Archive for the 'quotes' Category
Thanks to Linda who saved for me a New Yorker article by Elizabeth Kolbert, “Turf War.” It’s from the…um…July 21 issue. (Okay, it sometimes take me a little time to finally get around to things…)
It’s a worthy read that takes a historical look at some of the writings discussing the topic of the American lawn, beginning with Andrew Jackson Downing’s 1841 Treatise on the Theory and Practice of Landscape Gardening. Being a review of the lawn literature, it’s ripe with pithy quotes by the author and many others that show changes in American thought towards this carpet of mown grass. Read the article for all the quotes in context, but here’s a handful that I especially liked:
Among the dozen or so main grasses that make up the American lawn, almost none are native to America. Kentucky bluegrass comes from Europe and northern Asia, Bermuda grass from Africa, and Zoysia grass from East Asia.
Mowing turfgrass quite literally cuts off the option of sexual reproduction…In his anti-lawn essay “Why mow?,” Michael Pollan puts it this way: “Lawns are nature purged of sex and death. No wonder Americans like them so much.”
“A fine carpet of green grass stamps the inhabitants as good neighbors, as desirable citizens,” Abraham Levitt wrote. (By covenant, the original Levittowners agreed to mow their lawns once a week between April 15th and November 15th.)
[In a discussion on the us pesticides and herbicides on lawns:] In “American Green” (2006), Ted Steinberg, a professor of history at Case Western Reserve University, compares the lawn to “a nationwide chemical experiment with homeowners as the guinea pigs.”
Recently, a NASA-funded study, which used satellite data collected by the Department of Defense, determined that, including golf courses, lawns in the United States cover nearly fifty thousand square miles–an area roughly the size of New York State. The same study concluded that most of this New York State-size lawn was growing in places where turfgrass should new have been planted. In order to keep all the lawns in the country well irrigated, the author of the study calculated, it would take an astonishing two hundred gallons of water per person, per day.
For a developer…putting in turfgrass is by far the easiest way to landscape; what is sometimes called “contractor’s mix” grass seed is specifically formulated to provide a fast-growing–though not necessarily long-lasting–green. (Lowe’s, which sells fifteen pounds of contractor’s-mix seed for $23.52, advertises it as an “economy mixture that provides quick grass cover.”) The lawn may be wasteful and destructive, it may even be dangerous, but it is, in its way, convenient.
October 21 2008 | Categories: gardening • landscape design • quotes | Tags: lawns • pesticides • water use | 2 Comments »
A garden without animals is like a florist’s refrigerator–Hortense Miller, 1908–2008.
August 08 2008 | Categories: gardening • quotes | Tags: Hortense Miller | No Comments »
Rebecca Solnit wrote an essay for Extreme Horticulture,* a book by photographer John Pfahl who was the subject of one of this blog’s first posts. I bumped into the essay again as I was skimming through an anthology I’d read last year, Solnit’s Storming the Gates of Paradise: Landscapes for Politics. Here’s a fragment that I found really interesting, part of her essay, “The Botanical Circus.”
There is a whole language of class in the garden–when they returned to the garden, flowers were redeemed with the tasteful monochromatic schemes of the likes of Gertrude Jekyll; and, as gardening essayist Michael Pollan points out, there is a whole class war of the roses, in which old roses–more fragrant, more softly shaped, less abundant in their bloom, more limited in the palette–are the exiled aristocracy. Good taste is about renunciation: you must have enough to restrain in order to value restraint, enough abundance to prize austerity. After all, it was only after aniline dyes made bright clothing universally available that the privileged stopped dressing like peacocks; spareness is often the public face of excess…Moderation, the Greek philosopher said, is pleasant to the wise, but it’s not necessarily fun. Eleanor Perényi writes in her book Green Thoughts: A Writer in the Garden,
Looking at my dahlias one summer day, a friend whose taste runs to the small and impeccable said sadly, “You do like big conspicuous flowers, don’t you?” She meant vulgar, and I am used to that. It hasn’t escaped me that mine is the only WASP garden in town to contain dahlias, and not the discreet little singles either. Some are as blowsy as half-dressed Renoir girls; others are like spiky sea-creatures, water lilies, or the spirals in a crystal paperweight; and they do shoot up to prodigious heights. But to me they are sumptuous, not vulgar.
I’ve gone on in some posts about the necessity to rein in color choices to achieve some sort of harmony. But then I’ve written about wonderfully vulgar, er…sumptuous, plants like toloache and Echium wildprettii. I really do like a certain amount of order, but at the same I do appreciate these flaming agents of chaos. I may achieve pockets of “good taste” in the yard, but these are tempered by the bawdy and outrageous.
So what’s your garden like? Carefully coordinated and muted like a wardrobe from J. Crew or Land’s End? Or sassy and outrageous like Martha Stewart in hot pants and five-inch cha-cha heels?
A note on my links to books: The book links in all of my posts (with only one exception that I can think of) take you to abebooks.com, a site made up of hundreds of booksellers around the world, a good many of them the little brick and mortar operations that are dying out too quickly as giants like Amazon take over publishing.
July 31 2008 | Categories: gardening • quotes • rambles | Tags: class • good taste • John Pfahl • Rebecca Solnit • taste | 1 Comment »
Color of course needs to be an important consideration in planning the garden. You may be familiar with Gertrude Jekyll’s important book devoted just to the subject, Colour Scheme in the Flower Garden. If you don’t know it—or if you your copy is falling apart—you can read it for free online via Google Books. Her selections of plants won’t apply to many locations since she lived in England, but her thought processes about choosing colors and staging processions of colors throughout the year colors are instructive and worth the read.
You can find plenty of other garden books online through Google books. If they’re out of copyright you can see the entire text. Even if they’re still under copyright control, you can skim through many others–usually enough to let you decide if you want to buy the book, and often enough to answer a specific question that might be your only reason for wanting to look at the book.
When Google started their massive project to digitize items in many of the world’s major libraries they raised more than a few eyebrows. What were they up to? What were they doing scanning all these books and potentially releasing for free the hard work of the world’s authors?
I’ve just finished The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google by Nicholas Carr. It’s definitely a work of journalism and not poetry, but a paragraph on page 223 made my jaw drop and just by itself made reading the book worthwhile:
George Dyson, a historian of technology…was invited to Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, California, in October 2005 to give a speech… After his talk, Dyson found himself chatting with a Google engineer about the company’s controversial plant to scan the contents of the world’s libraries into its database. “We are not scanning all those books to be read by people,” the engineer told him. “We are scanning them to be read by an AI [Artificial Intelligence].”
Creepy. But at least in the end, when Google’s computers take over the world, they’ll at least be able to put together a color-coordinated English cottage garden.
July 12 2008 | Categories: gardening • quotes • rambles | Tags: artificial intelligence • color • Gertrude Jekyll • Google Books • Nicholas Carr | 1 Comment »
I quoted recently from Robert Pogue Harrison’s recent Gardens: An Essay on the Human Condition. Here are a couple more passages that I liked.
…[I]n the final analysis we must always remember that nature has its own order and that human gardens do not, as one hears so often, bring order to nature; rather, they give order to our relation to nature.
…[T]here is in the Versailles gardens an aesthetic drive to tame, and even humiliate, nature into submission…
While we long ago ceased to credit doctrines regarding the divine right of kings, and while few among us believe we are living in an age of enlightenment, we still have not sufficiently dismantled the doctrine of humanity’s divine right, which in many ways still reigns supreme in contemporary Western societies, in practice if not in theory. For all its perverse beauty and wondrous transfiguration of pride, Versailles will not be of much help to us when it comes to finding a less presumptuous relationship to nature than the one bestowed upon us by that era.
In the interest of full self-disclosure I’ve never visited the massive formal gardens of Louis XIV at Versailles, but I think I’d feel awestruck and spiritually injured at the same time. The author captures my squeamishness perfectly.
July 11 2008 | Categories: gardening • quotes • rambles | Tags: Robert Pogue Harrison • why people garden | 2 Comments »
Most of [Czech author Karel] Čapek’s commentators consider The Gardener’s Year a minor work, but as Verlyn Klinkenborg remarks in the introduction to the Modern Library English edition of 2002, “most students of Čapek believe gardening is a subset of life, whereas gardeners, including Čapek, understand that life is a subset of gardening.“
–Robert Pogue Harrison
My first meaningful exposure to the work of Čapek came through Leoš Janáček’s amazing 1925 opera, The Makropulos Affair, which is based on Čapek’s play of the same name. I suppose you could call it a science fiction opera: a young woman becomes the laboratory rat of her alchemist father, who is tasked by Emporer Rudolf II to devise a formula that will extend his life by three centuries. When given the potion, the daughter at first drops into a coma. However, when she wakes up, she truly has been transformed into being able to live another 300 years. In living through those extra years she becomes increasingly detached from her original humanity as she is forced to leave one mortal husband after another and loved ones fade around her. At the end of the opera, even though she is in possession of her father’s formula for the elixir that would allow her to keep extending her life, she refuses to concoct the drink and chooses humanity–and death.
It’s a powerful tale with echoes all the way back to the Odyssey, where Odysseus declines eternal life in favor of his known, mortal one, back in Ithaca with the family and friends he knows and loves. Also, Čapek, ever rooted in the earth and distrustful of the quick, shallow pleasures of “progress,” uses the play to express his dis-ease with where unthinking application of the technologies that were exploding around him would lead the human race.
I bring all this up because I’ve been reading Gardens: An Essay on the Human Condition, by Robert Pogue Harrison. One of the chapters is devoted to Čapek and his work, The Gardener’s Year. The quote at the beginning of this post comes from that chapter, as does this second by Čapek himself, in an extended quote:
I tell you, to tame a couple of rods of soil is a great victory… And if you have no appreciation for this strange beauty, let fate bestow upon you a couple of rods of clay–clay like lead, squelching and primeval clay out of which coldness oozes; which yields under the spade like chewing-gum, which bakes in the sun and gets sour in the shade; ill-tempered, unmalleable, greasy, and sticky like plasters of Paris, slippery like a snake, and dry like a brick, impermeable like tin, and heavy like lead. And now smash it with a pick-axe, cut it with a spade, break it with a hammer, turn it over and labour, cursing aloud and lamenting.
Then you will understand the animosity and callousness of dead and sterile matter which ever did defend itself, and still does, against becoming a soil of life; and you will realize what a terrible fight life must have undergone, inch by inch, to root in the soil of the earth, whether that life be called vegetation or man.
All this may sound a little dense and difficult going, but others of Harrison’s quotes from Čapek’s work show it to be incredibly funny at the same time. I have plenty of books lined up that I need to read, but this one is moving to the front of the queue.
July 07 2008 | Categories: everything • gardening • quotes • rambles | Tags: Gardener's Year • Karel Capek • opera • Robert Pogue Harrison • technology | 3 Comments »
I’ve been reading parts of The Afterlife of Gardens, by John Dixon Hunt, a book on gardens that comes at the subject from an interestingly different take. Where most books on gardens discuss the design aspects of gardens, and many books on gardening talk about plants and their needs, this volume tries to be a “reception study,” using a technique prevalent in analyses of literary texts “by exploring how sites are experienced, often through a longue durée of existence, change and reformulation.” It’s definitely an academic work, maybe one better suited to the late autumn months when the garden outside is tucked into its winter bed than this time of year when you want to be out in it, experiencing all the outrageous pleasures it has to offer.
One of the early chapters bears an intriguing title, “The Garden as Virtual Reality,” and it’s a look at some of the ways how gardens achieve their meaning. Here’s a snippet:
…I want to pursue the idea of the physical garden itself as a virtual reality. For one way of thinking about landscape architecture is to emphasize the way in which it affords visitors many of the same opportuniries as do sites on a computer screen: digitally, the visitor may choose his or her route, clicking on the mouse and opting for a variety of different paths, different experiences, different associations and ideas. Visiting a real site entails much of the same process, although now the“mouse” is a person’s deliberate or instinctive selection of routes and meanings withing the one territory… This kind of visitation of a real garden also involves constant interaction of the subject and object, since the exploration of a real landscape is by no means a passive activity; even a small urban square requires us to “get to know it,” with its elements directing our growing acquaintance with its potential as a space to inhabit.
In this way all good landscape architecture also manages to project a sense both of reality and of virtuality. There is the palpable, haptic place, smelling, sounding, catching the eye…; then there is also the sense of an invented or special place, this invention resulting from the creation of richer and fuller experiences than would be possible, at least in such completeness or intensity, if they were not designed. Like cyberspace, a designed landscape is always at bottom a fiction, a contrivance–yet its hold on our imagination will derive, paradoxically, from the actual materiality of its invented sceneries.
June 20 2008 | Categories: landscape design • quotes | Tags: Afterlife of Gardens • John Dixon Hunt • philosphy • virtual reality | No Comments »
Earlier I posted a couple of my tourist pictures of Idaho’s Shoshone Falls, the “Niagara of the West.” I’ve just begun to scan and print the negatives of the large-format work from the trip. Here are three from the falls:
Viewpoint at Shoshone Falls, Snake River, Idaho:
Shoshone Falls Park:
Parking Lot at Shoshone Falls Park:
Interestingly, in the pile of newspapers John had saved for me from while I was away, was a book review in the L.A. Times of Ginger Strand’s Inventing Niagara. Interestingly too, in browsing for the book on the web I noticed that it has two different subtitles: “Beauty, Power and Lies,” as well as the more provocative “How Industry, Commerce and Art Conspire to Sell (Out) a Natural Wonder.”
I’d lamented that the Niagara of the West had been despoiled and exploited to an unseemly theme-parkness, and in this long quote in the review Strand has similar things to say about the Niagara of the East:
Manicured, repaired, landscaped and artificailly lit, dangerous overhangs dynamited off and water flow managed to suit the tourist schedule, the Falls are more a monument to man’s meddling than to nature’s strength. In fact, they are a study in self-delusion: we visit them to encounter something real, then observe them through fake Indian tales, audio tours and IMAX films… We hold them up as an example of unconquerable nature even as we applaud the daredevil’s and power-brokers who conquer them. And we congratulate ourselves for preserving nature’s beauty in an ecosystem that, beneath its shimmering emerald surface, reflects our own ugly ability to destroy. On every level, Niagara Falls is a monument to the ways America falsifies its relationship to nature, reshaping its contours, redirecting its force, claiming to submit to its will while imposing our own on it.
Reviewer Tim Rutter, as much as he likes a lot of what Strand has to say, ends up finding the writing of the book to be tiring and frustrating. In that most post-modern technique now turning into cliche, the author’s process of writing the book plays a starring role in the book. When well done it can still be interesting, but in this example Rutter didn’t think that it was. Take that pronouncement under advisement, but it still sounds like the book is a worthwhile read.
June 16 2008 | Categories: art • landscape • places • quotes • rambles | Tags: human effects • natural world • Niagara Falls • parks • Shoshone Falls | 2 Comments »
I was thumbing through The American Lawn, edited by Georges Teyssot, a collection of thoughts on the phenomenon of American lawns by eight contributors. It’s a wide ranging collection of essays looking at the place of lawns in American culture since colonial days. One of the pieces, “The Electric Lawn” by Mark Wigley, has a couple of quotes that interested me in my current disenchantment with all things turf-related.
On lawns and power relationships:
While renderings for clients may show the lawn, and manuals of drawing technique may describe the ways in which it can be represented, the drawings with which architects communicate to themselves and other architects leave the lawn out. It is assumed that wherever there is nothing specified in the drawing there is grass. The lawn is treated like the paper on which the projects are drawn, a tabula rasa without any inherent interest, a background that merely clears the way for the main event. Yet the lawn is always precisely controlled, whether by the architect or landscape designer. Lawns are all about control. The green frame is far from neutral or innocent. What is left out of the picture often rules the picture.
And a look at 50s green-lawned utopia gone bad:
The deadly lawnmower is the star of the dark side of suburban life. Take Stephen King, the high priest of suburban gothic. In his 1985 film Maximum Overdrive, a passing alien spaceship causes all the machines on the planet to turn against their operators–insulting, taunting, torturing, and then killing. A young boy rides his bicycle down the middle of a generic suburban street. Lawns pass by on either side. The only sign of trouble is that the automatic sprinklers uncannily respond to his presence…A blood-stained lawnmower lurks behind a tree, idling, waiting. When the boy finally stops, it roars to life and chases him down the street…
Well, I didn’t see that movie, and Leonard Maltin rates it a bomb: “Stupid and boring.” Maybe a couple of interesting takes on suburbia, but nothing for the Netflix queue…
April 28 2008 | Categories: gardening • landscape design • quotes | Tags: lawnmowers • lawns • Mark Wigley | No Comments »
Are gardeners more humble people? Do we know things a lot of others don’t or believe in things others choose not to believe? Here are a couple thoughts for Earth Day, the first one a soft feather bed of a quote, the second one a bed of nails.
Human beings–any one of us, and our species as a whole–are not all-important, not at the center of the world. That is the one essential piece of information, the one great secret, offered by any encounter with the woods or the mountains or the ocean or any wilderness or chunk of nature or patch of night sky.–Bill McKibben in an interview with Susan Salter Reynolds, in the Los Angeles Times Book Review, April 13.
If wildlife species are to become extinct, that will be regrettable. But any literate person knows that extinction is the way of evolution, and is in the fundamental flow of life. However, man is different. If man is not immortal, then there is no purpose or meaning in his existence. Which in turn would mean no purpose or meaning in the universe. The human immortality imperative is absolute and radical. That is why wildlife conservation has never been permitted to move to the questions of ultimate value. There is no place for an ultimate nonhuman value in our western metaphysics, because of necessity, the human interest is the cosmic interest. That is what it is all about. Wildlife is an “externality.” — John. A. Livingston in The Fallacy of Wildlife Conservation, in The John A. Livingston Reader (2007: 101).
April 22 2008 | Categories: gardening • quotes • rambles | Tags: Bill McKibben • ecology • evolution • John A. Livingston • natural world • why people garden | 1 Comment »
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