[ Lost in the Landscape ]

in the greenhouse, or, the dictator’s wife

I was in the green­house Fri­day morn­ing, water­ing some pots of seedlings. It seemed funny for a sec­ond, because out­side the green­house it was rain­ing. If I hadn’t gone in there with the hose that morn­ing, the seedlings would have died in the desert for lack of water.

(Left, a Euphor­bia chara­cias ssp. wulfenii out­side the green­house, bloom­ing away in the rain.)

I used to grow and breed pha­laenop­sis orchids in the green­house. It was gonzo amounts of work to keep up with repot­ting hun­dreds of plants. And try­ing to con­coct an envi­ron­ment that would fool the orchids into think­ing that they were in the low­lands of the Philip­pines instead of the flats of South­ern Cal­i­for­nia wasn’t that easy either. In addi­tion to all the work, the green­house was an energy pig, tak­ing as much nat­ural gas to heat as the entire house.

So, end of orchid obses­sion. End of heat­ing the out­doors and wast­ing all that energy. (The New York Times has a recent piece on a cou­ple who decided to build them­selves a green­house. Their heater hasn’t arrived yet, but they’re already way over budget.)

Now that the trop­i­cal orchid episode of my life has ended the green­house is only heated by the sun via the green­house effect. At this time of year it’s handy to have a spot that will help give young plants a head start on spring. That’s pretty much how I use the green­house now.

And, um, yes, for a place to store gar­den clut­ter. Sort of a gar­den shed with windows…

For­tu­nately the win­dows are an opaque fiber­glass, so all the mess inside is obscured. Maybe even a lit­tle mys­te­ri­ous and poetic. Here are some pot­ted plants as seen from the outside.

As I was water­ing the plants in my lit­tle arti­fi­cial out­door desert I thought back to the 1980s. One the sto­ries from the news that has stuck in my brain all these years was a report on Michèle Ben­nett, the wife of Haiti’s dic­ta­tor, Baby Doc Duva­lier. The cou­ple was bad news all around, and one of Michèle’s vices was that she’d refrig­er­ate a part of the palace so that she and her friends could strut about in the fur coats that they col­lected. (Com­pared to her husband’s bru­tal ways, it all seems pretty minor, of course.)

Mink and fox and chin­chilla coats in Haiti. About as ratio­nal as a green­house full of warm trop­i­cal orchids in San Diego, I thought.

I guess we all want a lit­tle of of what doesn’t come eas­ily or nat­u­rally. But in an age of a grow­ing aware­ness of the need to live greener it’s good to stand back and see what we really need.

January 25 2009 | Categories: gardening | Tags: green living • greenhouse effect • greenhouses • Michele Bennett • orchids • solar energy • watering | 5 Comments »

garden lanterns

Here are a cou­ple cool wed­ding presents that we’re enam­ored with, a pair of solar-powered gar­den lanterns, a square bronze-colored one and a moss-toned teardrop shape.

Dur­ing the day­time, they’re beau­ti­ful gar­den orna­ments with their tra­di­tional sil­hou­ettes and del­i­cate col­ors. They soak up the sun’s rays to charge their bat­ter­ies, and then at night they let off a gen­tle bluish-white glow that lights up the lantern’s grace­ful out­line. Turns out one of the gifters, Sheila, an avid gar­dener that we hadn’t seen for years, now is involved with the web­site Isabella, where they’re available.

Here they are in the gar­den. I didn’t spend the hours to set up a cat­a­log shot, but I think you can get an idea of how great they look. The first shot is right before dusk show­ing the lanterns, the sec­ond after dusk, after the lanterns have turned them­selves on. The last image is the offi­cial cat­a­log shot.

 

Note that this blog isn’t a way to get you to click over to Ama­zon or other retail­ers to buy stuff. We gen­uinely liked this prod­uct. If they look cool to you and you’re hav­ing trou­ble decid­ing which style to pick, my rec­om­men­da­tion would be to go for the rounded shape if you have a lot of wind since it’s more aero­dy­namic. In a light breeze or a shel­tered loca­tion both would be good choices, and it actu­ally adds to the effect as they sway gen­tly.


 

July 19 2008 | Categories: my garden | Tags: garden ornament • lanterns • solar energy | 5 Comments »

a cool idea for garden shade

Maybe a year ago I was read­ing about a park­ing lot in town, at the local Kyocera cor­po­rate head­quar­ters, where they’d installed what they were call­ing “Solar Trees.” (They actu­ally trade­marked the name, but really aren’t all trees solar?) The Kyocera species of trees were steel poles that sup­ported big canopies made up of solar pan­els. They pro­vided shade to the cars below, and at the same time they gen­er­ated power. By the corporation’s esti­mate, one 30 by 40 foot solar tree would reduce as much green­house gases as a small grove of real trees.

Instal­la­tions like this are start­ing to appear in var­i­ous places, includ­ing a cou­ple of park­ing struc­tures at UCSD where they’re installing rooftop arrays over this summer.

I’ve thought about doing more with active solar devices, but where to put the pan­els was always an issue since the house has some pretty wacked roof angles, most of which don’t face south. Some sort of solar struc­ture in the gar­den might be an inter­est­ing solu­tion, maybe some­thing com­bin­ing a patio cover func­tion with power generation.

The Kyocera trees seem to be slanted more to cor­po­rate envi­ron­ments, and besides I find them more than a lit­tle mono­lithic and over­whelm­ing. Would you want these in your gar­den? But some­thing along these lines could be prac­ti­cal, good for the envi­ron­ment and attrac­tive. Sounds like a job for an artist or designer instead of an engineer…

That these trees sprouted here in town left me won­der­ing if there was any sort of link between them and Jim Bell, a local self-proclaimed “envi­ron­men­tal designer” who, among other things, has run for mayor (unsuc­cess­fully) twice, and once for City Coun­cil (also unsuc­cess­fully). I met him at a book sign­ing circa 2003, and he was hot on the idea of cov­er­ing all the roofs and park­ing lots with solar pan­els. His web site has an inter­est­ing statistic:

In the San Diego/Tijuana region, where I live, 20 per­cent cov­er­age of our build­ings and park­ing lots with solar pho­to­voltaic (PV) cells, cou­pled with effi­ciency improve­ments, would gen­er­ate enough elec­tric­ity to replace all forms of energy (elec­tric­ity, nat­ural gas, gaso­line, and diesel) cur­rently used in the region.

That idea was prob­a­bly not his orig­i­nally, either. But it speaks to a move­ment that’s in the air. Maybe the move­ment could begin right at home, in our back yards…

July 05 2008 | Categories: landscape design • rambles | Tags: patio covers • shade • solar energy • solar panels | No Comments »