Archive for the 'quotes' Category
Another quick stop over the holidays took the form of a visit to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
Installed at the new main entrance is this battalion of 202 antique streetlights, Urban Light, by artist Chris Burden. Streetlights like these of course were positioned at curbs in straight lines, spaced regularly. Clustering them together like this accentuates that fact, and to me makes the whole installation seem maybe just a little bit militaristic.
Arranged behind the Burden piece are some palm trees, the first plantings of what will be a large installation of palms by Robert Irwin. Irwin is the design force behind the Central Garden at the J. Paul Getty Museum, but here the trees will read less like a separate garden than plantings integrated into the art and architecture.
Their trunks echo the posts of the streetlights, as does the fact that they’re planted in a regular pattern. Also, as with the streetlights, they’re a collection of different kinds. A press release states: “Along with the palms, Irwin’s other medium is Southern California’s light, and the species of palms have been specially chosen to gather and reflect the interplay of light and shadow native to L.A.” [ source ] I love Robert Irwin’s work [ here’s a sample ], and I’ll be checking back on this installation as time goes on.
The whole vertical shaft thing becomes a theme around the Museum’s latest building, the newish Broad Contemporary Art Museum, which has red exterior accents, including plenty of red columns.
The landscaping in this part of the museum is interesting in that it uses palms or flat plantings. Virtually no shrubs. It’s a pretty urban planting that in part seems designed to give the homeless no place to camp.
Most horizontal surfaces, using decomposed granite or this Turfstone product, are designed as walkable extensions of the concrete paving. Where does the landscape end and the urban fabric begin?
Here’s an interesting gardening aside: The Museums are located on the same big city block as the famed La Brea Tar Pits, where the ground oozes black, gummy tar, a substance that has preserved bones of sabertooth tigers and woolly mammoths from the last ice age that got too close to the stuff. Just imagine trying to garden where digging a hole to plant a shrub might put you in contact with the deadly sludge! I have yet to pick up a garden book that even begins to discuss what to do with this kind of soil problem. While the park containing the tar pits has a few gooey shoe-grabbing spots, these plantings seemed free of the muck.
My main reason for visiting LACMA was to take in a photo exhibit that reassembles many of the works that were seen in the seminal 1975 “New Topographics” exhibition of landscape photography. These works in the show signaled a break from the more romantic takes on what landscape photos ought to look like and engaged a land where the human presence reigned supreme.
One of my favorite photographers in the show, Robert Adams, often combines the romantic sublime with a cooler take on what the world really looks like. To the left is “Mobile Homes, Jefferson County, Colorado” from 1973 [ source ], a great example of what his eye sees. You get the sense in his work that the human landscape often fails to live up to the stunning geography where it’s sited.
Seeing his work again prompted me to reread some of his Beauty in Photography: Essays in Defense of Traditional Values. (From this photo you can see that he takes “traditional values” pretty broadly.) Here’s a quick snippet gardeners and landscape designers might like to think about.
Not surprisingly, many photographers have loved gardens, those places that Leonard Woolf once described as “the last refuge of disillusion.” Gardens are in fact strikingly like landscape pictures, sanctuaries not from but of truth.
–from the essay, “Truth and Landscape” in Beauty in Photography
In parting, let me move from beauty in photography to beauty in art. Here’s a closeup of Urban Light, backlit by the afternoon sun:
(For another example of Burden’s work, check out the installation of 50,000 nickel coins and 50,000 matchsticks that the San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art exhibited: The Reason for the Neutron Bomb.)
January 12 2010 | Categories: art • landscape • landscape design • photography • places • quotes | Tags: architecture • architecture and landscaping • art and landscaping • Broad Contemporary Art Museum • Chris Burden • Los Angeles County Museum of Art • palm trees • robert adams • Robert Irwin | 8 Comments »
The current issue of Orion, one of my favorite magazines, features “World Without Violets,” a scary little essay by Robert Michael Pyle.
A mother in Britain discovered that the editors of the current Oxford Junior Dictionary, in their zeal to bring this little dictionary for children up to date, had removed a long list of words dealing with nature in order to make room for words like “broadband,” “bungee jumping” and “chat room.”
Pyle writes about the universe the editors of the Dictionary have created for the current generation of children who would use it:
It is a world without violets. Spring comes unannounced by catkins and proceeds without benefit of crocuses, cowslips, or tulips. Summer brings no lavender, melons, or nectarines, and autumn is absent of acorns, almonds, and hazelnuts. Winter must be endured without the holly and the ivy, the wren or the mistletoe.
So, suddenly bungee jumping–how retro-80s is that concept?–is more important than tulips, broadband more necessary for children to know about than melons, and chat rooms more of our real world than holly.
If someone decides that we don’t need a word for something, does that something cease to exist? Not really. But what kind of mindset decides that children don’t need to know about their natural world anymore? I was disturbed.
July 13 2009 | Categories: landscape • quotes | Tags: children • natural world • Oxford Junior Dictionary • words | 5 Comments »
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 »
I’ve heard salvia connoisseurs talk down about this plant, Salvia microphylla ‘Hot Lips,’ mostly because it’s getting to be so commonly available in areas where it grows easily. But of all the sages in my garden this one has been the best performer.
Living in a sunny spot with dry-to-average garden water, the plants are covered with these flowers year-round, hitting a peak in the fall.
Common or not, the flowers make the plant really interesting. Most are two colors, a combination of scarlet and white, with no two flowers exactly alike. But often you’ll get flowers that are almost all white or all red. I’ve heard that cold weather seems to bring out the white, and that syncs up with what I’ve seen. But at the same time you’ll often still have multi-colored flowers–all on the same plant.
The growth habit is like a lot of sages, meaning the plant has the lines of a chocolate truffle left on a warm dashboard. For me, so far it grows about 30 inches tall by 60 wide. It’s supposedly hardy down around 20 degrees, but don’t expect many flowers when the frost starts up.
If you can grow it, this could be a good candidate for your list!
February 01 2009 | Categories: art • gardening • my garden • plant profiles • quotes | Tags: sages • Salvia microphylla 'Hot Lips' • salvias | 4 Comments »
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 »
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 »
Forgive this long letter; I don’t have time to write a short one.
–George Bernard Shaw
Blotanical is asking garden bloggers to answer a simple question this month: Why do I garden?
But there’s a catch: The answer has to be SMS-sized, 160 characters or less! The brief answers are quick and easy to read. To write one is not.
Here’s my attempt:
I garden in order to glimpse nature’s processes and rhythms, because my garden takes care of me at least as much as I take care of it, and because all our gardens matter more than we’ll ever know.
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PS: If you don’t know Blotanical, you should. It’s a great online community of international garden bloggers that has recently surpassed the thousand-blog mark. If you figure several years of experience for most of the bloggers, you could consider that the site gives you easy access to several thousand years of combined gardening experience–plus all the bloggers’ great stories! Gardeners are the best people, and this site will prove it.
November 29 2008 | Categories: gardening • quotes | Tags: philosphy • why people garden | 9 Comments »
I’ve been thinking a lot about weeds lately. Now that the weather is changing, the little cool season green interlopers are starting to show themselves with a vengeance. And as I mentioned earlier, I’m reading American Perceptions of Immigrant and Invasive Species : Strangers on the Land by Peter Coates.
The epigram that starts off chapter 3 is an amazing quote from Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince:
There were on the planet where the little prince lived–as on all planets–good and bad plants…If it is only a sprout of radish or the sprig of a rose-bush, one would let it grow wherever it might wish. But when it is a bad plant, one must destroy it as soon as possible, the very first instant that one recognizes it. Now there were terrible seeds on the planet that was the home of the little prince; and these were the seeds of the baobab. The soil of that planet was infested with them. A baobab is something you will never, never be able to get rid of if you attend to it too late. It spreads over the entire planet. It bores clear through it with its roots. And if the planet is too small, and the baobabas are too many, they split it in pieces.
I’m not sure if Saint-Exupéry ever met a real live baobab plant, the world’s largest succulent, shown to the left in a photo by Quinn Norton (used under the Creative Commons 1.0 Attribution General License) [ source ].
And I’m not sure if the author was just using the word “baobab” just because it sounds cool and deliciously evil. But his description of a plant from hell sure describes a lot of the weeds that I feel compelled to keep up with.
After all, I wouldn’t want the world to split into pieces just because I was too lazy to weed my garden!
November 15 2008 | Categories: gardening • quotes • rambles | Tags: Antoine de Saint-Exupéry • baobabs • Peter Coates • The Little Prince • weeds | 2 Comments »
As my recent cold began to fade I began to put away the garden picture books and reach for a book that I knew would require a little more focus and reflection. I’m not that far into it yet, but Peter Coates’s American Perceptions of Immigrant and Invasive Species: Strangers on the Land is proving to be a surprisingly lively read for a book that seems aimed at an academic audience.
With interesting histories of “invading” plants and animals set against historical debates over human immigration, it’s a volume that could be interesting for many thoughtful gardeners and birders. Here are just a couple passages that touch on some of the issues in the book:
“Without question the most deplorable event in the history of American ornithology,” declared William Dawson in 1903, “was the introduction of the English Sparrow.” This may sound absurd to those acquainted with the passenger pigeon’s fate. Yet Dawson insisted that the notorious extinctions of the pigeon and the great auk … were mere “trifles” compared to the frightful repercussions for various small native birds of the “invasion of that wretched foreigner.” A dramatic remark of this sort from a century ago serves as a welcome corrective to the unreflective tone of current literature on bioinvasion, which frequently intimates that today’s level of concern in unmatched.
Those who speak of ecological nativism … give the impression that antipathy toward exotic species and the simultaneous championing of native biota have been particularly robust in the United States. This view usually emerges by default: commentators simply neglect to reflect on other national experiences. [Mark] Sagoff, [in “What’s Wrong with Exotic Species?”] though, directly compares American intolerance with a more relaxed European “cosmopolitanism” that “tolerates porous borders” for immigrant flora and fauna. He sees this as a reflection of different New and Old World conceptions of nature. Whereas Americans are dedicated to the “idea of pristine nature,” as enshrined in the related concepts of wilderness and indigenous species (native plants and animals, by implication, being biotic citizens of a terrestrial Eden), these notions, he claims, lack cultural, spiritual, and historical meaning for Europeans, who prefer their nature to be a blend of the nonhuman and the cultural. The alien organisms Europeans worry about and are keen to exclude from their countryside and farms, he explains, are genetically modified crops (mostly born in the United States).
November 09 2008 | Categories: gardening • landscape • quotes • rambles | Tags: invasive species • Mark Sagoff • native animals • native plants • Peter Coates • William Dawson | 3 Comments »
What follows is an unpaid political rant.
Unless you’re reading this blog using a bicycle-powered generator in the desert outback somewhere east of Perth you’ve heard of the revolutionary change in the leadership of the United States. It’s the culmination of tireless work for equality and civil rights by generations of good people. In Tuesday’s California elections, in addition to voting for Barack Obama in a landslide, voters also overwhelmingly approved Proposition 2, a worthy initiative that mandates more humane cage conditions for chickens and other farm animals.
I should be happy, and I am genuinely happy–about those and many other things that happened election day.
This gardener is pissed
But politics is a messy beast, and this gardener is having a bout of bad attitude. It started on Monday with the first signs of a bad cold and then worsened as some of the political fallout from Tuesday’s elections became clearer. So often, along with the good and revolutionary, you get delivered the vile and reactionary. In the same California elections I referred to the populace narrowly approved Proposition 8, a constitutional amendment rescinding the rights of gay and lesbian citizens from marrying each other, thereby upholding the traditional values of having gays and lesbians marry people of the opposite gender.
In effect, in their actions, the voters of California decided to grant additional civil rights to poultry, while at the same time rescinding rights for the state’s gay and lesbian population.
So, are we to conclude that, in a state where it takes 55% of the vote to raise property taxes, all it takes is a slim majority of the population to take rights away from thousands of its fellow citizens? Have the California voters said that my commitment in marriage last June to John is now null and void? Not so fast!
The lawsuits have begun, and one of the arguments is that very issue of the size of the vote necessary to revise a basic right that’s in the constitution versus merely amending it. Legal challenges often get a bad rap in this country, but if it had been left exclusively to the popular vote we’d still have things like segregation and industrial runoff igniting the rivers of the Northeast.
My current cold will pass, along with my current bad attitude. No matter the immediate outcomes of the challenges to Proposition 8, so too will pass this country’s romance with intolerance. No matter what transpires, John and I will continue to consider ourselves married.
It’ll take a while for the culture to change, but the signs are everywhere. Although people over 30 voted for California’s Proposition 8, the population 30 and under soundly rejected it by a margin of two to one.
Another sign: Let me quote the final sentence of Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech, in which he sets the bar for the changes that would need to take place. Notice the list, the agenda King sets.
…And when this happens, when we allow freedom to ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, “Free at last! free at last! thank God Almighty, we are free at last!”
And let me compare that the agenda Barack Obama set in his speech Tuesday night at Chicago’s Grant Park. His list, his agenda, his America resides in the third paragraph from the very beginning.
If there is anyone out there who still doubts that America is a place where all things are possible, who still wonders if the dream of our founders is alive in our time, who still questions the power of our democracy, tonight is your answer.
It’s the answer told by lines that stretched around schools and churches in numbers this nation has never seen, by people who waited three hours and four hours, many for the first time in their lives, because they believed that this time must be different, that their voices could be that difference.
It’s the answer spoken by young and old, rich and poor, Democrat and Republican, black, white, Hispanic, Asian, Native American, gay, straight, disabled and not disabled. Americans who sent a message to the world that we have never been just a collection of individuals or a collection of red states and blue states.
We are, and always will be, the United States of America.
At no time in his campaign did Obama defend gay marriage. That would have been political suicide. But it’s telling that we are no longer invisible as we were in King’s day. This is a different vision of America that will come to be as the next generation finally gets its say.
The bar has been raised.
November 06 2008 | Categories: everything • quotes • rambles | Tags: Barack Obama • gay marriage • gay weddings • Martin Luther King • politics • Proposition 2 • Proposition 8 | 2 Comments »
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