[ Lost in the Landscape ]

well endowed landscaping

Here’s a lit­tle week­end quiz: Any guesses as to where I took this picture?

Does this sec­ond photo help?

Clue #1: It’s in Los Angeles.

Clue #2: It’s a uni­ver­sity campus.

Clue #3: The school col­ors are echoed in the flower col­ors of the landscaping.

If you’re not into uni­ver­si­ties and their col­ors the answer is USC, the Uni­ver­sity of South­ern Cal­i­for­nia, where the plant­ing color scheme fea­tures the cam­pus col­ors of car­di­nal and gold. If you were to ask me for my opin­ion I’d offer that they’re prob­a­bly fine col­ors for foot­ball uni­forms but a lit­tle stri­dent for most gar­den sit­u­a­tions if they were the only col­ors you used. But the entire cam­pus was vibrat­ing with new plant­i­ngs of red salvias and yellow-orange marigolds, with a few left­over win­ter plant­i­ngs of pan­sies in sim­i­lar colors.

I men­tioned the plant­i­ngs to one of the cam­pus reg­u­lars I was up there to meet with. Appar­ently USC has an endow­ment (by what was prob­a­bly an enthu­si­as­tic alum­nus) to sup­ply bed­ding plants in the school colors.

From the themed sea­sonal color, to the lawns, to the hedges, to the fanat­i­cally clipped creep­ing fig around the Romanesque win­dows, to the trees planted in reg­i­mented rows, it’s so not my phi­los­o­phy of gardening.

But for an urban cam­pus set where the warm sea­son is just that, the tall trees pro­vide wel­come shade and the many benches set in the plant­i­ngs make for oppor­tu­ni­ties to sit and hold con­ver­sa­tions. And the style of the land­scape seems to come straight out of a tra­di­tion of how a cam­pus should look: neat, orderly, with a sense that many things of worth come from Europe.

My par­ents met on this cam­pus way back when. Look­ing at the com­fort­able but for­mal plant­i­ngs, I think I that can under­stand them a lit­tle bet­ter, the atti­tudes where they came from. Lift­ing my gaze to take in the tall sycamores, the mature mag­no­lias, I know that many of these trees were here when my par­ents attended the campus.

But as far as the team-themed bed­ding plants–Were they here then? I’m not so sure. I’ll have to ask my father about them, though it’s not the sort of detail he’s likely to remember.

A few plant­i­ngs flaunted col­ors other than the offi­cial school ones. The trees and lawns fea­tured green, of course, and here and there you’d find a non-conforming clus­ter of plants. I end with a cou­ple final shots of those.

May 02 2010 | Categories: gardening • landscape design • places | Tags: color combinations • University of Southern California | 11 Comments »