words, beautiful words

What are blog­gers talk­ing about dur­ing these cold Jan­u­ary days? Here’s an addic­tively fun way to find out.

Wor­dle lets you gen­er­ate word clouds that are stun­ningly beau­ti­ful to look at. The site calls itself “a toy for gen­er­at­ing ‘word clouds’ from text that you pro­vide,” but I’d argue that it’s an inter­est­ing way to fig­ure out the gist of what’s being discussed.

Word clouds have been around for a few years now. I wrote about them back in the ear­lier days of this blog, and this blog dis­plays a tag cloud on the left panel. But Wor­dle gives you all sorts of con­trol over things like color, font, lan­guage and arrange­ment. Just click on the home page’s “Cre­ate” tab to get going. All you need is some canned text, a link to a blog or web­site with an RSS or Atom feed, or you can enter a del.icio.us user­name to see a cloud of their tags.

Here’s a quick Wor­dled look at some of the posts on some Cal­i­for­nia mostly-gardening blogs. I selected black back­grounds for all of them so that there’s a basis for com­par­ing them visu­ally, but I had way too much fun cre­at­ing color com­bi­na­tions and pick­ing fonts and word arrange­ments. The blog con­tents should be cur­rent as of last night, Jan­u­ary 13.

(There are a huge num­ber of these. I’ve been home with a cold, too messed up to think coherently–but not too com­pro­mised to play with shapes and pretty col­ors. It makes me won­der whether the part of the brain that thinks is even in the same zip code as where artis­tic activ­ity takes place…)

To start off, the con­tent of this blog, before this post…

Cal­i­for­nia Native Plants…San Diego Style, Wor­dled.

Sierra Foothill Gar­den, Wor­dled.

Weed­ing Wild Sub­ur­bia…

Tulips in the Woods…

Town Mouse and Coun­try Mouse…

The Pitcher Plant Project…

Rooted in Cal­i­for­nia… (Did some­body say gelato?)

Queer by Choice…

Laguna Dirt…

Dry Stone Gar­den…

Chance of Rain…

Camissonia’s Cor­ner…

Blue Planet Gar­den Blog…

Bay Area Ten­drils Gar­den Travel…

Idora Design…

How’s Rob?, Wor­dled. Bees!

Hey Natives…

Grow Natives Blog…

Breath­ing Treat­ment…

Deb­o­rah Small’s Eth­nob­otany Blog…

GrokSurf’s San Diego…

And how do Cal­i­for­nia obses­sions com­pare to those from other parts of the country?

From New Jer­sey: View From Fed­eral Twist. Dur­ing the cold of win­ter, do peo­ple liv­ing in what I’d call the frozen tun­dra retreat indoors?

Cape Cod: The Mid­night Gar­den…

From in the rain shadow of the Olympics, Wash­ing­ton State: Ver­dure…

Ore­gon: Dan­ger Gar­den…

Maine: Jean’s Gar­den…

And how about to some blogs from other parts of the world?

From the UK: An Artist’s Gar­den…

Also from the UK: The Patient Gar­dener…

UK again: Plan­talis­cious…

My Lit­tle Gar­den in Japan…

South Africa: Elepant’s Eye…

So, after look­ing at of these, do you think the word clouds begin to fairly rep­re­sent what the blogs are dis­cussing? Or is Wor­dle really just a toy?

January 14 2011 | Categories: art • gardening | Tags: • • • | 22 Comments »

some missing words

The cur­rent issue of Orion, one of my favorite mag­a­zines, fea­tures “World With­out Vio­lets,” a scary lit­tle essay by Robert Michael Pyle.

A mother in Britain dis­cov­ered that the edi­tors of the cur­rent Oxford Junior Dic­tio­nary, in their zeal to bring this lit­tle dic­tio­nary for chil­dren up to date, had removed a long list of words deal­ing with nature in order to make room for words like “broad­band,” “bungee jump­ing” and “chat room.”

Pyle writes about the uni­verse the edi­tors of the Dic­tio­nary have cre­ated for the cur­rent gen­er­a­tion of chil­dren who would use it:

It is a world with­out vio­lets. Spring comes unan­nounced by catkins and pro­ceeds with­out ben­e­fit of cro­cuses, cowslips, or tulips. Sum­mer brings no laven­der, mel­ons, or nec­tarines, and autumn is absent of acorns, almonds, and hazel­nuts. Win­ter must be endured with­out the holly and the ivy, the wren or the mistletoe.

So, sud­denly bungee jumping–how retro-80s is that concept?–is more impor­tant than tulips, broad­band more nec­es­sary for chil­dren to know about than mel­ons, and chat rooms more of our real world than holly.

If some­one decides that we don’t need a word for some­thing, does that some­thing cease to exist? Not really. But what kind of mind­set decides that chil­dren don’t need to know about their nat­ural world any­more? I was disturbed.

July 13 2009 | Categories: landscape • quotes | Tags: • • • | 5 Comments »

out of darkness something blooms

I had a few CDs cross my desk that were recorded by a San Diego new music col­lec­tive called Trum­mer­flora. Their name sounded inter­est­ing, but I didn’t think another thing about it. Then in the book­let of one of the discs I read its definition:

Trum­mer­flora, or rub­ble plants and trees, are a spe­cial phe­nom­e­non unique to heav­ily bombed urban areas. The bomb acts as a plow, mix­ing rub­ble frag­ments with the earth, which often con­tain seeds dor­mant for a cen­tury or more. These seeds come to light and those that can live in this new and spe­cial earth grow and flour­ish.
–Helen and New­ton Harrison

So some­thing beau­ti­ful comes to light through acts of unspeak­able destruc­tion. Sud­denly I though that it was an amaz­ing word and a con­cept that holds out some hope that some­thing good can come out of the worst of sit­u­a­tions. Of course, this is a par­tic­u­larly tainted kind of good­ness, a sort of good­ness that you accept because the alter­na­tive is so much worse.

Trawl­ing around the web as I write this I couldn’t find other ref­er­ences to this word other than in the con­text of the musi­cians or the quote from the Har­risons. Did the Har­risons coin the word? (Of course, just becuase search engines don’t turn up some­thing, it doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist! (Or in this increas­ingly vir­tual word, maybe that’s exatly what it means?)) Or did the word spring to life–maybe in Germany?–after the dev­as­ta­tion of World War II?


Helen and New­ton Har­ri­son. Breath­ing Space for the Sava River, Yugoslavia, 1988 (detail). Pho­to­col­lage, text, maps. [ source ]

This whole notion of bring­ing life back to waste­lands has been one of the major themes of Helen Mayer Har­ri­son and New­ton Har­ri­son, the artists respon­si­ble for the quote in the first place. As a cou­ple they taught at the Uni­ver­sity of Cal­i­for­nia, San Diego from 1969–1993, and dur­ing this time I had the chance to see sev­eral of their exhi­bi­tions around town. Here’s a descrip­tion of their work­ing method in Bar­bara Matilsky’s 1992 book, Frag­ile ecolo­gies: Con­tem­po­rary artist’s inter­pre­ta­tions and solu­tions, quoted on a Green Museum page.

After first­hand study, research and inter­views with ecol­o­gists, biol­o­gists and plan­ners the artists cre­ate a pho­to­graphic nar­ra­tive that iden­ti­fies the prob­lem, ques­tions the sys­tem of beliefs that allow the con­di­tion to develop and pro­poses ini­tia­tives to counter envi­ron­men­tal dam­age. They exhibit their doc­u­men­ta­tion in a pub­lic forum–a museum, library, city hall–to stim­u­late dis­cus­sion, debate, and media atten­tion. By com­mu­ni­ca­tion to the pub­lic the prob­lems that con­front a frag­ile ecosys­tem and the ways in which the bal­ance can be restored, they exert pres­sure on the polit­i­cal sys­tem and rally pub­lic opin­ion in an attempt to avert eco­log­i­cal disaster.

So, while the New­tons would be pleased to see trom­mer­flora grow and thrive, their greater sat­is­fac­tion wouldn’t be achieved until we come to an under­stand­ing of the sys­tems that brought about the orig­i­nal destruc­tion. And if the projects became so suc­cess­ful that they’d anni­hi­late the need for its the artwork’s own exis­tence? I doubt the New­tons would mind, but I won’t be hold­ing my breath that we get there any­time soon.

Read fur­ther: The New­tons in their own words.

June 30 2008 | Categories: art • landscape design • places | Tags: • • • • • | 1 Comment »