[ Lost in the Landscape ]

mostly words

My win­ter pile of plant and seed cat­a­logs con­tains one that doesn’t fit the usual model. Instead of page after page of gor­geous soft-core porno­graphic pho­tos and draw­ings of plants in brawny full leaf and buxom full bloom, the J.L. Hud­son Seeds­man cat­a­log takes the form of a tight 95 pages of black-on-white text and only twenty-five small line draw­ings for illustrations.

This is a cat­a­log all about words. It could well change your expec­ta­tions of what a seed cat­a­log should be. It’s listed as an “eth­nob­otan­i­cal cat­a­log of seeds,” and you can sit down with it and read it like a novel. Most of the seeds descrip­tions come with a sen­tence or two of cul­tural trivia about the plant, mostly about how one of the world’s soci­eties uses that plant. I’ve been find­ing that this is the cat­a­log that I’ve been spend­ing the most time with this year.

In addi­tion to the inter­est­ing cat­a­log copy, you start to notice that the text itself is gor­geous in the way it sits on the page. I was try­ing to place the spe­cial qual­ity it has when I finally noticed on the last page an inter­est­ing state­ment: “This pub­li­ca­tion was type­set entirely with­out the use of computers.”

No com­put­ers? In 2009? So retro it’s avant-garde, like albums released on vinyl. But worry not. They also have an online pres­ence.

This is def­i­nitely a cat­a­log with atti­tude. It’s also a cat­a­log with a pur­pose, a pur­pose that’s well doc­u­mented in a state­ment on their web­site, a pur­pose that’s in line with their self-description as a “pub­lic access seed bank.” You can also start to under­stand the pur­pose when you look at the titles of the brief selec­tion of books offered in the back of the catalog.

One of the works, Inva­sion Biol­ogy: Cri­tique of a Pseu­do­science, has a writeup that includes the state­ment, “We have all heard the breath­less tales of the dan­gers of ‘inva­sive alien species,’ but what does sci­ence say about them? …In all cases… intro­duced species have increased bio­log­i­cal diversity.”

Another title, Eco­fas­cism: Lessons from the Ger­man Expe­ri­ence, gets a long writeup that includes the impas­sioned lines, “Most U.S. envi­ron­men­tal­ists are com­pletely opposed to the aims of fas­cism, but reac­tionary forces have begun to bend eco­log­i­cal themes towards these very ends. Only through knowl­edge may we pre­vent this per­ver­sion of environmentalism.”

Once you under­stand where the cat­a­log is com­ing from, you’ll start to under­stand the almost will­ful atti­tude that would drive them to offer seed of black mus­tard, one of the plants that has taken over much of the local ecosys­tem and has few friends among the plant peo­ple I know. And one of the recent online cat­a­log sup­ple­ments had seed for Arundo donax, a plant that has taken over some impor­tant local ripar­ian habi­tats. Why don’t you just dump plu­to­nium in your gar­den? Hmmmm…Does that make me an ecofascist?

You don’t have to agree with every­thing you see in the cat­a­log, and you don’t have to buy any­thing out of it. But this is one pub­li­ca­tion that’s a must read if you’d like to get your­self think­ing instead of all hot and both­ered over the usual pretty pictures!

January 24 2009 | Categories: gardening • rambles | Tags: biodiversity • ethnobotany • J.L. Hudson Seedsman • plant catalogs • seed banks • seed catalogs • seeds | 7 Comments »

weeds weeds weeds

Lots of times I’m glad to be liv­ing in South­ern Cal­i­for­nia where win­ters are mild and things hardly ever freeze. Today’s one of those amaz­ing win­ter days: bril­liantly sunny, warm–and it’s the mid­dle of Feb­ru­ary. But there are down-sides. Thou­sands of them.

What I’m talk­ing about of course are the weeds pop­ping up every­where in the yard. After a wet Jan­u­ary, as the days begin to warm, noth­ing has a stronger life-wish than the seeds that have been lying dor­mant in the soil. So now there are wild patches of grasses, oxalis, spurge, dan­de­lions and all sorts of other green mat­ter mak­ing a break from the cool secu­rity of the earth. Not that I blame them. I’m start­ing to feel moti­vated myself to break out of the heated house and spend some time in the sun­shine out­side. But at the same time I’m start­ing to think a lot about one of the quotes I listed last time, a cou­ple lines by David Cooper:

The life of a seri­ous gar­dener is not one that, as it hap­pens involves some gar­den­ing. Instead, it is one partly define by the struc­tured, reg­u­lar activ­i­ties which are imposed once the deci­sion to grow and to gar­den is made.

In cooler cli­mates, even seri­ous gar­den­ers get unbro­ken weeks indoors to pore over plant and seed cat­a­logs full of more bloom­ing things than you’ll see in any botan­i­cal gar­den. That’s an activ­ity I love doing as well. Today lots of these cat­a­logs are online, giv­ing the smaller grower an oppor­tu­nity to show­case their plants, and the offer­ings are as spec­tac­u­lar as ever. A cou­ple of inter­est­ing ones I’ve been look­ing at lately:

Sar­race­nia North­west (cool car­niver­ous plants)

Las Pil­i­tas (Cal­i­for­nia native plants)

But the weeds wait for no one. Jeez, some­times I won­der if I have the strength to take on a patch like this one, a severely under­loved cor­ner of the gar­den guarded by a spiny pachy­podium and over­run with the neighbor’s ivy:
And then there’s this lit­tle patch of dirt that until recently held some berries that had been over­run with all sorts of inva­sives. I took it down to bare earth a month ago, and the weeds are start­ing up in it already:
But what can you do? Let it go back to nature? Pave it over? For a gar­den with not enough plant­ing space for those amaz­ing plants in those plant cat­a­logs, niether of those seem like rea­son­able options. So…what will I do with my week­end? I’m sure it’ll have some­thing to do with weeding.…

February 09 2008 | Categories: gardening • my garden | Tags: obligations • plant catalogs • weeds | No Comments »