[ Lost in the Landscape ]

piece o’ history

Here’s the lat­est addi­tion to the gar­den, a small chunk of the House of Hos­pi­tal­ity in Bal­boa Park, a small chunk of San Diego archi­tec­tural history.

In the late 1990s the city reha­bil­i­tated the build­ing, one of many his­toric struc­tures built as tem­po­rary exhi­bi­tion spaces for the 1915 Panama–PacificCal­i­for­nia Expo­si­tion. The exhibit halls weren’t really intended to be a land­marks to pass into time immemo­r­ial. But the city has grown attached to these exam­ples of Chur­rigueresque archi­tec­ture, and the build­ings are actively preserved.

(“Chur­rigueresque” refers to the Spanish/Catalan archi­tect José Ben­ito de Chur­riguera, who devel­oped a fairly elab­o­rate Rococo style of orna­ment that was picked up in Colo­nial Mex­ico. Bertram Good­hue and Car­leton M. Winslow, the archi­tects who worked on the Expo­si­tion, stud­ied the style in Mex­ico and brought it a few miles north of the bor­der. The over-the-top plas­ter details made for dra­matic and escapist expo­si­tion build­ings, but the details are high main­te­nance and can begin to fail over the years. It got to the point that the orna­men­ta­tion was falling off the build­ings and threat­en­ing to ka-bonk passers-by.)

“Preser­va­tion” of the build­ing went through sev­eral phases, and even­tu­ally employed the wreck­ing ball. The old House of Hos­pi­tal­ity was demol­ished and a new one erected in its place. To make sure that the new build­ing closely resem­bled the orig­i­nal the old orna­men­ta­tion was removed from the build­ings and casts made. The new orna­men­ta­tion is now made of glass-fiber-reinforced-concrete instead of the orig­i­nal horsehair-reinforced plaster.

Rather than land­fill­ing the old archi­tec­tural orna­men­ta­tion, the inter­est­ing chunks were sold off to ben­e­fit the preser­va­tion efforts. And it was on a fran­tic Sat­ur­day morn­ing in 1997 where we were able to fight off some of the most aggres­sive shop­pers I’ve ever encoun­tered to pick up this piece of local his­tory. I’m pretty sure that my chunk of his­tory comes from the tower in the photo above, from around the arches.

The frag­ment was really cool, but it sat in var­i­ous cor­ners of the house and my stu­dio as we decided what to do with it. Last month we finally decided to lib­er­ate the piece back to the out­doors. Here’s its prob­a­bly final rest­ing place, attached to a long blank stretch of fence above the fishpond.

I don’t typ­i­cally go in for lots of gar­den art or pieces of fake Roman arti­facts sprin­kled around a gar­den. But I was happy with how this rel­a­tively small chunk of Bal­boa Park serves as a cool focal point for a part of the gar­den presided over by a long, plain fence.

In demol­ish­ing the orig­i­nal build­ing and dis­pers­ing its sur­faces the city has man­aged an odd sort of preser­va­tion. Zoos and botan­i­cal gar­dens some­times have the sad bur­den of keep­ing alive species that no longer exist in the wild. And my back yard holds a piece of a build­ing that exists only in a fac­sim­ile of the original.

June 27 2011 | Categories: art • gardening • my garden • places | Tags: architectural extinctions • architecture • Balboa Park • garden art • House of Hospitality • preservation | 8 Comments »

botanical side trip

While I was vis­it­ing San Diego’s Earth Day cel­e­bra­tions on Sun­day, I took a quick detour into Bal­boa Park’s Botan­i­cal Build­ing. It dates back to the 1914–15 Panama Pacific Expo­si­tion, and lays claim to being one of the largest lath struc­tures in the world.

It was an odd feel­ing to leave the sun-drenched cel­e­bra­tion of sus­tain­able liv­ing out­side and shift gears into the shaded, misted, and heav­ily watered Botan­i­cal Build­ing. Humid and trop­i­cal, the inte­rior reminded me of the over-watered vision of par­adise that many peo­ple still think of when they think of Cal­i­for­nia. Palms, cycads, bego­nias, orchids and other trop­i­cals and sub­trop­i­cals lazed in the shade or reached for the light dozens of feet overhead.

I usu­ally go to pub­lic gar­dens and keep an eye out for things I’d like to have in my own gar­den. Gar­dens are amaz­ingly demo­c­ra­tic that way. If you look hard enough, you can often find some of the rarest plants, espe­cially now with the web avail­able to help source them.

In these days of loom­ing water rationing, how­ever, I felt a lit­tle queasy that the Botan­i­cal Build­ing was show­cas­ing all sorts of water-intensive plants San Die­gans are try­ing not to fix­ate on so much these days. Our aver­age tem­per­a­tures enable the growth of these plants, our reg­u­lar rain­fall does not.

As I was think­ing about that queasi­ness, I real­ized that many of the Bal­boa Park build­ings nearby are muse­ums that are full of unique objects or things that would be so far beyond my means to buy. The resources of these muse­ums are focused on giv­ing the pub­lic access to things and ideas they might not ordi­nar­ily encounter. I decided to try to think of the Botan­i­cal Build­ing that way, as a sort of botan­i­cal museum. Although I could prob­a­bly find many of its plants if I searched hard enough–and a few of them are actu­ally totally common–I decided to try to look at and appre­ci­ate the plants as if they were museum objects I didn’t need to own.

And as my indig­na­tion started to lift, I started to be appre­cia­tive. Wasn’t it great that peo­ple in the city have a place where they can go visit some inter­est­ing plants but not have to worry about water­ing and car­ing for them? And the Botan­i­cal Build­ing is free! If peo­ple decide to cre­ate lit­tle pock­ets of par­adise at home, they don’t need to do their whole gar­dens this way. A lit­tle shaded cor­ner could give you a lot of the same sense of cool­ness and shel­ter that the Botan­i­cal Build­ing does.

In addi­tion to the big lath house, Bal­boa Park offers a num­ber of other plant­i­ngs, includ­ing two suc­cu­lent gar­dens. So it’s not like the park spends all its resources pimp­ing an out­dated vision of South­ern Cal­i­for­nia. And there’s value in see­ing an old-school plant­ing of this sort to help appre­ci­ate how local ideas about gar­den­ing have shifted.

So…back to my visit. Lots of things were in flower, but I ended up focus­ing on plants with var­ie­gated leaves that were used through­out the build­ing. No for­est would have so many var­ie­gated plants in so small a space, but this “gar­den museum” did a nice job in show­cas­ing some of the botan­i­cal world’s inter­est­ing foliage pat­terns. Take a look…

(As usual you click on the images to enlarge them, espe­cially if the signs in the thumb­nails are too small to read…)

Cycla­men

Ire­sine herbstii

April 21 2009 | Categories: gardening • places | Tags: Balboa Park • Balboa Park Botanical Building • foliage • variegated leaves • water use | 3 Comments »

earth day fair

Yes­ter­day was the big city Earth Day fair here in town at Bal­boa Park. Buoyed by tem­per­a­tures in the 80s, tens of thou­sands of peo­ple came out to celebrate.

Get­ting to the park required some form of travel, which for many peo­ple meant par­tic­i­pat­ing in a three mile traf­fic jam to exit at the park. (Just a lit­tle bit of irony in peo­ple in get­ting into their inter­nal com­bus­tion pow­ered vehi­cles to cel­e­brate the earth, don’t you think?)

With the main core of Bal­boa Park ded­i­cated to pedes­tri­ans and the fair, park­ing a car there was pretty impos­si­ble. The orga­niz­ers had arranged for remote park­ing and shut­tles, which seemed to be work­ing well.

I rode my scooter, which made park­ing in the unused space between cars easy. I give myself a few brownie points for dri­ving some­thing that’s pretty fuel-efficient, though in real­ity a car­load of peo­ple in a Hum­mer would have used about the same amount of gas to get there. I’m try­ing to get greener, really. (All of you read­ing this, hold me to it–Guilt works. So does an appeal to my sense of the greater good.)

In the end, though, even on a hot day, the way to get there was on two feet–or two wheels. Cars were barred from enter­ing the core of the park, and there was free valet park­ing for bicy­cles. Yeeha!

Once you got there you had your choice of 400-plus booths. Native plant soci­ety? Check. Land­scape con­trac­tors spe­cial­iz­ing in low-water land­scapes? Sev­eral. Infor­ma­tion on greener res­i­den­tial con­struc­tion prac­tices (includ­ing solar energy)? Or on most of the pub­lic nat­ural park­lands around the county? Or on con­vert­ing your car to a purely elec­tric vehi­cle? Absolutely.

Left: A 1930s (1932?) Rolls Royce that has been turned into a purely elec­tric vehicle.

On such a warm day I felt really sorry for the per­son in this garbage can cos­tume that was meant to draw atten­tion to city waste issues. But he or she was incred­i­bly perky all the time I watched. Bet­ter than the wilted guy in the banana suit nearby.

One of the kid-friendly booths was this hands-on demon­stra­tion of paper-making using recy­cled paper. I watched a girl of prob­a­bly no more than five star­ing at the lit­tle sheet of paper that she’d just made, like it was the most mag­i­cal object in the world.

And of course there were booths to buy earthly stuff: water stor­age sys­tems (a lit­tle pricey at over $6 per gal­lon of capac­ity), elec­tric bicy­cles, cool suc­cu­lents, san­dals, teeshirts, ket­tle corn… Okay, some of the offer­ings were more oppor­tunis­tic than they were green, but hey, it’s a fes­ti­val. The home-made lemon­ade stand caught my inter­est, but even by not long after noon, they were sold out. Waaah.

Events like this are inter­est­ing to see what’s being pushed as the lat­est great­est thing, and some of the green con­struc­tion tech­nolo­gies were pretty big. Fif­teen years ago an event like this would have been filled with peo­ple demon­strat­ing their double-paned win­dow sys­tems. Yes­ter­day I might have seen one out­fit offer­ing a spe­cial­ized ver­sion of insu­lated glaz­ing. That goes to show how what may have seemed cool and exotic a decade ago can become commonplace–and even part of reg­u­la­tions. It gives me hope that we’re see­ing a lot of peo­ple work­ing on some of our big prob­lems. And what’s con­sid­ered a bou­tique indus­try this year might be com­mon as dirt in a decade. Solar-electric kettle-corn stor­age sys­tems, anyone?

Crowds or not, I always enjoy going to Bal­boa Park. Here are just a few ran­dom sights. I’ll post tomor­row on what was going on in the botan­i­cal build­ing, seem­ingly obliv­i­ous to the Earth Day happenings.

Always a crowd-pleaser, the wild trunks of the Aus­tralian tea tree (Lep­tosper­mum lae­vi­ga­tum) were draw­ing pho­tog­ra­phers every few min­utes. I’ve loved this plant ever since I saw it in the 1970s at the Los Ange­les County Arbore­tum. I might have room for one if I nuke every­thing else in the back yard…

The park is devot­ing itself more to Cal­i­for­nia native plants. Here’s a new plant­ing of bush poppy (Den­drome­con, prob­a­bly har­fordii) with a ground­cover ceonothus.

In my clois­tered life a tightly cropped patch of lawn is a pretty exotic sight. And then add lawn bowlers on top of that. Wow. Not things I see every day. The park is always great for keep­ing my eyes open…

April 20 2009 | Categories: places | Tags: Balboa Park • Earth Day | No Comments »

bird’s nest fern

Ferns are some of my favorite plants. Their del­i­cate leaves and strong archi­tec­tural forms keep me look­ing at them. The lit­tle ginkgo-shaped leaves and black stems of the maid­en­hair fern have to be right up there among my favorite kinds of fern.

But with all the delicate-looking ferns to choose from, what’s got to be another of my favorite is the bird’s nest fern (Asple­nium sp.). Here are some close­ups of the sides of the undi­vided spears of a spec­i­men at San Diego’s Bal­boa Park.

January 14 2009 | Categories: gardening | Tags: Balboa Park • birdsnest ferns | 5 Comments »

balboa park’s desert garden

Jan­u­ary can be an amaz­ing month for suc­cu­lents and other desert plants. Many aloes and agaves explode into bloom, and plants with ephemeral foliage are green with leaves in ways you don’t often see them.

San Diego’s Bal­boa Park houses one of the prime local col­lec­tion of cacti, suc­cu­lents and other desert dwellers from around the world. The Desert Gar­den, the larger of its two suc­cu­lent gar­dens, was estab­lished in 1976, but many of the plants are senior cit­i­zens much older than the age of the garden.

Aloes star in its Jan­u­ary land­scape, with red and orange torches of flow­ers that dou­ble as hum­ming­bird magnets.

And shown here, lurk­ing in the shad­ows, is one of the local hum­ming­birds, stak­ing its territory.

Among the big, mature spec­i­mens are sev­eral dragon trees, Dra­caena draco. In this first photo, on the near trunk, you can see a red­dish patch where the plant’s red sap has dried. When cut, these plants ooze a fluid that in some Euro­pean leg­ends was pur­ported to be dragon’s blood, hence the plant’s name (draco = dragon).

This is a pub­lic gar­den, and so it’s sub­ject to fund­ing glitches and bat­tles over civic pri­or­i­ties. I’d con­sider the gar­den to be in great con­di­tion con­sid­er­ing those limitations.

One thing I would have loved to have seen, though, would be more plant labels. I encoun­tered so many inter­est­ing species, but very few of them had name tags. I have this thing about need­ing to know the name of a plant–Call me com­pul­sive. But the lack of labels drove me crazy. I real­ize, how­ever, that tags don’t come cheap. And in a wide-open pub­lic gar­den, labels can walk away with pieces of suc­cu­lents in the hands of evil plant addicts.

One of the plants that was labeled was this Natal Bot­tle­brush, Greyia suther­landii. A bit scrappy-looking as a plant, but what great flowers!

Also labeled was the Mada­gas­car ocotillo, Allu­au­dia pro­cera. I loved the spi­ral pat­tern­ing of its spines.

Another prob­lem with this being a pub­lic gar­den is that there are quite a few spec­i­mens where people’s temp­ta­tions to carve their ini­tials in the plant life got the bet­ter of them. This euphor­bia was scarred many times over. But that wasn’t going to stop it from blooming.

After vis­it­ing the gar­den I was sur­prised by how many shots I’d racked up in the cam­era. And for some rea­son, the major­ity of them were ver­ti­cals. Is there some­thing about succulents–particularly the upright-growing kinds that mimic the way a human stands–that scream out for pho­tograph­ing them in an upright orientation?

Some yuc­cas, I think, with spent bloom stems.

Boo­jum trees, Fouquieria colum­naris, native to Baja Cal­i­for­nia. This plant is in the same genus as the Cal­i­for­nia desert’s spec­tac­u­lar ocotillo, which inter­est­ingly isn’t related to the Madas­car ocotillo, above.

Aloes and kalan­choes in bloom.

The main gar­den is a flat, easy stroll over wide decom­posed gran­ite path­ways. As part of a recent expan­sion, the gar­den now also includes this switch­back down into Florida Canyon, also part of Bal­boa Park. The plants along the descent are still young, but should look spec­tac­u­lar in a decade or so.

Not every­one in the world loves cac­tus and suc­cu­lents. They might point to the defen­sive spines many of the plants have, and they might say the sculp­tural shapes of the plants don’t look soft and cozy like leafy shrubs or fra­grant roses. Next to the Desert Gar­den is Bal­boa Park’s rose gar­den. Dur­ing spring­time, thirty sec­onds of walk­ing would take you from the world of cac­tus and suc­cu­lents to a gar­den manic with flow­ers and heavy with the aroma of roses. But on this bright Jan­u­ary day, the adja­cent roses were pruned down to naked stems and pierc­ing thorns. It was the cac­tus and suc­cu­lents that looked warm and welcoming.

The Desert Gar­den is located across Park Boule­vard from the Nat­ural His­tory Museum on Bal­boa Park’s museum row. The gar­den has no walls, no entry fee, and is open 24/7, 365 days of the year.

If the 2.5 acres of the Desert Gar­den isn’t enough of a cac­tus and suc­cu­lent fix, cross Park Boule­vard and take a stroll over to the Bal­boa Park Club, maybe ten min­utes on foot, and take in the parks orig­i­nal 1935 cac­tus gar­den, which, accord­ing to the park’s web­site, was estab­lished “under the direc­tion of [San Diego gar­den­ing leg­end] Kate Ses­sions for the 1935 Cal­i­for­nia Pacific Inter­na­tional Expo­si­tion.” There you’ll find “some of the largest cac­tus and suc­cu­lent spec­i­mens in the Park,” along with a nice col­lec­tion of proteas.

January 11 2009 | Categories: gardening • photography • places • plant profiles | Tags: Balboa Park • Balboa Park Desert Garden • cacti • desert plants • drought-tolerant landscaping • in bloom • succulents | 3 Comments »

balboa park holiday lights

Sat­ur­day night John’s wind ensem­ble had a con­cert in San Diego’s sig­na­ture Bal­boa Park. The park was dec­o­rated up for the hol­i­days with strings of lights, a sec­u­lar Santa with sleigh and rein­deer, and a decid­edly un-secular row of nativ­ity scenes.

In the last cou­ple of years most of the incan­des­cent lights got replaced with LEDs–Rah, green! But the wattage on every­thing seemed a lit­tle low this year. There were even a few thou­sand feet of light strings that were left in the “off” posi­tion. Maybe the city (which has been on eco­nomic hard times for sev­eral years now) decided not to splurge on run­ning more lights. Or maybe they were try­ing to make a state­ment that you can dec­o­rate for the hol­i­days with­out drain­ing the power grid.

What­ever the case, the dis­plays still did a pretty good job of fight­ing off that human fear of the dark at the same time they let you know that Dorothy, you’re not in Novem­ber any­more. Here are some pic­tures I took with John’s lit­tle dig­i­tal instamatic.

Enter­ing the park…

Palms and Christ­mas trees in the fore­ground, the Organ Pavil­lion (with the “world’s largest out­door organ”) in the background…

Another take on the palm and Christ­mas trees…

Acci­den­tal no-tripod hol­i­day light effects…

The park has a cou­ple of kid-scaled climbable sculp­tures by the late artist Niki de Saint Phalle, who used to live in town. These are extremely pop­u­lar with the lit­tle Gen Z’ers. Art that you can touch and climb all over–What a concept!

Here’s one of her fun, slob­ber­ing creatures…

And finally: El Cid (left, on horse­back) vs Santa (right, in sleigh).

Looks like El Cid won this one.

December 22 2008 | Categories: art • places | Tags: Balboa Park • christmas trees • holiday lights | 6 Comments »