[ Lost in the Landscape ]

loud music and sage

I drove all the way up to Los Ange­les for an organ recital last night. I knew I was in for trou­ble when the usher handed me a pro­gram and offered me a pair of earplugs. But more on that later.

John hates the idea of me to tak­ing my scooter to LA, so I grudg­ingly drove the gas-devouring Jeep. But to turn the sit­u­a­tion to an advan­tage I stopped by the Tree of Life Nurs­ery in San Juan Capis­trano. It’s a few miles east of I-5, but ten ten min­utes of dri­ving off the inter­state beats an hour and a half each direc­tion from San Diego.

I’d been plan­ning on doing some­thing with the unclaimed zone between my house and the neigh­bor behind me, and I wanted some native plants to fill in the zone. This would be a good chance to pick up some plants with­out the ridicu­lous commute.

The plant­i­ngs around the nurs­ery fea­tured some vibrant spring flow­ers, includ­ing this stand of Cal­i­for­nia pop­pies and vivid vio­let phacelia.

And this traf­fic cone mal­low was pretty spec­tac­u­lar as well (prob­a­bly desert mal­low, Sphaer­al­cea ambigua).

While there I picked up some plants for my project, includ­ing some more plants of white sage (Salvia api­ana) and a clone of pur­ple sage (Salvia leu­co­phylla ‘Amethyst Bluff’). I’ll post more on that project later in the week.

Nego­ti­at­ing LA rush hour traf­fic can be an ordeal, and doing it with a dozen plants in the back of the car wasn’t any­thing I was look­ing for­ward too, espe­cially if I had to jam on the brakes. But traf­fic was fairly light and I got to my des­ti­na­tion with plenty of time for a relax­ing din­ner before the concert.

And now, on to the con­cert: When the lights dimmed, a man got up to intro­duce the per­former for the evening. Charle­magne Pales­tine was one of the fig­ures active in the avant-garde music scene, first in New York around 1970, and slightly later in Los Ange­les. The man intro­duc­ing him apol­o­gized that dur­ing ear­lier rehearsals they’d blown three fuses on the organ, and that they might need to inter­rupt the con­cert to replace more fuses.

The con­cert loca­tion, the First Con­gre­ga­tional Church of Los Ange­les, claims to have the world’s largest indoor church organ, a mon­ster with well over 20,000 pipes. What would the sound be if you got sev­eral thou­sand of them going at the same time? The audi­ence got to find out about an hour into the piece.

What had started out as a wispy cloud of del­i­cate sus­tained notes had grad­u­ally gown in inten­sity as organ stops got added. When the composer/performer finally did a face-plant into the key­board around the 60 minute mark and remained there unmov­ing for a good ten min­utes, the hall shook with a throb­bing earth­quake of sound that with zero doubt was the loud­est, most intense, most jar­ring ten min­utes of any­thing I’ve ever heard in my life. (There’s a record­ing of Schling-Blägen, the piece Charle­magne Pales­tine per­formed in con­cert, but that in no way gives pre­pares you for the phys­i­cal assault that the you’ll expe­ri­ence live.)

When the piece ended, I was still shak­ing. I wasn’t sure I could drive home very reli­ably, and I was glad I wasn’t on the scooter.

As I opened the car door, the smell of sage escaped from plants behind the back seat. It’s said that sage tea is good for calm­ing the nerves, and the same could prob­a­bly be said for the aroma from the plants. With all my nerves still fir­ing on over­load, it was prob­a­bly the per­fect rem­edy for what I’d just expe­ri­enced. When I got home two hours later, I lay down, and went right to sleep.

PS: I’ve only talked about the loud­ness of the piece, but in the final analy­sis there was a lot of beauty and del­i­cacy in it as well. I loved it. Music can take you many places. This piece took me some­where I’ve never been.

March 17 2009 | Categories: gardening • places | Tags: Charlemagne Palestine • music • sages • Tree of Life Nursery | 2 Comments »

at the tree of life nursery

The plant cat­a­log of the Tree of Life Nurs­ery is impres­sive. Selec­tions hail mainly from the state of Cal­i­for­nia, but they carry a few selec­tions from the South­west United States. Refresh­ingly they also aug­ment their selec­tion with plants from Baja California.

(The bio­log­i­cal zones of South­ern Cal­i­for­nia spread south of the imag­i­nary line of the inter­na­tional bor­der, so the inclu­sion of plants from Baja makes per­fect sense. The divi­sion of Alta Cal­i­for­nia from Baja Cal­i­for­nia is a purely human and arbi­trary one. There’s no river, no range of moun­tains to divide the two coun­tries, only an arbi­trary line on a map and stretches of bor­der fenc­ing that range from wispy strands of barbed wire to welded pieces of steel left over from Oper­a­tion Desert Storm.)

The Tree of Life cat­a­log even lists poi­son oak! (“Decid­u­ous shrub, vin­ing, shiny leaves, skin irri­tant, valu­able for wildlife, reveg­e­ta­tion.”) When I vis­ited on Sat­ur­day I didn’t see any out on the sales tables, though I wouldn’t have been sur­prised if they’d have offered to don their haz­mat suits and bring me up a cou­ple from the prop­a­ga­tion areas… They did have a good sam­pling of much of the rest of the cat­a­log, and I had the time to care­fully look over each of their offerings.

The nurs­ery is sur­rounded by plant­i­ngs that include a few of their offer­ings. Grown-up spec­i­mens are often com­pletely dif­fer­ent from the one-gallon babies, so it’s a great oppor­tu­nity to see how some plants will mature.

To give every­thing an authen­tic early-California feel they appar­ently have even thought to pep­per their grounds with period-appropriate rep­tiles. Unfor­tu­nately I didn’t see any.

The new dis­cov­ery of the week­end was a del­i­cate but stun­ning stand of late-autumn golden grasses of the pur­ple three-awn (Aris­tida pur­purea). Sway­ing gen­tly in the after­noon breeze and back­lit with the day’s sun, they looked like a slightly larger, less floppy native take on the Mex­i­can feather grass that’s get­ting to be a beau­ti­ful cliche in our gar­dens and quite poten­tially a new pest in our local canyons. Unfor­tu­nately I was so taken with the grasses that I neglected to take their portrait.

It was tough to say no to so many inter­est­ing plants, but I was there on a mis­sion: I needed some­thing extremely low and spread­ing for next to some step­ping stones that I’d installed last week­end. The loca­tion gets close to zero addi­tional water through­out the year, so the plants had to be happy with that kind of deprivation.

Trips to nurs­eries with­out a plan in hand can some­times lead to a bad case of assortment-itis, with a trunk-load of wildly dis­sim­i­lar plants with clash­ing cul­tural needs. I ended up with three selec­tions which, though dif­fer­ent species, have sim­i­lar cul­tural needs. Also I thought their strongly con­trast­ing plant forms and col­ors would look well together: a pros­trate form of the gray-green foliaged coastal Cal­i­for­nia sage­brush (Artemisia cal­i­for­nica ‘Canyon Gray’), a low selec­tion of Cal­i­for­nia buck­wheat (Eri­o­gonum fas­ci­c­u­la­tum ‘Dana Point’), and the almost white-foliaged Carmel aster (Lessin­gia filagini­fo­lia v. cal­i­for­nica).

And, um, yes. I did get a cou­ple other plants. But not too many…

November 04 2008 | Categories: gardening • my garden • places | Tags: Artemisia californica • Artemisia californica 'Canyon Gray' • California coastal sagebrush • Carmel aster • Dana Point buckwheat • Eriogonum fasciculatum • Eriogonum Fasciculatum 'Dana Point' • Lessingia filaginifolia v. californica • native plants • sagebrush • shopping • Tree of Life Nursery | 1 Comment »

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 »