loudon, a lead­ing British hor­ti­cul­tur­ist of the mid-nineteenth cen­tury. He pro­nounced them “the most beau­ti­ful of trees.” Yet exotic trees had already become a manda­tory ingre­di­ent of the “polite” British land­scape enclosed within pri­vate estates. Loudon him­self was one of the trend­set­ters who insisted that, notwith­stand­ing the oak’s charms, “no res­i­dence in the mod­ern style can have a claim to be con­sid­ered as laid out in good taste, in which all the trees and shrubs employed are not either for­eign ones, or improved vari­eties of indige­nous ones.

The most sought-after of these arbo­real exotics were hardy North Amer­i­cans. Britons were ruth­lessly con­de­scend­ing toward Amer­i­can artis­tic achieve­ments at this time. “In the four quar­ters of the globe,” Syd­ney Smith famously inquired [in 1820], “who reads an Amer­i­can book?” or goes to an Amer­i­can play” or looks at an Amer­i­can pic­ture or statue?” Yet no one asked “who plants an Amer­i­can tree?”

February 10 2009 | Categories: gardening • landscape • landscape design • quotes | Tags: Add new tag • agriculture • books • David G. Fairchild • exotics • invasive plants • kudzu • native plants • Peter Coates • trees | 3 Comments »