[ Lost in the Landscape ]

more mediterranean than thou

Gosh, it’s been a while, hasn’t it? The main dis­trac­tions keep­ing me away from post­ing have been a cou­ple of classes I’ve been tak­ing to fill in some art his­tory holes I hadn’t both­ered with before. For one of them I’ve been doing a lit­tle research on Granada’s Patio de la Ace­quia, the “Court­yard of the Aque­duct,” one of the gar­dens at the Gen­er­al­ife, the gar­den fortress across the canyon from its more famous neigh­bor, the Alhambra.

This par­tic­u­lar gar­den, a long, rec­tan­gu­lar space with a cen­tral water fea­ture 162 feet long and 4 across, holds the dis­tinc­tion of being “…the old­est orna­men­tal gar­den in the West­ern World, with the addi­tional value of never hav­ing ceased to be a gar­den dur­ing the last seven cen­turies” (Casares-Porcel et al. in Del­gado et al., 2007).

I enjoy cre­ative research of this sort, and I thought I’d share some of the cool things that I’ve been find­ing out.

Today, the gar­den looks like this:

Peter Lor­ber. Gar­te­nan­lage Gen­er­al­ife, Alham­bra, Granada, Spanien eigene Auf­nahme, Erstel­lungs­da­tum 22.Juni 2006. Photo via Wiki­me­dia.

But like any gar­den that’s been a while it’s under­gone some major changes. The plants, for sure, have gone through a few gen­er­a­tions and some major changes. For exam­ple, the big splashy bougainvil­lea that you see behind the col­umn cap­i­tal on the right side would in no way have been part of the orig­i­nal gar­den. The Patio was started in the later thir­teen cen­tury. Bougainvil­leas weren’t described until the 1700s, and didn’t make it to Europe until later. And the big splashy foun­tains are gen­er­ally bogus to the orig­i­nal as well, hav­ing been added in the 1940s or early 1950s by archi­tect Fran­cisco Pri­eto Moreno. (EDIT: Sep 19: While the foun­tains are not orig­i­nal, their appear­ance pre-dates Prieto-Moreno’s work on the gar­den. I’m still research­ing when they appeared.)

But the one really mind-blowing dis­cov­ery that came about in this gar­den was the result of some exca­va­tions done in the wake of a cat­a­strophic fire that con­sume one of the adja­cent struc­tures. Archae­ol­o­gist Bermudez and his team dug and dug and didn’t encounter the orig­i­nal soil line until they got 70 cm. beneath the level of the orig­i­nal pave­ment. And his and oth­ers’ research began to paint a pic­ture of a gar­den with plant­ing beds sunken deep between the walk­ways and water features.

Part of me–the gar­dener side–says “so what.” Maybe they just dug out the old icky soil and added a new layer on top. But exca­va­tions in Seville at the gar­dens of the Alcázar have found gar­den beds with stucco dec­o­ra­tions on their sides. Oth­ers had fresco paint­ings. So that pretty much con­vinces me that they weren’t going to all that bother just to bury their orna­men­tal gar­den bed dec­o­ra­tions under a pile of gar­den soil, and it reveals that these were part of a gar­den tra­di­tion where they had low­ered plant­ing beds at least some of the time.

Below is a photo off Flickr of one of those gar­dens at the Alcázar, the Patio de las Don­cel­las, the Court­yard of the Maid­ens, that’s been restored to its orig­i­nal low soil sur­face. In gar­dens today you’re used to see­ing raised beds, or gar­den paths near the level of the sur­round­ing plant­i­ngs. But this? Wow. (There were prob­a­bly fewer per­sonal injury attor­neys around in medieval Spain, so I doubt the ropes at the edges of the gar­den bed reflect the orig­i­nal way these beds would have been experienced.)

Christophe Porteneuve. [Patio de las Don­cel­las, Alcázar, Seville]. Photo via Flickr.

And the last piece of infor­ma­tion related to all this was a lit­tle graph that I put together try­ing to see how my local cli­mate stacks up to Granada’s, rainfall-wise. On his most recent visit to lec­ture at my local Cal­i­for­nia Native Plant Soci­ety, Bart O’Brien, author and Direc­tor of Spe­cial Projects for the Ran­cho Santa Ana Botanic Gar­den, pointed out how California’s mediter­ranean cli­mate is the most extreme of all the five main mediter­ranean cli­mates in its extremes of wet and dry.

The fol­low­ing com­pares Granada, located at over 2000 feet of ele­va­tion against sea-level San Diego, so this isn’t the fairest of com­par­isons. And Granada’s annual rain fall is some­thing over 14 inches, ver­sus San Diego’s aver­age of slightly over 10 inches. But you can get a gen­eral sense of how extended the Cal­i­for­nia sum­mer dry can get.

Spe­cial rights on this post, to com­ply with the Cre­ative Com­mons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license of the first image:

More Mediter­ranean than thou by James SOE NYUN is licensed under a Cre­ative Com­mons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at www.soenyun.com.
Per­mis­sions beyond the scope of this license may be avail­able at http://soenyun.com/mailform.html.

September 18 2011 | Categories: gardening • landscape design • places | Tags: archaeology • Generalife • Granada • Mediterranean climate • Patio de la Acequia • Spain | 11 Comments »

outdoor rooms versus the garden

I’m start­ing to worry about the Jamie Durie’s of the world. I, as a gar­dener, am get­ting con­cerned that the kind of land­scap­ing he represents—outdoor spaces that are becom­ing increas­ingly indis­tin­guish­able from tightly dec­o­rated indoor spaces—seems to be tak­ing over.

Take a look at what peo­ple are doing on home makeover shows, includ­ing Durie’s own The Out­door Room on HGTV. Look at the increas­ing bulk of out­door fur­ni­ture in cat­a­logs. Or just go shop­ping for a patio set, which is what we did recently.

Some of the smaller-scale out­door fur­ni­ture we saw…

…and more of the smaller-scale furniture…

The mis­matched plas­tic sets we’ve from as long as fif­teen years ago that been liv­ing with were look­ing long in the tooth. We wanted a sim­ple table and chairs for the roof deck, and maybe some­thing for the back patio. Yes, we found tables and chairs in the stores…

Some of the bigger-scaled seat­ing, as uncom­fort­able as it is large.

Yet more. At least this set was comfortable.

…But there’s been a huge explo­sion in huge-scaled resort-themed seat­ing, much of it wrapped in syn­thetic wicker. They tell you to “think big” when select­ing fur­ni­ture scaled to the larger out­doors, but so much of this would be all out of pro­por­tion to the aver­age gar­den. In all this McMansion-scaled fur­ni­ture I kept see­ing Jamie Durie, and I wondered:

A. Who has space for all this huge fur­ni­ture? and,

B. What hap­pens to the space devoted to gar­dens when the inside starts to sprawl outdoors?

A 2010 inter­view in the LA Times didn’t raise my com­fort level. When asked about the basic focus of his recently launched TV series Durie replied, “The rea­son I cre­ated this show was to cast a wider net and reach the non-gardener. I want to encour­age peo­ple inter­ested in travel, archi­tec­ture, design, food or even fash­ion — and the show really encom­passes all that. It’s really just laced with gar­dens, which is the icing on the cake.” How do you rec­on­cile this state­ment with the tag line for his web­site, jamiedurie.com: “Con­nect­ing peo­ple with plants”?

These out­door rooms are spaces where pot­ted plants are largely inter­change­able with throw pil­lows. Planted sur­faces and gar­den beds give way to hard­scape. The domin­ion of humans, shel­tered indoor spaces, make their move to trans­form the out­doors into places where nature gets increas­ingly mar­gin­al­ized. Humans dom­i­na­tion marches ahead.

Con­trast these with gar­den rooms of the past, which seeme more about the plants, often fea­tur­ing walls made out of plants and liv­ing green things under­foot. Our generation’s out­door rooms seem to be all about the humans. For a pur­port­edly green-conscious era all this seems backwards.

Is any­one else both­ered by this? Or is it just me?

July 03 2011 | Categories: gardening • landscape design | Tags: chairs • Jamie Durie • outdoor furniture • outdoor rooms • rants • tables | 18 Comments »

long, winding path

Sun­day we went up to LA for a fam­ily birth­day. While we were up there we stopped by Los Ange­les Mod­ern Auc­tions, which was hav­ing a pre­view for an upcom­ing sale that includes some really cool items by Ettore Sottsass, one of my favorite 20th Cen­tury design­ers. Paint­ings, sculp­ture, fur­ni­ture, gen­eral stuff: you can see it for years in books and mag­a­zines but the expe­ri­ence of com­ing face to face with it can be pretty different.

Once of the not-by-Sottsass lots in the sale is this immense gar­den path designed by Cal­i­for­nia ceramic artist Stan Bit­ters, a stu­dent of Peter Voulkos. Like Voulkos his work is inspired by the mate­r­ial of clay itself–And how can you get more earthy, more pri­mal than clay? Ceram­ics, gar­den­ing, it all can come from the same place.

The path can be assem­bled in sev­eral con­fig­u­ra­tions, and in this con­fig­u­ra­tion coils more than forty feet long. The piece comes from the later 1960s, at a time when Bit­ters was work­ing with a ceram­ics man­u­fac­turer that basi­cally gave him 20 tons of clay to see what he could make out of it.

When some­one gives you 20 tons of clay you make big things, and this is just one of many exam­ples of the really really big art­works he started to cre­ate. Most of his works of that era grew out of col­lab­o­ra­tions with architects–Big work works really well outdoors.

His work is all over pub­lic spaces up in the Fresno area. In recent years he’s been doing pub­lic and pri­vate com­mis­sions in the Los Ange­les and Palm Springs areas.

The gar­den path looked a tad cramped and out of place on dis­play in a ware­house full of pol­ished mod­ern and post­mod­ern fur­ni­ture and art, but just imag­ine this snaking its way through a land­scape. Very cool.

This was a path he made for his own home and gar­den, and it has a gen­tle casu­al­ness, a wel­come lack of striv­ing, that you can see in the pri­vate pieces artists make for them­selves and friends. You can make out the casual, earthy sur­face details and glaze in this detail.

So if your gar­den needs a casual but still pretty stun­ning focal point here’s your chance. You’ll prob­a­bly need to rent a very large truck to bring it home.

March 01 2011 | Categories: art • gardening • landscape design | Tags: ceramics • clay • garden paths • hardscape • Stan Bitters | 7 Comments »

hiding from the neighbors

We have new neigh­bors imme­di­ately behind the house next door. One of their first acts was to erect this gonzo back deck.

The pre­vi­ous owner was a house-bound woman who for the last twenty years of her life lived mostly indoors. Her back fence stopped at the prop­erty line and was six feet high. We never saw her, she never saw us.

The new own­ers, a young cou­ple, appar­ently didn’t care for the big dark fence get­ting in the way of their view. And they appar­ently didn’t think their back yard was large enough since the new deck juts out many feet into a city ease­ment. I’m sure they have a great view of the ocean. But using the equa­tion, I can see them = They can see us, I’m cer­tain they also have a tremen­dous view of my back yard.

There are a few islands of pri­vacy. This black bam­boo pro­vides a lit­tle bit of screening–if you’re stand­ing in just the right spot.

But this view from the bed­room win­dow shows that the isn’t much pri­vacy from much of the gar­den. I planted a Dr. Hurd man­zanita in front of the bam­boo, before the new neigh­bors moved in. Once it hits its twelve foot tar­get, it’ll help pro­vide some shel­ter. But being a man­zanita it’s tak­ing its good old time get­ting larger. Had I known we’ve have this pri­vacy issue I’d have planted some­thing faster grow­ing, maybe a desert willow.

A few things get in the way of plant­ing more large plants on the prop­erty line. There’s a buried drain–not the best thing to plant a small tree over. This is also the the south­ern edge to the prop­erty. A tree would pro­vide some shel­ter, but it would also shade a gar­den pop­u­lated with sun-loving plants and home­own­ers. Also, the pre­vi­ous own­ers of our house installed a large fish­pond in what would be the most wel­come spot for a small tree.

We’re still try­ing to think of what to do. Until we have a larger plan in place, we’re let­ting some plants get taller than we oth­er­wise might. This mys­tery shrub came with the house. Although it’s grow­ing too close to a fence to let it get very large, we’re still let­ting it grow taller. There’s one of these plants in the canyon nearby and the best idea I have is that if it’s native it might be a Pacific wax myr­tle (Morella (for­merly Myr­tica) cal­i­for­nica), but I think the ID is incor­rect because Calflora shows its native range end­ing to the north, in Los Ange­les County.

Here’s a closer look at the foliage. Later in the year it has tiny white flow­ers with an insanely pow­er­ful fragrance–gardenias on steroids, maybe. Feel free to send me any ideas for this plant’s iden­tity. It’s prob­a­bly wish­ful think­ing on my part think­ing this is a native instead of an escapee from one of the local gardens.

[ EDIT, Jan­u­ary 24 ] Well, I knew you guys would come through! Mag­gie and Bahia have pointed me in the right direc­tion. Think­ing that it was a local native was def­i­nitely wish­ful think­ing on my part. The mys­tery shrub is a Vic­to­rian box, Pit­tospo­rum undu­la­tum. The fact that it’s escaped into at least one spot in the local canyon makes me think that this is des­tined not a long-term plant, par­tic­u­larly when you con­sider that it can get mas­sive size for a sub­ur­ban lot, not to men­tion it’s ridicu­lously close place­ment to the fenceline.

The Cal­i­for­nia Inva­sive Plant Coun­cil describes its prob­lem poten­tial this way: “Infes­ta­tions in CA are small. More prob­lem­atic on north coast.” Not the worst plant, but I could def­i­nitely do better.

The pri­vacy prob­lem could be worse. The neigh­bors spend almost no time out­doors, and much of that is in the rel­a­tive pri­vacy of dark­ened evenings.

Still, gar­dens are as much about fan­tasy as they are real­ity. It’s not that we’re doing any­thing par­tic­u­larly scan­dalous in the back yard, really. But if we were, we wouldn’t want the neigh­bors to see!

January 24 2011 | Categories: gardening • landscape design • my garden | Tags: neighbors • privacy • screening • what to do? | 18 Comments »

amusing landscape

Our week­end Net­flix view­ing was The Sav­ages, a 2007 film star­ring Laura Lin­ney and Philip Sey­mour Hoff­man who play a sis­ter and brother who are called in to care for their ail­ing father. The sib­lings leave New York City and Buf­falo in the fall to pick up their father in Sun City, Arizona.

I laughed at some of the estab­lish­ing shots of the land­scap­ing in Sun City. I had to share.

Long rows of these soc­cer ball trees are shown all over Sun City.

Houses with these ball shaped trees…

Big palm trees, but the plant­ing bud­get didn’t allow every­one to get one of their own…

This hedge really got me laugh­ing. What emerges from behind the hedges two sec­onds after this shot is even funnier…

As far as the film, I liked it. As expected, the sib­lings have issues between them, includ­ing some sib­ling rivalry that’s sim­mered for four decades. But all in all they’re adults try­ing hard to do the right thing for their father: noth­ing too Hol­ly­wood and cloy­ingly uplift­ing, but noth­ing that’s a real downer, either.

Of course such mature behav­ior would never fly in many fam­i­lies I’m famil­iar with. Over­all it left me with the feel­ing that’s best summed up by a bumper­sticker John has that hasn’t made it onto a vehi­cle yet: My Fam­ily is More Dys­func­tional than Yours.

November 15 2010 | Categories: art • gardening • landscape design | Tags: films • The Savages | 7 Comments »

landscaping horror: where diy meets wtf

One of my friends recently turned me on to Regretsy, a blog that gath­ers together some of the more unfor­tu­nate objects that earnest DIY­ers have made and posted for sale at the Etsy craft site.

I really like Regretsy’s tag line, “where DIY meets WTF,” and I’ve bor­rowed it for the sub­ti­tle of this quick post on a new gar­den space that went up in my neigh­bor­hood, a bit of land­scap­ing hor­ri­ble­ness that seemed per­fect for Halloween.

I thank John for notic­ing it first and point­ing it out to me, know­ing how well I’d appre­ci­ate it. “It’s on the right as you head down the hill. You can’t miss it.”

Ah, what a won­der: plas­tic grass-colored indoor-outdoor car­pet­ing, one of my per­sonal favs…placed nat­u­ral­is­ti­cally between the side­walk and the side fence…

But it gets bet­ter! Ever six feet or so, next to the fence, the designer has planted big red silk roses. I’m sure they were meant to coor­di­nate with the red curb.

A gar­den made out of dead things emu­lat­ing live ones. Zom­bies. Plas­tic roses. Be afraid. Be very afraid.

One of the dan­gers of hav­ing lovely flow­ers next to a pub­lic walk­way is that some­one might want to pick them.

One of the roses planted in this plas­tic lawn. Note the price tag still attached.

Could this be the lat­est avant-garde gar­den designed by Martha Schwartz, who’s incor­po­rated plas­tic plants into her designs, as in her [ Splice Gar­den, at Cambridge’s White­head Insti­tute ]?

No, sadly, prob­a­bly not. But I will force myself to say some­thing nice about it: At least it doesn’t require water­ing, except maybe to hose off the dust.

October 31 2010 | Categories: gardening • landscape design | Tags: astroturf • drought-tolerant landscaping • Martha Schwartz • plastic • plastic turf • water conservation | 15 Comments »

a palm garden takes shape

I’m sure I’m not the first to have noticed the irony: The main approach to Los Ange­les County Museum of Art takes you through the BP Grand Entrance. The back way in takes you through the La Brea Tar Pits.

When I took the pho­tos on the last day of July crude oil was still gush­ing into the Gulf of Mex­ico, and the irony was heavy like the odor of tar com­ing from the fenced-off pits where archae­ol­o­gists were work­ing behind the museum on extract­ing crit­ters and plants that got caught in the ances­tral goo.

Here, junior’s ball has some­how made it over the fence around one of the pits. You could maybe res­cue it with a stick…or you could wade through the tar and hope that you don’t get caught, only to be dis­cov­ered by archae­ol­o­gists a few mil­len­nia down the road.

We arrived at the museum an hour before it opened, via the back entrance, so we had a chance to spend some time with Robert Irwin’s Palm Gar­den Instal­la­tion. I posted [ before ] on the ear­lier stages of the gar­den, and it’s still not com­plete. But by now you can really make out many more of the ele­ments of what the final gar­den will look like.

There are many palm species used in the gar­den. A num­ber of them are planted in a lawn, inside planter boxes that mimic the wooden planter boxes the trees were grown in. But unlike the wooden tem­po­rary planters, these per­ma­nent homes are made out of thick steel plate–the “it” mate­r­ial of the moment for well-financed mod­ern gardens.

A closer look at the planter box…

In a back cor­ner you could see a col­lec­tion of palms in pots, and in this photo you can get a bet­ter idea of the kind of planter box the steel ones are meant to suggest.

Another look at some of the palms in tran­si­tion… In this instal­la­tion some of the plants are rotated out accord­ing tot he sea­son. I’m not sure whether these are headed in or out.

LACMA was about to open a new facil­ity, the Resnick Pavil­lion designed by Renzo Piano. As the build­ing nears com­ple­tion more ele­ments of the Palm Gar­den Instal­la­tion are being planted. In addi­tion to palms it includes sev­eral of the non-palm species. These are some spec­tac­u­larly var­ie­gated agaves plants of a fur­craea, pos­si­bly Fur­craea foetida ‘Mediopicta’–Thanks for the cor­rec­tion, Loree!

The way the plants have been shaped, with the low­est leaves removed, made them look like var­ie­gated New Zealand flax (phormi­ums) until you got close to them. It’s not a bad look. It’ll be inter­est­ing to see if these agaves fur­craeas are kept pruned this way or whether they’ll be allowed to grow into the rosettes that agave fur­craea grow­ers are used to see­ing. This is in no way a nat­u­ral­is­tic gar­den, so my guess is that the agaves plants will be kept this shape. Besides, how do you mow around them with­out run­ning over the leaves?

Detail: Fur­craea foetida, I think

Another detail of the var­ie­gated furcraeas

Another of the non-palm species: this cycad devel­op­ing this really cool cone. It’s prob­a­bly some­thing like three to four feet long.

A bench and real palms out­side the Resnick pavilion…

The sin­gle most dra­matic ges­ture is the place­ment of this palm with a thickly bul­bous trunk that’s been planted in a tight open­ing that leads two sto­ries down into a park­ing garage. The effect is like star­ing down into a North Dakota Min­ute­man mis­sile silo. It’s more than a tad unset­tling, and asserts that garden-making can be about more than design­ing pleas­ant, unchal­leng­ing spaces.

Say “Los Ange­les” to some­one and ask them what comes to mind. Palm trees would prob­a­bly be one of the first things the per­son might bring up, even though the city’s offi­cial tree is the coral tree is and the offi­cial flower the bird of par­adise. “Cars” would prob­a­bly be another. Here palms and cars come together, with a short arcade of the trees lin­ing the dri­ve­way down into the park­ing garage.

I’m not any­thing remotely resem­bling a palm expert, so I can’t tell you what species this is. But I can show you that it has amaz­ingly sculp­tural trunks.

Look­ing up into the fronds gives you the sen­sa­tion clos­est what you get from many of the art­works Robert Irwin did before he designed gar­dens. The fronds fil­ter the light in inter­est­ing ways, and two or more lay­ers make things darker than just a sin­gle layer. If you stand in the dri­ve­way and look straight up the neg­a­tive space of the sky reads like a bright zigzag between the del­i­cate lay­ers of palm.

If you’d like to com­pare the effect of the palm fronds to an ear­lier Irwin piece, here’s a cor­ner of his Run­ning Vio­let V Forms, a piece that I walk around and under at least twice a week. In this 1980s piece pan­els of violet-colored mesh turn light or dark, depend­ing on the num­ber of lay­ers, and the mesh turns opaque or trans­par­ent depend­ing on how the light is strik­ing it. The mesh inter­acts with views of the euca­lyp­tus grove where it’s placed. I’ve loved this piece ever since the day it went up. You can read my love story with this piece [ here ].

Artists often com­plain that big muse­ums don’t pay enough atten­tion to local artists in their scram­ble to show off big-name artists from the other coast or another coun­try. This sum­mer day LACMA had sev­eral gal­leries devoted to the the pho­tographs of Cathy Opie, and work of other local artists could be found the walls of sev­eral of the gal­leries. But I didn’t iden­tify any plant species used in this gar­den that came from within a thousand-mile radius.

Word is that Robert Irwin is design­ing yet another gar­den, this one for a new fed­eral cour­t­house here in San Diego. Wouldn’t it be great if he could use some of our Cal­i­for­nia species in the project? What about some of our del­i­cately trans­par­ent plants like deer weed or broom bac­cha­ris? Or what about some of the many plants that undergo stun­ning trans­for­ma­tions as the sea­sons change? To see an impor­tant new, high pro­file gar­den com­prised of local natives would be such an amaz­ing opportunity.

September 07 2010 | Categories: art • gardening • landscape design • places | Tags: British Petrolium • La Brea Tar Pits • Los Angeles County Museum of Art • palm trees • Robert Irwin | 9 Comments »

getty garden, light and shadow

I try to stop by Robert Irwin’s Cen­tral Gar­den at the Getty Cen­ter when­ever I’m nearby. This early august day was bright but cool, a per­fect day for a stroll through the gar­den to see what new things I’d find.

If you’ve never been to the gar­den, it divides into two large parts: a cen­tral bowl hold­ing a maze of two col­ors of clipped aza­leas and its sur­round­ing plant­i­ngs, and, above it, a straight water­course that is shaded all along its length by Lon­don plane trees, a cousin of the Amer­i­can sycamore.

This trip I was con­cen­trat­ing on how the idea of light and shadow, dark and light played out in the over­all design and plantings.

To expe­ri­ence the upper water­course, you fol­low a path that zigzags back and forth. It takes you in and out of the shade and shel­ter of the trees, let­ting you expe­ri­ence the bright Los Ange­les sun­light and how it con­trasts with the dap­pled light the trees pro­vide in the spring, sum­mer and fall.

The water­course near the top of the Cen­tral Garden

The water­course, the shel­tered core of this top gar­den, changes from a noisy stream with large stones in its path at the top, to a water­way that glides qui­etly over a tex­tured streambed down below.

The effect of the dap­pled sun­light is repeated in the plant­i­ngs. Dark, almost black-leaved, plants alter­nate with light-colored ones. In this photo it’s almost hard to dis­tin­guish the alter­nat­ing light and shadow of the trees above from the dap­pled plant­i­ngs below. It’s a lit­tle con­fus­ing, a tad dis­ori­ent­ing. And if you’re fas­ci­nated with the effects of light and shadow as I am, you might find it a qui­etly thrilling experience.

Even this lit­tle detail, a plant­ing of suc­cu­lents, plays with con­trasts, light and dark. It’s a lit­tle cor­ner that would look great in a home gar­den, and here it fur­ther helps to rein­force the vibra­tions of light and dark in the upper garden.

When I first saw the gar­den I thought the plant­i­ngs were a lit­tle chaotic. All this light and dark, all this con­tin­ual con­trast­ing of col­ors and plant shapes seemed rest­less. Small doses would look great as perky lit­tle con­tainer plant­i­ngs, but it seemed way too much of a good thing. It seemed like a lit­tle Eng­lish cot­tage gar­den doped up on steroids.

But I’ve been chang­ing my mind. All this crazi­ness rein­forces the intense vibra­tion of con­trasts that you expe­ri­ence walk­ing the zigzag path.

Once you make your way out of the upper por­tion of the gar­den you’re set free into the rel­a­tive calm of the lower bowl. There’s no more zigzag­ging in and out of the shade, there’s no more quick shift­ing from light to dark. Still, the sunken design of the lower gar­den ensures that one of the sides will expe­ri­ence shade dur­ing most of the day. And the plant­i­ngs down here, still alter­nat­ing dark and light, tell you that you’re still in the same garden.

Yes, each trip here I see some­thing new. But I also real­ize that mak­ing this kind of gar­den hap­pen is such an extreme com­mit­ment of resources and labor.

I haven’t quite fig­ured out a way to pho­to­graph the cap­i­tal out­lay it takes to keep this gar­den look­ing great. But I’d like to end this post with a trib­ute to the heroes, those ded­i­cated gar­den­ers who make this place a gar­den worth vis­it­ing sev­eral times a year.

Thanks, guys!

August 07 2010 | Categories: art • gardening • landscape design • places | Tags: J. Paul Getty Museum • light and shadow • Robert Irwin | 8 Comments »

interesting, challenging reading

This is a post for the reader who might enjoy an occa­sional book on gar­den­ing and land­scape archi­tec­ture that isn’t designed to sit on your cof­fee table or nightstand.

The British Library has recently unveiled EThOS, a por­tal to elec­tronic the­ses and dis­ser­ta­tions from the UK. If the the­sis has been dig­i­tized, it’s avail­able to you for down­load once you reg­is­ter. Reg­is­tra­tion is free, and so are most of the texts. If some­thing isn’t avail­able yet, you can request it to be dig­i­tized within thirty days so that you can down­load it. Once again, that process is usu­ally free.

Only a small minor­ity of the­ses and dis­ser­ta­tions writ­ten these days is on gar­den­ing of course, but there’s some great work being done on the topic in British insti­tu­tions, with the Uni­ver­sity of Sheffield lead­ing the way.

Do a basic search on “Sheffield” and “land­scape” and you’ll get titles like the fol­low­ing that are avail­able with­out wait­ing thirty days:

Wu, Jiahua. Land­scape mor­phol­ogy : a com­par­a­tive study of land­scape aesthetics.

Jor­gensen, Anna. Liv­ing in the urban wild woods : a case study of the eco­log­i­cal wood­land approach to land­scape plan­ning and design at Birch­wood, War­ring­ton New Town.

Alturki, Ashraf. Atti­tudes towards designed land­scapes in two desert cities : Med­ina, Saudi Ara­bia and Tuc­son, Arizona.

Zhao, Jijun. Thirty years of land­scape design in China (1949–1979): The era of Mao Zedong. (The abstract for this one out­lines some fas­ci­nat­ing ideas about designed land­scape and ide­ol­ogy: “[L]andscape archi­tects first emerg­ing in early twen­ti­eth cen­tury China con­cerned them­selves espe­cially with the design of gar­dens and parks. This sit­u­a­tion remained almost unchanged dur­ing the rad­i­cal social­ist rev­o­lu­tion, which resulted in the found­ing of the People’s Repub­lic of China in 1949 that was led by Chair­man Mao Zedong (1893–1976). Dur­ing the Mao era (1949–1979), the impact of the Chi­nese com­mu­nist ide­ol­ogy on land­scape was far-ranging and ground break­ing. Besides exten­sive devel­op­ment of pub­lic parks for social­ist edu­ca­tion as well as recre­ational pur­poses, cities were reshaped with large hous­ing areas cre­ated for workers–the pro­le­tari­ats, and urban squares play­ing a cru­cial role in exhibit­ing polit­i­cal power, while the coun­try­side was reshaped from a hier­ar­chi­cal land­scape with an exploita­tive nature to an egal­i­tar­ian one, where the broad masses were to ben­e­fit from improvements.”)

Alter­nately, try a search on “Sheffield” and “gar­den” and you’ll find titles like these, dig­i­tized and ready to download:

Gilberthorpe, Enid Con­stance. British botan­i­cal gar­dens in the 1980s : changes reflected by bib­li­o­graph­i­cal and social survey.

Kel­lett, J.E. Pub­lic pol­icy and the pri­vate gar­den : An analy­sis of the effect of gov­ern­ment pol­icy on pri­vate gar­den pro­vi­sion in Eng­land and Wales 1918–81. (Sheffield City Polytechnic)

…and then there are intrigu­ing titles like these that still need to be dig­i­tized though you could be read­ing them in not much more time than it takes for a book to be deliv­ered to your doorstep:

Qasim, Moham­mad. The poten­tial role of pri­vate gar­dens in devel­op­ing greater envi­ron­men­tal sus­tain­abil­ity in cities.

Can­non, Andrew R. Wild birds in urban gar­dens : oppor­tu­nity or constraint?

Be fore­warned. From the skim­ming I did, these texts read like…well, col­lege dis­ser­ta­tions. Even among the authors who write really clearly you sense a cer­tain amount of them play­ing aca­d­e­mic buzz­word bingo. After all, the authors have to tell their profs that they know the lit­er­a­ture and can use their lingo. In addi­tion, the pho­tos accom­pa­ny­ing the texts aren’t picture-book qual­ity the way they appear online. But once you get beyond that, you cross over to a world rich in ideas.

[ Elec­tronic The­ses Online Ser­vice ]

July 29 2010 | Categories: gardening • landscape design | Tags: books • dissertations • Electronic Theses Online Service • EThOS • theses • University of Sheffield | 2 Comments »

fairly cool plants

On my recent trip to the San Diego County Fair the hor­ti­cul­tural dis­plays seemed to divide into two big cat­e­gories: exhibits that fea­tured cool designs (usu­ally entered by a land­scape design firm or indi­vid­ual) and those that fea­ture some pretty cool plants (mostly in exhibits assem­bled by spe­cialty nurseries).

I’ve talked enough about the cool designs. Here are some fairly cool plants. Some have been around for cen­turies, oth­ers are fairly new to our gar­dens. Hope­fully the new intro­duc­tions are fairly tame, oth­er­wise you might be see­ing here the new exotic weed pests that’ll be keep­ing us busy for the next hun­dred years.

Ptilo­tus exal­ta­tus \‘Plat­inum Wal­laby,\’ a plant that has been show­ing up in nurs­eries this past year.

Oh look: Another note­wor­thy plant, another ptilo­tus, Down Under.

Christ­mas in July? The Ecke poin­set­tia ranch folks who sup­ply a huge per­cent­age of the world’s poin­set­tias were show­ing off this new white vari­ety, Polar Bear. My county used to be poin­set­tia cen­tral for the world, but cheaper pro­duc­tion costs have dri­ven a lot of that to Cen­tral America.

Char­treuse, green, white and near-black: Lob­u­laria Snow Princes, two kinds of ipo­moea, with Coleus Col­or­Blaze Alli­ga­tor Tears.

Gera­nium crispum, var­ie­gated form. This is one of many foliage plants that have flow­ers that don’t seem to add much to the foliage.

Gosh, yet another note­wor­thy plant with a ‘Note­wor­thy Plant’ sign next to it. (Kin­duv reminds me of those turnoffs labeled ‘scenic view­point’ on high­ways through spec­tac­u­lar land­scapes, as if you needed the sign to tell you you were look­ing at some­thing scenic or–in this case–noteworthy.) This was labeled a ‘Pine Nee­dle Fern,’ but not with its species name. My quick web trawl didn’t turn up much with that name, only a fact that it’s con­sid­ered one of the more pri­mae­val kinds of fern. Very cool, what­ever it is.

Rice flower, Ozotham­nus dios­mi­folius, a plant drought-tolerant selec­tion that, like the ptilo­tus plants, comes from Aus­tralia. You’d think they’d have run out of their notable plant signs by now.

Men­tion the word suc­cu­lent and peo­ple have visions of a fairly desert-ey land­scape. Here’s a dis­play by Cor­dova Gar­dens that instead comes off as a really lush flower arrangement.

Deute­ro­coh­nia bre­v­i­fo­lia, a fairly amaz­ing suc­cu­lent. (Edit: this is actu­ally a bromeliad!)

Mam­mi­laria parkin­so­ni­ana, a fairly amaz­ing cactus.

A nice mixed plant­ing of cac­tus and suc­cu­lents at the Solana Suc­cu­lents display.

A gor­geous pur­ple prickly pear Opun­tia Santa Rita, part of the Solana Suc­cu­lents exhibit.

Agave victoria-reginae, a nor­mally prim lit­tle bun­dle of green and white botan­i­cal joy. Check out bloom stalk in the next photo, however…

OMG, when that thing blooms, stand back! This lit­tle two-foot plant has prob­a­bly pro­duced a twelve-foot inflo­res­cence. How do you design with this plant? Is it a fore­ground plant? Or some­thing for the back­ground? Not a bad quandary to be in.

July 03 2010 | Categories: gardening • landscape design • places | Tags: San Diego County Fair • succulents | 7 Comments »