Beginning Again in the Garden

Chance

Sun, 28 Feb 2010 12:03:32 -0800

Chance is a subdivision of death, writes novelist and Oxford philosopher Iris Murdoch, because it reminds us of transience and mortality, our not being able to dominate the world. I like chance; I dally with it, entertain the horror of transience at a remove from myself. This morning, I emptied a pot, hoping to find a lily bulb from last year to replant, and found rotted roots instead. But ivy seedlings are shooting toward the sky from cracks in the path, the seed blown there by chance, seedlings stealing a chance of growing tall and seeding themselves. They are so plentiful and I am so erratic in my attention, it seems the ivy could dominate and get out of my control. Why do I like that? It’s evidence of life force. It makes me feel alert, as if, didn’t I write something similar last week, the life in me wants to greet something equally alive shooting out of the ground at my feet. But there’s something more than that, because every year, contemplating the ivy seedlings, I think of stopping the ivy once and for all and planting in the cracks oxalis bulbs, white-flowering oxalis, like on the stone patio at Filoli. I never do that though. Why is ivy more thrilling?

Sense of Plenty

Sat, 20 Feb 2010 17:55:54 -0800

Today, at a workshop I taught, with the same title as this blog, at Gamble Garden in Palo Alto, of 5 sources of beauty I presented, the one closest to people’s hearts was “a sense of plenty.” It beat out “sunlight,” “path,” “sheltered seat with a view,” and “water.” Plenty was all around us. Just outside the window, under a michelia tree covered in fragrant blossoms, were bright blue omphalodes, a cuter-than-forget-me-not perennial which spreads slowly by runners. Digging Dog nursery sells the plants. (Annies Annuals has a white variety, very pretty, shown here.) It’s a long story, but there’s a strong connection between plenty and beauty. According to contemporary philosopher Elaine Scarry, an experience of beauty has the effect of making us want to replicate the thing we are looking at. We might see something and immediately want to draw it, and then draw it again and again—or take photographs, or write about it. An experience of beauty is generative. How affecting then to come across a beautiful thing that has replicated itself. For a moment, it’s as if my consciousness and its have a common rhythm.
Thanks from my heart to the participants at the workshop today; we stirred up a sense of plenty in that room.

Judith Taylor, How the World Got into Our Gardens

Tue, 26 May 2009 12:24:58 -0700

Judith Taylor is a British adventurer turned plant historian. Reading her latest book, The Global Migrations of Ornamental Plants, I felt all my plants lose their familiarity and become a collection of immigrants whose journeys had mostly to do with wealth and exploitation. My garden became alive as a site of history, and I glimpsed my part in the emergence of a homogeneous global garden style, the result, paradoxically, of our insatiable demand for new things. Judith and I corresponded by email. She’s reading from her book at the SF Main Library on June 3, at 6 p.m.

HW: How did you get interested in this subject, Judith? And how long did the book take to write?
JT: I became interested as the result of a chance remark about my olive book. I gave a presentation at the International Congress of Historical Geographers. They are one of my favourite groups as what I do is at the intersection of history and geography. The moderator said offhandedly that I was studying the migrations of trees as compared to the migrations of people, their more usual stock in trade. This suddenly framed my work in a clear new light. I began to follow this trail. It became clear to me that there are more plants whose ancestors came from exotic places than natives in our garden palette. The question was how to prove this.
       The first thing I did was to take the AHS A to Z Encyclopaedia of Garden Plants and turn it into a database. That took more than a year. The book has about 15,000 entries and differs from the other books in that genre because it lists the country of origin of the species. Sticking solely to species, there were about 6,000 entries.
      My scientific background kicked in. I decided to do some very elementary statistics and counted the places from which plants originated. No one else has taken that approach. I proved my point. About 30 % are Asian in origin, 10 % from China alone. Approxmately 17% are North American natives.
        I supplemented this work with an analysis of the USDA statistics on plant sales and volume. Very few people know that the USDA counts potted plants the way the Commerce Department counts noses. I found all this in the fabulous A P Giannini agriculture library at Berkeley, starting with their first census in 1890. It was quite clear that the biggest sellers and largest volumes were for plants of foreign extraction. All these building blocks are in the appendixes at the back of the book.
        This was the kernel of the work. I then found out a great deal about the men, (largely men), who took the plants back, first to England and France, and only much later directly to the U.S.
         I next had to fit this into a timeline and here again I did something seldom done by others. I had special maps created at Berkeley by a talented geographer, showing roughly century by century, where the plants originated and where they ended up. Finally, I took a stab at when the process was completed, that is when the ascendance of foreign plants over native ones occurred. It seems to be about 1870 in the U.S.
        Another huge chunk of work was the decoding of the mother of all books about European botanists in China and their discoveries, Bretschneider. I turned his 1,000 page book into a database too. Everything you ever needed to know on this subject until 1891 is in that book, but he did not organize it in the way to which we are accustomed. Most writers rather nervously give him credit and then shy away from its content. I turned the place upside down to get permission to include his photo in the book. Once again I found it at Berkeley, in the old Asian studies library.
       Thus the answer to your question of how long it took to prepare was a very long time, maybe about 3 years or even more. At that point I had enough material to give a presentation to the ICHG in Auckland, NZ. It created a minor sensation.

HW: In your pursuit of "botanical imperialism," I think you found pirates, missionaries, goldminers, and other adventurers. Who is your favorite?
JT: This is a touchy subject and one I tried to finesse. There are a number of excellent books about it. I will admit to a soft spot for “the pirate of exquisite mind,” Captain William Dampier. How he avoided being hanged is a mystery.
I am also partial to one of the very few women involved, Georgiana Molloy, who gave birth to 8 children in the back of beyond, on the Swan River in Western Australia. Mrs Molloy still managed to send marvellous plants back to England in spite of all her responsibilities. The poor thing died after her last child was born.

HW: Did plants travel on slave ships? I'm afraid you are going to say yes.
JT: No, I doubt if many, or even any, plants travelled on slave ships. The largest number of slavers worked the West Africa route and very few plants came from West Africa.

HW: Could you tell us about the arrival here in northern California of one of your favorite plants?
JT: The camellia came more or less at the same time as the gold rush and so is a critical milestone. The man who brought the plant was a professional nurseryman from Massachusetts, Colonel J. L. Warren. He was a major force in the development of California’s horticulture and agriculture. We owe him a great debt of gratitude.

HW: You mention "American gardens" were popular in Europe at one time; what did they look like?
JT: The American garden was the province of the very rich. ”Capability “ Brown used handsome American trees as specimens in his park-like grounds: robinias, maples, bald cypresses, franklinias and conifers which had never been seen before. Glorious shrubs like azalea and laurel were also used. Smaller herbaceous plants such as the California poppy, the larkspur, the clarkias and lewisias, came a bit later but were the basis of the Victorian bedding plants. Until then very few native plants lent themselves to mass effects.

HW: You point out that there's been so much movement of plants among countries that now most gardens are the same, the world over. What do you think about that?
JT: It is very strange. When I was in Auckland the front gardens looked almost exactly like Hampstead or Streatham, in England. NZ’s native plants are bold and exciting, yet very few gardeners seem to use them, at least in their front gardens. Roses are a huge deal in NZ. Almost every one of them has Chinese genes.
     The great Roberto Burle Marx had an epiphany in Berlin in 1910. He came from Brazil but had never seen Brazilian plants like the ones in the Berlin botanical garden at Dahlem used in Brazilian gardens. He had only seen insipid European plants used in formal gardens.
     There should be a balance between the doctrinaire attitude of the native plant societies and the recognition that the exotics have given us great joy. Many native plants are indeed gorgeous. In California’s drought-ridden region native plants are far more sensible but it does not mean we should get rid of everything else.

HW: Almost all the people in the book's index are men. Did I hear you say you are going to tell the story of women in your next book?
JT: The life of a plant collector in the 18th and 19th centuries was brutal, short and miserable. Women were not candidates for this type of hardship.
When it comes to plant breeding in a garden or nursery, more women are involved though it is still a male-dominated business. Stay tuned for Visions of Loveliness: The Work of Forgotten Flower Breeders (Krieger Publications 2010).

HW: You and I are both immigrants: How did you get here, Judith?
JT: In 1959 I went from Oxford to New York for a one-year internship at the Brooklyn Hospital. I never returned to live in England again. I did all my post graduate medical training in New York. I taught at the medical school, did private practice and then administrative medicine until 1994. In 1994 my husband and I decided to move to the Bay Area to have fun. We succeeded in this modest goal and continue to enjoy the area’s earthly delights. That was what unleashed the propensity to write books, a very addictive condition.

Check out Judith’s website, horthistoria.com, for more information about her work and to purchase her books.

Get the Ugly Out

Wed, 22 Apr 2009 09:37:28 -0700

It’s been 6 1/2 years that I’ve been looking at the ugly green plastic tape strapping the jasmine vine to the deck post. And the strident, acid pink-red new growth of the Pieris japonica that clashes with the red-purple magnolia. And more recently the fountain that doesn’t work, the pond clogged with rotted leaves, mosquito larvae swarming on the surface.
John Berger, in The Shape of a Pocket, says “We live our daily lives in a constant exchange with the set of daily appearances surrounding us. . . . What we habitually see confirms us.” So if what we look at is ugly, how are we confirmed? In guilt, despair, passivity? I’ve looked at that green tape hundreds of times and flinched and done nothing.
But looking can change: “it can happen . . . that we catch sight of another visible order which intersects with ours and has nothing to do with it. . . . it is as if, at brief moments . . . suddenly and disconcertingly we see between two frames. We come upon a part of the visible which wasn’t destined for us. Perhaps it was destined for night-birds, reindeer, ferrets, eels, whales . . .”
I’ve cleaned the pond, fixed the fountain, introduced mosquito fish, replaced the green tape with clear tape, and removed the pieris, and I’m seeing a different picture. With the ugliness gone, my feet follow my gaze into the garden, the flowers are blazingly alive, and I like the world more. I track the fish swimming in and out of the shadows, and a gate seems to open; as Berger says, “the human order, still in sight, is no longer central and is slipping away. The interstices are open.”

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Keeping Up a Daily Practice

Sun, 12 Apr 2009 19:19:03 -0700

It’s Easter, which is a major holiday in England, and I’m homesick for English hedgerows and wet early-spring sunlight, for cowslips on the Wiltshire Downs and the bluebell wood above Combe Florey in Somerset. I push myself into the garden, put on Wellies, and get into the pond. The smell of rotted leaves in the bottom of the pond is the same in San Francisco as Somerset. And the light, blocked and bounced by a low magnolia branch, arrives on the silty water among shadows, like the garden light on most English days.
It’s been three months since I wrote the first entry here, Leaf Litter Welcome, and I had resolved then to make gardening a daily practice. Every morning I’ve been in the garden, I’ve loved it, particularly the rainy times; it’s a luxury I hardly allow myself anymore, to go out and mess around in the rain. At one point, I was leaning over to plant dahlia cuttings, and water spilled out of the overhead gutter down my neck. I liked that. I don’t mind my scratched hands and dirty nails either, though they don’t seem to belong in the rest of my life.
I have done a lot of work in the garden, though the practice of gardening fails to properly stick. I stripped a jasmine out of the evergreen pear tree and had to call for help when I realized the weight of it falling onto me. I had resolved to remove the magnolia because its pink-purple flowers have clashed for years with the red new growth of the pieris, and the magnolia trunk, where it bends so beautifully toward the pond, has sprouted watershoots that ruin the tree’s form; but when the magnolia began to bud, I removed the pieris and watershoots instead. I had been ready to write an elegy to the magnolia, its last spring, and mention Pirkle Jones and Dorothea Lange’s photographs of a whole valley during its last spring. Jones and Lange, in 1956, documented the final spring in the valley that is now submerged beneath Lake Berryessa. The series is published in Pirkle Jones: California Photographs. It was in that book that I found Rebecca Solnit’s comment on Time.

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What I Didn’t Say in Gardens Illustrated

Thu, 26 Mar 2009 14:14:11 -0700

I can’t get this Stinson Beach garden out of my mind. In December 2007, when landscape architects Eric and Silvina Blasen sent me Marion Brenner’s photographs of it, I knew Gardens Illustrated would like it, and sure enough it’s published in the current issue of the magazine. I’ve written about it, but it’s not out of my mind. I can’t stop poking around for a fuller explanation of why this particular garden registers so deeply.

I have a notion it’s about Time. Eric told me he thinks a lot about the quality of Timelessness, but we couldn’t pin it down. An idea of Rebecca Solnit’s, in her book As Eve Said to the Serpent, might be a clue: she says about natural landscape, and this garden lies so fittingly in the landscape around it, that it represents “a place in which change has not yet happened, the original condition of the earth, origin itself.”

Something similar to “a place in which change has not happened” came up in my interview with the owner of the garden, Kim Wright-Violich. She said that her teenagers sit around the firepit in the evenings and it feels like “a throwback to a more innocent time.”

Also, she mentioned that when she watches the grasses in the garden she’s reminded of the sequence in “American Beauty” of the bag floating in the air. Talking about the title of the movie in an Amazon.com interview, screenplay writer Alan Ball says, “. . . you think Angela’s the American Beauty—the blond cheerleader . . . But it’s not Angela—it’s that plastic bag. . . . It's the way of looking at the world and seeing what incredible beauty there is in the world. And I think that's something that we're born with that gets ironed out of us by our culture and by experience and by conformity. I think there's a part of everybody that yearns to get that back.”

An original condition, a way of looking, seeing what beauty there is in the world, is perhaps relevant to Silvina Blasen’s comment on their working process: “we try to make more of what already is,” meaning, she says, that they find a way to read the language of the site and then go with that, make more of it.

I’ve gotten as far as this now: I’m thinking of looking at the garden as like watching the plastic bag—one feels the presence of a wave or curl, movement that’s expansive, uplifting, as one looks. It’s maybe a visually triggered loop of origin-laden, unlocked Time, which the Blasens have snapped into real time?

Any ideas? I’d be very grateful.

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Neglect

Mon, 9 Mar 2009 11:54:42 -0700

It’s a hard word, neglect. It’s got that word shame close behind it. Ivy left to go to seed or root from its stems across the garden—that’s neglect. For a good while, I told myself I was not neglecting the garden but rather watching it go its own way. Neglect as in—I’ve given the garden permission to undo the intentions of the previous owners of the house. They hired a designer who built a Japanese garden, with dry stream, stone bridge, pond, and waterfall, in back of an old Victorian house. That was hard for me: I wanted to create a place from scratch. And this garden wasn’t lacking anything in an obvious way. Quite the contrary, it was perfectly full, healthy, and prim. Tear it out, said friend and landscape designer Shirley Watts. Keep just the evergreen pear tree, that little conifer, and reuse the bridge stone, said friend and landscape architect Isabelle Greene. But it was a place already, birds in the camellias and ivy (early on, the ivy was only on the fence and clipped tight), and my partner and most people who came to the house admired the garden as it was. So, my beginning again in the garden is an act of reclamation, a summoning of courage to undo and make something new.

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Spontaneous Shelter Sculptures

Tue, 24 Feb 2009 13:09:16 -0800

Barbara Berry wrote yesterday: “Hope you got to see the twig sculptures in the Music Concourse. It was magical to walk out of the Academy of Science and see what people had done. At first I thought it was something à la the man [Patrick Dougherty] who is working at Civic Center with the tree sculptures. Then I realized people must have done it spontaneously.
We saw a man and his young child creating something, so Locke and I did the same. We were on our way to get a coffee at the de Young (which was closed), but felt like we had stumbled on to "unplanned" artwork. I hope the gardeners let it be.”

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Patrick Dougherty 4: Shelter

Mon, 23 Feb 2009 11:16:28 -0800

“One thing we need and have always needed is a place of protection. We need shelter from inanimate dangers: cold, rain, snow, sun; and we need concealment from hostile and dangerous animals, especially when we are particularly vulnerable,” writes Grant Hildebrand in Origins of Architectural Pleasure. Dougherty’s sculptures, including the one shown here, made on Becher Farm, stir up that need. Even though the Civic Center sculpture is 10 feet off the ground, each piece of it registers as a place one might go into and look out from; Dougherty purposefully creates interiority and openings. It’s a structure our ancestors would have recognized as survival advantageous. Children search out such spaces—they climb over the fences of wide open city playgrounds to explore the sheltered spaces among bushes. Most of us enjoy sheltering porches, canyons, redwood groves, even ditches. How poignant—is this the right word?—that Dougherty is building vigorously imagined shelter in these fearful economic times right outside the city government offices, and in a wide open space where many people with no homes spend their days. The sculpture title is Upper Crust, it’s where the upper half live, Dougherty quipped.

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Patrick Dougherty 3: Drawing

Fri, 20 Feb 2009 11:23:26 -0800

This would make a perfect site, sculptor Patrick Dougherty exclaimed to himself as he came upon the Civic Center. Much time had been spent in the last few months pruning branches off the sycamore trees, now, just arrived in town, he would put some back on. It felt “a little provocative.”
First, he’s making a “random structural weave” in the tree shaft, then “starts layering up” the willow branches, being careful to protect the sycamore nodes, which will burst into leaf next month. Dougherty says he uses “a drawing style” as he works. He builds patterned lines that have a lot of directionality, “like the flow of a drawing.”
Nest-like? Well, not much like a pigeon’s nest, of which there must be many nearby: “pigeons . . . bring small sticks, stand next to the nest site, and just toss the twigs in,” write James and Carol Gould, in Animal Architects. “The result, given the inaccuracy of the behavior, is a stick that is loosely stuck into the previous pile of sticks. Surprisingly enough . . . the added element usually winds up oriented circumferencially, which is the best overall direction for nest strength in this species.”

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Filoli Margins

Thu, 19 Feb 2009 13:53:26 -0800

At Filoli gardens in Woodside yesterday, there was not a breath of wind in the trees, no movement except that of the roller-coaster swoop and dive of the hedges through the knot garden. When, suddenly, a hen stepped out of an immaculately clipped laurel hedge into the grand perennial border. She scratched and pecked up the Middle Section to the South Upper Section, finding a good meal at a patch of flowering chickweed near the Agastache ‘Blue Fortune’.
The motion in the woodland garden, across the daffodil meadow, just beginning to flower, was too small to detect: the angle of the weak sunlight must have been shifting over the canopies of the tree-sized camellias, a heavy blossom must occasionally thud onto the soil. Standing idly there, my attention flickered (is this the essential landscape flirtation?) through to the towering oaks beyond the garden fence, the—it’s so easy to pretend—incoherent, boundary-less out-there. And then I turned to find a view of the pretty clock tower within the gridded garden. And then again back out to the once unmarked, unframed place.

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Pond Cleaning in the Rain

Sun, 15 Feb 2009 14:48:49 -0800

For a couple of weeks now, Steven Pitsenvarger and two colleagues from Parks and Rec have been raking the silt out from the bottom of the Japanese Tea Garden ponds in Golden Gate Park. They are getting the muck from a year’s worth of fish waste and fallen leaves into wheelbarrows on shore, stooping to pick up a corroded penny, then another, and another. In still ponds, the copper in the coins harms fish, but the water in the tea garden ponds is flowing water—it drains out under the street to the arboretum. During the annual cleanup, the fish stay in a big holding tank. Steven feeds them honey nut Cheerios once in a while—fish cannot digest regular fish food when water temperature drops below 51 degrees. Once the silt has been removed, any day now, the gardeners will prune the trees around the pond, then refill the pond with water, adding sodium thiosulphate to neutralize the chloramines, so the water is safe for the fish.

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