A student started working at a commercial landscaping company. He was surprised that his co workers were not all excited about plants the way we are at school. He mentioned this difference, and I dwelled on it a bit because it is true. So the thoughts convened and words tumbled out the spillway.
The following pictures start at one end of the spectrum, and work their way to the other side. Its not a straight shot, there is a wee twist & wiggle back and forth. Nevertheless, there is a big head and a serpentine tail; it is a rainbow arc going from red outer edge to violet inner.
We begin with a well maintained, crisp and clean, somewhat idealized landscape. As we traipse along, we pause where land is cared for sporadically – its not quite tight and put together, but not altogether a mess either. And finally, we find ourselves meandering in some kinda wild country older than most of our memories.
For me the main distinctions between the zones are density, diversity, and form. I like and appreciate all of them, all the places. I am happiest in magic wonderlands where my head explodes from sheer visual excitement, scat on the trails, and the smell of eucalyptus Yerba Santa and sage brush. I am a fan of structure, machines, order, and labor. Most of the time I inhabit a realm somewhere in between. Okay lets go!
“We use these plans as a teaching tool in our landscape design class. We use them for discussion, critique, and to learn from the work of others. We apply the basic design principles of unity, scale, rhythm, and balance to understand the design process, what works and what doesn’t work over time in an outdoor space. And glimpse how the initial design is just one facet of an undertaking that includes further fine tuning, grading and drainage, irrigation, right plant right place, care and maintenance, and labor labor labor.”
To add to this, I would tack on the following, for those of you engaged in the creation and dreaming of outdoor spaces and gardens. The goal is to bring together the disjunct worlds of design, construction, and maintenance. Enjoy and appreciate what makes a garden so special. And honor the earth and all her creatures. In order to do so…
You have to spend time in a place, sink into the ground, be close, get to know her, if you want the design to hum like home. Yes you can use stats and data and sensors and monitors and surveys and spreadsheets, they are okay. But you also want to cultivate feel. Where the light dappling over the leaf tips is reflected in the light of your own being.
There’s more to architecture than hard structures that stick out and last for centuries. There is the architecture of the plants themselves in community, and the architecture and vibrancy of the people that inhabit the space. And if you believe in or can sense spirits or energy frequencies or shared synchronicity that would comprise another facet of ‘architecture’. That is the unseen that radiates and synthesizes and skeletonizes that which is visible to the eye. The architecture of light and particles, reflection and immersion.
If you have never gardened yourself, except in resumes and weekend workshops and sustainability regenerative bioregional holistic genuine certificates, it is very hard to know what to plant, how to plant it, or how the plants might even work together. You will relegate ‘plants’ to the low rung of the design process, a minor detail if important at all, a make-little-money aspect of a much larger grander bolder vision. If you have never heard birds sing or had a salamander in your hand and a slug on your lips, you will not be able to incorporate any of these aspects into your garden and it will be as if you went to school and all you did was work and no play no recess no friends no laughter.
When you communicate, it is fine to use words nobody quite understands, paragraphs which twist and turn and stretch on to no end, blocks of text that stack heavily one atop another. This is part of being professional or academic or intelligent or clever or cunning or something rather that you learn in the highest echelons of any institution. Each realm and sphere has their ‘language’. The more layers between you and whoever, that is insulation and protection and camouflage and subterfuge and obfuscation and obstruction and specificity and technical and more. It kinda has to be that way. Well nature has that too, an endless web of intricate interdependent symbiotic parasitic scatalogic relationships. But sometimes, in your design plan, it helps to be simple and direct. Then you can start to have an honest conversation with the contractor, or the client, or the site. Engage in a little back and forth on the same level, speaking plain understandable English. A chat over tea or coffee and pastries to discern where each is coming from and going, and then growing the whole thing together in an organic way. Opes, I did say organic. The is a fuzzy word which means different things to different people, it is loaded and unloaded and offloaded and loses its meaning. Ugh.
It all started with a student named Brent – an adventurous and savvy indoor grower of basil and other crops. He spoke of pupping cream and sent me a link. I went down the hole. The timing was fortuitous because we had all just read an essay by orchid master Tom Perlite about the various plant hormones and the role they play in development. We were about to make cuttings and use auxins in products like rootone, dip & grow, and clonex. The topic of discussion was the synthetic versions we apply to plants in cultivation. Most folks do not recognize or understand the overall importance of hormones in plants, animals, humans. So here then is a quick primer of pictures for an overview that brings it closer to home.
We talk about the old time sources of hormones and why we sought after them. Perhaps a male eager for that boost to be the alpha, or a female in menopause hoping for the return of coolness, skin and lubrication. We touch upon triiodothyronine, thyroxine, estrogen, adrenaline, cortisol, growth hormone, insulin, testosterone, and erythropoietin. Then we circle back to plants and cytokinins, the ingredient in the pupping cream. More another day about the other plant hormones like gibberellins, ethylene, and abscisic acid.
Mission Azul 