visiting crestridge

For today’s Gar­den Blog­gers’ Bloom Day I’m doing some­thing a lit­tle dif­fer­ent. My gar­den looks a lot like it has in recent posts, so I thought I’d take you along on a tour last week­end of Cre­stridge Eco­log­i­cal Pre­serve, in San Diego County, a lit­tle over half an hour from the coast. The flow­ers were out in force.

One of the inter­est­ing nar­ra­tives of this place is how a land­scape responds to being burned. This pre­serve and many of the homes around it burned intensely in the big 2003 Cedar Fire. A lot of the homes nearby with their new tile roofs and crisp, new stucco look like they’ve been rebuilt out of the ashes.

Same goes for the plants. The Engel­mann oaks that help define the char­ac­ter of the pre­serve burned. But many are bounc­ing back. Really, if it weren’t for the burned snags it’d be hard to guess that this area was cin­ders seven and a half years ago.

The Pre­serve fea­tures a small vis­i­tor kiosk designed by James T. Hubbell, the county’s best known pro­po­nent of organic archi­tec­ture. Wood post-and-beam con­struc­tion with straw-bale infill makes up the walls of the one-room space. Floors are a mix of flag­stone and tile mosaics. Very groovy.

Around the kiosk is a native plant gar­den funded by a grant by the local CNPS chap­ter. Unlike the land­scape around it, this gar­den receives some irri­ga­tion to keep it look­ing more garden-like. But today the gar­den extended seam­less into the sur­round­ing landscape.

The flo­ral high­light of the trip is the the preserve’s stand of the rare Lake­side cean­othus, Cean­othus cya­neus. It’s vivid, dark color and big flo­ral heads make it what must be one of the most spec­tac­u­lar of the cean­othus species. It’s not par­tic­u­larly gar­den tol­er­ant, but given per­fect drainage and no water once estab­lished, it might hang around for a few years and stop traf­fic pass­ing by your garden.

On this trip we saw this lilac, as well as late-blooming exam­ples of the much more com­mon but less spec­tac­u­lar Ramona lilac, Cean­othus tomen­to­sus, and some inter­grades that look like they’re the love chil­dren of these two species.

Below is a lit­tle gallery of the visit. Hover on any image for a label of the plant. Click to see the entire image.


Check out what’s hap­pen­ing in gar­dens around the world in the other Gar­den Blog­gers Bloom Day posts hosted by Carol, of May Dreams Gar­dens. As always, thanks, Carol!

May 15 2011 | Categories: landscape • places | Tags: • • • • • • • • | 13 Comments »

sun and smoke

Here’s a quick invite to any­one in the area to check out my piece in the cur­rent Juried Bien­niel at the William D. Can­non Gallery in Carls­bad. The show runs through March 18.

James Soe Nyun. Sun and Smoke, Video Still (Two Suns), 2010. Pig­ment print lam­i­nated to plex­i­glass, 18 x 36 inches.

This is a still from a video work in progress that uses still images that I took star­ing into the sun dur­ing the big Octo­ber, 2003 Cedar Fire that was the largest of sev­eral firestorms that burned through this part of California.

This past Octo­ber we didn’t get the intense dry winds from the desert that often hit that time of year. Instead, we’ve been get­ting those Santa Ana winds now, mak­ing for a warm win­ter, with humid­ity down into the teens or sin­gle digits.

I’ll take a warm win­ter over a hot Octo­ber. But the intense fire weather will be back as sure as this is Cal­i­for­nia. No par­adise is perfect.

February 04 2011 | Categories: art | Tags: • • • | 3 Comments »

after the fires

After San Diego County’s fires of 2003 moved into new areas, I was one of those tacky dis­as­ter tourists who went into some of the recently reopened areas. It’s inter­est­ing what moti­vates peo­ple to do things of the sort. An acquain­tance with doc­u­men­tary pho­tog­ra­pher aspi­ra­tions scours the world for dis­as­ter, and has gone to wit­ness famine in Africa and Asia, and was in Banda Ache in 2005 not long after the pre­vi­ous December’s tsunami. What can you wit­ness in times like that?

I wasn’t look­ing for human suf­fer­ing. Also, I had no inter­est in the mawk­ish Hallmark-card exploita­tion of some weird sort of notion of human dig­nity that emerges in des­per­ate times. I was pri­mar­ily inter­ested in the fires as one whop­ping dose of real­ity of the power of nature, just as I have this fas­ci­na­tion of vol­ca­noes and earth­quakes, not for the ter­rors they can unleash on us humans, but more for a much-needed dose of human humil­ity. I think that we humans are blis­ter­ingly arro­gant as a species and need to be rat­tled into con­scious­ness about our place in the universe.

You can make some of these dis­cov­er­ies while gar­den­ing, observ­ing the world and uncov­er­ing your place in it. But I guess I’m dense enough that it takes some­thing cat­a­clysmic to give me the rest of the story. Dunno…maybe it’s the same kind of need that dri­ves peo­ple to moun­tain climb­ing or NASCAR…

So there I went, out into the burn areas, mostly to the back­coun­try, but also around my neigh­bor­hood. Look­ing back at the pho­tos I took I think that I was look­ing to find some sort of order or beauty out of the mess. Was it look­ing for some sort of reas­sur­ance? Or maybe some­thing approach­ing accep­tance? Mak­ing peace with the real­i­ties of the world?

La Jolla Panorama with Smoke I, Day 3, 2003.

Here’s the left half of a dip­tych taken on the third day of the fires from the top of Mount Soledad, a view­point that on other days gives you a view of the ocean, down­town San Diego and the moun­tains to the east. This was day three of the fires, with the flames now prob­a­bly no closer than ten miles away. But that day most of what you saw was the air, thick with smoke and the color of burnt caramel.

“Tim Loves Julia” Rock, near El Cap­i­tan Reser­voir, Day 3, 2003.

Taken the same day as the pre­vi­ous image, this was out just a cou­ple miles from where the Cedar Fire began. With the winds blow­ing east-to-west, the air was sur­pris­ingly clear imme­di­ately over­head but the smell of ash was every­where. This boul­der with the graf­fiti was prob­a­bly about as close as I got to look­ing at that human dig­nity thing. I won­der if Tim and Julia are still together. Or was this just some drunken mid­night out­ing with a six­pack and a can of spraypaint?

My first tourist pic­tures turned into a small pho­to­graphic series, The Fire Works. Over the course of sev­eral months I vis­ited many areas that had burned and looked for the signs of change, restora­tion or recovery.

Mis­sion Trails Park II, 3 Months Later, 2004.

After three months and a few rains things were still black­ened, but the green was start­ing to come back.

Mis­sion Trails Park VI, 3 Months Later, 2004.

Taken the same after­noon as the pre­vi­ous image, the signs of recov­ery are a lit­tle more sub­tle in this pic­ture. Imme­di­ately after the fire the rocks were black. Now they’re washed white. In a large print of this image you can see lit­tle seedlings return­ing to the park.

Rock and Branches, Cuya­maca Ran­cho State Park, 6 Months Later, 2004.

The Cuya­maca Moun­tains expe­ri­enced some of the most intense burn­ing. But add some time, sun­light and water and you end up with one of the more spec­tac­u­lar spring wild­flower blooms I’d seen in a few years.

Hill with Wild­flow­ers, Cuya­maca Ran­cho State Park, 6 Months Later, 2004.

…And this is one of the last images I took in the series, the fol­low­ing May. With the major­ity of the pines in the Cuya­maca Ran­cho State Park wiped out, restora­tion was far from com­plete. It may take longer than my life­time, and things will never be exactly as they were. But nature is doing what it does and doing it beautifully.

This project was a real eye-opener for me. You can read about the trans­for­ma­tions that occur after a fire and appre­ci­ate the facts. Still, there’s noth­ing like get­ting out into the areas that were affected to give me a much deeper appre­ci­a­tion of the changes.

After 2007’s fires, how­ever, after watch­ing too many days of dis­as­ter cov­er­age on tele­vi­sion, I had no incli­na­tion what­so­ever to repeat my post-fire sur­veys of 2003 and 2004. I stayed in the house, turned on the HEPA air fil­ter I’d bought after the ear­lier fires, and tried my best not to let the hor­rific news cov­er­age get to me. Some­times you feel that a human being has seen enough.

Speak­ing of things that humans prob­a­bly shouldn’t have to ever live through, let me plug a book by one of my recent cowork­ers, Paul Har­ris, who’s recently pub­lished Diary From The Dome: Reflec­tions on Fear and Priv­i­lege Dur­ing Kat­rina.

Paul went as tourist to New Orleans, look­ing to spend a laid-back week tak­ing in what the South­ern city had to offer. Instead he ended up in the mid­dle of Hur­ri­cane Kat­rina, evac­u­ated to the Super­dome along with thou­sands of the city’s res­i­dents who couldn’t find a way out of town. You’ve heard or read of some of what hap­pened there, but Paul gives an espe­cially har­row­ing account of the the expe­ri­ence. He saw and lived through things none of the press reported, includ­ing how being a white tourist gave you priv­i­leges that none of the major­ity black res­i­dents were offered. This book will open your eyes.

October 19 2008 | Categories: art • landscape • photography • places | Tags: • • • • | 1 Comment »

fire season

I’ve been think­ing a lot about fire lately. I blogged a few days ago about start­ing an infor­mal exper­i­ment to look at ways to start seeds that require fire to ger­mi­nate. And lately we’ve been expe­ri­enc­ing the sort of dan­ger­ous fire con­di­tions that you only see in the autumn here in South­ern California.

When the dry Santa Ana winds scour west­ward from the desert an hour to the east, they can bring to Octo­ber some of the warmest days of the year. At the same time, as these dry, gale-force winds blow west­ward through the moun­tain passes, they breed dan­ger­ous con­di­tions for major wildfires.

Mon­day night, as I was leav­ing the office, some­one stopped me on the way out. “Have you heard about the fires?” he asked. The Los Ange­les area had been see­ing fires over the last cou­ple of days and now Camp Pendle­ton, forty miles to the north, was burn­ing. Peo­ple were being evac­u­ated from their homes.

Oh no. Here we go again, I thought. For­tu­nately, sev­eral days later, those fires all seem to be doused or at least on the way to con­tain­ment. But the fire weather is still with us.

It was almost a year ago when John and I were up on the roof deck, hav­ing an early din­ner, enjoy­ing a freak­ishly warm Octo­ber after­noon. Look­ing directly west the hori­zon was clear, but to both the north and south there were dark streaks of smoke. Dri­ven by the same desert winds that had made that after­noon so remark­ably warm, the smoke rose high into the atmos­phere from sources far­ther inland and streaked out over the ocean. Things were burn­ing, and it was look­ing bad.

Above: An enhanced NASA image of the San Diego County fires that first after­noon, Octo­ber 22, 2007 [ source ]

One of John’s cowork­ers lost his home that first night of the fire. Over the next sev­eral days, hun­dreds of thou­sands of oth­ers were tem­porar­ily home­less when they were ordered to leave their homes in the largest evac­u­a­tion in Cal­i­for­nia his­tory. In the final tally, a quar­ter of the county’s land had burned and at least peo­ple seven had lost their lives, includ­ing sev­eral migrant work­ers who were trav­el­ing on foot, north to their jobs. (Ear­lier this year pro­ducer Laura Cas­taneda put out a doc­u­men­tary, The Devil’s Breath, on some of their sto­ries. When the his­tory of the migrant work­ers is writ­ten, it’ll be full of the sort of heroic fig­ures and try­ing cir­cum­stances that pop­u­late the Amer­i­can nar­ra­tive of the set­tle­ment of the “wild west.” )

Last year’s fires had fol­lowed a set of even more destruc­tive ones in 2003. Those came closer to my house than last year’s flames–within maybe three miles–and that first morn­ing saw a hot rain of ash and even embers.

The pho­to­jour­nal­ists were rush­ing to the fire lines, try­ing to get a shot of the dev­as­ta­tion. But it was the vision of the sun veiled in smoke drew out my cam­era that first morn­ing. There’s a color to the light that comes with fire, a per­va­sive and almost sticky yellow-brown that reminds you of sun­set col­ors even in the mid­dle of the day, but the brown­ing effect is so pro­found that every­thing looks wrong. If I didn’t tell you that the images were of smoke you might con­sider the images beau­ti­fully atmos­pheric. I guess they are, but there’s that scary coun­ter­bal­anc­ing of some­thing being out of con­trol and dangerous.

(That vibra­tion of beauty and ter­ror goes straight back to eighteenth-century aes­thet­ics, and to early writ­ings of peo­ple like Joseph Addi­son, who remarked that “The Alps fill the mind with an agree­able kind of hor­ror.” This is rich ground that been mined by a num­ber of artists for the last quarter-millennium. In the pho­tog­ra­phy world, John Pfahl and Richard Mis­rach are just a cou­ple of those who have pro­duced sig­nif­i­cant bod­ies of work draw­ing on this con­flicted Roman­tic notion of the sub­lime. And as long as peo­ple have this notion of awe and pow­er­less­ness, there will be cen­turies more of art draw­ing from it.)

[ next, after the fires… ]

October 18 2008 | Categories: art • landscape • photography • rambles | Tags: • • • | 3 Comments »