Category Archives: gardening

mostly words

January 24, 2009 James 8 Comments

My winter pile of plant and seed catalogs contains one that doesn’t fit the usual model. Instead of page after page of gorgeous soft-core pornographic photos and drawings of plants in brawny full leaf and buxom full bloom, the J.L. Hudson Seedsman catalog takes the form of a tight 95 pages of black-on-white text and only twenty-five small line drawings for illustrations.

This is a catalog all about words. It could well change your expectations of what a seed catalog should be. It’s listed as an “ethnobotanical catalog of seeds,” and you can sit down with it and read it like a novel. Most of the seeds descriptions come with a sentence or two of cultural trivia about the plant, mostly about how one of the world’s societies uses that plant. I’ve been finding that this is the catalog that I’ve been spending the most time with this year.

In addition to the interesting catalog copy, you start to notice that the text itself is gorgeous in the way it sits on the page. I was trying to place the special quality it has when I finally noticed on the last page an interesting statement: “This publication was typeset entirely without the use of computers.”

No computers? In 2009? So retro it’s avant-garde, like albums released on vinyl. But worry not. They also have an online presence.

This is definitely a catalog with attitude. It’s also a catalog with a purpose, a purpose that’s well documented in a statement on their website, a purpose that’s in line with their self-description as a “public access seed bank.” You can also start to understand the purpose when you look at the titles of the brief selection of books offered in the back of the catalog.

One of the works, Invasion Biology: Critique of a Pseudoscience, has a writeup that includes the statement, “We have all heard the breathless tales of the dangers of ‘invasive alien species,’ but what does science say about them? …In all cases… introduced species have increased biological diversity.”

Another title, Ecofascism: Lessons from the German Experience, gets a long writeup that includes the impassioned lines, “Most U.S. environmentalists are completely opposed to the aims of fascism, but reactionary forces have begun to bend ecological themes towards these very ends. Only through knowledge may we prevent this perversion of environmentalism.”

Once you understand where the catalog is coming from, you’ll start to understand the almost willful attitude that would drive them to offer seed of black mustard, one of the plants that has taken over much of the local ecosystem and has few friends among the plant people I know. And one of the recent online catalog supplements had seed for Arundo donax, a plant that has taken over some important local riparian habitats. Why don’t you just dump plutonium in your garden? Hmmmm…Does that make me an ecofascist?

You don’t have to agree with everything you see in the catalog, and you don’t have to buy anything out of it. But this is one publication that’s a must read if you’d like to get yourself thinking instead of all hot and bothered over the usual pretty pictures!

art, gardening, quotes, rambles

visualize your blog content

January 23, 2009 James 6 Comments

A lot of blogs these days–including this one–have tag clouds in their sidebars. These highly visual displays of tags the blogger has supplied give you a good sense of the kinds of topics the blog covers. And they give you a sense of how often the topics get discussed.

These do a nice job of displaying the words the blogger thought would be important, but they sometimes miss the big picture that you could get by turning an entire post into a cloud, something using all the words in the post, not just the ones supplied by the blogger.

One of the interesting things I saw in the coverage of Barack Obama’s inauguration was an Associated Press visualization of his inaugural address using an online tool to analyze the frequency of the words he used. (Perhaps the AP’s analysis was based on one at Free Government Information.) Then the story went on to compare it with a visualized version of George Bush’s 2005 inaugural address.

I used the same tool, TagCrowd, to re-visualize the same Obama speech. TagCrowd picks the most frequently used words and assigns different sizes to them. As in a regular tag cloud, the bigger the visualized word, the more times it was used.

But instead of comparing it to Bush’s address, I visualized Lincoln’s Gettysburg address, since people seem to compare Obama and Lincoln. You can see how language has shifted over one and a half centuries, as well as how differently the men use words.

Interesting, huh?

Then I thought, why not try visualizing some blog posts by turning all the words in blog posts into clouds? Would the results between posts be that different? And would they differ much from the tag cloud in my left sidebar?

The first posting I analyzed is a recent one, “greener gardening practices,” from January 7:

How would that gardening post compare with one of my older hoity-toity art posts? This is the cloud derived from “gardens, phonebooths, poetics and old maids,” a post from January 21, 2008:

Pretty different clouds, I thought. (And sorry for the typos on “Cochise!”) The different subjects resulted in dramatically different vocabularies and different word emphases. Also, over the last year, I’ve been trying to simplify my writing for the web–not at all dumbing it down, but adapting to how people read text on a screen versus text in a book. That probably contributed to a difference between the two posts.

Try TagCrowd. Compare old posts with new posts, or posts about your garden with those about your friends or travels. Or pick just one text you like to see what the repeated words tell you.

I think you’ll discover some interesting things!

gardening, my garden, rambles

expressive irrigation

January 19, 2009 James 5 Comments

Only a couple areas of the garden are on automatic watering with dedicated sprinklers. The rest of the garden has to depend on rainfull and the gardener dragging a hose over to whatever needs to be watered. I’m sure that reduces how much I water because I’m very conscious of how long I’m standing there with the hose and how moist the soil appears to be getting.

It’s been warm for the last couple of weeks, and a month since the last rains, so I’ve been doing a certain amount of watering. But I’ve also been making little line drawings with the hose…

And how many of you have this same sprinkler head? I try no to anthromorphize things too much, bust this sprinkler always seems to be staring back at me quizzically.

gardening, rambles

um, how do you pronounce that?

January 17, 2009 James 11 Comments

Am I the only one with problems with how to pronounce the Latin names for plants?

Last fall I was at a nursery and noticed a gorgeous stand of grasses in their demonstration garden. What was it, I asked?

“JFjfaljsldjflajsdljf purpurea,” the woman said.

I stared at her for a couple seconds. I’m sure my jaw was dropped and I looked pretty stupid. I worked backwards from the part I recognized, “purpurea,” and finally understood that she’d just told me that the plants were Aristida purpurea, purple three-awn.

To her credit she hadn’t actually said “JFjfaljsldjflajsdljf” for the genus name. Instead it was a very flat, American-style pronunciation that came out something like “Uh-RIS-tuh-duh.” I’d seen the name on paper a lot before that moment, but I’d never heard someone pronounce it. All along I was holding a very different sound in my head, something more like “Ah-ree-STEE-dah.”

In my undergraduate years studying music I was required to sing in the chorus. Two of the pieces we sang, Bach’s B-minor mass and Mozart’s Vesperae Solennes del Confessore, were in Latin. With Ancient Latin being a thoroughly dead language, Singer’s Latin–basically Latin sung as if it were Italian–was what I’d learned.

With the air tense with misunderstanding and purple three-awn blowing in the wind behind me, American Botanical Latin so rudely came face to face against my Singer’s Latin. Who was right?

I’d probably guess both of us and no one. Botanical Latin over the years has been studded with plant names honoring people and places whose names contain letters and sounds you’d never encounter old-school Latin. (Oerstedella schweinfurthiana, anyone?) And who’s to say pronouncing Latin as if it were Italian makes sense? Scholars now say that modern Shakespearean English is pretty far removed from the original Elizabethan pronunciations. It stands to reason that modern Italian is much further separated than that from its Latin source.

So, really, when you come down to it, we all talk with accents. And sometimes, to make ourselves better understood, we have to adapt to the ways the people around us say things.

Left: The plant that started all this, Aristida purpurea, photographed by Stan Shebs, from the Wikimedia Commons, used under the Creative Commons ShareAlike 2.5 license [ source ].

gardening, my garden

quaking and shaking

January 16, 2009 James 4 Comments

The morning was warm so I went up onto the deck to soak up a little of the January sunshine. While I was up there I noticed the wind shaking the leaves of one of the potted plants growing up there.

This is Euphorbia cotinifolia, a shrub in the same genus as the exalted poinsettia and the lowly and weedy spurges. Species like the quaking aspen tree (Populus tremuloides) get all the glory for having foliage that quivers in the wind, but I thought the maroon leaves on this plant were doing a pretty good job of it.

This turns out to have been my first YouTube video upload. John’s little digital Instamatic has a movie mode that lets you capture moving snapshots. The quality isn’t what the perfectionist in me would like for it to be, but like other snapshots I think you get the idea what’s being photographed…

gardening

bird's nest fern

January 14, 2009 James 5 Comments

Ferns are some of my favorite plants. Their delicate leaves and strong architectural forms keep me looking at them. The little ginkgo-shaped leaves and black stems of the maidenhair fern have to be right up there among my favorite kinds of fern.

But with all the delicate-looking ferns to choose from, what’s got to be another of my favorite is the bird’s nest fern (Asplenium sp.). Here are some closeups of the sides of the undivided spears of a specimen at San Diego’s Balboa Park.

gardening

after a little more research…

January 14, 2009 James 3 Comments

If you read it on the internet it must be true, right? I’ve had some questions about a recent post that relayed some information on farmers in Iraq being prohibited from saving seeds. After doing more detailed research it looks like some of the exact facts need to be scrutinized a little more critically. But your conclusions on the situation may not change much.

All the bluster revolves around Order 81, a directive on plant variety protection that Paul Bremer, the U.S. Coalition Provisional Authority administrator, pushed pushed into effect (at the behest of Monsanto, according to a 2008 interview with F. William Engdahl). The press release from Focus on the Global South and GRAIN that got the firestorm of opinion going declares that, “while historically the Iraqi constitution prohibited private ownership of biological resources, the new US-imposed patent law introduces a system of monopoly rights over seeds.” If you look at the current version of the release you’ll see that it’s all marked up with corrections and clarifications, with a piece of emphatic clarification at the beginning of the release:

The law does not prohibit Iraqi farmers from using or saving “traditional” seeds. It prohibits them from reusing seeds of “new” plant varieties registered under the law. In practical terms, this means they cannot save those seeds for re-use either.

So is Focus on the Global South and GRAIN thinking the law is benign and just? Their press release may be contrite about the confusion they might have caused, but in the current rewritten version still goes on to decry the order as a slap in the face against food sovereignty at the same time it drives big agribusiness into the traditional ways of traditional peoples.

It’s all fascinating reading that gives more nuance and background to the conclusions that people were coming to. In the end it’s not only a case about people’s ways of life being destroyed, nor is it a simple case of protecting intellectual property. Here are a few samples of what’s out there:

Iraq’s new patent law: A declaration of war against farmers (the original press release, 2004-5)

Iraq and Washington’s ‘seeds of democracy’ by William F. Engdahl (2005)

Why Iraqi Farmers Might Prefer Death to Paul Bremer’s Order 81 by Nancy Scola (2007)

And if you’re brave, here’s the order itself, 2004, with Paul Bremmer’s signature: COALITION PROVISIONAL AUTHORITY ORDER NUMBER 81: PATENT, INDUSTRIAL DESIGN, UNDISCLOSED INFORMATION, INTEGRATED CIRCUITS AND PLANT VARIETY LAW

I really would like to see a contemporary analysis of the situation. Was all this bluster? Or has the situation played out as many feared? Based on stories of the social and environmental costs of reliance on Monsanto crops has created in some parts of India, for instance, I suspect things can’t be going well in Iraq.

gardening

a fun gardening movie

January 12, 2009 James 7 Comments

Last July I did a post on the documentary A Man Named Pearl, and at point asked a question about what films there were about gardening. Leslie made the recommendation of Greenfingers, a Y2K British production starring Clive Owen and Helen Mirrin. Based loosely on a true story, it told of incarcerated gardeners in England that had a rehabilitation program involving gardening. In real life the prisoners eventually went on to design award winning garden exhibits at the Hampton Court and Chelsea Flower Shows.

My Netflix queue is pretty long, but by last week I’d worked through a few dozen films and the red envelope containing Greenfingers arrived in the mail. I won’t give away the end any more than I have–It’s based only loosely on the facts I’ve mentioned above. But if you haven’t seen it already it’s definitely a worthy movie rental–Warm, funny and romantic, it’s a great film for these long winter nights.

Now if only the film didn’t use so many plastic plants, including a red hibiscus that features prominently in the plot. We’re gardeners, people! We can tell!

gardening, photography, places, plant profiles

balboa park's desert garden

January 11, 2009 James 4 Comments

January can be an amazing month for succulents and other desert plants. Many aloes and agaves explode into bloom, and plants with ephemeral foliage are green with leaves in ways you don’t often see them.

San Diego’s Balboa Park houses one of the prime local collection of cacti, succulents and other desert dwellers from around the world. The Desert Garden, the larger of its two succulent gardens, was established in 1976, but many of the plants are senior citizens much older than the age of the garden.

Aloes star in its January landscape, with red and orange torches of flowers that double as hummingbird magnets.

And shown here, lurking in the shadows, is one of the local hummingbirds, staking its territory.

Among the big, mature specimens are several dragon trees, Dracaena draco. In this first photo, on the near trunk, you can see a reddish patch where the plant’s red sap has dried. When cut, these plants ooze a fluid that in some European legends was purported to be dragon’s blood, hence the plant’s name (draco = dragon).

This is a public garden, and so it’s subject to funding glitches and battles over civic priorities. I’d consider the garden to be in great condition considering those limitations.

One thing I would have loved to have seen, though, would be more plant labels. I encountered so many interesting species, but very few of them had name tags. I have this thing about needing to know the name of a plant–Call me compulsive. But the lack of labels drove me crazy. I realize, however, that tags don’t come cheap. And in a wide-open public garden, labels can walk away with pieces of succulents in the hands of evil plant addicts.

One of the plants that was labeled was this Natal Bottlebrush, Greyia sutherlandii. A bit scrappy-looking as a plant, but what great flowers!

Also labeled was the Madagascar ocotillo, Alluaudia procera. I loved the spiral patterning of its spines.

Another problem with this being a public garden is that there are quite a few specimens where people’s temptations to carve their initials in the plant life got the better of them. This euphorbia was scarred many times over. But that wasn’t going to stop it from blooming.

After visiting the garden I was surprised by how many shots I’d racked up in the camera. And for some reason, the majority of them were verticals. Is there something about succulents–particularly the upright-growing kinds that mimic the way a human stands–that scream out for photographing them in an upright orientation?

Some yuccas, I think, with spent bloom stems.

Boojum trees, Fouquieria columnaris, native to Baja California. This plant is in the same genus as the California desert’s spectacular ocotillo, which interestingly isn’t related to the Madascar ocotillo, above.

Aloes and kalanchoes in bloom.

The main garden is a flat, easy stroll over wide decomposed granite pathways. As part of a recent expansion, the garden now also includes this switchback down into Florida Canyon, also part of Balboa Park. The plants along the descent are still young, but should look spectacular in a decade or so.

Not everyone in the world loves cactus and succulents. They might point to the defensive spines many of the plants have, and they might say the sculptural shapes of the plants don’t look soft and cozy like leafy shrubs or fragrant roses. Next to the Desert Garden is Balboa Park’s rose garden. During springtime, thirty seconds of walking would take you from the world of cactus and succulents to a garden manic with flowers and heavy with the aroma of roses. But on this bright January day, the adjacent roses were pruned down to naked stems and piercing thorns. It was the cactus and succulents that looked warm and welcoming.

The Desert Garden is located across Park Boulevard from the Natural History Museum on Balboa Park’s museum row. The garden has no walls, no entry fee, and is open 24/7, 365 days of the year.

If the 2.5 acres of the Desert Garden isn’t enough of a cactus and succulent fix, cross Park Boulevard and take a stroll over to the Balboa Park Club, maybe ten minutes on foot, and take in the parks original 1935 cactus garden, which, according to the park’s website, was established “under the direction of [San Diego gardening legend] Kate Sessions for the 1935 California Pacific International Exposition.” There you’ll find “some of the largest cactus and succulent specimens in the Park,” along with a nice collection of proteas.

gardening

seed saving banned?

January 10, 2009 James 4 Comments

View the update to this post here.

Here’s a bit of political unpleasantness I read about in a seed description in the Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds catalog listing for the Iraqi tomato variety, Rouge D’Irak:

Saving seeds was made illegal under the “Colonial Powers” of the United States. Under the new law, Iraqi farmers must only plant seeds from “protected varieties” from international corporations.

First Hiliburton, then Blackwater, and now monster agribusiness taking advantage of the war. I wish I was surprised.

The Baker Creek online catalog actually lists five different plants of Iraqi origin, in case you’d like to help preserve varieties that Iraqi farmers now can’t legally grow from their own seeds: four tomatoes, Tatar of Mongolistan, Rouge D’Irak, Al-Kuffa, and Nineveh; along with a melon, Baghdad Long. Aren’t you heirloom tomato specialists looking for new varieties to try? How about these plants with an amazing contemporary history?

Doing some quick research on this I ran across a posting over at The Alchemist’s Garden that’s great reading. Take a look!

[ Lost in the Landscape ]

Category Archives: gardening

mostly words

visualize your blog content

expressive irrigation

um, how do you pronounce that?

quaking and shaking

bird's nest fern

after a little more research…

a fun gardening movie

balboa park's desert garden

seed saving banned?

an artist loosed in a garden