[ Lost in the Landscape ]

friday randomness

Here are a few mostly unre­lated things I’ve been stor­ing up.

Shop­ping for Pumpkins

First off, I wanted to share this fun(?) photo that’s only a few days late for Cana­dian Thanks­giv­ing or a cou­ple weeks early for the US hol­i­day. (Be sure to click it to enlarge it to get the full effect.) The image is “McLean, Vir­ginia (1978)” by pho­tog­ra­pher Joel Stern­feld. It’s his best-known photo and the cover to one of the edi­tions of his book, Amer­i­can Prospects.

A big part of pho­tog­ra­phy can be being in the right place at the right time. But then you have to know when to snap the shut­ter. Stern­feld nailed this one!

Orna­men­tal Grasses

Grasses have been used as lawn mate­ri­als for cen­turies, but the last cou­ple decades have seen an explo­sion in the use of orna­men­tal grasses that you don’t attack with lawn­mow­ers. The Cana­dian firm, Bluestem Nurs­ery, has assem­bled one of the bet­ter brief guides to dozens of commonly-used orna­men­tal grasses. When does a grass bloom? How much water does it need? How large does it get? Just take a look at the great sum­mary. Click on the plant name for pho­tos and a more detailed descrip­tion. It doesn’t have every plant you’ll run into in a seed cat­a­log, but it has plenty of the hardier species.

Pen­ste­mons from Seed

A few weeks ago I was plan­ning to sow seeds of a cou­ple species of pen­ste­mon. Some of the species in the genus require a cold snap to ger­mi­nate, oth­ers require light, while some respond to a fairly elab­o­rate string of tem­per­a­ture changes. And some just spring to life after you sprin­kle them in some soil and water them in. I had no idea what kind of treat­ment my species required until I went trawl­ing the web. That was when I ran across Jim Swayne’s pen­ste­mon seed ger­mi­na­tion method­ol­ogy pages.

There you’ll find sev­eral hun­dred pen­ste­mon species listed, along with brief ger­mi­na­tion notes on how you make the lit­tle seeds come to life. (For exam­ple, one of the more elab­o­rate rou­tines, for P. hartwegii, goes some­thing like: “Sow fresh seed @ 70ºF (21ºC), sow stored seed under thin cover 8 wks @ 40ºF (4ºC), move to 50ºF (10ºC) under light; if no germ. in 4 wks, move to 60ºF (16ºC).” For­tu­nately my two species were closer to the “just add water” category.)

An Elec­tion Video You Haven’t Seen

Leav­ing the gar­den, I wanted share this clip in recog­ni­tion of the elec­tions just con­cluded. It may be the last elec­tion footage you’ll need to watch this sea­son: a promo for Please Vote for Me, a Dan­ish doc­u­men­tary from 2007 on an elec­tion for Class Mon­i­tor for a third grade class in Wuhan, China. It’s a lit­tle Sesame Street in parts, but it’s got its Lord of the Flies moments as well.

November 14 2008 | Categories: gardening • photography | Tags: Bluestem Nursery • elections • germination • Jim Swayne • Joel Sternfeld • ornamental grasses • penstemon • politics • seeds • Vote for Me | 1 Comment »

poultry: 1, humans: 0

What fol­lows is an unpaid polit­i­cal rant.

Unless you’re read­ing this blog using a bicycle-powered gen­er­a­tor in the desert out­back some­where east of Perth you’ve heard of the rev­o­lu­tion­ary change in the lead­er­ship of the United States. It’s the cul­mi­na­tion of tire­less work for equal­ity and civil rights by gen­er­a­tions of good peo­ple. In Tuesday’s Cal­i­for­nia elec­tions, in addi­tion to vot­ing for Barack Obama in a land­slide, vot­ers also over­whelm­ingly approved Propo­si­tion 2, a wor­thy ini­tia­tive that man­dates more humane cage con­di­tions for chick­ens and other farm animals.

I should be happy, and I am gen­uinely happy–about those and many other things that hap­pened elec­tion day.

But pol­i­tics is a messy beast, and this gar­dener is hav­ing a bout of bad atti­tude. It started on Mon­day with the first signs of a bad cold and then wors­ened as some of the polit­i­cal fall­out from Tuesday’s elec­tions became clearer. So often, along with the good and rev­o­lu­tion­ary, you get deliv­ered the vile and reac­tionary. In the same Cal­i­for­nia elec­tions I referred to the pop­u­lace nar­rowly approved Propo­si­tion 8, a con­sti­tu­tional amend­ment rescind­ing the rights of gay and les­bian cit­i­zens from mar­ry­ing each other, thereby uphold­ing the tra­di­tional val­ues of hav­ing gays and les­bians marry peo­ple of the oppo­site gender.

In effect, in their actions, the vot­ers of Cal­i­for­nia decided to grant addi­tional civil rights to poul­try, while at the same time rescind­ing rights for the state’s gay and les­bian population.

So, are we to con­clude that, in a state where it takes 55% of the vote to raise prop­erty taxes, all it takes is a slim major­ity of the pop­u­la­tion to take rights away from thou­sands of its fel­low cit­i­zens? Have the Cal­i­for­nia vot­ers said that my com­mit­ment in mar­riage last June to John is now null and void? Not so fast!

The law­suits have begun, and one of the argu­ments is that very issue of the size of the vote nec­es­sary to revise a basic right that’s in the con­sti­tu­tion ver­sus merely amend­ing it. Legal chal­lenges often get a bad rap in this coun­try, but if it had been left exclu­sively to the pop­u­lar vote we’d still have things like seg­re­ga­tion and indus­trial runoff ignit­ing the rivers of the Northeast.

My cur­rent cold will pass, along with my cur­rent bad atti­tude. No mat­ter the imme­di­ate out­comes of the chal­lenges to Propo­si­tion 8, so too will pass this country’s romance with intol­er­ance. No mat­ter what tran­spires, John and I will con­tinue to con­sider our­selves married.

It’ll take a while for the cul­ture to change, but the signs are every­where. Although peo­ple over 30 voted for California’s Propo­si­tion 8, the pop­u­la­tion 30 and under soundly rejected it by a mar­gin of two to one.

Another sign: Let me quote the final sen­tence of Mar­tin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech, in which he sets the bar for the changes that would need to take place. Notice the list, the agenda King sets.

…And when this hap­pens, when we allow free­dom to ring, when we let it ring from every vil­lage and every ham­let, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God’s chil­dren, black men and white men, Jews and Gen­tiles, Protes­tants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spir­i­tual, “Free at last! free at last! thank God Almighty, we are free at last!”

And let me com­pare that the agenda Barack Obama set in his speech Tues­day night at Chicago’s Grant Park. His list, his agenda, his Amer­ica resides in the third para­graph from the very beginning.

If there is any­one out there who still doubts that Amer­ica is a place where all things are pos­si­ble, who still won­ders if the dream of our founders is alive in our time, who still ques­tions the power of our democ­racy, tonight is your answer.

It’s the answer told by lines that stretched around schools and churches in num­bers this nation has never seen, by peo­ple who waited three hours and four hours, many for the first time in their lives, because they believed that this time must be dif­fer­ent, that their voices could be that difference.

It’s the answer spo­ken by young and old, rich and poor, Demo­c­rat and Repub­li­can, black, white, His­panic, Asian, Native Amer­i­can, gay, straight, dis­abled and not dis­abled. Amer­i­cans who sent a mes­sage to the world that we have never been just a col­lec­tion of indi­vid­u­als or a col­lec­tion of red states and blue states.

We are, and always will be, the United States of America.

At no time in his cam­paign did Obama defend gay mar­riage. That would have been polit­i­cal sui­cide. But it’s telling that we are no longer invis­i­ble as we were in King’s day. This is a dif­fer­ent vision of Amer­ica that will come to be as the next gen­er­a­tion finally gets its say.

The bar has been raised.

November 06 2008 | Categories: everything • quotes • rambles | Tags: Barack Obama • gay marriage • gay weddings • Martin Luther King • politics • Proposition 2 • Proposition 8 | 2 Comments »

a little road trip

The most rad­i­cal thing you can do is stay home.
–Gary Sny­der, quoted by Rebecca Sol­nit in the cur­rent Orion

With all my apolo­gies to Gary Sny­der, Sat­ur­day included a quick trip up to Tree of Life Nurs­ery in South­ern Orange County, one of the main spe­cial­ists in Cal­i­for­nia native plants. I found it some­thing between tragic and funny that I trav­eled an hour and a half to look at plants that lived four houses away. But then there were all those unusual plants that I’d never see in a life­time of hik­ing around California.

The trip from my house in San Diego tra­verses the coastal I-5 cor­ri­dor, which in these parts is char­ac­ter­ized by sub­ur­ban sprawl with inter­mit­tent splices of some­thing resem­bling nature. The first big splices are the lagoons: Los Peñas­qui­tos, San Elijo, Batiq­ui­tos. And then, after Ocean­side, you hit the open hill­sides of Camp Pendle­ton that go on for miles. A free­way runs through it, so it’s any­thing but pris­tine. Also, many days you see heli­copters by the high­way and amphibi­ous craft just off the coast, stag­ing some sort of mil­i­tary takeover of Cal­i­for­nia. Sat­ur­day was rel­a­tively quiet, how­ever, with just the con­stant grind of the traf­fic at your back as you looked out to sea. Still, the scraped fore­ground didn’t help develop any sense of com­muning with the earth.

Soon the twin sea­side domes of the San Onofre nuke plant lay down the sig­nal that civ­i­liza­tion is about to take over again. A few more miles of homes and busi­nesses takes you to Ortega High­way, where a turn to the east gets you off the interstate.

You’re almost to the nurs­ery, but not quite. Two final miles of roads through homes in San Juan Capis­trano remind you that there’s an elec­tion just a few days away, and the tenor of the dozens of signs rein­forces what­ever stereo­types you might hold of Orange County being a con­ser­v­a­tive won­der­land. (Of course, pro­gres­sive Laguna Beach–which is to Orange County what Austin is to Texas–is only a few hill­sides away.)

Finally, for the final five miles to the nurs­ery, the road opens up through the open shade of an oak wood­land habi­tat. The morn­ing is quiet and there are only a few cars and motor­cy­cles on this tour route that even­tu­ally leads to Lake Elsinore.

But long before you get to the lake, you find the nursery.

Even the first view of the place from the park­ing lot is promising.

The main sales area cen­ters around Casa La Paz, a scenic adobe set among the oaks. It’s easy to imag­ine your­self in early Alta Cal­i­for­nia before the arrival of petu­nias and the non-Spanish White Man. This is a place that’s per­fected the the­ater of shop­ping for native plants.

Inside the Casa, you’ll find a thought­ful selec­tion of books on native and Mediterranean-climate gar­dens, as well as books on the local flora. In the fall, and once again in the spring, they offer free classes on replac­ing your lawn with Cal­i­for­nia natives. But it’s the plants that bring most peo­ple here.

Tomor­row: more on the nurs­ery trip.

November 03 2008 | Categories: gardening • landscape • places | Tags: Camp Pendleton • native plants • Orange County • politics • Tree of Life Nursery | No Comments »