art

after the party

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If your definition of a good party is one that gets the police called on it, my July 4th party was a failure. But by other standards I think it went pretty well. (The new garden bench was really appreciated and well-used.)

As you try to play host, the party can pass by so fast you don’t have time to really take it in. And before you know everyone has left and you’re left with what people didn’t eat or drink, plus all the things people bring along, edible and not.

Inventorying the drinks it almost looks like we have more cans and bottles than we started with. I guess people were scared to try this year’s weird/unusual beverage offering, Malta India, a sweet non-alcoholic drink from Puerto Rico. We ended up with eight out of eight bottles unconsumed. And there were gifts of a lot of sixpacks of things we didn’t start out with.

There was a gift of this patriotic chrysanthemum…

…and then this…

I’ve known San Diego artist Tom Driscoll for a while, and he brought along one of his recent pieces.

Tom Driscoll: Array 2, in a preliminary mockup before its exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego. Gypsum cement and powdered pigment.

For several years now he’s been making casts in found molds–the packaging for various consumer products that we usually throw away–using gypsum cement and powdered pigment. Talk about recylcing.

Here’s a preparatory installation in his studio of a big piece, Array 2, that was featured in the Here Not There: San Diego Art Now exhibition last year at the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego.

Tom Driscoll. Array 2, detail of installation at the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego. Photo: Elena Jacinto.

Here’s an alternate view, looking upwards, that lets you appreciate the physicality of the components.

Alexander Girard Quatrefoil fabric

If the only thing keeping you from bringing this piece home is that it might not match your sofa, you could reupholster your living room suite in this fabric, Alexander Girard’s 1954 Quatrefoil design, shown here in the “pink” colorway… (Image from eamesfabric.com.)

The piece that Tom brought to the party is a cast of packaging for a computer mouse. Although you look at the object and say “computer mouse,” the packaging was a simplified version of the original object. The resulting piece is more like a sketch of the original object, not a faithful reproduction. It looks great, but if you’re lucky you can complete the experience of the piece by holding it in your hand: cool, smooth, muscular and heavy, it looks and feels like an artwork crafted out of an exuberantly colored piece of stone. If Jean Arp or Constantin Brâncusi sculpted computer mice they might look and feel something like this. This is one seriously sensual object! And–yikes!–I actually have a red sofa it would match.

Thanks, Tom, and thanks to everyone else who contributed to making this a great day!

gardening, my garden

the big project

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It’s done at last, the project from Hades.

The ugly backside of the outdoor fireplace, a week into the demolition

What started out as this ugly outdoor fireplace with attached bench…

The finished bench, from the end.

…has now morphed effortlessly (yah right) into this new garden feature: part bench, part deck, part raised bog/planter. It’s about four by sixteen feet in size.

For the last two years my bog plants were hogging up the sunny spot in the middle of the patio. Totally in the way. The new bench needed to have a raised bog/planter detail, returning some of the hardscape to garden.

With a general plan in place we got going.

 

Some scenes from the project:

This act of creation began with an act of destruction. The decrepit and not earthquake-safe chimney came down a brick at a time over several weekends. We saved 350 bricks that came off in pretty good condition and hand-chiseled the mortar off of most of them. Inside the fireplace was the reason the whole thing hadn’t collapsed already: 200 pounds of reinforcing steel. At current metal recycling rates we got almost 30 dollars for the scrap metal.

The rustic Japanese tiles that I loved 15 years ago and still appreciate now

I had some moments of nostalgia and renewed appreciation for the little Japanese tiles that I picked out fifteen years ago to try to ornament what at the time was already a marginally attractive garden feature. The didn’t come off the fireplace easily, and the shards and even the good bits were dispatched to the dump. As much as we tried to recycle, this project is not going to get a Platinum LEED rating.

The super-story bricks removed, we were left with a long concrete bench. I like plain concrete as a material, but this bench had been formed around a wood fence that had rotted away a decade ago. We shimmed over the ugliness and covered it all with wood.

A shimmed corner with support for the decking about to be installed
The whole bench with shims in place


 

The bench with black paint to keep the white from showing through between the slats
Before adding suppot battens for the planter we checked to see how it would look with them outside. Ugh. Way too rustic, too Country Home, too NASCAR. The battens are now hidden inside.


 

With the fireplace gone, it opens up the patio to the rest of the back yard.I liked how the zones were distinct before, but the bench still serves as a gentle separator between garden zones.


 

The bench was poured with this Greco-Roman column for support. Were they pining for some lost ancestors? Or were they postmodern ten years before the movement caught on with architects? Whatever the case, we decided to paint it black to de-emphasize it. No way were we going to take on taking it out!
The planter nearly complete, ready for the pond liner
Pond liner being put into place. This is to protect the wood and allow the bog plants to sit in water. This could also be repurposed in the future as a raised pond, or--after punching some drain holes--a normal planter box.
...and here it is with the bog plants in place.


A final “after” picture:

We’re going to relax some before starting the next garden project, maybe in these two old butterfly chairs John got second-hand 30 years ago, with our feet up on the new bench…

gardening, landscape design

outdoor rooms versus the garden

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I’m starting to worry about the Jamie Durie’s of the world. I, as a gardener, am getting concerned that the kind of landscaping he represents—outdoor spaces that are becoming increasingly indistinguishable from tightly decorated indoor spaces—seems to be taking over.

Take a look at what people are doing on home makeover shows, including Durie’s own The Outdoor Room on HGTV. Look at the increasing bulk of outdoor furniture in catalogs. Or just go shopping for a patio set, which is what we did recently.

Some of the smaller-scale outdoor furniture we saw...
...and more of the smaller-scale furniture...

The mismatched plastic sets we’ve from as long as fifteen years ago that been living with were looking long in the tooth. We wanted a simple table and chairs for the roof deck, and maybe something for the back patio. Yes, we found tables and chairs in the stores…

Some of the bigger-scaled seating, as uncomfortable as it is large.
Yet more. At least this set was comfortable.

…But there’s been a huge explosion in huge-scaled resort-themed seating, much of it wrapped in synthetic wicker. They tell you to “think big” when selecting furniture scaled to the larger outdoors, but so much of this would be all out of proportion to the average garden. In all this McMansion-scaled furniture I kept seeing Jamie Durie, and I wondered:

A. Who has space for all this huge furniture? and,

B. What happens to the space devoted to gardens when the inside starts to sprawl outdoors?

A 2010 interview in the LA Times didn’t raise my comfort level. When asked about the basic focus of his recently launched TV series Durie replied, “The reason I created this show was to cast a wider net and reach the non-gardener. I want to encourage people interested in travel, architecture, design, food or even fashion — and the show really encompasses all that. It’s really just laced with gardens, which is the icing on the cake.” How do you reconcile this statement with the tag line for his website, jamiedurie.com: “Connecting people with plants”?

These outdoor rooms are spaces where potted plants are largely interchangeable with throw pillows. Planted surfaces and garden beds give way to hardscape. The dominion of humans, sheltered indoor spaces, make their move to transform the outdoors into places where nature gets increasingly marginalized. Humans domination marches ahead.

Contrast these with garden rooms of the past, which seeme more about the plants, often featuring walls made out of plants and living green things underfoot. Our generation’s outdoor rooms seem to be all about the humans. For a purportedly green-conscious era all this seems backwards.

Is anyone else bothered by this? Or is it just me?

art, gardening, my garden, places

piece o’ history

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Here’s the latest addition to the garden, a small chunk of the House of Hospitality in Balboa Park, a small chunk of San Diego architectural history.

In the late 1990s the city rehabilitated the building, one of many historic structures built as temporary exhibition spaces for the 1915 Panama-PacificCalifornia Exposition. The exhibit halls weren’t really intended to be a landmarks to pass into time immemorial. But the city has grown attached to these examples of Churrigueresque architecture, and the buildings are actively preserved.

(“Churrigueresque” refers to the Spanish/Catalan architect José Benito de Churriguera, who developed a fairly elaborate Rococo style of ornament that was picked up in Colonial Mexico. Bertram Goodhue and Carleton M. Winslow, the architects who worked on the Exposition, studied the style in Mexico and brought it a few miles north of the border. The over-the-top plaster details made for dramatic and escapist exposition buildings, but the details are high maintenance and can begin to fail over the years. It got to the point that the ornamentation was falling off the buildings and threatening to ka-bonk passers-by.)

“Preservation” of the building went through several phases, and eventually employed the wrecking ball. The old House of Hospitality was demolished and a new one erected in its place. To make sure that the new building closely resembled the original the old ornamentation was removed from the buildings and casts made. The new ornamentation is now made of glass-fiber-reinforced-concrete instead of the original horsehair-reinforced plaster.

Rather than landfilling the old architectural ornamentation, the interesting chunks were sold off to benefit the preservation efforts. And it was on a frantic Saturday morning in 1997 where we were able to fight off some of the most aggressive shoppers I’ve ever encountered to pick up this piece of local history. I’m pretty sure that my chunk of history comes from the tower in the photo above, from around the arches.

The fragment was really cool, but it sat in various corners of the house and my studio as we decided what to do with it. Last month we finally decided to liberate the piece back to the outdoors. Here’s its probably final resting place, attached to a long blank stretch of fence above the fishpond.

I don’t typically go in for lots of garden art or pieces of fake Roman artifacts sprinkled around a garden. But I was happy with how this relatively small chunk of Balboa Park serves as a cool focal point for a part of the garden presided over by a long, plain fence.

In demolishing the original building and dispersing its surfaces the city has managed an odd sort of preservation. Zoos and botanical gardens sometimes have the sad burden of keeping alive species that no longer exist in the wild. And my back yard holds a piece of a building that exists only in a facsimile of the original.

gardening, my garden

you paid money for that?

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At the plant sale attached to the recent succulent show a couple of the society members looked at one of the plants I had in my hands and made all sorts of approving noises. “Great plant!” or “Wow, you scored!”

That was not the reaction when I got the plants home.

While John didn’t quite come out and say something like, “You paid good money for that?,” it was there in implication in what little he said.

I suppose it’s the curious gardener’s curse, getting all excited over some of the odder botanical life forms that didn’t get sprinkled on with the magic unicorn glitter that makes a plant conventionally pretty. Add to that the more general gardener’s curse of being able to see the future in recognizing the promise in a packet of black seeds indistinguishable from dust or a bag of brown bulbs looking no more promising than a heap of shallots.

Here’s one of the little plants, Ipomea platensis, a species in the same genus as morning glories. This is the young plant.

Some day it’ll grow up into something looking like this plant in the main succulent show. Very cool, but we’re missing the magic unicorn glitter.

This is a cool plant with a Latin name that would draw snickers from a junior high school science class, Fockea edulis.

Some day I hope mine grows up into something looking like these larger plants in the main show…

Here’s a more mature specimen of Dioscorea elaphantipes, another of the little plants I got. I think the form of the caudex on this one looks pretty amazing. So far these are three caudex-forming (caudiciform) species, but the inflated plant parts all look quite different from each other. The foliage, too, looks totally different one plant to the next.

Oper­culi­carya decaryi also has a cool inflated stem…

…and tiny, dark, delicate leaves.

And then there was this one, Tyle­codon striatus, a plant that even I think is kinduv ugly. Lots of brown stem and not much else. They have competitions to find the ugliest dogs. Do they have ugly plant contests? This species stands a pretty good chance of winning. And I paid good money for it!

Not all was lumpy and bulbous at the plant sale, and there actually was a lot of unicorn glitter spread over many of the plants.

Echevaria Afterglow and Sedum adolphii 'Oranges'
Golden sedum
Dudleya brittonii
Flower on Adenium obesum, a relative of the tropical plumeria. Like most of the plants I purchased this species will form a dramatic caudex, but people seem to buy it at least as much for the flowers.

I liked the forest of plant labels at this vendor's booth. One of them bears the really unhelpful plant name of succulent...

There were succulent-friendly pots, too. Just look at all that drainage.


And of all the pots I came so close to going home with this one by Don Hunt Ceramics. Isn’t the glaze terrific? You wouldn’t care if the plant inside was as ugly as one of my new ones!

Considering what I purchased–and especially what I did not buy–this might just be the last time I’m allowed to go shopping unattended.

gardening, my garden

cooking for vermin

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It’s been a bad year for pocket gophers. I’ve been cleaning up the garden for our annual big July 4th party, dealing with gopher damage and generally getting everything pretty-like. One large spot in the front–just about the first zone of the garden visitors will encounter–is totally bare and calls out for some new plants to fill in the space. But the last thing I wanted to do is to install something new that would turn into expensive gopher chow.

I decided that I would try to place some new plants in the dead zone, but wanted to see if I couldn’t try something to deter the gophers. Gopher bait pellets are popular, but I can’t say that they’ve worked for me. How can you tell if something is working when the creature you’re after lives 99.9% of the time underground and their damage seems to come in random spurts? And I worry about the cat discovering a poisoned gopher. Gopher-killing traps are popular, and it’s the one method that seems to have the best chance at success. Still I’m not sure I’m ready to go there.

I’ve tried castor bean-based repellant. I’ve tried blood meal. Both things that are supposed to keep the creatures at bay, but I don’t know that they’ve worked for me for longer than a few days. And the idea of spreading blood meal fertilizer around native plants at the start of what’s summer dormancy for many of them didn’t seem like too bright an idea. (Let me force feed you some bratwurst while you’re trying to get to sleep…) One thing I haven’t tried is chili powder.

I admit that this is just an experiment, maybe one that’s doomed to fail. The only things I have going on my side are the facts that, 1) there’s at least one commercial product out there that combines blood meal with chili powder, and 2) you sometimes see references on gopher control using chili, usually in combination with something like garlic. Since I don’t want to do blood meal, the chili powder alone might do something.

And if chili powder might work, why not use the most industrial-strength stuff you can your hands on? It’s not pepper spray, but the local Indian grocer sells 880 grams of extra-hot ground pepper for less than five dollars–less than half the price for the blood-meal/chili mixture I’ve seen. I cook with the stuff, but a half teaspoon will make a large batch of food sizzle and scare away most of my Ohio relatives. It might work for gophers, too.

So, into the planting holes I mixed up a recipe of soil mixed with generous amounts of the chili powder, about 1 quarter cup per hole. Next, into the holes go the three new San Miguel Island buckwheats. They’re not the most exotic of the California native plants, but I was pretty happy to find several well grown examples in a local generalist nursery. If you see a business doing something good, why not support them?

Finally the plants got a healthy top-dressing of the chili powder. What I didn’t use on the new plants I spread around a few other plants that seem to be favorite gopher menu items. This is how it looks before watering it in, pretty glaringly orange-red. It looks closer to normal after you soak it in a bit.

One Big Caution: Although chili powder is a natural product, it’s still a nasty irritant. Wear gloves. A respirator and goggles might be a good addition on a windier day. I’m not saying this for dramatic effect. Wind blew some in my eyes and I suffered the expected effect–no surprise. But I also rubbed my gloves on the side of my face, only to have my face burn like a second degree sunburn for half an hour.

Will all this fail and collapse into a pile of chili powder induced flames? Dunno, but it’ll be an interesting experiment.

rambles

i was hacked

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You might think of gardens and even garden blogs as little zones of quiet in the hubbub of life beyond. But try as you might the outside world always seems to find you. Some of the dark forces in the world found this blog and tried to mount a quiet takeover in the form of the WordPress Pharma Hack.

Diana of Elephant’s Eye was the first to notice when several weeks ago some of the search results for this blog were being hijacked with an offer to buy pharmaceuticals online without a prescription. My blog? Pimping Viagra and Tramadol? How rude. The situation continued to get worse as more results showed signs of the hack, and reached a point in Google Analytics where the word “pharmacy” was indexed twice as frequently as the word “plant.” I had no idea what was happening.

Eventually I tracked down the offending hack. Better yet there were several sites showing ways to make the beast go away. Fortunately this wasn’t the sort of hack where all the data vanishes, and at no point were any readers harmed by visiting these pages. But removing the problem required a lot of time checking out individual files and database entries in the secret inner sanctum files behind the scenes.

If you blog at WordPress.com or Blogspot you’re probably safe from ever encountering this. Both services have tech staff way more on the ball than I’m able to be.

If you host your own instance of WordPress, as I do, then you need to be on the lookout for it. The Pearsonified blog offers some useful ways to deal with the attack, as do several other resources. Just search for “WordPress pharma hack.”

At this point I think I’ve got it beat. Results on Google still show a few offending search results, but overall things are looking better as the robots spider through the content. So recovery from this hack is like recovering from a bad bout of the flu.

Some handy things to avoid getting hacked, or to quickly find out about a hack with it if you are:

  • Blog at one of the main blog platforms unless you have a need or desire to exert more control over your blog content, display or delivery.
  • Google yourself frequently, and Google your blog content. It’s not just for vanity anymore.
  • Keep your WordPress version current. Updating will take less time and hassle than righting the wrongs of a hacker.
  • Check your blog stats often. A big dropoff in traffic might signal a big problem with the blog.
  • If you see another blogger’s content being hijacked, point it out to them. The symptoms of this attack are invisible if you’re just viewing pages or writing content. It’s only when you use a search engine that you notice this particular hack.

So…hopefully that’s the end of this headache. Relieved of the need to figure out the prescription for the problem, I actually accomplished some gardening today–and blogging too. Life is much better now.

Stay safe!

gardening

succulence

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Rebutia muscula
Copiapoa hypogaea var. barquitensis

One of the halls in San Diego’s Balboa Park almost always seems to have a plant show dedicated to one group of plant or another. This past weekend it was the turn for cactus and succulents, courtesy the San Diego Cactus and Succulent Society.

This show featured an expected sampling of cactus, but a surprisingly low number of plants with colorful, splashy foliage like you’d find on some sedums or echevarias. Maybe some of them don’t transport so easily, and many others get too big to take to a show. Or maybe there’s a certain snobbery against easy-to-like plants that are probably a little overexposed in garden centers and home stores around town.

I'm not sure how to react to this entry, a carved up specimen of the common San Diego County coastal prickly pear, Opuntia littoralis. Most botanical gardens will have vandalized cactus and succulents, with initials carved into plants that will carry the scars for the rest of their lives. And here's another act of creative vandalism. It's fun, but I'm a little too uptight to enjoy it without feeling some guilt or dis-ease. But in the end it’s probably a better deal for the plant than to chop up the leaf for a big serving of nopales.

Notocactus leninghausii
Mammillaria carmenae
Sulcorebutia rauschii

Rebutia fulviseta--sorry for the awful focus on this one...

Euphorbia poissonii
Euphorbia unispina
And yet another euphorbia, this one E. misera, native right here in coastal San Diego County.
Oops...I didn't get the name of this wonderful wonder. Sorry. Maybe one of you knows? EDIT JUNE 12: Hoover suggested that this might be Cal­ibanus hookeri, and it looks like that is indeed the plant. Thanks, Hoover!
This decades-old specimen is Adenia glauca.

Whatever the reason for the dearth of “pretty plants,” weird was in, and I found myself gravitating to the side of the exhibition hall with plants that took up the idea of succulent growth habits and ran with it in ways you don’t see in cactus or rosette-forming succulents. Pretty many of them are not, but there’s a major cool factor with these.

Out of these I really grooved on the caudiciform species, plants that develop grossly enlarged stem bases, stems or roots to store water for the plant to use during the dry months of the year.

It was easy to snap up a big pile of photos at the show with my cellphone camera, but the quality of almost all of them was been pretty pathetic. Low indoor light = Slow exposures = Blurry photos. And controlling focus is really really touchy to nearly impossible.

I’m not about to give up my real cameras, but gosh these little devices are handy, like the convenient Hostess Twinkies of the photographic world. Amazing how much we’re willing to give up for the sake of convenience. Still, every now and then the photographic Hostess Twinkie goddess smiled on me and gave me sharp images that were focuses almost where I’d have focused with my camera.

Anyway, you might have guessed that where there’s a plant show, there’s usually a plant sale. But that’ll be the topic of a future post…

an artist loosed in a garden