[ Lost in the Landscape ]

at the county fair

Are gar­den­ers ter­ror­ists? You’d think so look­ing at the sign posted out­side the San Diego County Fair.

This gar­dener took advan­tage of the “Fur­lough Fri­day” deal for state employ­ees (free admis­sion!) and checked out the offer­ings of the fair for the first time in half a decade. I guess the ratio­nale of free admis­sion was to get more peo­ple in the gate to par­take of the rides and stunt food–you know, the bizarre offer­ings that often involve impal­ing some­thing on a stick, stick­ing it in bat­ter, and then deep-frying it. I searched all over for the worst of the worst stunt food but the best (worst?) I could find was a stand offer­ing “fried Twinkie lattes”–really noth­ing more weird than a vanilla latte–and this trailer sell­ing choco­late cov­ered bacon. Nei­ther dish really seemed to be deep fried, so I guess they’re get­ting with the health-conscious kick…

My main des­ti­na­tion was the out­door gar­den dis­plays, where the main point of each dis­play seemed to be either attract­ing new cus­tomers to the land­scape firms there or–in the case of the non-profit insti­tu­tions and gar­den clubs–education. The fair’s never been about land­scape design as a high art, but there’s always inter­est­ing stuff there.

If there was theme to the dis­plays this year, “edi­bles” seemed to be the word, keep­ing up the health-conscious theme of the not-deep-fried chocolate-covered bacon. This dis­play by the San Diego Botanic Gar­den in Coop­er­a­tion with the San Diego Water Author­ity won the prize for the best edi­ble land­scape. The dis­play also won an award for the exhibit that arranged plants in a way that demon­strated “good taste.”

It fea­tured food crops and orna­men­tals of all sorts as long as they fit into the purple-pink-green-silver palette, and demon­strated that a gar­den with veg­gies could be as pulled together as any other gar­den. In its com­bi­na­tion of cool-weather crops (such as pur­ple cab­bage) with warm-weather ones (like basil and squash) it was also a reminder that this is a gar­den show than a real-world garden.

Here are a few more pho­tos of dis­plays that played with the edi­bles theme:

I kept my eye out for uses of native plants, but there were almost none. Part of that is prob­a­bly because the major­ity of the charis­matic flow­er­ing natives do their thing at the end of win­ter or dur­ing spring. The one main excep­tion was a small dis­play by native plant spe­cial­ist Tree of Life Nursery.

Inside, in the adja­cent exhibits build­ing, there was a flower show going on, with roses and dahlias and glad­i­o­lus and lots of cub­bies with flower arrange­ments. And that’s where I saw a few more natives, where they had a cat­e­gory for cut native flow­ers. So there was more mon­keyflower here, along with one of the bush pop­pies (Den­drome­con) and some matil­ija poppies.

Really, who doesn’t love these matil­i­jas? The last photo is of one of them. Next post I’ll share some other sightings.

June 28 2010 | Categories: gardening • places | Tags: edible landscaping • native plants • San Diego County Fair | 8 Comments »

landscaping without plants

From my desk at work it’s less than a fif­teen minute stroll to this view­point, which has got to be one of the most famous places to stand in all of mod­ern architecture.

The view is of the cen­tral plaza of the Salk Insti­tute of Bio­log­i­cal Stud­ies, which archi­tect Louis Kahn designed for his client, polio vac­cine pio­neer Jonas Salk. The plaza fea­tures this sim­ple water fea­ture that pulls your eye towards the water, 400 feet below, and to the hori­zon and the sky. The mate­ri­als of the plaza are reduced down to water, traver­tine mar­ble and the angled con­crete walls of the research buildings.

No plants. When Kahn was work­ing on the design he’d had a con­ver­sa­tion with Mex­i­can archi­tect Luis Bar­ragán. Ken­neth Framp­ton recounts Barragán’s sem­i­nal response in Stud­ies in Tec­tonic Cul­ture: The Poet­ics of Con­struc­tion in Nine­teenth and Twen­ti­eth Cen­tury Archi­tec­ture:

“I would not put a tree or blade of grass in this space. This should be a plaza of stone, not a gar­den.” I [Kahn] looked at Dr. Salk and he at me and we both felt this was deeply right. Feel­ing our approval, he added joy­ously, “If you make this a plaza, you will gain a facade–a facade to the sky.”

As much as I love plants, I have to agree that this was the right deci­sion. There’s an unpho­tograph­ably joy­ous expe­ri­ence of pure space that set­tles into your mind as you stand or sit to con­tem­plate the view.

If you can pull your eyes off the horizon–not an easy thing to do–you start to notice, how­ever, that plants do fig­ure in the plaza’s final real­iza­tion. Imme­di­ately to the east are some steps, and plant­ing beds on either side of the steps. As with a lot of mod­ern plant­ing design, the planters fea­ture one kind of plant and one kind only. Con­sid­er­ing the plant­ing design was exe­cuted many years ago, prob­a­bly in the late 1960s or early 1970s, long before the cur­rent focus on edi­ble land­scap­ing, it’s sur­pris­ing that the plant of choice was orange trees, at least four dozen of them. (Maybe it has some­thing to do with the envi­ron­men­tal ethic that was devel­op­ing while the Salk was being designed, an ethic that we’re finally redis­cov­er­ing today.)

Below is a 360-degree panorama from the top of the steps. Just imag­ine walk­ing west towards the hori­zon, at dusk, on a calm evening, as the orange trees begin to flower and scent the air.

April 24 2009 | Categories: gardening • landscape design • places | Tags: architecture • edible landscaping • Lis Barragan • Louis Kahn • Salk Institute | 15 Comments »