[ Lost in the Landscape ]

bamboozled

Yes­ter­day after­noon I had to run an errand up to coastal north­ern San Diego County. The des­ti­na­tion was two, three miles from Quail Botan­i­cal Gar­dens, in Encini­tas. Even with a pre­dic­tion for pos­si­ble rain­show­ers, it seemed like a worth­while stop, par­tic­u­larly since I hadn’t been there for three or four years.

Left: The entrance to Quail. Am I too much of a con­spir­acy the­o­rist in think­ing that the yel­low flow­ers and foliage were planted to coor­di­nate with the big yel­low arrow point­ing to the entry?

The first thing that hit me was the admis­sion charge, which for John and me totaled twenty bucks. If they hadn’t been host­ing a spe­cial event this week­end, there would have been an addi­tional charge to park.

When I first started going there the gar­den was oper­ated by San Diego County, and there either was no admis­sion charge, or it was neg­li­gi­ble. When the County hit finan­cial hard times in the 1990s, one of the first things they decided to cut was pub­lic sup­port for Quail. I’m a firm believer in pub­lic sup­port of open space and gar­dens like Quail, and to have to pay this kind of sur­charge is scan­dalous. To me it’s not an issue of my being cheap. Instead it’s a moral issue verg­ing on democ­racy, the col­lec­tive good, an notions of right and wrong.

The gar­dens are located in the county’s upscale coastal region, just a stone’s throw from the La Costa Resort and Spa, so the idea of pay­ing ten bucks to look at plants might not seem like any sort of hard­ship to much of the com­mu­nity. But think of all the peo­ple that can’t afford to take advan­tage of the grounds. But that’s our county for you. At least, to their credit, the grounds orderly and the plants are well-maintained.

Any­way, back to the visit: We parked and took in the grounds. One of the high­lights there is an impres­sive assort­ment of bam­boos. Their pam­phlet calls it “the nation’s largest col­lec­tion of bam­boo, from giant tim­ber bam­boo to exotic smaller bam­boos for your home gar­den.” It was enough to make me want to take out the remain­ing lawn and replace it with a stand of run­ning bam­boos. John was less enthu­si­as­tic about the idea.

It wasn’t hard to be impressed by the giant trop­i­cal bam­boo, Den­dro­cal­mus gigan­teus.

Some of the “smaller” bam­boos were pretty strik­ing as well. These are two shots of the striped blow­pipe bam­boo, Bam­busa dolichoclada ‘Stripe.’ The plants are still tall but how tall I can’t say. It’s like being down­town some­where: When you’re at the foot of a build­ing it’s some­times hard to tell if its a few sto­ries tall or one of the major skyscrapers.

Another of the bam­boos with var­ie­gated yellow-and-green stalks is this painted bam­boo, Bam­busa vul­garis ‘Vit­tata’, shown here with the var­ie­gated leaves of an uniden­ti­fied smaller-growing bam­boo. (A plant with­out a label? What kind of botan­i­cal gar­den is this?)

Not all of the bam­boos with var­ie­gated yel­low and green stalks are huge. Here’s a rel­a­tively man­age­able Alphonse Karr bam­boo, Bam­busa mul­ti­plex ‘Alphonse Karr.’

This Ben­gal bam­boo (Bam­busa tulda ‘Stri­ata’) also exhib­ited a bit of strip­ing, only in green and white. Only a few of the stalks had strip­ing, so it’s not as pro­nounced as on the pre­vi­ous selections.

One of the pro­grams Quail has is to incor­po­rate pieces of art within the gar­dens. Here’s part of an instal­la­tion of “Steeples,” eight col­or­ful ceramic totems by Christie Benis­ton. It’s set in the midst of a shady grove of a run­ning bam­boo species that I couldn’t find a label for.

This is the plant­ing that made me want to replace the cur­rent remain­ing patch of lawn. (Bam­boos are giant grasses, so con­cep­tu­ally I sup­pose you could call a bam­boo grove a giant lawn–and one you don’t have to mow!) Imag­ine open­ing the din­ing room door and hav­ing a grove of these pup­pies out­side. It prob­a­bly would cut down on the sun­bathing oppor­tu­ni­ties, but this would be an amaz­ing planting.

October 05 2008 | Categories: art • gardening • places • plant profiles | Tags: bamboo • botanical gardens • government funding • parks • Quail Botanical Gardens | 3 Comments »

niagaras of the east and west

Ear­lier I posted a cou­ple of my tourist pic­tures of Idaho’s Shoshone Falls, the “Nia­gara of the West.” I’ve just begun to scan and print the neg­a­tives of the large-format work from the trip. Here are three from the falls:

View­point at Shoshone Falls, Snake River, Idaho:

Shoshone Falls Park:

Park­ing Lot at Shoshone Falls Park:

Inter­est­ingly, in the pile of news­pa­pers John had saved for me from while I was away, was a book review in the L.A. Times of Gin­ger Strand’s Invent­ing Nia­gara. Inter­est­ingly too, in brows­ing for the book on the web I noticed that it has two dif­fer­ent sub­ti­tles: “Beauty, Power and Lies,” as well as the more provoca­tive “How Indus­try, Com­merce and Art Con­spire to Sell (Out) a Nat­ural Wonder.”

I’d lamented that the Nia­gara of the West had been despoiled and exploited to an unseemly theme-parkness, and in this long quote in the review Strand has sim­i­lar things to say about the Nia­gara of the East:

Man­i­cured, repaired, land­scaped and arti­fi­cailly lit, dan­ger­ous over­hangs dyna­mited off and water flow man­aged to suit the tourist sched­ule, the Falls are more a mon­u­ment to man’s med­dling than to nature’s strength. In fact, they are a study in self-delusion: we visit them to encounter some­thing real, then observe them through fake Indian tales, audio tours and IMAX films… We hold them up as an exam­ple of uncon­quer­able nature even as we applaud the daredevil’s and power-brokers who con­quer them. And we con­grat­u­late our­selves for pre­serv­ing nature’s beauty in an ecosys­tem that, beneath its shim­mer­ing emer­ald sur­face, reflects our own ugly abil­ity to destroy. On every level, Nia­gara Falls is a mon­u­ment to the ways Amer­ica fal­si­fies its rela­tion­ship to nature, reshap­ing its con­tours, redi­rect­ing its force, claim­ing to sub­mit to its will while impos­ing our own on it.

Reviewer Tim Rut­ter, as much as he likes a lot of what Strand has to say, ends up find­ing the writ­ing of the book to be tir­ing and frus­trat­ing. In that most post-modern tech­nique now turn­ing into cliche, the author’s process of writ­ing the book plays a star­ring role in the book. When well done it can still be inter­est­ing, but in this exam­ple Rut­ter didn’t think that it was. Take that pro­nounce­ment under advise­ment, but it still sounds like the book is a worth­while read.

June 16 2008 | Categories: art • landscape • places • quotes • rambles | Tags: human effects • natural world • Niagara Falls • parks • Shoshone Falls | 2 Comments »

gardens, phonebooths, poetics and old maids

I’ve been reread­ing The Poet­ics of Gar­dens, a won­der­ful, witty, thought­ful book by archi­tect Charles Moore, land­scape archi­tect William Turn­bull and the­o­rist William J. Mitchell. In two places it ref­er­ences Igor Stravinsky’s Poet­ics of Music, in which Stravin­sky argues that sounds can’t be con­sid­ered to be music until a human mind has orga­nized them. (John Cage, of course, would argue you blue if you said that to him…) Extend­ing Stravinsky’s argu­ment, Moore and friends argue that a space can’t be con­sid­ered to be a proper gar­den until it’s been shaped by human actions.

The sit­u­a­tion at the Mojave Phone­booth brings their argu­ment to mind. The Mojave National Pre­serve pur­ports to set aside a piece of nature for the enjoy­ment of the gen­eral pop­u­la­tion in a way that mir­rors the mis­sion of the Yosemites and Yel­low­stones of the world. One of the main rea­sons that we go to these places is to com­mune with the won­ders and plea­sures of the world beyond our gar­den walls and city gates. We go to com­mune with nature.

But the very names many of these places gives away the real sit­u­a­tion, with many of them called “national parks” or “state parks” or “regional parks.” And parks–think of New York’s Cen­tral Park–raise expec­ta­tions of spaces under human con­trol. The removal of the phone­booth was just an obvi­ous symp­tom of this con­trol, a con­trol that goes througout the nat­ural sys­tem, from the con­struc­tion of roads and vis­i­tor facil­i­ties to restrict­ing what kinds of activ­i­ties a per­son can do in a cer­tain place. Humans are now posi­tioned so that they could exert obvi­ous con­trol any­where on earth. The Amazon’s get­ting slashed and burned and there’s comfy year-round hous­ing on the South Pole. And what’ not under con­trol now could be with vary­ing amounts of effort. I’m in some ways a gullible Roman­tic and I work hard to guard that pre­cious naiveté, but–as much as I hate to admit it–this “nature” thing is now an arti­fi­cial distinction.

I won’t try to answer the “when did nature end” ques­tion, but something’s that inter­ested me is look­ing at the con­trols that ended it. It’s been said in var­i­ous places that one of the meth­ods of con­trol­ling some­thing is to name it–Just think of how many moun­tains bear the names of peo­ple that have had polit­i­cal power and abil­i­ties to con­trol peo­ple and land­scapes. A dis­tinct form of nam­ing fea­tures is where fea­tures in the land­scape are given bear names based on their sup­posed human characteristics.

Over the years I’ve been notic­ing places that have names like “Indian Head” or “Kiss­ing Rocks.” The place that made me really stand up and take notice (and stim­u­late my gag reflex) was Chir­ic­ahua National Mon­u­ment, in extreme south­east­ern Ari­zona, when I first vis­ited it in the early 90s. Here, a 1930s trail goes through an area known as the “Heart of Rocks,” where there’s a con­cen­tra­tion of fea­tures 10–30 feet tall bear­ing plaques label­ing them in all sorts of dis­tinctly human terms, using names drawn from a hodge­podge of cul­tural ref­er­ents. This is where I saw Kiss­ing Rocks, two just-touching for­ma­tions with lip-like pro­tru­sions. Then there’s “Punch and Judy Rock,” and “Totem Pole,” and “Thor’s Ham­mer.” Mixed in with these, “Big Bal­anced Rock,” “Camel,” and “Mush­room Rock” seemed much more benign.

I returned to Chir­ic­ahua last Spring and decided that it would be and inter­est­ing project to doc­u­ment some of these for­ma­tions. On the way up the moun­tain I was explain­ing what I was doing to a Park Ser­vice ranger. Of all the for­ma­tions, one of the ones that she’d had the most neg­a­tive reac­tions to was “Old Maid.” And, down the moun­tain a ways, be sure to check out “China Boy,” she sug­gested. Then there’s a whole moun­tain­top eas­ily view­able from the park­ing lot at the top of the moun­tain that’s labeled “Cochise Head,” a ques­tion­able homage to Cochise, who held up for sev­eral years in these moun­tains before he was captured.

If you look at the Park Ser­vice lit­er­a­ture for the park you’ll see “Big Bal­anced Rock” men­tioned, but they’ve down­played the other names. The plaques remain, how­ever, maybe as a reli­quar­ies to the1930s mind­set that came up with most of the names. (The ranger I spoke to thought that Cochise Head might date fur­ther back, to the late 1800s.)

So why all these names? Sure, some­one was hav­ing some fun with it all, but I’m inter­ested in the ques­tions bub­bling below the sur­face. Are humans so scared of or alien­ated by “nature” that they have to project human traits on it to be able to begin to deal with it? Are we so blind to nat­ural processes and geol­ogy that we can only under­stand it on our terms? Is nam­ing some­thing the begin­ning of a long chain of con­trol­ling actions that ulti­mately leads to its destruction?

James SOE NYUN: “China Boy,” Chir­ic­ahua National Mon­u­ment, Ari­zona, 2007

James SOE NYUN: “Cochise Head,” Chir­ic­ahua National Mon­u­ment, Ari­zona, 2007

James SOE NYUN: “Kiss­ing Rocks,” Chir­ic­ahua National Mon­u­ment, Ari­zona, 2007

James SOE NYUN: “Old Maid,” Chir­ic­ahua National Mon­u­ment, Ari­zona, 2007

January 21 2008 | Categories: gardening • landscape • landscape design • photography • rambles | Tags: Chiricahua Mountains • mojave national preserve • mojave phone booth • mojave phonebooth • parks | 1 Comment »