Photographing a tree can present some challenges. You can walk around it to select the best angle, or pick a time of day with the best lighting conditions, but you still have to deal with the fact that the tree stays rooted in its spot and that the background behind the tree may be an unsightly or incomprehensible mess.
Myoung-Ho Lee. Tree #8, archival InkJet print. [ source ]
Last year I ran across the work of Korean photographer Myoung-Ho Lee, whose photos of trees present an elegant—and spectacularly not practical—solution to this problem of background. He just brings a plain background with him and stands it up behind the tree. If you figure that the trees in the photos are at least 25 feet tall, you get a sense of how huge the background sheet has to be.
Myoung-Ho Lee. Tree #13, archival InkJet print. [ source ]
Some of the photos have just the tree isolated against the plain background. Others show the tree and background in the larger context of the landscape where the tree is growing.
The results are pretty amazing, and create photos that are rich with suggestion and ideas about photography.
Myoung-Ho Lee. Tree #11, archival InkJet print. [ source ]
You might be driven to think about the fact that to photograph something in the wilds is to select it. Although this act of selecting the tree isn’t really digging the thing up from nature, it’s still bringing something from the wilds indoors onto a wall. That might make you think that photography—and much of art—is finding something interesting interesting in the world and bringing it into a gallery.
You also might think that looking at a photograph of something might tell you something about how the thing in the photo looks, but very little about its context or meaning.
And you might even think of Marcel Duchamp displaying a signed urinal in an exhibition, with the basic premise that if an artist calls something art, it’s art.
Myoung-Ho Lee. Tree #12, archival InkJet print. [ source ]
None of those thoughts are “right answers,” and you will probably have other thoughts of your own. I think you’ll agree, however, that these are some of the more striking photographs of trees that have ever been taken.
July 07 2009 | Categories: art • gardening • photography | Tags: Myoung-Ho Lee • trees | 12 Comments »
Here are a few more selections that you might find interesting from American Perceptions of Immigrant and Invasive Species: Strangers on the Land, by Peter Coates, published in 2006.
Before Columbus brought seeds and cuttings along on his second voyage to the West Indies, North America was home to less than 1 percent of the world’s total complement of cereals, starches, fruits, and vegetables.
Today, the only crops of significant commercial value native to the territory that became the United States are cranberry, blueberry, pecan nut, sugar maple, sunflower, and tobacco—a fact that offers eloquent testimony to the great service that has been duly rendered by a sting of public-spirited Americans…
No American public servant since [Thomas] Jefferson deserves more credit for transforming the foreign into the common than David G. Fairchild. In his capacity as agricultural explorer in charge at the Section for Foreign Seed and Plant Introduction from 1898 until 1928, Fairchild brought the navel orange to Florida and California from Brazil and oversaw the introduction of Italy’s seedless grape and China’s dry land pistachio. His most notable contributions, however, were in the introduction of the Chinese soybean and…the tree that became an essential prop of Washington, D.C.’s monumental landscape, adorning the Tidal Basin: the Japanese flowering cherry tree.
Fairchild’s encounters with the infamous vine that “ate the South”…left him somewhat chastened. He first came across kudzu about 1900 while touring Japan, where this wild, semiwoody perennial was fed to livestock. In his autobiography he recalled a visit to a “kudzu enthusiast” in Chipley, Florida, who was renowned for singing its praises as a forage crop in the early 1900s, despite his neighbors’ distrust. “Whenever I think of that night’s talk with the kudzu pioneer,” recalled Fairchild, “I have a special feeling of pride in what might be called our American willingness to try something new, whether it be a new forage crop, a new food, or any one of a thousand new, machine-made gadgets.” Fairchild, who confessed that “perhaps I have an undue passion for the new,” retained his faith in kudzu for quite some time, despite its proclivity to spread at will. By the late 1930s, however he was expressing his growing reservations in print. The seeds he brought back from Japan and planted on his property in Florida “‘took’ with a vengeance, smothering everything they got onto, and pretty soon we became alarmed. Feeling that the kudzu was too much for us, we began to cut it out.”
Fairchild finally returned home, so to speak, in 1946, when invited to make his selection for the “My Favorite Tree” guest column in the journal of the American Forestry Association (the nation’s oldest conservation organization, founded in 1875). After mentioning a string of exotic also-rans, but discarding them as unsatisfactory, he recalled that he had seen his first grove of California coastal redwoods (Sequoia sempervirens) fairly late in life, at a time when he was still besotted with exotic Asiatic promise: “A feeling of utter paralysis overtook me and the passion for planting trees, my puny little trees, anywhere, became distasteful.”
The stories in the book are great, and the social commentary is compelling. Unfortunately, every now and then a botanical clinker drops into the book’s pages, such as the one that follows the quote on redwoods immediately above, where the author waxes, “Though the redwood is only really found in California (there is a tiny patch in the most southwesterly corner of Oregon), it is arguably more American than any other tree in the United States insofar as it has no relatives, near or distant, in any other country.” Like, um, what about the Chinese dawn redwood (Metasequoia glyptostroboides)?
Okay, this isn’t a book you read for the botany, but it’s a worthy and thoughtful work on plants and the human condition, perfect for late winter reading as you contemplate the impending blooming of your cherry trees.
Although it’s primarily about biological immigrants to North America, Peter Coates points occasionally out that the immigrant-carrying boats sailed both directions:
The native oaks of Britain and the United States were greatly admired by J.C. Loudon, a leading British horticulturist of the mid-nineteenth century. He pronounced them “the most beautiful of trees.” Yet exotic trees had already become a mandatory ingredient of the “polite” British landscape enclosed within private estates. Loudon himself was one of the trendsetters who insisted that, notwithstanding the oak’s charms, “no residence in the modern style can have a claim to be considered as laid out in good taste, in which all the trees and shrubs employed are not either foreign ones, or improved varieties of indigenous ones.
The most sought-after of these arboreal exotics were hardy North Americans. Britons were ruthlessly condescending toward American artistic achievements at this time. “In the four quarters of the globe,” Sydney Smith famously inquired [in 1820], “who reads an American book?” or goes to an American play” or looks at an American picture or statue?” Yet no one asked “who plants an American tree?”
February 10 2009 | Categories: gardening • landscape • landscape design • quotes | Tags: Add new tag • agriculture • books • David G. Fairchild • exotics • invasive plants • kudzu • native plants • Peter Coates • trees | 3 Comments »
The record heat in October and November finally did in the Australian tree fern that I’d been nursing. The plant grows in full sun in its native environment, and was supposed to be able to survive full sun in coastal California. But two months of the hottest and driest weather this past year took care of what little will to live the plant had left.
The fern served as a focal point in the garden, and its passing left a big void and a sad stick of dead trunk. It doesn’t help that the neighbor’s basketball backboard lines up almost perfectly with the dead trunk.
We toyed briefly with training a small vine up the dead trunk, celebrating life and death and renewal and all that, but we couldn’t think of something that would look great as the main focal point of the space. So we were faced with coming up with a suitable replacement.
We started with some basic requirements:
- The tree should max out in the 12-20 foot range and be not too broad—There’s a young tangerine tree nearby that we wouldn’t want to shade.
- Some plants immediately nearby would appreciate some shade, but others are quite happy with close to full sun; a tree that could be trained to have an open branch structure would work well.
- Something with a graceful natural form would be terrific—no big green popsicle-looking shade trees, please.
- The plant should be pretty easy to find locally, and couldn’t cost too much.
- This being drought-prone California, a tree that would be able to get by with much lower water requirements than original the tree fern would be a must.
- The “look” of the tree would have to complement Mediterranean, tropical or just plain odd-looking plants.
- Though not an absolute requirement, a native plant would be nice.
The short list came down to four trees or large shrubs.
Ginkgo biloba
Pros: Both John and I have always loved ginkgos, particularly their distinctive foliage and incendiary yellow autumn coloration. And their history of being a living fossil is cool. There are strains that range from little round shrubs to massive shade trees, with a couple options in the 12-20 foot range that could be trained with multiple trunks. Though not desert plants, they can make do with fairly low amounts of water.
Cons: Availability, mostly. Local sources carry the itty bitty bonsai-friendly subjects or the big shade trees, nothing in between. The tree grows really slowly, so getting a specimen of the small varieties would be a challenge. The final look of the plant, too, might not be perfect for the location.
Black peppermint willow (a.k.a. Australian myrtle willow), Agonis flexuosa ‘Jervis Bay Afterdark’
Pros: Striking dark dark dark purple (almost black) leaves, and a neat weeping habit. The bark is shaggy and attractive. Rapid growth to its target size. Drought tolerant.
Cons: The plant seems to develop a dense shade-tree look as it matures—maybe too dense for the spot. The literature says this form only gets to sixteen feet or so, but it’s only been around for a decade. Call me distrustful, but I’m just suspicious that it could be more maintenance than I want to sign up for to keep it small. Mature trunks seem large in scale to the plant. There’s a bamboo nearby, and it might be just too much wispy, willowy foliage.
[ Image from Metro Trees ]
Crape myrtle, Lagerstroemia x fauriei
Pros:Several clones are available locally in boxed specimen size for not too much money—instant gratification! Gorgeous summertime flowers. Interesting exfoliating bark. The fauriei hybrids resist mildew better than the pure species.
Cons: Their colors would look really similar to a pair of nearby bougainvilleas. The rigid forms of the trees would definitely pull the garden in a formal Mediterranean direction.
Dr. Hurd manzanita, Arctostaphylos x ‘Dr. Hurd’
Pros: Perfect eventual size (ca. 15 feet). Fairly fast-growing for a manzanita (though no speed demon). Dramatic red-brown stems with large light green leaves. Drought-tolerant, but also more tolerant of garden water than most manzanitas. Flowers in the winter.
Cons: Sporadic availability locally, and possibly only in small sizes. I’m worried that the spot might be just a little over-wet for even this manzanita.
[ Image from San Marcos Growers, who grew my plant ]
So what was the decision? I put a five-gallon manzanita on order and it hit the nursery a few days later. It’s more of a Charlie Brown shrub at this point and will take some patience and a few years to get to its final size. If it survives the amount of water it gets, if it attains the size I want, if it behaves well with its neighbors, it could be the perfect plant for this location. Check back in five years and I’ll tell you how it’s worked out…
Coincidentally Saturday’s Los Angeles Times had a whole page spread on manzanitas a full eight days after I put mine in the ground. I felt so much ahead of the Times…
February 02 2009 | Categories: gardening • my garden • plant profiles | Tags: Agonis flexuosa • Arctostaphylos x Dr. Hurd • crape myrtles • Ginkgo biloba • Lagerstroemia x fauriei • manzanitas • trees | 9 Comments »
I was heading back to my desk at work on Thursday and noticed a cluster of my coworkers looking out a window. There’s a little access road right outside. Usually it doesn’t have a full-grown eucalyptus tree fallen across it, but this day it did.
I don’t have my camera with me most of the time, but Declan had his. He was part of the volunteer crew who wrestled the tree to the curb, but he also managed take these shots.
[ View the entire set on Flikr ]
Not much later the building’s safety person had issued a warning:
Just a heads-up, literally: high winds are blowing down eucalyptus branches and trees around campus. About an hour ago, an entire tree broke off and fell across the access road… (Very fortunately, no people or vehicles were in its path.) Until the winds die down, please be sure to watch and listen for breaking branches and avoid walking through the eucalyptus groves.
The UCSD campus is home to over 200 thousand of these trees in plantings that date back a hundred years, back to a eucalyptus mania when eucalyptus were planted all over Southern California, including three million just a few miles up the coast in what’s now Rancho Santa Fe.
If you live in this part of the state you’ve probably heard the stories: that the trees are call widowmakers because they drop their branches if you look at them wrong, that they’re just giant non-native weeds that take up valuable space…bad things like that.
I wonder if the bad rap on the first count is entirely deserved. For sure, some eucalyptus are brittle, and there have been three times in the last year alone when I was within fifty feet or thirty seconds of being taken out by falling eucalyptus. But with almost a quarter million of them on campus and millions of them in town it’s inevitable that a few of them keel over or fall apart. Are they that much worse than oaks or other trees that people plant by the millions?
I did a quick and totally informal survey of some headlines, eucalyptus versus oaks. Maybe the eucs are totally bad news. May they’re not that much worse than other species. Whatever the case, they definitely can be gorgeous trees.
Shadows cast over towering eucalyptuses (Eucalypturs kills woman in Old Town San Diego, The San Diego Union-Tribune—January 8, 2003)
2 killed in ‘freak accident’ : Falling oak crushes pickup on County Line Rd. (Oak tree, The Post and Courier (Charleston, N.C.)—April 16, 2008)
Tree check asked after accident (Eucalyptus kills woman in parked pickup truck, Evening Tribune (San Diego, CA)—December 25, 1987)
Man killed by falling tree (Oak tree falls onto pickup truck, News Sentinel, (Knoxville, TN) December 28, 2008)
$160,000 awarded in Zoo death (Award given to family of girl killed by falling eucalyptus, The San Diego Union—August 2, 1986)
Girl killed by falling tree at Boy Scout camp (Oak tree, Associated Press, via MSNBC—August 10, 2005)
Half of the incidents above involved pickup trucks. Weird. Maybe that’s the deadly combination: pickup trucks and large trees. Like mobile homes and tornadoes…
January 31 2009 | Categories: landscape • places • rambles | Tags: eucalyptus • falling trees • oaks • trees • UCSD | 4 Comments »
If a tree talks in the woods and no one’s around to hear it, does it make a sound?
Tuesday morning I had my choice of places to view the televised inauguration of Barack Obama or ways to hear the audio feed. Working as I do on the UCSD campus, there were rooms in libraries, radios at coffee stands and individual laptops that were all playing the ceremonies. The most unusual venue I could pick from was to hear the inauguration broadcast through the speakers of lead-plated eucalyptus trees that were installed over twenty years ago as part of the campus’s Stuart Collection.
Left: The tree in the installation that plays music.
The work is Trees by artist Terry Allen, and was constructed from three eucalyptus that either had died or had to be removed to make way for new construction. The dead trees were cut into big chunks, dipped in wood preservative, reassembled, and then covered with small sheets of lead attached nails. What was the artist’s intent? The Stuart Collection’s description offers this explanation:
One could walk through the grove several times before noticing Allen’s two unobtrusive trees. Not only do these trees reinvest a natural site with a literal sense of magic but they implicitly make connections between nature and death and the life of the spirit. It is not surprising that students have dubbed this area the “Enchanted Forest.”
At the entrance to the vast, geometric library the third tree of Allen’s installation remains silent - perhaps another form of the tree of knowledge, perhaps a reminder that trees must be cut down to print books and build buildings, perhaps a dance form, or perhaps noting that one can acquire knowledge both through observation of nature and through research.
Right: The tree in the installation that recites poetry.
On Tuesday, the tree that ordinarily recites poetry and the one that typically offers songs and music were dedicated to an audio feed of the Presidential inauguration. The organizers had high hopes, predicting “hundreds of students” would show up for the event. But for the few minutes I could spend there, I counted just about a dozen people and two dogs (well-behaved ones, attending with their owners, not dogs doing their thing on the trees…).
Left: The “bark” on the mute tree, showing the nails holding the lead plates, as well as the list of credits of the people who worked on the project.
Left: The mute tree, as seen from the library entrance.
The special programming wasn’t the easiest sell that morning. The inauguration was already a huge event.
I’ll have to admit I had a hard time paying attention the the art event myself. You could feel change in the air. And even talking trees in a forest weren’t enough to get people to stop.
January 22 2009 | Categories: art | Tags: Barack Obama • eucalyptus • presidential inauguration • recycling • Stuart Collection • Terry Allen • trees • UCSD | 4 Comments »
We’ve just returned from a couple of days in L.A. The drive up and back isn’t one of the great scenic routes on earth, and for the most part it’s not particularly interesting botanically.
The plantings of trees along I-5 and the 405 over 150 miles mostly draw from tried and true California plant staples like palms and eucalyptus, with stands of Italian cypress and occasional pines concentrated in the more residential areas. They’re attractive enough and generally drought-tolerant choices, but the rhythm of palm, palm, eucalyptus, palm, cypress, palm, eucalyptus, palm gets a little repetitious over the course of two and a half hours (if traffic is moving).
A new kind of tree has been appearing over the last half dozen years, however. With the recent growth of cell phones, there’s been an explosion in how many cell towers you see—More bars in more places translates into more cell towers in more places. The providers have occasionally tried to hide the towers by trying to make them pass as trees—usually with pretty comical results.
To keep myself amused on the trip I shot a few photos of roadside trees. See if you can spot the cell towers in the grid below. (Answers are at the end of this post, but I don’t think you’ll need the answer key.)
Trees and cell towers
Give up? The cell towers are the far right in the top row (fake palm), the first in the third row (fake…er…what is that supposed to be? a redwood? roadside in Southern California?) and far right in the third row (plain vanilla cell tower). At least the cell tower trees are drought-tolerant.
August 25 2008 | Categories: landscape design • places | Tags: cell phones • cell towers • drought-tolerant landscaping • Interstate 405 • Interstate 5 • Los Angeles • Orange County • roadside plantings • trees | 1 Comment »
Few ideas are simpler: Plant a tree. Shade your house. Reduce your cooling expenses. Reduce global warming.
A current program that’s giving away shade trees for free is coming out of the California Center for Sustainable Energy. Customers of San Diego Gas & Electric in San Diego and Orange Counties can get their choice of twenty kinds of trees in fifteen gallon containers. Each household can claim as many as ten trees. Choices run from small, slow-growing crepe myrtles to big London plane trees to native live oaks.
Even if you’re out of the target audience for the program, their site has a link page to a pile of shade tree and urban forestry sites with lots of information. Their own site has a couple of basic principles for deciding where to put a shade tree and what kind to use:
- Plant only deciduous trees on the south side of the building to allow the sun to warm your home in the winter
- Concentrate planting on the west side, that’s where the energy savings are the greatest
A few years back there was a similar giveaway program, and houses in the neighborhood got flyered with offers for your choice of one of three tree species. For free. They’d even plant the tree for you.
Free cassia tree
The neighbor next door opted for one, a gold medallion tree, Cassia leptophylla. It’s in bloom right now and is pretty attractive. The plant is supposed to top out at thirty feet and spread twenty or thirty feet.
But now we come to the part of the post where we look the gift horse in the mouth.
My neighborhood is on the first rise of hills over the Pacific Ocean. Many of the houses here have views out over the ocean, Mission Bay, downtown San Diego and even down to the hills of Tijuana in Mexico and the craggy Coronado Islands off the coast of Tijuana and Rosarito. (There’s something really cool about standing on your roof deck and being able to see another country.) My view isn’t the most spectacular. Still, the glimpses of water and the land below give me a sense of place.
As for the cooling effects of the trees, the majority of the houses around here either don’t have air conditioning or—like our neighbor with the tree—have it but never use it. If things get warm, you open a window or door. Of course, a couple miles inland things are different, and a shade tree can save you lots in cooling.
So, to my neighbors, a plea: Go ahead and plant trees, but select the ones that are scaled for your house and the neighborhood.
Ugly house
But to this one particular neighbor I offer a special exemption. Please
do plant a tree. Ivy. Shrubbery. Anything!
August 01 2008 | Categories: gardening • places | Tags: California Center for Sustainable Energy • shade trees • trees • view neighborhoods | 2 Comments »
