All posts by James

my garden, plant profiles, rambles

the kindness of strangers

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I love big, splashy plants as much as the next person, but there’s a plant that I’ve got a special attachment to that’s neither big nor splashy.

Green rose

The green rose, Rosa chinensis viridiflora, lives up to its name. When the “flowers” open, what’s inside the protective sepals is certainly green. But there are no rose petals in sight. The blossom just keeps on opening, revealing more and more sepals, all of them green in color, sometimes tinged with a reddish cinnamon color. Inside a typical rose, once the sepals unfurl and the petals open, you finally get to the pistils and stamens, the reproductive parts that enable sexual reproduction and perpetuation of the species. But this plant lacks them too, just like it lacks petals. If this plant were to turn up in nature, it’d go extinct once the single plant passed on.

Its history is a little fuzzy, though it was for sure introduced to the rose-growing world in 1856 by Bembridge and Harrison in England. In The history of the rose by Roy E. Shepperd, the author notes that the plant has been in cultivation since 1743, which for a plant with no hopes of reproduction by seeds is quite a feat. Through the years, people have found something about this plant interesting enough to start cuttings or make grafts onto rootstock or wholesale dig up the plant and take it along with them when they move.

I was a rose geek in my early teen years, growing and exhibiting roses around the Los Angeles area. At one point I had something over a hundred roses, including this one. I moved down to San Diego, and by the later 1980s finally had a house with room for plants. My parents were moving out of the homestead, and for some reason I felt the need to rescue this one rose from an uncertain future. Of all the roses, I dug up this one and moved only this one. Reading through some of the posts on this rose at davesgarden.com–including someone who moved her great grandmother’s plant–I’m not the only with an attachment to it.

And somehow, through the kindness of strangers smitten with this wonderfully weird plant, the green rose has stayed in cultivation for something like 264 years.

gardening, my garden

free at last

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Someone John knew had a big Australian tree fern in a pot in his front entry. The plant got too big and we adopted it. At some point we repotted it into a fairly huge pot, something like two feet across. The fern seemed happy enough and kept growing. That was three or four years ago, and by October the fern was about to grow into the eight foot tall patio cover.

When we completed the new raised bed having a giant tree fern in the middle of it wasn’t in the plan. But looking at the fern, setting it free into the ground seemed like the right thing to do.

Moving the 200 pounder through the soft new dirt wasn’t easy. Neither was digging a hole deep enough to accommodate it. (Thanks, John!) But the beast is in the ground, and from all appearances, pretty happy with its new spot in the garden. In fact, it celebrated by unfurling new frond after new frond, more than doubling the number it had while in a pot. Seeing that, it seemed like the fern had been in suspended animation all the while it was in the pot, and now it was finally tasting life. Nature in a pot may be convenient for the humans, but nature might not be so thrilled…

Free at last
The new home for the fern…

New fronds
Some new fronds…

art, photography

coda: John Pfahl

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A few posts ago I wrote about the garden photography of John Pfahl. Four of the works from this series are in the exhibition, Picturing Eden, at San Diego’s Museum of Photographic Arts. The show runs through January 13, 2008.

The show has a lot of work in it on the general theme of paradises, whether they be gained, lost, regained or created. The show is curated by Deborah Klochko, and had its origins at George Eastman House International Museum of Photography and Film. I had almost no time to look at the work, but there were definitely some great images. I’ll try to write up something a little more extensive later…

gardening, my garden, rambles

cats, bulbs, corms and tubers

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Here’s a picture of our cat Scooter, squinting:

Scooter, Squinting

Lovely, eh? She’s definitely great company in the house or when we’re outside gardening. But being a cat, she’ll be around one minute and off doing something else the next, only to reappear when you least expect it. Something like bulbs in the garden.

You plant the bulbs in the ground, add some water, and practically forget about them. Then when they’re ready, they emerge and bloom for a few days or a few weeks. Then they’re not there anymore, long before you get tired of them.

Last narcissus 2

Most of the paperwhite narcissus in the garden have already bloomed. In San Diego they mark the start of the long bulb season, with its long successions of narcissus, cyclamen, freesia, dichelostemma, blommeria, oxalis, ornithogalum, ixia, ranunculus, homeria, calla, amaryllis, gladiolus, plus whatever else that you’d forgotten that you’d put into the ground. I never get tired of seeing them when they come decide to come around around. Something like the favorite cat…

art, landscape, landscape design, photography

when landscaping fails

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Desert Center, California lies about halfway between Indio and the Colorado River, halfway between a hot, flat desert town and the Arizona border. Unless you need to stop for gas, you pass by it on I-10 at wide-open highway speeds. It’d be a blur like any other anonymous desert town if it weren’t for the palm trees.

The huge date palms there grow single-file in formations that describe wide circles, V-shapes, or a triangle that’s many acres across. Transplanted there by Stanley Ragsdale in the early 1990s, most of the trees now have seen better days. Even for drought-tolerant date palms, irrigation is essential here in the low desert. The watering proved inadequate and many of them died. In their current state of falling into ruins the trees are visually amazing, the vegetable equivalent of the Acropolis.

Palms 1, Desert Center

James SOE NYUN: Palms I, Desert Center, California

I first went to photograph the town and its trees in 2003 on a hot, breezy day in April. It was approaching noon, and there was no shade other than what a minimal palm trunk could provide. It’s not the sort of lighting situation that a lot of photographers consider acceptable, but for this body of work it was perfect. Besides, so many of the well-known 19th century expeditionary photographs of the American West were taken in harsh conditions similar to what I encountered. Palms I, above, and Palms II, below form a diptych: Imagine Palms I on the left and Palms II on the right.



James SOE NYUN: Palms II, Desert Center, California

There weren’t many structures there next to the interstate, not much beyond the obligatory cafe and gas station. The big surprise, though, was an abandoned school, compact, constructed of brick, and modern in its architecture. It had almost no windows in the classrooms except for high clerestories place beneath broad, sheltering eaves. Not that different from the schools I attended up in the Los Angeles area, I thought. In photography–and in painting for centuries before it–ruins are often a bit of a cliche, but name me a landscape photographer who hasn’t shot some at some point. I couldn’t resist:

Desert Center School

James SOE NYUN: Breezeway, Abandoned School, Desert Center, California

Both the palm trees and the town clearly had seen better days. Stephen A. Ragsdale, the man who founded the town in 1921, died in 1971. Stanley Ragsdale, the one who directed the planting of the trees, died in 1999. Without their energies, this area of the city faltered, and the palms began to fail. The town and these landscapes shot there function for me like Northern European vanitas paintings, reminders of life’s struggles, its shortness, and the certainty of entropy. Again, those aren’t transcendentally fresh ideas, but to see them particularized in a place that’s struggling though still very much alive fascinates me. Judging by the number of people who leave the highway, gas up, then drive slowly towards the palm formations, I’m not the only one who’s fascinated.

For more information on Desert Center see: Wikipedia / The Center for Land Use Interpretation.

For more information on the large series this images are a part of see: James SOE NYUN: Blue Daylight Project.

gardening, my garden, rambles

losing control

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I was at the day job, prepping for a meeting, when John IMs me from home.

Do you want me to plant the pansies?

Innocent enough question, eh? The day before I’d bought 4 sixpacks of them, little white vanilla numbers that I thought would be good temporary fill at the front of the new planting bed until I could decide what else to plant and until what I’d planted could begin to fill in. They’d been sitting in the sun and getting them in the ground would have been a good thing. So I said sure, go ahead.

When I got home they were in the ground, not exactly where I’d envisioned them, but attractive. John said something about how 4 sixpacks didn’t go very far in the big new bed and how he’d always wanted to do one of those color-zone plantings. Big swaths of one color next to big swaths of another. Something big, splashy and commercial. I groaned a noise that to him must have sounded like agreement.

The next day I get another IM at work. He’s bought more. Lots more. He’d forgotten how many plants he’d put in the previous day, so he got a quantity that he thought was how much he’d already put in. Instead it ended up being 12 more sixpacks. That goes a lot further than just 24 plants!

So there’s the bed full of the original plain white pansies, new dark maroon-purple ones, and another area of new white ones with purple faces. Pansies can be okay fillers up close, but spread throughout a garden uniformly between larger plants they begin to look like……….well, ever been to the landfill on a windy day? Little paper scraps blowing everywhere? Yeah, that was my first impression.

Note to myself: Breath. Let go. Stop feeling like you need to make all the aesthetic decisions. Give it time. They may look perfectly fine when they grow up in a couple months.

A garden is always a collaboration, whether it’s just you and the plants or there are others involved.

art, gardening, landscape design, photography

extreme gardening

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In the late 90s I was fortunate to be part of a show of photography at San Francisco Camerawork, entitled Feed, that centered on our relationship with food. One of the artists in the show was one of my photographic heroes, John Pfahl, who in the 1970s produced his funny and quirkily beautiful Altered Landscapes series. In that San Francisco show he was represented by images of compost, Very Rich Hours of a Compost Pile.

The work that I’d to say a few things about are his documents of over-the-top gardenscapes, his Extreme Horticulture series.

Dr. Wadsworth's Tree

John Pfahl: Dr. Wadsworth’s Tree, Chatauqua, N.Y.

These are all beautiful, color-soaked images, most of them of the sort of gardens where “natural” isn’t a word that would immediately spring to mind. The raw plant materials are often gorgeous, but they’re sheared, arranged and manipulated in ways where the hand of the gardener or designer is in-your-face obvious. Often gardens like that give me the creeps. They and talk to a culture where a country’s President is often shown on his Crawford, Texas ranch, clearing brush, like he’s some sort of representative of good humanity battling the evil forces of nature that want to overrun our boundaries. Most of Pfahl’s gardens are testosterone gardens, gardens all about control, gardens all about domination. But at the same time, they’re often beautiful or funny in their overmanicured way.

Bare Trees and Topiary

John Pfahl: Bare Trees and Topiary, Longwood Gardens, Kensett Square, PA

Espalier Demonstration

John Pfahl: Espalier Demonstration, Longwood Gardens, Kensett Square, PA

Pfahl Getty Garden

John Pfahl: Cactus Garden, J. Paul Getty Center, Los Angeles, California

Maybe I’m overgeneralizing, but the East Coast gardens pictured seem heavy into shaping plants into topiaried sculptures. It’s a heavily European thing–Just think of the immaculately-worked gardens at Versailles. The Western gardens seem to show a little more interest in and respect for the materials. Plants are placed where the designer wants them, but they seem to be chosen more for what they can do in that location, rather than what can be done to them. The arrangements of cactus and succulents at the Getty, for instance, show clear thought about where the plants were placed. But the plants are allowed more to be themselves. (And I wonder if that freedom somehow also translates into freedoms that people are allowed to have…) Besides, have you ever tried to prune a cactus?

The tension of natural tendencies versus control is one that’s always interesting to me. Nature often isn’t convenient, and it’s often never where we want it to be. Scraping a hillside to put in suburban housing and pulling up an errant weed are part of the same continuum. But where do you draw the line about what’s good and what’s bad? Is keeping a garden inherently better than bulldozing native scrub to build more mcmansions? I think the answer is yes, but the question is a complicated one. There’s economics, notions of justice, respect for living things, and all sorts of other things that have to be considered. It’s an intriguing question that resides not far below the surface of John Pfahl’s photographs.

art, everything, gardening, landscape, landscape design, rambles

and so it begins

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There’s an old family photo that I think about every now and then. My sister and I are seated at a viewpoint overlooking the lower falls on the Yellowstone River. My sister is staring into the camera and at my mother who took all these early family pictures. And next to her is me, staring not at the camera but over the railing at something off to the side, not the main attraction of the falls, but something else–maybe the gorge, maybe the river, maybe the clouds and sky and weather. Lost in the landscape.

For me gardens can be wonderful little mementos of the larger landscape. Surround me with interesting plants and their interesting colors and textures, and you’ll stand a chance of losing me in it. But I’m also interested that these patches and pots of earth are totally faked versions of what lies beyond the garden gates and city walls. There’s always a human hand in the garden, and I’m interested in what the garden reveals about the person planning, planting and tending the garden.

And I have lots of other interests that I expect will end up here–art, photography, design, music, politics, science, stuff in the news–and so I expect these notes will ramble a bit, something like an old Lady Banks rose growing in many directions from its rootstock. Since the rambles and brambles grow from the same rootstock, though, I expect they’ll have something in common.

I guess all that’s a bit of a manifesto. I don’t want to lay down too many rules, though, because the world is such an interesting place, even if that world is a small patch of garden with herbs for the kitchen or a tiny re-creation of the cosmos in a flowerpot on someone’s apartment windowsill.

And so, off we go!