out of darkness something blooms

I had a few CDs cross my desk that were recorded by a San Diego new music col­lec­tive called Trum­mer­flora. Their name sounded inter­est­ing, but I didn’t think another thing about it. Then in the book­let of one of the discs I read its definition:

Trum­mer­flora, or rub­ble plants and trees, are a spe­cial phe­nom­e­non unique to heav­ily bombed urban areas. The bomb acts as a plow, mix­ing rub­ble frag­ments with the earth, which often con­tain seeds dor­mant for a cen­tury or more. These seeds come to light and those that can live in this new and spe­cial earth grow and flour­ish.
–Helen and New­ton Harrison

So some­thing beau­ti­ful comes to light through acts of unspeak­able destruc­tion. Sud­denly I though that it was an amaz­ing word and a con­cept that holds out some hope that some­thing good can come out of the worst of sit­u­a­tions. Of course, this is a par­tic­u­larly tainted kind of good­ness, a sort of good­ness that you accept because the alter­na­tive is so much worse.

Trawl­ing around the web as I write this I couldn’t find other ref­er­ences to this word other than in the con­text of the musi­cians or the quote from the Har­risons. Did the Har­risons coin the word? (Of course, just becuase search engines don’t turn up some­thing, it doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist! (Or in this increas­ingly vir­tual word, maybe that’s exatly what it means?)) Or did the word spring to life–maybe in Germany?–after the dev­as­ta­tion of World War II?


Helen and New­ton Har­ri­son. Breath­ing Space for the Sava River, Yugoslavia, 1988 (detail). Pho­to­col­lage, text, maps. [ source ]

This whole notion of bring­ing life back to waste­lands has been one of the major themes of Helen Mayer Har­ri­son and New­ton Har­ri­son, the artists respon­si­ble for the quote in the first place. As a cou­ple they taught at the Uni­ver­sity of Cal­i­for­nia, San Diego from 1969–1993, and dur­ing this time I had the chance to see sev­eral of their exhi­bi­tions around town. Here’s a descrip­tion of their work­ing method in Bar­bara Matilsky’s 1992 book, Frag­ile ecolo­gies: Con­tem­po­rary artist’s inter­pre­ta­tions and solu­tions, quoted on a Green Museum page.

After first­hand study, research and inter­views with ecol­o­gists, biol­o­gists and plan­ners the artists cre­ate a pho­to­graphic nar­ra­tive that iden­ti­fies the prob­lem, ques­tions the sys­tem of beliefs that allow the con­di­tion to develop and pro­poses ini­tia­tives to counter envi­ron­men­tal dam­age. They exhibit their doc­u­men­ta­tion in a pub­lic forum–a museum, library, city hall–to stim­u­late dis­cus­sion, debate, and media atten­tion. By com­mu­ni­ca­tion to the pub­lic the prob­lems that con­front a frag­ile ecosys­tem and the ways in which the bal­ance can be restored, they exert pres­sure on the polit­i­cal sys­tem and rally pub­lic opin­ion in an attempt to avert eco­log­i­cal disaster.

So, while the New­tons would be pleased to see trom­mer­flora grow and thrive, their greater sat­is­fac­tion wouldn’t be achieved until we come to an under­stand­ing of the sys­tems that brought about the orig­i­nal destruc­tion. And if the projects became so suc­cess­ful that they’d anni­hi­late the need for its the artwork’s own exis­tence? I doubt the New­tons would mind, but I won’t be hold­ing my breath that we get there any­time soon.

Read fur­ther: The New­tons in their own words.

June 30 2008 | Categories: art • landscape design • places | Tags: • • • • • | 1 Comment »

those arrogant humans…

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: • • • • • | 1 Comment »