After leaving NYC, MB Maher headed to Iceland. Only a California photographer would want to visit Iceland in December. But Maher says the light there now is “permanent Malick,” that is, what three or four hours of daylight there is this time of year.
Obviously, this is also where all the Christmas ponies are kept. I’m still waiting for mine.
Must I really squeeze in one more post on the High Line in 2012? Have we become bored and cynical already about this dream of a garden on an abandoned railway trestle made real against seemingly insurmountable odds? (Yes to the former and a resounding no! to the latter. Not on my blog anyway.) I don’t know if the hipster doll left on the High Line a few weeks ago was meant to allude to recent controversies revolving around accusations that the runaway success of the High Line park was responsible for “Disneyfying” the surrounding neighborhood.
At least I think it’s a toy. The photographer didn’t say. Left purposely or simply forgotten, I just hope there was no anti-hipster voodoo involved.
MB Maher was in NYC last week and grabbed a quick portrait of the High Line in early winter, including this well-dressed hobo debating whether to ride the rails. (Possible caption: Is relentless pursuit of the hip a train to nowhere?)
More signs of affection for the High Line.
The High Line without Oudolf’s emotional planting would still be worth visiting for the great views, similar to strolling across the Brooklyn Bridge or Golden Gate Bridge.
Giving us access to views previously granted only to birds.
Nourishment for us, nourishment for the birds.
Laying down new tracks in urban garden design: Is it a garden threaded through a city, or is the city now threaded through a garden?
Because urban parks aim for creating utilitarian space, they are oftentimes monocultures, stripped of species diversity. A garden aims for the transformative, urging us to escape into another world. I think the High Line successfully merges urban park and garden, simultaneously intensifying the appreciation of both the built and natural world by immersion in both.
Tidy, formal parks, with their authoritarian focal points, can seem like bon-bons attempting to satisfy ravenous, denatured urban appetites. I find that the shifting perspectives, stark contrasts, and wildly rich plantings make the High Line a four-season feast.
Edited to correct photo attribution; photos 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and 9 taken by J. Mericle/threadandbones.
With apologies to Abbie Hoffman (’60s radical and author of counterculture best-seller Steal this Book)
Literally, sheet mulching for the bookish set.
I had some time late yesterday afternoon so decided to dip my toe into holiday retail.
In truth, all I did was look at plants. And even bought a few. For myself.
This season of giving is off to a roaring start.
But look, Christmas trees in the background. See? I was holiday shopping!
Astelia and echeverias
Agave ‘Blue Glow’
The inspiration to include some seed pods from the castor bean plant in leftover Thanksgiving vases already filled with chamomile and hypericum came from this photo from thequintessentialmagazine. Nice touch with the alocasia leaf too.
Like a bloody echinops, the ricinus makes striking cutting material. I suppose it’s the awareness of the castor bean plant’s intensely poisonous properties that prevents me from ever considering it suitable for vases. It’s obviously causing me alliterative fits just talking about it…poisonous properties prevent…
Clean, bright simplicity. Agave attenuata underplanted with variegated St. Augustine grass, by garden designer Dustin Gimbel. This tough, subtropical grass works beautifully in holding this slope, and is allowed to grow long and shaggy or clipped and tidy, according to the owner’s whim and schedule. No frost issues for this coastal Southern California garden.
One of the more excruciating projects this past summer involved the tiled patio on the east side of the house, photo taken 10/3/10. The indoor tile left over from a friend’s DIY project was a mistake the day we laid it down almost two decades ago. It was the right price, as in free, but I’ve always hated it. It’s incredibly slippery when wet, which is quite often since I’m always watering the containers here. The fact that it was free blinded me to the obvious distinction in traction between indoor and outdoor tile. Our big Newfoundland Toby used to tear through this space, performing a cartoon-character skid when the tiles were wet, like a goofy Newf on ice skates, madly pumping his paws to regain footing before shooting out the gate.
Like a sore tooth, it was a low-grade source of constant annoyance. The solution had to be cheap, of course, and every time I walked through this space I ticked off possible alternatives. Just lay gravel down over it? I actually saw this done on a local garden tour, the entire concrete driveway left in situ but graveled over, a no-sledgehammer method of transforming a utilitarian driveway into crunchy conservatory terrace for potted plants. But I couldn’t just careen from crazy solution to crazier solution all the time.
Then one morning in early summer when I was home alone (6/10/12 to be exact), I grabbed a hammer and chisel, and with no overarching plan knocked off a tile, just to see if I could. And I could. It was surprisingly easy. At that point, I had a tile patio minus one tile, which is no longer an intact patio but basically a demo in progress. So I kept at it, in secret, until every tile was removed. Amazingly, no one came around to the east patio until it was half finished, at which point it became a fait accompli. Some tips on how to get motivated for onerous, back-breaking tasks: Read a particularly incendiary article on a topic sure to push your buttons, grab the hammer and chisel, and have at it. (Good thing it was an election year.) Swing wide, swing hard, substitute issues for tiles, and shatter them into tiny pieces. Wear protective safety glasses.
The mastic remained until mid August, when in desperation we attacked it with a rented floor resurfacing machine, a monster that leaped and bucked like a crazed bronco, at one point throwing Marty and slamming him into the side of the house. The diamond blades created a head-splitting noise and produced dust clouds that reached white-out conditions. (And all that long day Marty never once said, “What the hell were you thinking?”)
Now what? Besides the expense, adding anything on top would screw with the grading. And after that ordeal, staining the concrete seemed like a walk in the park. I briefly checked out estimates with professionals, but opted for DIY once again, and a week later we purchased a cheap concrete stain set from a big box store, about $80. The process included four distinct steps, including a light acid wash to clean the surface, the main color, highlights, then a sealer. My biggest concern was for nearby plants getting residue washed into their soil, because a lot of water is used in the process, but all plants survived the stain application fine.
The sprayer had gummed up by the time the highlights were applied, even after carefully cleaning the equipment, which ultimately gave a stippled, paint-spattered effect instead of more even coverage, and the grid from the tile ghosted through. But by this point, we were so thrilled to have survived the ordeal that any result would have been deemed acceptable.
Photo taken 11/1/12 of the stained (non-slippery) concrete.
Surfacing briefly, like the porpoises I watched slicing the surface of the ocean on the ferry boat crossing to Catalina Island Friday.
A visit mostly all business*, the pleasure coming mainly from the 30-minute walk to the conference room at a resort not far out of town where I would be working in the afternoon. The pleasure of walking in a small town decorated in Catalina Tile.
An island with water scarcity issues far worse than the mainland, slightly alleviated recently by desalinization plants.
Translation: Succulents are everywhere.
Bougainvillea lines the roads on which tourists zip around in rented golf carts, which gives the island a Jurassic Park feel.
We hitched a lift on one of the golf carts the last steep 500 feet or so to the resort.
Back on the mainland in my own garden, Aloe capitata var. quartzicola promises to reveal its first bloom this week.
That is, if the snails don’t get it first.
Not to be outdone by a winter-blooming aloe, Verbascum ‘Clementine’ made the ridiculous decision to send up a bloom in November.
I’m hoping this doesn’t mean she’ll be too exhausted to bloom in spring.
I mentioned recently the salvaged tank where the Hibiscus acetosella is growing.
The leaning inflorescence crashing in on the tank belongs to the tetrapanax. Beautiful, no?
Such beauty bears a price. Come closer:
Closer still:
There were a couple bees, the odd hoverfly, and the occasional wasp, but mostly just hundreds and hundreds of flies.
Sorry, but I just had to share.
(If Linda is reading, tonight’s viewing will be Ken Burn’s The Dust Bowl.)
*One day I swear to pay a visit to the Wrigley Botanical Garden.
I planted this Hibiscus acetosella in a big, salvaged industrial tank in July, replacing some Verbena bonariensis ‘Lollipop’ that finished unexpectedly early, and it grows so much better in the steadier conditions of a container than in the darwinian struggle of my summer garden. Before this year, it never really sank in that this hibiscus actually thrives in the warm days and cool nights of autumn, because it had previously always withered away in too-dry soil by September. Perennial in zone 10, fast growing enough to be grown as an annual in colder zones. The fleeting blooms are sparsely produced and incidental to the Japanese Maple-like leaves, which are the primary motivation for growing this hibiscus. The flowers come in the same brooding color as the leaves and are barely noticeable unless backlit by the morning sun. Five blooms were open this morning. Such startling discoveries add a jolt of excitement to the morning garden browse.
Contributing to the The Fall Color Project this year, hosted by Dave at Growing the Home Garden, won’t be as easy as stepping out the back door and taking a photo of the smoke tree ‘Grace,’ now dearly departed since August, who semi-reliably colored up beautifully in fall, written about here.
Cotinus ‘Grace’ December 2010
Finding local fall color is never easy. This is coastal Southern California after all, and the nighttime temperatures are just now dipping occasionally into the high 40’s. Frosts are rare and freakish. Evergreens probably have the edge over deciduous trees here.
But I noticed the Gulf muhly grass, Muhlenbergia capillaris, at the Long Beach Airport, was in fine form this year.
And liquidambars are a reasonable bet for fall color.
As is Gingko biloba.
This “living fossil” has many fans. According to a recent article in The New York Times, designer George Nelson, of iconic Bubble Lamp fame, strongly favored the gingko:
“We moved several times during those 21 years. The most interesting was the brownstone that George bought around 1960, on 22nd Street between Broadway and Park Avenue South. Back then, the block was decimated: there were no restaurants, no stores, no nothing. George had me go door to door to ask the owners of buildings on the block to get the city to plant trees. They had to be ginkgo trees. If you walk down 22nd Street now, you’ll see mature ginkgo trees.”
Though we mourn the loss of Grace, our relationship with her had deteriorated into a 1950s sci-fi movie, The Attack of the House-Eating Smoke Tree. In the early-morning sky made visible again by the departure of Grace, Marty observed the transit of the International Space Station overhead at 5:15 a.m. And the light filling the garden this fall is a color project all its own, lighting up the corollas of nicotiana like tiny flares.
