Monthly Archives: May 2008

gardening, places

the danger of houseplants

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Confession time. I have this fixation on Antarctica.

Most people who go to spas and do time in hotels with pool bars don’t understand it. But, as with all other perfectly honorable fetishes, it’s surprising and reassuring the number of people I run into who actually get it.

Sometime in the mid 1990s I was seriously planning a trip there, though it’s a trip that I still haven’t taken. I was trawling around what was then the internet, doing some random research, when I came across some memos from the National Science Foundation concerning houseplants in Antarctica that at the time I found a little bizarre:

In line with requirements of the Antarctic Conservation Act
[Section 4. Prohibited Acts (a) (C)], and its regulations
[Subpart B, Section 670.4 (f)], the Senior U.S. Representative,
Antarctica issued a directive reminding U.S. Antarctic Program
participants of prohibitions against maintenance of household
plants at U.S. Antarctic Program (USAP) stations and facilities.
That directive is attached to this Environmental Action
Memorandum.

To further implement the directive, this Environmental Action
Memorandum details approved methods for disposition of any
household plants (and associated materials) that currently may be
at USAP stations or facilities.

Disposition of Household Plants

Any household plants, associated growth media (e.g., soil), and
associated growth containers currently at any USAP station or
facility shall be turned over immediately to the NSF
Representative (or designee). Such plants and growth media shall
be incinerated in a suitable metal waste collection barrel (non-
plastic growth containers shall be incinerated at the same time).
The resultant ash and debris shall be retrograded from Antarctica
following approved procedures. No plastic growth containers
shall be incinerated (these shall be compacted and placed in a
suitable metal waste collection barrel for subsequent retrograde

from Antarctica). Special handling or approvals may be required
for the retrograde of these soil “contaminated” plastic growth
containers.

Sidney Draggan

Back then I thought it was ridiculous that anyone would be worried about creeping charlies, spiderplants, philodendrons and diffenbachias taking over the pack ice. Even today it does seem to lean a bit towards the overprotectionist direction, but not by much. Caution is always good with fragile ecosystems like Antarctica. Even if the main houseplants wouldn’t become weeds and take over the continent, who knows what damaging viruses and other pathogens could be stowaways in potting soil, pathogens that might threaten the few plants that live there today.

Way back when, Antarctica wasn’t positioned at the South Pole, and it was warm enough to host many plants, including forests of Antarctic beech trees. In this day and age of global warming, who knows how long it’d be before penguins would end up having to roost in fields of someone’s escaped African violets?

photography, places, rambles

destination: yellowstone

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At the risk of sounding too much like Christian on Project Runway, I’m about to embark on a little “vay-cay.” I leave San Diego on Wednesday in my old Jeep Cherokee for what could be its last major trip to the American West.

gas prices on April 30These days I worry about gas prices, my carbon footprint, and the mechanical reliability of my trusty vehicular companion that I’ve had since it was a baby, back in 1993. My preferred modes of transport the last seven years has been scooters I’ve owned, the first a zippy little Aprilia Scarabeo 150, and now a big Buick of a scooter, a 582cc Honda Silver Wing that weighs over 500 pounds. It has no style, but I got it for cheap. (For all its massiveness, it still gets almost 50 miles to the gallon.)

Above: the Shell station down the hill on April 30, before they raised their prices.

But the thought of strapping two camera bags with three cameras, two serious tripos and a big steel box of film to the scooter sounds a little crazy. And that’s before you factor in the camping gear and multiple changes of clothes to keep me looking semi-snazzy. Important things, you know. Besides, when I floated the idea with John–mostly in jest–his jaw dropped with concern.

“Yellowstone? On a scooter?”

Maybe I was cruel to even scare him like that, particularly after the episode six years ago when he spent seven weeks taking care of me when I was piled into a wheelchair after a little meeting of the body with hard pavement. But the Jeep it will be for this trip. And not only will the trip be in a car, I’ll at John’s urging be packing a cell phone, in case the Jeep breaks down.

That cell is a big move. Even though I’ve been doing email for over twenty years and have had my own web site for well over ten, I’ve been a total Luddite when it comes to cell phones. Yes, they’d be handy to have sometimes, but I’m not willing to chance being turned into one of those people–You know the type: device planted firmly to ear, muttering inanely about foot cream or last night’s pasta salad to whoever will listen, and often doing it in a moving vehicle while driving distractedly like a chauffeur on a Quaalude jag. Pray for my soul, folks.

So, cellphone in pocket, I’ll be heading north through Las Vegas into the Nevada outback, through desert towns with great names like Elgin, Carp(?!), Ely, Pioche, Jackpot and Caliente. (In naming just six cities, I’ve named virtually all the cities on the map on this route that cuts due north through the Great Basin, along the Eastern edge of Nevada.) The nominal destination is Yellowstone, and I intend to get there. But who knows what else I’ll find. There might even be some cellphone reception along the way!

art, gardening, photography

gardens as social spaces

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A little while back I wrote about the Critical Mass photography awards. One of the “Top 50” photographers, Lucas Forest Foglia, had a series based on a community garden and the people who interact there.

Left: Lukas Forest Foglia: Savuth Watering [ source ]

The Great American Garden shares undertones with the Great American anything: competition, excess and individualism. Just look at all the battles for the greenest lawn that the Scott’s fertilizer people perpetuate in their ads that are about to start saturating the airwaves.

But community gardens allow something else to happen. They’re shared spaces and meeting places where people of differing backgrounds and cultures interact.

Foglia’s photos look at the varied people who work plots of land in a community garden in Providence, Rhode Island, and they celebrate the intersections that develop there. It’s a nice body of work and definitely worth a look.

Lessons

Left: Lukas Forest Foglia: Lessons, 2005 [ source ]

my garden, plant profiles

mariposa lily

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Here’s a plant I hadn’t grown before, the Mariposa Lily, Calochortus superbus.

Mariposa Lily

The first plant to bloom was creamy yellow, almost white, with very few markings. It had a remarkably lacy petal thing going on–but that was due to insects munching on the plant.

And then this clone bloomed, pale blush with some of the most outrageous petal markings I’ve ever seen on a bulb, almost like a peacock feather. Gee, I thought I’d gotten the wrong bulbs since they were so different. But doing my research I was assured they were actually the kinds of variation you can expect from this plant. In fact, there’s a web page that shows lots of variations of this species.

Interior of Mariposa lily

I haven’t seen what this plant does during the summer in a bed that gets moderate-to-light watering. This is a California native and comes from areas where it dries out in the summer, so chances are excellent that the bulbs would rot in the ground. I’ll try to dig up most of them and store them dry, but I’ll leave a few in the ground for a test, particularly those in areas that are farther away from the sprinkler. They’re so cool–I hope they’ll come back next year!

art, my garden

extreme "bonsai"

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Here’s a project that I’ve been thinking about doing for a while, something that I see combines classical bonsai, European topiary traditions, and 60s minimalist art. About a month ago I finally took those thoughts out into the garden. It’s so much a work in progress at this point, but I think you can see where it’s headed.

This is the front:
front view of orchard

And here it is from a slight angle:
sliced orchard view

The “finished” piece is similar to a bonsai grove in most respects, except than I’ve taken a slice out of the center of it. Conceptually I see this closely related to my Destructive Testing photographs, one of which I’ve posted here. And just as the photographs obsess a bit about the human-culture dynamic and issues of control, I see this piece as dealing with similar issues, only in living form.

I started with some sheet steel that I welded into this sculpture/pot (top view):

bonsai pot

Angle view:

bonsai pot alternate view

Then I used standard bonsai techniques to root- and top-prune seven Japanese boxwood plants, and then planted them in a casual orchard formation. Several clumps of elfin thyme complete the composition.

Similar to bonsai, I see this as a multi-year commitment. I intend to pinch the growths frequently to encourage finer branch structure, the quality bonsai people call “ramification.” I want the thyme to fill in more, and I plan to eventually thin the canopy so that you can better see the structure of the “trees.” With time the container will weather to a nicely variegated patina of oxidized steel, and the leaves will diminish in size to heighten the sensation of miniaturization.

Though elevated to a supreme level of “naturalness,” bonsai is heavily about control. People look at the little plants, and quickly see that there’s a human presence under the surface of what they’re viewing. The aims of the art, however, combine the miniaturization with an effort to make the plants even more “natural” than they really are–if that’s possible–and to create a sense of perfect balance and harmony.

The aims of classical European topiary are radically different from bonsai’s. But when people view the shaping, sculpting and meticulous pruning that are so much a part of topiary, they also register that these are all acts of imposing human desires on the natural world.

Whenever this piece is exhibited I’ll do a meticulous trimming of the slice that’s been taken out of the center so that the slicing of the rectangle into two portions is mirrored in the planting above.

Will this combination of an elevated naturalism from bonsai with the blatant geometry of the pot and the shearing and shaping from topiary make the viewer think a bit about how their actions relate to the natural world? I hope so.

I’ll post more in this series once they get to a point worth sharing…

art

more ancestral vegetables

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One of the things I like to do in art museums is to look at the fruits, flowers and vegetables in still life paintings from a couple or more centuries back. Often I recognize exactly what the plant life is, but other times I see things that look like no plants I’ve seen or food I’ve eaten.

When I was cleaning off my desk at work the other day I ran across an exhibition brochure of Spanish still lifes that one of my coworkers had picked up on her last trip to Barcelona. The show featured work by the like of Goya, Zurabán, and Juan Fernández “El Labrador.” The painting in the brochure that caught my eye was by Jaun Sánchez Cotán, a painter who created one of my favorite series of still life works.

Cotan Still Life
Jaun Sánchez Cotán. Still Life of Game, Vegetables, and Fuit, 1602. Oil on canvas. Prado Museum.

In the painting, in addition to the game, there are lemons and apples that look absolutely recognizable, like what you’d find at a farmer’s market today, though the apples–a beautiful gold with a rosy-red blush–look smaller than the modern hybrids today. The root vegetables look like parsnips, and something else a bit whiter, like today’s daikon radishes. But I doubt daikon would have been a hot seller in 1600s Spain.

The stick to the left with stuff attached to it–What are those? Squab? I can’t make it out clearly in a little two-by-three-inch brochure reproduction. But it’s the massive, gracefully curved veggie to the right that dominates the painting and steals the show. It’s to my eyes a cardoon, an edible thistle very similar to artichokes, though not a variety you see in stores much these days.

There’s a good description of cardoon in the Anioleka Vegetable Seeds Co. listing:

For culinary use, unlike the artichoke where the flower heads are eaten, with Cardoon, it is the thick leaf bases, hearts and roots which are utilized for food and harvested in the early spring to early summer months. Cardoon can be used in soups, stews and salads and has a slightly spicy, celery-like flavor similiar to Artichoke hearts.

Much of Cardoon’s lack of popularity is due to the fact that like the artichoke, a tremendous amount of space is required to grow them. Cardoon can grow up to 7 feet in height and is very evasive [i.e., invasive] in most climates. Care should be taken to remove the flower heads of the plant before they produce seeds, for Cardoon can agressively naturalize throughout your property.

In addition to naturalizing throughout your property, this plant can take do lots of damage to your local ecosystem. You run across large stands of artichoke thistle in the local Southern California canyons, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they were actually cardoons loosed from gardens or agriculture. Go ahead and grow them, but grow them responsibly.

But back to the Sánchez Cotán painting. All the beautifully rendered fruits and veggies and game occupy this dramatic space that looks something like a black cupboard or windowsill, but also something that looks like a dark infinite void. Because of this amazing space and ambiguity it looks decidedly modern and fresh to my eyes. And the vibration back and forth of the once-live subjects with the dark dark darkness conjures up notions of life and death, and the fragility of existence–all that without the cheap theatrics of skulls that often appear in paintings like this. This is vanitas painting at its best.

The painter uses this background in several other works, including my absolute favorite one of the series, a painting that so happens to be in the collection of my local art museum:

sanchez cotan painting
Jaun Sánchez Cotán. Quince, Cabbage, Melon and Cucumber, 1602. Oil on canvas. San Diego Museum of Art.

I can’t tell you how much I love this painting. A good forty percent of the surface is black. Absolute, utter black. The fruits and vegetables begin in the light, and draw your eye as you follow along the graceful curve from the lively quince, to the extravagantly ruffled cabbage, to the sensual melon sliced open with a slice taken out for you to savor with your eyes, and finally to the final vegetable, a cucumber that curves gently but insistently towards the back, towards the enveloping blackness, a blackness that makes itself felt every bit as much as any of the fruits and vegetables.

Quinces and cabbages today look pretty much like what’s in the painting. There are so many melons out there that it’s hard to keep track, but it looks like an ancestor to the French heirloom sold today as Charentais. And the green, lumpy cucumber–It’s totally recognizable, though it looks closer to gherkins or the Asian varieties than the smooth, plastic-surfaced cukes that you see in the stores most of the time.

Interesting vegetables, for sure, and what an amazing painting!

my garden, plant profiles

ancestral vegetables

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cucumber seed packetSaturday I put some seeds of Armenian cucumber into the ground.

There are heirloom vegetables and then there are ancestral varieties like this, varieties that go so far back into history that to grow them and have them at your table is to connect with history, traditions and the ground that they grow in. The Armenian cucumber dates back at least to the fifteenth century, when it was introduced into Italy from Armenia. I’m sure it was being consumed long before then.

Although called a cucumber it’s actually classified as a melon, Cucumis melo var. flexuosus, and is closer genetically to honeydews than to the standard English or pickling cucumbers. With its unusual ribbed creamy green exterior, you have to do a bit of explaining when you share the extras from the garden: well, yes…it’s called a cucumber, but it’s really something different…

The flesh is mild and firmer than any other cucumber out there, almost crunchy, the texture of unripe melon. The fruits can easily reach 30 inches long, but are best picked when half that size. They’re great in salads, and they pair amazingly well with tomatoes.

Last year I started them in late June and had cucumbers 60 days later. Two hills of plants were plenty for two people, with cukes left over for the neighbors. Pretty good soil, moderate watering and occasional fertilizing kept them happy and productive until the end of September. Some people trellis them, but they’re fine if you let them roam like other melons. I like this variety so much that it’s one of those plants that I’ll keep planting as long as I have room for it.

art

wolfgang laib: a different sort of botanical art

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The first time I encountered work by Wolfgang Laib I almost walked past it. The piece consisted of several uniformly-sized sulphur-yellow piles of some substance, each only a very few inches high.

laib pollen work

Some artwork you look at and you get immediately. Others don’t click until you read the label for some sort of clarification that can turn into one of those OMG aha moments. Turns out the little yellow piles were made of pollen that the artist had collected.

The piles were small, but anyone who grows plants knows that coming up with that quantity of pollen would take days, weeks, maybe longer, and bespoke a certain kind of focus (or utter obsessiveness). It’s an artwork that highlights the importance of the work’s materials as well as the processes and lifestyle the artist needs to commit to in order to make the work.

The Five Mountains Not to Climb On (Die fünf unbesteigbaren Berge), 1984. Hazelnut pollen, height: approximately 2 3/4 inches [ source ]

Left: The cover of the catalog, Wolfgang Laib Eine Retrospektive.

Another room in that exhibit I attended had one of his stunning squares, also made of pollen, laid out on the ground. Minimalism has strongly influenced how subsequent artists approach what they do, and making uniform piles or geometric shapes of something can verge on cliché. But the edges of the pile were a little soft, with the pollen defying staying exactly within the margins of the square, and the softened edges made the square seemed to dematerialize and float, like the rectangles in Rothko’s paintings.

Assertive in color but intensely fragile in nature, the work showed a reverence by the artist to his materials. But at the same time it required a respect from the viewer to at least not do something as blunderingly insensitive as to walk through the artwork. Unfortunately, before that La Jolla exhibition closed, someone had done just that.

landscape, plant profiles

wild and out of control

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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!