[ Lost in the Landscape ]

from 8.8.88 to 8.8.08

Although this is not a polit­i­cal blog, it’s a space that acknowl­edges that you can’t escape the world, even nested within the walled con­fines of your pri­vate­gar­den spaces. An event that crept into my men­tal gar­den is the 20^th anniver­sary of the 8.8.88 pop­u­lar upris­ing in Burma (a coun­try whose mil­i­tary rulers have decided should be called Myan­mar). I thought I’d mark the occa­sion with pic­tures from a trip I took there with my father in 1998, shortly after the tenth anniver­sary of the attempted revolution.

But first, a quick recap in case you’re not famil­iar with the events: On August 8, 1988 stu­dent pro­test­ers led a pop­u­lar upris­ing against the rul­ing mil­i­tary junta, lead­ing in the course of sev­eral weeks to the down­fall of Gen­eral Ne Win. For the first time since 1962, when the gen­eral seized power, the coun­try sensed that democ­racy might be pos­si­ble once again. But the mil­i­tary pan­icked and installed mar­tial law, lead­ing to a crack­down that very likely resulted in far more casu­al­ties than China’s noto­ri­ous and bet­ter known Tianan­men Square inci­dent which would take place less than a year later.

The inci­dent in China was immor­tal­ized in that famous pho­to­graph of the lone pro­tester fac­ing off with a tank. Frag­ile flesh meets hard­ened steel; youth­ful ide­al­ism con­fronts bureau­cratic power. How can any­one for­get that picture?

But with a gov­ern­ment more secre­tive and repres­sive than even China’s, there were no sim­i­larly indeli­ble images to make it out of the Burma, and the events of 8.8.88 live pri­mar­ily through sto­ries handed down from those who were there. In retelling the story I hope to keep its mem­ory alive. [Read more on Burmese democ­racy efforts.]

Fast-forward ten years to Octo­ber 1998, the end of the mon­soon sea­son, and two months after a small band of stu­dents had staged a protest in front of Sule Pagoda in down­town Ran­goon. The stu­dents were no match and the gov­ern­ment won this time.

Things were “sta­ble” when we arrived, though an Orwellian smog hung in the air every­where we went. Sol­diers with rifles guarded key loca­tions in Ran­goon. Check­points with armed guards slowed down travel out­side of the cap­i­tal. (The US State Depart­ment still had a travel advi­sory in place.)

Above: One of the many mind-control signs you see around the coun­try. (The Tat­madaw is the rul­ing junta.) This one is on the grounds of the his­toric palace in Mandalay–prime tourist habi­tat. Imag­ine a sign like this at the entrance to Dis­ney­land…

Our plan was to touch base with fam­ily in the Ran­goon area for a week, travel for two weeks around what parts of the coun­try the mil­i­tary allowed any­one to visit, and then return for a final week to Ran­goon. That last week was time I’d set aside to “do pho­tog­ra­phy” beyond my tourist snap­shots. The malaria I con­tracted in up-state Burma gave me a week of fevered delir­ium to end my trip instead, so all these pho­tos were snapped dur­ing the first part of the trip. Out of a few hun­dred slides, I’ve scanned a few of botan­i­cal inter­est, a few of my father’s home vil­lage, some zoo pic­tures, plus a few that show some of the tex­tures of how peo­ple live under one the most repres­sive regimes in the world.

To get to my father’s vil­lage we drove to the city where the good dirt road ended and the bad dirt road began. There we rented a Jeep to take us as far we could get on road sur­faces that were still part-liquid, part-goo from the mon­soons that were just con­clud­ing. In Burma’s poor econ­omy, even the rel­a­tively pros­per­ous who could afford a vehi­cle couldn’t nec­es­sar­ily afford tires or the bribes nec­es­sary to get you in the good graces of the offi­cials who would have access to foreign-made tires in the first place. After we couldn’t go any far­ther in the Jeep, we hired a bul­lock cart to take us the last cou­ple of miles to the village.

One of my father’s friends who also emi­grated to the United States from this vil­lage sent money back to his rel­a­tives. Some of the funds helped the fam­ily get by. Some went to build a small pagoda out­side the vil­lage. And some went to build­ing this catch basin that helps pro­vide the vil­lagers with water through the eight months of the year that see almost no rain­fall. This is gen­er­ally how projects get financed. The gov­ern­ment does vir­tu­ally noth­ing unless the rulers can derive some kind of ben­e­fit from the transaction.

A flow­er­ing cot­ton plant in the vil­lage. Although I wear a lot of cot­ton, I’d never thought much about where it came from until I saw this plant. Look­ing at the flow­ers you can tell right away that it’s a mal­low, first cousin to hol­ly­hocks, okra and hibiscus.

Farm­ers in the vil­lage cot­ton fields, like farm­ers and gar­den­ers every­where else, have prob­lems with weeds. Here’s one of their unde­sir­ables, an Asi­atic lily. (If all my weeds could be so attrac­tive I wouldn’t have any need for “good” plants!)

The vil­lage bicy­cle mechanic’s “garage.” The mechanic, like many adults that you encoun­tered, auto­mat­i­cally went into this stiff, at-attention pose when­ever you’d point a cam­era at him, maybe some­thing to do with cam­eras loaded with slow film… My father has the same pos­ing issues, even with a cam­corder. (You can imag­ine how com­pelling videos of him just stand­ing there are.)

The last night we were in the vil­lage we hired a band and threw a party. Most of the vil­lage showed up. Two of the musi­cians are shown with split-bamboo per­cus­sion clap­pers called wal­le­cotes (how­ever you spell it…).

Above: After we left the vil­lage we passed through another, more pros­per­ous set­tle­ment. Here’s a class at their school.

An agi­tated ele­phant at the Ran­goon zoo. I am not a fan of zoos, and a visit to an old-school zoo like this one shows some of the rea­sons. The legs of the ele­phants stay chained to the posts all day long. Even at the thor­oughly mod­ern San Diego Zoo and Wild Ani­mal Park, the ele­phants were kept chained to their stalls at night until the prac­tice was dis­con­tin­ued in the 1990s in response to a well-publicized and par­tic­u­larly egre­gious case of neglect.

Caged mon­key at the Ran­goon zoo.

This leop­ard and a neigh­bor­ing lion got to spend their days pac­ing twelve-foot-square cages of steel and concrete.

A cou­ple of road­side epi­phytic plants: a staghorn fern on the left and on the right an orchid in the vanda/phalaensopsis (Sar­can­thi­nae) sub­tribe. Between cities, you can park your car and often see exotic plantlife like this.

Here are a cou­ple good sites if you’d like to do a lit­tle more read­ing on the coun­try. The sec­ond in par­tic­u­lar has some actions that you can do to help bring democ­racy back to Burma, every­thing from switch­ing off the Olympics to donat­ing your many billions.

Irrawady.com
US Cam­paign for Burma

August 08 2008 | Categories: landscape • places • rambles | Tags: 8888 • agriculture • Burma • China • dictatorships • vacations • weeds | No Comments »

yellowstone “wild” flowers

There were a num­ber of spring flow­ers doing their thing at Yel­low­stone a cou­ple weeks ago. I saw a patch of bright yel­low and took this photo:

Yes, dan­de­lions. They were all over. I talked to a ranger nearby who said that the park has a big prob­lem with inva­sive species. He wasn’t a botan­i­cal expert, he said, but he thought there was a true wild dan­de­lion, as well as the gar­den ver­sion. Unfor­tu­nately, this to me looks like the gar­den ver­sion. They were all over the park, as well as all over Idaho on the way there.

June 12 2008 | Categories: landscape • places | Tags: dandelions • invasive species • weeds • Yellowstone National Park | No Comments »

wild and out of control

All over town here in San Diego you see the black mus­tard plant, Bras­sica nigra, now approach­ing the end of its bloom­ing period.

The undu­lat­ing yel­low mounds of it doing its thing are a spec­tac­u­lar sight, so much so that Napa Val­ley, up north in the wine coun­try, has an annual Mus­tard Fes­ti­val that’s just come to its con­clu­sion. The fes­ti­val host the expected Napa wine and food offer­ings, and also hosts con­tests in pho­tog­ra­phy, art and cook­ing with mus­tard. In addi­tion to how the plant looks, it has an inter­est­ing his­tory, as told by Napa pio­neer Calvin Chester­field Grif­fith, quoted on the Mus­tard Festival’s site:

This is the story of our early Cal­i­for­nia when it was only a wilder­ness, with great quan­ti­ties of trees, beau­ti­ful plains, all kinds of wild ani­mals and birds; many, many Indi­ans, and no white men at all.

Father Serra had come from Spain to Mex­ico to spread the reli­gion of Jesus Christ, and hear­ing about this beau­ti­ful, vast coun­try to the north, decided to explore it. With a few faith­ful fol­low­ers and Indian guides, he trav­eled north through what is now our glo­ri­ous and loved Cal­i­for­nia. As he trav­eled he scat­tered to the right, and to the left, the mus­tard seeds which he had brought with him from Spain.

The fol­low­ing year, as they returned south they fol­lowed ‘a rib­bon of gold;’ and fol­low­ing that path again Father Serra estab­lished his ‘Rosary of Mis­sions,’ begin­ning in San Diego and end­ing in Sonoma.

It’s an appeal­ing, roman­tic story, but it also side­steps the fact that the mus­tard has invaded much of the West, and can be found in most of the United States. As a robust win­ter annual, it can out-compete most native plants, par­tic­u­larly in dis­turbed loca­tions, and form vir­tual mono­cul­tures that pre­vent other plants from get­ting a foothold. The pic­tures above were taken a few blocks from my house, in Tecolote Canyon. Because of abun­dant mois­ture ear­lier in the year, the plants were well over my head in spots, eas­ily seven feet tall.

To the left is a pic­ture of a part of the canyon where the mus­tard hasn’t taken over. It’s a good exam­ple of coastal sage scrub, rich in plantlife and alive with birds and insects. The white-flowering plant in the fore­ground is black sage, Salvia mel­lif­era, bloom­ing up a storm, with yel­low deer­weed (Lotus sco­par­ius) behind it. So what would I prefer–a rich eco­log­i­cal mix of plants that host a range of ani­mal life, or a showy burst of color that nour­ishes almost no ani­mal life and is about to dry out to a wild­fire magnet?

Alert on a new inva­sive: Cousin Jenny, a new Mas­ter Gar­dener in South Car­olina, alerted me to a new inva­sive plant, cogongrass, a plant that’s being listed as a treat even worse than the suf­fo­cat­ing kudzu. Here’s a link to a story in the Beau­fort Gazzette. Like the black mus­tard, it’s an attrac­tive plant, but it’s also seri­ous bad news.

More on weeds and inva­sives: I’ve been leaf­ing through Weeds of Cal­i­for­nia and Other West­ern States, by Joseph M. DiT­o­maso and Eve­lyn A. Healy. It’s a sump­tu­ous two-volume set, a coffee-table book of weeds if there ever was one, with 3000 images of the 750 evil species it lists. It also comes with a CD-ROM of the images in the book that can be used with­out roy­al­ties for edu­ca­tional purposes.

In addi­tion to the 750 nas­ties, there’s a table in the back with poten­tial future threats from plants that are just enter­ing the ecosys­tem. The book leans towards the tech­ni­cal side, but there’s a handy glos­sary and index. It took me 20 min­utes to fig­ure out that the annoy­ing grass com­ing up in spots around the yard was tall veld­grass. But with other species I was able to go right to the offender.

I found it strik­ing that a huge num­ber of the weeds–like the black mustard–were of Euro­pean ori­gin, likely brought over by set­tlers from there over the past cen­turies. Con­trols have since been erected that help reduce the entry into the coun­try of plants that might prove inva­sive. How­ever, with peo­ple, prod­ucts and pro­duce jet­ting all around the world these days, it’s inevitable that there will be waves of invad­ing plants from regions other than Europe. The cogongrass that’s of con­cern in the South, for instance, comes from Asia.

As I wan­der around the yard inven­to­ry­ing the plants com­ing up in the crevices, it’s weirdly com­fort­ing to know that my yard is con­tribut­ing to pre­serv­ing the earth’s bio­log­i­cal diversity–though unfor­tu­nately I’m not nec­es­sar­ily help­ing along the species that really need it the most!

May 03 2008 | Categories: landscape • plant profiles | Tags: black mustard • Brassica nigra • cogongrass • exotics • weeds | No Comments »

scorched earth gardening

After my last post I did more research on con­trol­ling Eng­lish ivy. Beyond the commonly-quoted advice to spray with her­bi­cides, or to attempt the mechan­i­cal removal that is occu­py­ing me these days, I saw an inter­est­ing idea for a new but as-yet-untested bio­log­i­cal con­trol Noth­ing imme­di­ately use­ful, unfor­tu­nately. And then I started to see tech­niques that could only be dreamed up by peo­ple like me who’ve been spend­ing too much time fight­ing off Hed­era helix.

From the folks at the Uni­ver­sity of Cal­i­for­nia, in a dis­cus­sion of ivy, comes:

Pre­scribed burn­ing: An extreme method that has been used with some suc­cess is to burn ivy plants and resprouts with a blow torch at reg­u­lar inter­vals; the energy used by the plant to regrow will even­tu­ally be depleted. Obvi­ously, this approach requires con­sid­er­able caution.

And from Organic Land Care.com comes:

Another more dras­tic method has been to use a blow-torch to repeat­edly blast the plant with a hot flame. By repeat­edly expos­ing the plant to high heat, this method is intended to exhaust the H. helix of its energy so that it is unable to mul­ti­ply or pro­duce berries for repro­duc­tion (Reichard, 2000).

So…fatigued of doing things the old-fashioned way, I went to the garage and got the blow­torch. After aim­ing the flame at some ivy leaves they began to writhe and smoke in a most sat­is­fy­ing way. Soon the leaves started to burn, which sur­prised me since ivy is one of the plants that shows up occa­sion­ally as a rec­om­mended plant for firescap­ing. As the leaves burned, some of the dead grasses around them started to catch fire. Just a lit­tle more heat and I’d have had a lit­tle brush­fire started. Hmmmm. Maybe it’s not such a good idea, I started to think, look­ing up at a wood fence not more than two feet away. Damn, it felt good, but I ended the exper­i­ment right then and there–it prob­a­bly wasn’t a good idea to burn down the neighborhood!

March 07 2008 | Categories: gardening • my garden | Tags: blowtoches • ivy • prescribed burning • weeding • weeds | 1 Comment »

vegetable plutonium

In my more active anti-nuke activist days one of the more com­pelling argu­ments against nuclear power was that some of its byprod­ucts were so long-lived that they would remain lethal for longer than human civ­i­liza­tion has existed. Plutonium-239, for exam­ple, has a half-life of some­thing like 24,000 years, and even a tiny par­ti­cle of it could prove dan­ger­ous to a person.

I was think­ing about that dur­ing my weed­ing exer­cise this week­end, deal­ing with a neglected cor­ner of the gar­den where the neighbor’s Eng­lish ivy had crossed over and under the fence and set up a stand that had spread 20 feet or more into my yard. In the course of its inva­sion, it had con­tributed to a low brick retain­ing wall being pushed over.

The wall the ivy helped push over

I hate to use stuff like Roundup in the yard, but I tried it on the ivy a cou­ple weeks ago. Some of the weeds around it shriv­eled to brown ghosts of them­selves, but at best the ivy showed a lit­tle burn­ing around the edges of the leaves. I’d tried Roundup­ping the ivy before, with sim­i­lar min­i­mal results. Ivy really seems like the thing that wouldn’t die. Some online sites have guide­lines on how to get rid of the stuff, but none of them seem to guar­an­tee easy con­trol. (A cou­ple of the sites I looked at: South­east Exotic Pest Plant Coun­cil Inva­sive Plant Man­ual and the Plant Con­ser­va­tion Alliance’s “Least wanted” pages.)

I wasn’t look­ing for­ward to the alter­na­tive of dig­ging it out by hand, but dig­ging it out by hand was the chore that ate my week­end. And it’s a chore that’ll be occu­py­ing at least a cou­ple more. The job is extra-awful in that even a lit­tle piece of ivy run­ner left in the ground could grow roots and set up a whole new colony. You have to be sure to dig down the foot or so that the run­ners can travel at, and you need to be sure that you’ve rid the patch of all the alien ivy life forms before you move on to the next spade­full. It’s like veg­etable plu­to­nium in that any lit­tle bit left in the ground could prove dan­ger­ous for future gen­er­a­tions. Nasty, evil stuff.

Here you can see the pro­por­tion of dirt to ivy roots…

If my mantra of my teen years was “No nukes!” the mantra of my cur­rent gar­den­ing life has to be “No Ivy!” Frank Lloyd Wright was famous for his quote that went some­thing like, “Doctor’s can always bury their mis­takes. Archi­tects can only plant ivy.” Well, friends, doing that would be the great­est mis­take of all.

March 03 2008 | Categories: gardening • my garden • quotes | Tags: herbicides • ivy • plutonium • weeding • weeds | 2 Comments »

weeds weeds weeds

Lots of times I’m glad to be liv­ing in South­ern Cal­i­for­nia where win­ters are mild and things hardly ever freeze. Today’s one of those amaz­ing win­ter days: bril­liantly sunny, warm–and it’s the mid­dle of Feb­ru­ary. But there are down-sides. Thou­sands of them.

What I’m talk­ing about of course are the weeds pop­ping up every­where in the yard. After a wet Jan­u­ary, as the days begin to warm, noth­ing has a stronger life-wish than the seeds that have been lying dor­mant in the soil. So now there are wild patches of grasses, oxalis, spurge, dan­de­lions and all sorts of other green mat­ter mak­ing a break from the cool secu­rity of the earth. Not that I blame them. I’m start­ing to feel moti­vated myself to break out of the heated house and spend some time in the sun­shine out­side. But at the same time I’m start­ing to think a lot about one of the quotes I listed last time, a cou­ple lines by David Cooper:

The life of a seri­ous gar­dener is not one that, as it hap­pens involves some gar­den­ing. Instead, it is one partly define by the struc­tured, reg­u­lar activ­i­ties which are imposed once the deci­sion to grow and to gar­den is made.

In cooler cli­mates, even seri­ous gar­den­ers get unbro­ken weeks indoors to pore over plant and seed cat­a­logs full of more bloom­ing things than you’ll see in any botan­i­cal gar­den. That’s an activ­ity I love doing as well. Today lots of these cat­a­logs are online, giv­ing the smaller grower an oppor­tu­nity to show­case their plants, and the offer­ings are as spec­tac­u­lar as ever. A cou­ple of inter­est­ing ones I’ve been look­ing at lately:

Sar­race­nia North­west (cool car­niver­ous plants)

Las Pil­i­tas (Cal­i­for­nia native plants)

But the weeds wait for no one. Jeez, some­times I won­der if I have the strength to take on a patch like this one, a severely under­loved cor­ner of the gar­den guarded by a spiny pachy­podium and over­run with the neighbor’s ivy:
And then there’s this lit­tle patch of dirt that until recently held some berries that had been over­run with all sorts of inva­sives. I took it down to bare earth a month ago, and the weeds are start­ing up in it already:
But what can you do? Let it go back to nature? Pave it over? For a gar­den with not enough plant­ing space for those amaz­ing plants in those plant cat­a­logs, niether of those seem like rea­son­able options. So…what will I do with my week­end? I’m sure it’ll have some­thing to do with weeding.…

February 09 2008 | Categories: gardening • my garden | Tags: obligations • plant catalogs • weeds | No Comments »