[ Lost in the Landscape ]

a fake forest

Last time, I wrote about going to the euca­lyp­tus groves at UCSD to look for wild­flow­ers. I’ve always been fas­ci­nated with these areas of the cam­pus. Boston ivy grow­ing on brick build­ings might define the look of cer­tain East Coast schools, but here it’s the euca­lyp­tus trees.

At first your eye fol­lows the trunks on these trees, in the sum­mer cov­ered with beau­ti­ful exfo­li­at­ing bark, up to the high branches and out to the weep­ing branches that come back towards earth, often with vivid red col­oration on the stems, con­trast­ing with the slen­der gray-green leaves. Indi­vid­u­ally the trees are strik­ing, and grow­ing together they give the impres­sion of a light, sunny for­est. Pay some atten­tion to how they’re planted, how­ever, and the ini­tial impres­sion of pris­tine nature falls apart. Below I’ve taken a pic­ture and drawn black lines that accen­tu­ate the rigid rows that were used to plant the “for­est.” Not so nat­ural after all. South­ern Cal­i­for­nia, home of the sim­u­lacra man­u­fac­tured in Hol­ly­wood, the fake fea­tures of Dis­ney­land, and the arti­fi­cially buxom women of West-Side L.A., does it again.

You prob­a­bly know that the trees are native to Aus­tralia, and may know that down under they’re some­times called “widow-makers” because of their ten­dency to drop their branches onto peo­ple. You may even know their his­tory in South­ern Cal­i­for­nia, that they were planted by the mil­lions as part of var­i­ous get-rich schemes in the later 19th and ear­lier 20th cen­turies, with promises that they’d grow wood for rail­road tres­tles or ocean piers, or that they’d yield essen­tial oils with all sorts of mirac­u­lous prop­er­ties. A great arti­cle in the Jour­nal of San Diego His­tory goes into some of their fas­ci­nat­ing past.

The plant­i­ngs that remain through­out South­ern Cal­i­for­nia are beau­ti­ful stands. The occa­sional grove even har­bors monarch but­ter­flies on the migra­tions. (An area of the UCSD groves used to be alive with mon­archs dur­ing the win­ter in the ear­lier 1980s, but I haven’t seen more than the occa­sional monarch since then. Too bad, for sure.) But these groves of perfectly-aligned trees for me talk about cul­ture and nature, and of the ways acci­dents of his­tory shape how the world looks today.

March 15 2008 | Categories: landscape • places • rambles | Tags: eucalyptus • forest • UCSD | 2 Comments »

into the wild

A cou­ple posts ago I men­tioned dich­e­lostemma bloom­ing in the gar­den and I was think­ing that they were prob­a­bly also bloom­ing wild in the nat­ural spaces around me. I took a lunchtime walk through one of the semi-wild areas on the north part of the cam­pus of the Uni­ver­sity of Cal­i­for­nia, San Diego. The area has been set aside as a nat­ural pre­serve, although “nat­ural” in this case is actu­ally a canyon of native plants mixed in with some ear­lier 20th cen­tury plant­i­ngs of euca­lyp­tus. Fake as it may be as a gen­uine South­ern Cal­i­for­nia chap­ar­ral ecosys­tem, the edges where the grove meets the scrub starts to take on more native flavors.

There had been heavy rains this past Jan­u­ary, fol­lowed by occa­sional wet peri­ods, so the ground was still moist in spots. The weather was now turn­ing warm, sunny and spring-like. Grasses were grow­ing exu­ber­antly. It wasn’t long before I started to notice occa­sional flow­ers in the under­story. Although the spaces under the euca­lyp­tus prove hos­tile to most flow­er­ing plants other than the occa­sional also-imported black mus­tard, the blue dicks were pretty con­tent to be there, a sin­gle plant here, big rafts of them there.


A flow­er­ing head of Dich­e­lostemma cap­i­ta­tum, mixed in with the grasses and euca­lyp­tus


A larger stand of them, with their lit­tle flower heads raised up two feet or more in the dap­pled shade

I was tuned in to what I was see­ing, but in the back of my mind I was aware that back in my gar­den the same species of plants was also bloom­ing. Back home the blue dicks are part of a long con­tin­uum of “spring­time” flow­ers that begin with the first nar­cis­sus in Octo­ber and con­tinue into a num­ber of plants that have yet to bloom. But in the wild areas of South­ern Cal­i­for­nia this is it. Spring is short and–in a wet year like this one–intense, orgias­tic. As the weather warms the rains will stop. The grasses will die out and the flow­ers will fade out. Soon the long brown sea­son will begin. But in the fic­tion­al­ized nat­ural world of my gar­den, spring will be here for sev­eral more months. I’ll enjoy it for sure. But some­how it seems a lit­tle wrong.

March 14 2008 | Categories: landscape • my garden • places • rambles | Tags: blue dicks • Dichelostemma capitatum • eucalyptus • spring • UCSD | 2 Comments »