[ Lost in the Landscape ]

some of my favorite photographs

My visit after Christmas to the Getty Center had as its main destination an exhibit of photographs by Carleton Watkins.

Watkins worked all over the West Coast, and was the first person to develop an important body of work on Yosemite. The show contained beautifully preserved examples of his photographs, including a few that rank up there among my all-time favorite photographs ever taken.

Carleton Watkins: El Capitan, 1860s [ Library of Congress ]

More than one person has argued that Watkins is the first important artist to come out of California, regardless of medium, and I would not argue that point. There’s a poise and stillness to the work. The images seem to float in their own time and space that extends to infinity.

Even after an hour in a crowded series of galleries, the work left me with a sense of stillness that I still feel, over a week later. (The fact that I’m still on vacation also probably has something to do with it…)

Carleton Watkins: First View of the Yosemite Valley from the Mariposa Trailca. 1866.

In the image to the left, El Capitan, the light-colored mass of granite to the distance in the left, balances elegantly with the bulk of the nearer hillside on the right. It’s an amazingly formal, modern image. I don’t know of any drawing, painting or other photograph from up to this time that looks anything like it.

(This is one of two versions of this image taken at the same time from the same vantage point. I prefer the other version of this image, which is in the Getty show. I wasn’t able to find anything on the web to borrow of either version, so this quick shot out of one of my books that at least gives you an idea of the image.)

Carleton Watkins: Cape Horn, Columbia River, 1867 [ National Gallery of Art ]

I had a conversation with Roy Flukinger, Curator of Photography & Film at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin, about nineteenth century landscape photographs. He spoke of a “transubstantiation” of matter that occurs in many of them, where the long exposures and photographic techniques rendered water, air and land to be almost equivalent materials. In the image above, the water and sky and distant mountains merge into each other. The cliffs to the right seem to float over the water. At the same time, they seem to fit into the rocks to the left like a key fits into a lock, or the way the shape of Africa reaches across the Atlantic to nestle into the empty space of the Caribbean on a map.

Carleton Watkins: Cape Horn near Celilo, 1867 [ Metropolitan Museum of Art ]

The quietness and sense of infinite space in this one is phenomenal. If your blood pressure doesn’t drop ten points after viewing this image, nothing will bring it down!

Dialogue Among Giants: Carleton Watkins and the Rise of Photography in California runs until March 1.

January 03 2009 | Categories: art • landscape • photography • places | Tags: albumin prints • Carleton Watkins • Columbia River • J. Paul Getty Museum • landscape photography • Washington (State) • Yosemite | No Comments »

getty center garden in winter

John and I spent the holidays at his aunt’s house in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Northridge. Christmas at her house is a family affair, but with family dispersed around the country, it’s not always as raucous as it sometimes has been. This year we were thrilled to have a big contingent of immediate family, including Jenny and her mad scientist husband from South Carolina. Past readers of this blog might recognize Jenny’s name as a sometimes contributor of photos and comments. It was great seeing you, Jenny! (And Joe too!)

Friday, on our return home, John and I stopped by the Getty Center for an exhibition of the photographs of Carleton Watkins (more on that show in a future post). To visit the Getty without taking in its gardens would be unthinkable, and we spent more time outdoors than we did in the galleries.

It had rained the previous two days, clearing out the garbage in the air. The views from the hilltop were spectacular. Here you can see the skylines of Century City in the foreground against downtown in the distance.

This is the view to the southwest, across Santa Monica Bay. The distant land mass (straight ahead and to the right) is Catalina Island, forty-plus miles away.

The visit last Friday was the first time we’d visited the gardens of the Getty Center during the winter. The Robert-Irwin-designed Central Garden advertises itself as “always changing, never twice the same,” so this would be a good chance to see it during a time that was less pornographic with flowering plants.

Still, there were flowers. This is the core planting of clipped azaleas in the central water feature. In fact this was the first time I’d been there when the little mazes were showing any flowers. In addition to the blooms, the foliage of one of the two azalea varieties darkens and reddens in the cooler winter weather, making the planting appear to be comprised of interlocking rings of different plants.

If you click on the image to enlarge it, you’ll see that the plants could stand a little bit of clipping. The azaleas are little floating islands in the water, so keeping them trimmed involves a little more than strolling over them with hedge clippers.

John’s aunt volunteers at the museum, and once she’d asked one of the groundskeepers how they trim the plants. At first he mimed getting in a boat and rowing to the azaleas. Then, after pausing for effect, he grinned and said that the water was really shallow, and that they actually just donned some waders to do their work.

Aside from the azaleas, there were just a few other things in bloom: bougainvilleas, brugmansias, roses, eryngiums (sea-hollies) and some winter bloomers. Most of the interest came in the form of foliage and stems.

Here are some details from the plantings that emphasize color, form and texture, most of it best appreciated at close distances. Some of the color combinations rant toward the monochromatic. Here gray succulents contrast with the black leaves of Ophiopogon planiscapus.

This one featured yellow and green.

The foliage here tends more towards the bronze end of things.

In this composition, the silver-leaved Dichondra argentea is being slowly out-competed by the red oxalis (probably a red-leaved form of O. pupurea). Once the weather warms, the oxalis will die back, letting the dichondra regain its dominance.

Some of the color combinations were more varied.

Some plantings ran towards the chaotic. Like, don’t you think the blue aster-ey bits in this planting (lower right) are a little too over the top? I think the light gray leaves would have added a nice contrast to this combination. But the flowers… Gild the lily, why don’t you?

But, hey, it’s all taste isn’t it?

In a nod to the season, several specimens of browned late-season grasses moved dramatically in the strong midday winds. Before you go getting any ideas that this was a planting in the heightened naturalistic style of the New Perennials garden designers like Piet Oudolf, the grasses were single plants of contrasting species, placed in pots placed along the walkway.

In this last photo, in contrast to the preceding pictures of winter grasses, two plants with somewhat grass-like forms belie the fact that it’s winter. To the left is the restio, Chondoropetalum elephantinum, and the right is variegated society garlic, Tulbaghia violacea.

Some garden designers would like you to be able to know exactly what season it is by looking at the plants in the garden. Following this philosophy you should be able to set your calendar by looking at the garden. But what gives away the fact that it’s winter in this photo are the two visitors, bundled up against the cold. Looks like winter to me!

December 28 2008 | Categories: gardening • landscape design • places | Tags: J. Paul Getty Museum • Los Angeles • plant combinations • Robert Irwin • seasons • winter | 5 Comments »

final thoughts on the getty

The gardens of the Getty Museum for sure are among the most photographed botanical spots in Los Angeles. After the first of my recent Getty notes Cousin Jenny in South Carolina sent me some of the picture she’d taken there on her last trip out in June. I liked them and thought I’d share some with you.

Here’s an abstraction of plants that she did.

And here are some succulents she coveted. Since she lives where it’s wetter than Southern California, growing many succulents outdoors would be a real stunt. We’ve e-mailed back and forth a little about how it’s always the plants that you can’t grow easily that are the ones you often drool over. These are easy plants here where you don’t have to worry about them rotting in the wet ground. But South Carolina? A little trickier.

And she also was interested in some of the hardscape details. The Central Garden has these big boulders cemented into the watercourse that descends into the lower pool. They can help to break the force of running water during our occasional storms. But, hey, they look cool.

And here’s her shot of the lower Central Garden with its clipped azaleas. I’ve never seen the plants in bloom but I’m sure it’s quite the sight as this abstract topiary doodle goes from green leaves to rosy red flowers.

“Always changing, never twice the same” is the phrase that the Getty uses on their website to describe the Robert Irwin-designed Central Garden. But anyone who’s at all a half-observant gardener could tell you that that’s a characteristic of any garden that isn’t made out of astroturf and concrete.

In this garden the azaleas bloom and the plane trees drop their leaves, but it really isn’t the place you go to see the subtle shifts of a season. Most of the other plantings are heavily managed. To me it’s more about human-managed change than about the seasons and cycles of life and regeneration. Things are as carefully staged as the store windows at Bloomingdale’s. Once a plant starts looking scrappy, it’s outta there like summer’s deck shoes. It’s a beautiful garden, for sure, but it’s trying to do different things than many other gardens.

People often talk about how a typical visitor arrives at the Getty. You park you car down on the flats, in a garage or more remote lot, depending on the volume of visitors. Then you have the option the walk up the hill about a mile or take the tram. (I’ve never seen anyone on foot.) The architect, Richard Meier intended the visit to be a special pilgrimage. Ascending slowly up the hill, your visit takes you from the common world to the shining acropolis on the hill.

That hillside that you ascend has been replanted with the head-high native plants that populate the nearby area. Once you get to the top, most of the plantings shift to more “decorative” plants from around the world. To me it could easily be interpreted that the local vegetation isn’t worthy of a place like the Getty, just as most of the “culture” contained in the museum walls comes from distant times and distant places.

But the Getty, despite being established to enshrine ancient to early modern artworks, has an active photography program, and they also show a number of established living artists, even some from Southern California. While most of these artists get their showings mainly outside of their main galleries, there’s the occasional breach of the hallowed walls. For instance, last weekend, a video piece by Southern Californian Bill Viola was running in the North Gallery alongside European sculpture that was centuries older.

And, similarly, while most of the plantings at the Getty come from places beyond Southern California, I was pleased to see that the plantings of trees right at the front entrance was made up of local sycamores. With their beautifully cut leaves and wonderfully mottled trunks, these trees can stand up to anything else that was planted on the grounds. It’s a statement of local pride, just like showing the work of some of our great local artists. Good going, Getty!

August 30 2008 | Categories: art • gardening • landscape design | Tags: hardscape • J. Paul Getty Museum • Jenny • native plants | 1 Comment »

some hardcape ideas to borrow

As promised here are some random notes on hardscape details at the Getty Museum that I found pretty cool.

The travertine tiles that make up most of the outdoor paving are laid out in a fairly random pattern…except for this checkerboard spot near the front entrance. I liked how the little pocket of order suddenly dissolves into randomness.

And here large tiles contrast with smaller ones. By including a number of smaller, darker tiles at the edge of the transition, you notice the difference in scale more than if the were uniformly the same color.

I liked the spikes of walkway interrupting the green plane of the lawn. Even on a smaller scale this could be fun in a location where you could view it from above.

Okay, this next detail is probably beyond the scope of your average DIYer, but I liked the contrast of smooth and raw, machined and natural. In this case the saw-cut stone by the walkway contrasts beautifully with its rougher edges.

And this one, too, might be a little unrealistic for my back yard, but I really liked it. This is a big pedestal that was built for a Henry Moore’s sculpture, Bronze Form. The base is a wide slab that’s been travertine-tiled. A water source on top provides a shallow sheet of water, maybe about a quarter-inch deep, that crosses the top of the base and disappears into a groove at the edge. I thought of it something like a sideways fountain, with water going horizontally instead of straight up…

August 29 2008 | Categories: landscape design | Tags: hardscape • J. Paul Getty Museum • travertine • water features | No Comments »

some plant ideas to borrow

Last weekend’s Los Angeles trip included a short stop by the Getty Museum in Brentwood.

I’d posted earlier about their exhibit featuring botanical illustrations by Maria Sibylla Merian that continues through the end of August. It was a compact, intense show with artwork by Merian and her contemporaries, along with examples of some of the earliest illustrated botanical books.


Unfortunately it was one of those thou-shalt-not-photograph exhibitions, so I had to be content with snapping these two for-sale prints in the kiosk outside the galleries. Merian was interested in plants, but even more so in the critters that live in them. Here you see various creepy crawlies cavorting with the plant life.

When visiting a place like the Getty it’s easy to get overwhelmed with the sheer unapproachableness of everything you see—the Acropolis-like site, the billion-plus dollar construction budget, the irreplaceable artworks. But looking around the grounds there are all sorts of cool details that would be at home in a back yard planting or patio project.

Here are some of the plantings that I thought were cool. Some were in the Robert Irwin-designed Central Garden, others were around the museum grounds that were designed by the landscape architectural firm of Olin Partnership. (The best piece I’ve run across on the Web about the less famous garden plantings was in, of all places, The Australian Humanities Review.)

Many of the shady plantings underneath the planting of London plane trees use light-colored foliage to make the plants pop in the shade. It’s a technique that you read about a lot—but it works wonders. Here’s a nice combination of light-color succulents.


Again in the shade, here are some plants with green-and-white variegated foliage, including a New Zealand flax.


And the last of these shade pictures, a planting featuring a chartreuse-leaved oxalis species. John thought it looked a little anemic, but I thought it was pretty cool.


Out of the shade, a planting of contrasting foliage colors can be a great accent. Here the planting avoids green altogether, and combines plants predominating with red and yellow tones, including the “Sticks of Fire” clone of the evil pencil tree.


In a garden with a large number of different plants it helps to have zones with less contrast. Here a long, curving row of pink crape myrtles were blooming over an extended bed of variegated society garlic blooming with their lavender-pink flowers.


Mass plantings don’t have to go into rows or grids. Here’s my favorite planting on the entire property, a seemingly random arrangement of golden barrel cactus. The arrangement is informal, but it’s as much a product of human intervention as something that’s overtly geometrical. The Robert Irwin-designed Central Garden draws most of the visitors, but this area is the most spectacular to my eyes.


If you have a billion-dollar view most people decide to chop down all the plants between you and the view. Here, the almost-transparent, unobtrusive, but still dramatic spent flower stalks of these variegated century plants (Agave americana ‘Marginata’) actually helps complete the view, giving focus to what would be a run-of-the-mill spectacular view of the West Side of L.A. The actual flowers on these sculptural inflorescences died months ago, and the stalks are actually black and not green. But they’re cool as all get out—So why not leave them be?


Plantings soften a lot of the hard geometrical edges. Here some prostrate rosemary cascades over the hard edge of the travertine wall.


And here, the baby’s tears growing between the rough travertine squares softens the transition from human hard-edged geometry to the softer forms of the vining Boston ivy.

Next post I’ll share some of my favorite details from the hardscape around the Getty.

August 28 2008 | Categories: gardening • landscape design | Tags: foliage plants • J. Paul Getty Museum • plant combinations • shade • shade plants | No Comments »

let it rust

Picasso and on occasion other artists have been credited with the quote that goes something like, “Good artists copy, great artists steal.”

Left: Garden at the Getty Center, Los Angeles [ source ]

The garden designed by Robert Irwin at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles has both received raves and been the topic of rants. After my visits there I’m torn somewhere in between. There are things I like about it, and there are things that seem like missed opportunities or inappropriate choices.

One of the things I really like is its use of sheets of steel for retaining walls. (You can see it in the foreground and middle-ground in this picture.)

Each material that you use in a garden—whether it be wood or stone or steel—has its own personality. I particularly like the warm brown color that that steel ages to, as well as the industrial vibe that it brings.

While it probably doesn’t rise to the Picasso’s level of theft, using sheet steel for retaining walls is an idea I’ve incorporated into my own garden. Two sides of the raised bed I put in last fall use the material.

My gardening budget is nothing like the Getty Museum’s, so instead of inch-thick material I used 11-gauge sheets (just shy of 1/8 inch thick). Also, since steel is heavy stuff, thinner sheets don’t require heavy equipment and can be handled by two people. I welded inch-and-a-half angle iron to the top edges, both to give it extra rigidity to help hold back the soil and to give my scrawny little sheets some visual heft.

Over eight months the walls have taken on a warm patina and are almost as alive as the plants in the bed.

I don’t consider myself to be mainly swayed by practicality over aesthetics. Since steel rusts and degrades over time, using it for a retaining wall is probably a less durable option than using other materials. Still, as far as the longevity of the steel is concerned, I’m encouraged by a scrap that I’ve had outdoors for the last ten years. When I cut into it recently the interior was pristine and shiny. Only the outer shell showed any signs of rust. Of course, steel that’s in constant contact with the ground and moisture—like my garden retaining wall—will degrade quite a bit faster.

We’ll see whether this is a five-year solution or one that will outlive me.

July 20 2008 | Categories: landscape design • my garden | Tags: J. Paul Getty Museum • planters • raised beds • Robert Irwin • rust • steel | 4 Comments »

extreme gardening

In the late 90s I was fortunate to be part of a show of photography at San Francisco Camerawork, entitled Feed, that centered on our relationship with food. One of the artists in the show was one of my photographic heroes, John Pfahl, who in the 1970s produced his funny and quirkily beautiful Altered Landscapes series. In that San Francisco show he was represented by images of compost, Very Rich Hours of a Compost Pile.

The work that I’d to say a few things about are his documents of over-the-top gardenscapes, his Extreme Horticulture series.

John Pfahl: Dr. Wadsworth’s Tree, Chatauqua, N.Y.

These are all beautiful, color-soaked images, most of them of the sort of gardens where “natural” isn’t a word that would immediately spring to mind. The raw plant materials are often gorgeous, but they’re sheared, arranged and manipulated in ways where the hand of the gardener or designer is in-your-face obvious. Often gardens like that give me the creeps. They and talk to a culture where a country’s President is often shown on his Crawford, Texas ranch, clearing brush, like he’s some sort of representative of good humanity battling the evil forces of nature that want to overrun our boundaries. Most of Pfahl’s gardens are testosterone gardens, gardens all about control, gardens all about domination. But at the same time, they’re often beautiful or funny in their overmanicured way.

John Pfahl: Bare Trees and Topiary, Longwood Gardens, Kensett Square, PA

John Pfahl: Espalier Demonstration, Longwood Gardens, Kensett Square, PA

John Pfahl: Cactus Garden, J. Paul Getty Center, Los Angeles, California

Maybe I’m overgeneralizing, but the East Coast gardens pictured seem heavy into shaping plants into topiaried sculptures. It’s a heavily European thing—Just think of the immaculately-worked gardens at Versailles. The Western gardens seem to show a little more interest in and respect for the materials. Plants are placed where the designer wants them, but they seem to be chosen more for what they can do in that location, rather than what can be done to them. The arrangements of cactus and succulents at the Getty, for instance, show clear thought about where the plants were placed. But the plants are allowed more to be themselves. (And I wonder if that freedom somehow also translates into freedoms that people are allowed to have…) Besides, have you ever tried to prune a cactus?

The tension of natural tendencies versus control is one that’s always interesting to me. Nature often isn’t convenient, and it’s often never where we want it to be. Scraping a hillside to put in suburban housing and pulling up an errant weed are part of the same continuum. But where do you draw the line about what’s good and what’s bad? Is keeping a garden inherently better than bulldozing native scrub to build more mcmansions? I think the answer is yes, but the question is a complicated one. There’s economics, notions of justice, respect for living things, and all sorts of other things that have to be considered. It’s an intriguing question that resides not far below the surface of John Pfahl’s photographs.

November 25 2007 | Categories: art • gardening • landscape design • photography | Tags: J. Paul Getty Museum • John Pfahl • Longwood Gardens • topiary | 3 Comments »