Re: The Evolution of a Gardener

Hi Ben and all readers,

 

It is 43 degrees outside, at 12.13PM, and I am staying indoors with ears alert for the fire siren to sound the evacuation - there is no apparent danger here today but our state govt has dropped the pretence that out taxes and bush-fire levies should actaully fund a fire service that extends outside the CBD and inner suburbs!

Where-ever man goes he changes the landscape forever. It's not just the plants and gardens that are alien: what about the freeways, towns, cities, villages, airports, shipping ports, shopping malls, gold courses, vineyards, farms, orchards, schools, colleges, universities, cemeteries, power stations, dams, hospitals, parks, rubbish tips, factories, power stations and nurseries? Nothing can be just plonked down in a landscape without there being a major impact on what was there before. Adjusting to that idea is difficult for many who feel concerned about making as small  a footprint as possible. With some 22 millions California (as an entity) just can't be landscape neutral. (My population numbers are probably wrong.) It can't be environmentally neutral either. The whole civilization thing is an artificial construct invented by Man.

Asking folks to use native plants is fraught with conceptual challenges: native to where - the contiental US? the West Coast from N to S, the SW desserts, the Rockies? the lesser mountain ranges/ estuaries/ riversides/  floodplains/ salinas marshes bogs fens swamps? the region within 50 Km of your home - why not 1 Km? What is native? What is more important is what will be native once climate change has run its course and plants 'native' to an area are no longer able to grow there and populate it .

Tropical gardens are out of synch with the usual climatic patterns of California - even in LA LA Land and Disney Land and Nuts Berry Farm,  just as English flower gardens are at FILOLI and Japanese gardens in SF. I could go on. But I can't stop without referring to the Robert irwin garden at the (new) Getty - now that is a totally defiant garden: it defies the climate; the architecture, the broader landscape - a total anachronism. Ah, but it;s Art with a capital A. It's a cultural abberation made possible by the interventions of technology, chemical interventions, irrigation interventions and evey other amendment made possible by the culture within which we (you) live.

Maybe what you are becoming aware of Ben is the dissonance between what you perceive was there before the arrival of European settlers and what actually confronts you face-to-face every day? Don't forget that even the native Americans (there's that 'n' word again) changed the landscape too - fish traps, settlements, burial grounds, sacred sites, trade places, burning fires deliberately to harvest animals by driving them towards hunters. middens of shellfish in the coastal dunes etc.

Out of all the landscapers who worked in CA - Yoch to Church, Lockwood de Forest to Ganna Walska the unspoken Spanish settlers who made simple patio gardens perhaps came closest to working with the landscape, climate and plants to produce a response sympathetic to local consitions. I agree with you in this.

Irrigation: the idea of using  it for flower gardens, is another technological dead-end. It creates a design dead-end too. Designers don't have to think about making a garden without it ie making gardens that get by on the rain that falls. In this respect designers have delluded themselves into believing they are artists; they believe they should be free of the constraints of the materials with which they work; that local conditions can be overcome by technologies applied to conceptual iudeals such as the Arcadian garden - or indeed, of California as Arcadia itself.

Now that I've bagged technology I have to add that modern sub-surface in-line irrigation technology such as invented and developed in the orchards, groves, vineyards and truck gardens of Israel are really excellent in saving water, delivering it just where its needed, in the right quantity - even with fertiliser and pesticides etc included.

BUT for home landscapes I believe it is vital to start out every plan with a rainfall only commitment to which small amounts of irrigation water can be added as families grow and change to support grassy play areas, shade trees, productive trees - shrubs- vines and even specialised flower beds. We really have no choice but to move determinedly away from the idea of green from front to back and side to side coupled with year-round flowers. It may have been a dream for those East Coasters of the Golden Age but it was only ever a dream. Whatever William Randolph Hearst wanted, and however Julia Morgan tried to make it come true it just wasn't, and isn't, sustainable even for one man let alone for the millions of peope who live in  California .

cheers

trevor n.

 

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