[ Lost in the Landscape ]

mowing is like vacuuming…

I don’t have many oppor­tu­ni­ties to mow the lawn. I’ve basi­cally told John that the day he can’t keep up with the grass will be the day I break into the Mon­santo fac­tory and abscond with all the Roundup they have and then apply it to the lawn. There’s lots of other ways I’d rather use the space.

The day has come. John had some work done on a foot and will be hob­bling around for a cou­ple months. The grass, how­ever, well-watered from the Jan­u­ary and Feb­ru­ary rains, didn’t stop grow­ing, and it was time to have the con­ver­sa­tion.

Well, in the end, I’m embar­rassed to say that I caved, rea­son­ing that he should be back to push­ing the mower around in a few weeks, and now isn’t the best sea­son to think of plant­ing some­thing that will require water to keep it going through the dry sum­mer and fall ahead. Besides, John really likes his lit­tle patch of lawn, and he lets me have my way with most of the rest of the garden.

So I popped some allergy tablets and pulled out the elec­tric mower and headed for the patch of grass. Back and forth I went over the brown­ing green sur­face. Back and forth, back and forth. It’s weirdly med­i­ta­tive, like vac­u­um­ing, I decided, only with a device that can chop off your toes.

As I took down the seed heads it was a chance to look at this what we call a lawn. It’s never been a fanat­i­cally main­tained piece of green, and fea­tures lit­tle colonies of Saint Augus­tine, Bermuda, rye, clover and what­ever other species the wind has deliv­ered. The bio­log­i­cal diver­sity of this patch would do the Ama­zon proud and drive any single-species lawn fanatic to distraction.

By mid-summer it’ll go mostly brown as we cut back on water­ing to con­tinue with our water con­ser­va­tion. At that point, fac­ing four to six months of brown, four to six months of thatch being tracked into the house every time you walk across the gar­den, that’ll be when we might con­tinue our dis­cus­sion with whether we might want to do some­thing else with this patch of prime gar­den real estate.

What­ever we decide, you can rest assured that we will not be installing the plas­tic turf that’s get­ting to be a pop­u­lar gar­den sur­face around town. In fact, I like that stuff so lit­tle I’ve started my very first Face­book group, Plas­tic Turf Must Die!!!!!! As far as I’m con­cerned far­dens are about life and grow­ing things, and this stuff is as dead and cheesy as any­thing out there. If you’re any sort of joiner and hate the stuff your­self, join the group!

March 31 2010 | Categories: gardening • my garden | Tags: grass • lawns • mowing | 7 Comments »

a vacant house

There’s a house across that street that is look­ing like it’s turn­ing into a vic­tim of the cur­rent mort­gage fiasco. The owner bought at the top of the home val­u­a­tions and prob­a­bly expected prices to keep growing.

When no one had seen the main owner for weeks we were start­ing to think that things weren’t quite right over there. A month ago a mort­gage broker’s sign appeared in front of the house, then some­one with the city came by to shut off the water. See­ing all this hap­pen­ing con­firmed our worst fears.

Since life here in the desert can’t exist with­out sup­ple­men­tal water, the last time a house sat vacant on our street one of the neigh­bors kept it watered while another mowed the lawn. With that sit­u­a­tion fresh in John’s mem­ory, he cor­nered the neigh­bor across the street and struck a deal. Between the two of them they’d tend the house until a new owner could move in, doing what they can to keep up the neighborhood.

At some point the water got restored to the house, and so the yard was get­ting water. But no one was tak­ing care of the mowing.

Enter John and the neigh­bor. Now, when­ever one of them has a mower out, the park­ing strip along the side­walk gets a quick haircut.

Unfor­tu­nately, the yard inside the gates is going feral, but at least we can’t see it so eas­ily. This was difficult-to-maintain land­scap­ing put in by non-gardeners and only tended by hired help. Once the gar­den­ers left, entropy started to claim the inner yard. (John’s and the neighbor’s com­mit­ment to keep­ing up the neigh­bor­hood for free go only so far. And by now you may gather my gen­eral shrill atti­tude towards main­tain­ing expan­sive lawns in the desert…)


The last word is that the house has been sold. Who bought it, when they’ll move it, who they are–all that’s still the grand mys­tery that these trans­ac­tions so often are. These deals can fall through any time.

After you live in a neigh­bor­hood for a while you get to expe­ri­ence good neigh­bors and neigh­bors from the other side of hell. The last ones in this house were some of the good ones–personable, friendly, inter­est­ing and tol­er­ant, and we’re sad to see them go. As we head in for another round in this game of new neigh­bor roulette, we’re keep­ing our fin­gers crossed for rea­son­able ones again.

July 26 2008 | Categories: gardening • landscape design | Tags: grass • lawns • mortgage crisis • vacant houses | 1 Comment »

chemistry, physics, biology

Here’s a cool art­work by Heather Ack­royd and Dan Har­vey that was fea­tured at the recent Wim­ble­don tennis-thing. It’s made of three pan­els of grass.

The sec­tions were grown in a dark­ened space under arti­fi­cial lights that pro­jected through pho­to­graphic neg­a­tives. The brighter the expo­sure, the richer the green color.

It’s the reverse prin­ci­ple at work as leav­ing a hose or board on your lawn for a week: When you pick up the hose or board you can see how the grass grew pale where it was deprived of sunlight.

So what would you call this art process? It’s basi­cally using light to effect a trans­for­ma­tion of some kind of mate­r­ial, and that’s pretty much the def­i­n­i­tion of photography.

Photography’s first rev­o­lu­tion was the abil­ity to use chem­i­cal processes to fix an image made by light–think of the pho­tog­ra­pher dis­ap­pear­ing into a dark­room with some unpromis­ing plates or film and com­ing back with a mag­i­cal image. Then the physics of turn­ing light sen­sors into elec­tri­cal impulses made chemistry-free imag­ing pos­si­ble, lead­ing to things like tele­vi­sion cam­eras and your cell­phone camera.

And now comes this process where the record­ing device is bio­log­i­cal. Of course, rely­ing on some­thing liv­ing and grow­ing, the result is any­thing but per­ma­nent, but that’s also one of the nice things about the pieces. Noth­ing lasts forever.

The grass art­work reminds me of Den­nis Oppenheim’s bril­liant 1970 pho­to­graphic per­for­mance, Read­ing Posi­tion for Sec­ond Degree Burn, where he leaves a book on his chest as the exposed parts of him sun­burn on the beach. The first pic­ture shows him at the begin­ning, with the book. In the sec­ond, hours later with the book removed, a sun­burn describes the area where the book pro­tected him.

Den­nis Oppen­heim. Read­ing Posi­tion for Sec­ond Degree Sun­burn. Chro­mogenic prints with applied text.

It’s just as much a “bio­log­i­cal pho­to­graph” as the Wim­ble­don piece. While the grass piece stuns most in its exe­cu­tion, the Oppen­heim piece, com­ing out of con­cep­tual art, buzzes with ideas and humor.

Next time you come back from the beach with untanned patches where your swim­suit shaded your body, why not con­sider your­self a walk­ing pho­to­graph?


[ Thanks to Landscape+Urbanism, where I first saw the Wim­ble­don grass pieces, and to Cre­ative Review, where I’ve linked. ]

July 18 2008 | Categories: art • gardening • photography | Tags: Dan Harvey • Dennis Oppenheim • grass • Heather Ackroyd • lawns • sunburns • suntans | 4 Comments »