[ Lost in the Landscape ]

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 »