Re: the state of our state and also our local botanic gardens

Maria,
I just happened to have paid a visit to Strybing, (now called the San Francisco Botanic Garden, as it was decided that Strybing was too hard to pronounce or remember, as well as Arboretum being a bit archaic and incomprehensible to a more modern marketing machine), just last week after half a year between the last visit.  You are quite right that the economic situation is not treating the local parks well, and maintenance and lack of staff because of budget cuts is taking its toll, but so far the Botanic Garden is no overgrown jungle, but instead one where more money is being spent on new layouts for handicap accessible trails throughout the gardens, and old dying plants don't always get replaced, nor weeding and aesthetic pruning kept up with.  The gardens are still fabulous for the various collections of one of a kind plants therein, but the upkeep is sadly not keeping up with the necessities.  I suspect that the fact that these are also municipal jobs
 with civil service bureaucracy and not all staff gardeners have their hearts in maintaining their assigned areas to the same standards.  Some of my favorite sections of the gardens, such as the succulent hill and the South African collections are looking especially peaked/not weeded/pruned/plantings well maintained or pruned. 

At the same time, some of the newer designed portions of the gardens that may not have been there when you lived here are holding up fairly well; such as the beautiful compacted earth/concrete walls in the revised Australian section, or the courtyard patio behind the library.  While the entry gardens that had been designed by Roger Raiche and David McCrory still have an incredible range of plants, they in no way reflect the complexity of the original installation, nor could they without a much higher budget for maintenance.

By comparison, while the UC Berkeley Botanic Garden is also suffering from money woes, the individual collections and maintenance, and especially the signage is much better maintained, but then again, UCB's garden is not free to enter, while SF's is only now proposing to charge an entry fee to help make up the deficit.  Sometimes the entire state seems like some sort of vast Ponzi scheme where the money has simply vanished, and no one has enough money to really keep up with anything, while at the same time, there are still multi-billion dollar infrastructure projects under construction, such as the replacement eastern span of the Bay Bridge.

So much deferred maintenance and lack of attention to infrastructure maintenance, as well as drastic budget cuts to both elementary schools and universities, it is not a particularly good time to be young and starting university or just graduating and looking for work.  The private sector of landscape architects, designers, architects, contractors, etc are also hurting financially, even the high end of the market has contracted greatly over the past year and a half, such that people like me feel grateful to have continued work at all, and new projects still come into play, but with much tighter budgets.

I prefer not to dwell on the negative too much, and feel fortunate that I am not in danger of losing my own home as so many are/have, and truly appreciate the fact that I get to create with plants and outdoor space on a daily basis, in one of the most beautiful places in the state, with such a wealth of interesting people, sources of both rare and common plants, and a community that overall values the beauty and necessity of having gardens around us.  I also enjoy the opportunity to both practice my foreign language skills daily while also being able to teach practical english to my help, who are such a key part of allowing me to do what I do. I don't know why, but I have suddenly in the past few weeks felt compelled to get my help actually speaking english on the job, and have been very pleasantly surprised that I still have the patience to teach english(something I did for a brief two years while living in Brazil 30 years ago), and also that my help
 really are capable of communicating only in english with the right encouragement.  I find it is taking me back to my 6 month struggle to learn portuguese, and the little notebook for adding new words every day, not to mention that my spelling and writing in spanish is also improving as I practice with my help.  I'm finding it useful to finally learn all the correct pronunciation of letters in spanish, of which far too many I didn't really know correctly and would fake it with portuguese.  It amazes me that my help even understood my "portunhol", but of course they are much too polite to laugh at me or even correct my mispronunciation.  

So it is a small price to pay to turn off the music during my job commute, and instead give short bursts of english lessons each day.  It also makes me realize that I would really enjoy doing some volunteer work teaching adult reading or english tutoring again to adults, as a way to give back, and add my small part to making the state of California a more functional and humanistic place to live.  Sadly I don't also have the time during the week to volunteer at the botanic gardens, too caught up with having to make a living, so the most I usually do is donate plants for the annual sales and help staff the annual sales event at Strybing every May, as well as help out at the several bromeliad and succulent and cactus society sales also held at Strybing.

--- On Sat, 8/1/09, maria guzman <mirror@3rivers.net> wrote:

> From: maria guzman <mirror@3rivers.net>
> Subject: Re: Summer plantings in a balmy Bay Area Garden
> To: "medit plants forum" <medit-plants@ucdavis.edu>
> Date: Saturday, August 1, 2009, 12:48 PM
> I used to live a couple of blocks
> from Strybing Arboretum and spent so much time there it was
> as my own backyard.  Since I regularly read the LATimes
> (one child in LA, the other in SF) I expect funds to upkeep
> the parks have been slashed if not eliminated, and few
> besides  volunteers will be maintaining the
> Arboretum.  While Golden Gate Park has always had a
> modest homeless population tucked away in the shadows, I'm
> now trying to visualise it as a weedy jungle - not
> picturesquely gothic but more overgrown and menacing.
> Perhaps someone would like to post an update on the
> situation.
> 
> Maria in Montana
> (p.s.  Neither child has the slightest interest in
> things botanical so it's hopeless to ask.  They sure
> didn't inherit my genes!)
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