a palm garden takes shape

I’m sure I’m not the first to have noticed the irony: The main approach to Los Ange­les County Museum of Art takes you through the BP Grand Entrance. The back way in takes you through the La Brea Tar Pits.

When I took the pho­tos on the last day of July crude oil was still gush­ing into the Gulf of Mex­ico, and the irony was heavy like the odor of tar com­ing from the fenced-off pits where archae­ol­o­gists were work­ing behind the museum on extract­ing crit­ters and plants that got caught in the ances­tral goo.

Here, junior’s ball has some­how made it over the fence around one of the pits. You could maybe res­cue it with a stick…or you could wade through the tar and hope that you don’t get caught, only to be dis­cov­ered by archae­ol­o­gists a few mil­len­nia down the road.

We arrived at the museum an hour before it opened, via the back entrance, so we had a chance to spend some time with Robert Irwin’s Palm Gar­den Instal­la­tion. I posted [ before ] on the ear­lier stages of the gar­den, and it’s still not com­plete. But by now you can really make out many more of the ele­ments of what the final gar­den will look like.

There are many palm species used in the gar­den. A num­ber of them are planted in a lawn, inside planter boxes that mimic the wooden planter boxes the trees were grown in. But unlike the wooden tem­po­rary planters, these per­ma­nent homes are made out of thick steel plate–the “it” mate­r­ial of the moment for well-financed mod­ern gardens.

A closer look at the planter box…

In a back cor­ner you could see a col­lec­tion of palms in pots, and in this photo you can get a bet­ter idea of the kind of planter box the steel ones are meant to suggest.

Another look at some of the palms in tran­si­tion… In this instal­la­tion some of the plants are rotated out accord­ing tot he sea­son. I’m not sure whether these are headed in or out.

LACMA was about to open a new facil­ity, the Resnick Pavil­lion designed by Renzo Piano. As the build­ing nears com­ple­tion more ele­ments of the Palm Gar­den Instal­la­tion are being planted. In addi­tion to palms it includes sev­eral of the non-palm species. These are some spec­tac­u­larly var­ie­gated agaves plants of a fur­craea, pos­si­bly Fur­craea foetida ‘Mediopicta’–Thanks for the cor­rec­tion, Loree!

The way the plants have been shaped, with the low­est leaves removed, made them look like var­ie­gated New Zealand flax (phormi­ums) until you got close to them. It’s not a bad look. It’ll be inter­est­ing to see if these agaves fur­craeas are kept pruned this way or whether they’ll be allowed to grow into the rosettes that agave fur­craea grow­ers are used to see­ing. This is in no way a nat­u­ral­is­tic gar­den, so my guess is that the agaves plants will be kept this shape. Besides, how do you mow around them with­out run­ning over the leaves?

Detail: Fur­craea foetida, I think

Another detail of the var­ie­gated furcraeas


Another of the non-palm species: this cycad devel­op­ing this really cool cone. It’s prob­a­bly some­thing like three to four feet long.

A bench and real palms out­side the Resnick pavilion…

The sin­gle most dra­matic ges­ture is the place­ment of this palm with a thickly bul­bous trunk that’s been planted in a tight open­ing that leads two sto­ries down into a park­ing garage. The effect is like star­ing down into a North Dakota Min­ute­man mis­sile silo. It’s more than a tad unset­tling, and asserts that garden-making can be about more than design­ing pleas­ant, unchal­leng­ing spaces.

Say “Los Ange­les” to some­one and ask them what comes to mind. Palm trees would prob­a­bly be one of the first things the per­son might bring up, even though the city’s offi­cial tree is the coral tree is and the offi­cial flower the bird of par­adise. “Cars” would prob­a­bly be another. Here palms and cars come together, with a short arcade of the trees lin­ing the dri­ve­way down into the park­ing garage.

I’m not any­thing remotely resem­bling a palm expert, so I can’t tell you what species this is. But I can show you that it has amaz­ingly sculp­tural trunks.

Look­ing up into the fronds gives you the sen­sa­tion clos­est what you get from many of the art­works Robert Irwin did before he designed gar­dens. The fronds fil­ter the light in inter­est­ing ways, and two or more lay­ers make things darker than just a sin­gle layer. If you stand in the dri­ve­way and look straight up the neg­a­tive space of the sky reads like a bright zigzag between the del­i­cate lay­ers of palm.

If you’d like to com­pare the effect of the palm fronds to an ear­lier Irwin piece, here’s a cor­ner of his Run­ning Vio­let V Forms, a piece that I walk around and under at least twice a week. In this 1980s piece pan­els of violet-colored mesh turn light or dark, depend­ing on the num­ber of lay­ers, and the mesh turns opaque or trans­par­ent depend­ing on how the light is strik­ing it. The mesh inter­acts with views of the euca­lyp­tus grove where it’s placed. I’ve loved this piece ever since the day it went up. You can read my love story with this piece [ here ].

Artists often com­plain that big muse­ums don’t pay enough atten­tion to local artists in their scram­ble to show off big-name artists from the other coast or another coun­try. This sum­mer day LACMA had sev­eral gal­leries devoted to the the pho­tographs of Cathy Opie, and work of other local artists could be found the walls of sev­eral of the gal­leries. But I didn’t iden­tify any plant species used in this gar­den that came from within a thousand-mile radius.

Word is that Robert Irwin is design­ing yet another gar­den, this one for a new fed­eral cour­t­house here in San Diego. Wouldn’t it be great if he could use some of our Cal­i­for­nia species in the project? What about some of our del­i­cately trans­par­ent plants like deer weed or broom bac­cha­ris? Or what about some of the many plants that undergo stun­ning trans­for­ma­tions as the sea­sons change? To see an impor­tant new, high pro­file gar­den com­prised of local natives would be such an amaz­ing opportunity.

September 07 2010 | Categories: art • gardening • landscape design • places | Tags: • • • • | 9 Comments »

a visit to the l.a. county museum

Another quick stop over the hol­i­days took the form of a visit to the Los Ange­les County Museum of Art.

Installed at the new main entrance is this bat­tal­ion of 202 antique street­lights, Urban Light, by artist Chris Bur­den. Street­lights like these of course were posi­tioned at curbs in straight lines, spaced reg­u­larly. Clus­ter­ing them together like this accen­tu­ates that fact, and to me makes the whole instal­la­tion seem maybe just a lit­tle bit militaristic.

Arranged behind the Bur­den piece are some palm trees, the first plant­i­ngs of what will be a large instal­la­tion of palms by Robert Irwin. Irwin is the design force behind the Cen­tral Gar­den at the J. Paul Getty Museum, but here the trees will read less like a sep­a­rate gar­den than plant­i­ngs inte­grated into the art and architecture.

Their trunks echo the posts of the street­lights, as does the fact that they’re planted in a reg­u­lar pat­tern. Also, as with the street­lights, they’re a col­lec­tion of dif­fer­ent kinds. A press release states: “Along with the palms, Irwin’s other medium is South­ern California’s light, and the species of palms have been spe­cially cho­sen to gather and reflect the inter­play of light and shadow native to L.A.” [ source ] I love Robert Irwin’s work [ here’s a sam­ple ], and I’ll be check­ing back on this instal­la­tion as time goes on.

The whole ver­ti­cal shaft thing becomes a theme around the Museum’s lat­est build­ing, the newish Broad Con­tem­po­rary Art Museum, which has red exte­rior accents, includ­ing plenty of red columns.

The land­scap­ing in this part of the museum is inter­est­ing in that it uses palms or flat plant­i­ngs. Vir­tu­ally no shrubs. It’s a pretty urban plant­ing that in part seems designed to give the home­less no place to camp.

Most hor­i­zon­tal sur­faces, using decom­posed gran­ite or this Turf­s­tone prod­uct, are designed as walk­a­ble exten­sions of the con­crete paving. Where does the land­scape end and the urban fab­ric begin?

Here’s an inter­est­ing gar­den­ing aside: The Muse­ums are located on the same big city block as the famed La Brea Tar Pits, where the ground oozes black, gummy tar, a sub­stance that has pre­served bones of saber­tooth tigers and woolly mam­moths from the last ice age that got too close to the stuff. Just imag­ine try­ing to gar­den where dig­ging a hole to plant a shrub might put you in con­tact with the deadly sludge! I have yet to pick up a gar­den book that even begins to dis­cuss what to do with this kind of soil prob­lem. While the park con­tain­ing the tar pits has a few gooey shoe-grabbing spots, these plant­i­ngs seemed free of the muck.

My main rea­son for vis­it­ing LACMA was to take in a photo exhibit that reassem­bles many of the works that were seen in the sem­i­nal 1975 “New Topo­graph­ics” exhi­bi­tion of land­scape pho­tog­ra­phy. These works in the show sig­naled a break from the more roman­tic takes on what land­scape pho­tos ought to look like and engaged a land where the human pres­ence reigned supreme.

One of my favorite pho­tog­ra­phers in the show, Robert Adams, often com­bines the roman­tic sub­lime with a cooler take on what the world really looks like. To the left is “Mobile Homes, Jef­fer­son County, Col­orado” from 1973 [ source ], a great exam­ple of what his eye sees. You get the sense in his work that the human land­scape often fails to live up to the stun­ning geog­ra­phy where it’s sited.

See­ing his work again prompted me to reread some of his Beauty in Pho­tog­ra­phy: Essays in Defense of Tra­di­tional Val­ues. (From this photo you can see that he takes “tra­di­tional val­ues” pretty broadly.) Here’s a quick snip­pet gar­den­ers and land­scape design­ers might like to think about.

Not sur­pris­ingly, many pho­tog­ra­phers have loved gar­dens, those places that Leonard Woolf once described as “the last refuge of dis­il­lu­sion.” Gar­dens are in fact strik­ingly like land­scape pic­tures, sanc­tu­ar­ies not from but of truth.

–from the essay, “Truth and Land­scape” in Beauty in Photography

In part­ing, let me move from beauty in pho­tog­ra­phy to beauty in art. Here’s a closeup of Urban Light, back­lit by the after­noon sun:


(For another exam­ple of Burden’s work, check out the instal­la­tion of 50,000 nickel coins and 50,000 match­sticks that the San Diego Museum of Con­tem­po­rary Art exhib­ited: The Rea­son for the Neu­tron Bomb.)

January 12 2010 | Categories: art • landscape • landscape design • photography • places • quotes | Tags: • • • • • • • • | 8 Comments »