City College of San Francisco why I love thee an ode to a Community College
In the state of California we got three tiers of ‘higher education’ in the public sector at the tops is the UC, University of California – four year schools in the middle is the State University – four year schools at the bottom is the Community College – two year schools
Academically speaking, UCs are for the 3.8, 3.9 to 5.0 GPAs kids with a bunch of extras the State Universities are for students in the A’s and B’s range and the Community Colleges, well, anybody can go there
I went to two UCs for my undergraduate education the best part of both of them was their proximity to the ocean one was close to Black’s Beach the other was close to Steamers Lane that is where I got my education during dawn patrol and afternoon glass off in the sea I took classes in ecology evolution and conservation but there was a huge disconnect between academia and real world
we never did any walkabouts around the neighborhood looking at weeds or flowers or picked up garbage on the beach for ‘environmental justice’ worked in a park for ‘labor studies’ or went after poachers for ‘conservation’ class was a lot of theories, graphs, statistics, and verbose language things I did not understand whole bodily, things I still do not grasp I also took some art classes at the UC again, I have forgotten the content amidst the crowd of 300, but remember well a kind black lady with colorful clothes named Faith Ringgold and images of wild yam cults and elegantly carved ashanti stools
For graduate school, I went to a State University to be exact – San Francisco State University the best part of the curriculum were the field trips excursions to the icy-morning mountains, to the shot-up road sign deserts, overnights to the wet-tent-at-night woodlands, to the sweat-up-your-neck foothills voyages with professors named Patterson, Hafernik, Desjardin, Parker, and Blair so vivid were the blooms, and so colorful the fruits! And the animals!! this is how I fell in love with the flora and fauna of a valley, of a grassland, of a washed out gully in the sands I was happy to wander around with classmates, observe and see things as they are
For work, I have taught at a Community College for the past sixteen years I teach horticulture, which is gardening, landscaping, tree and nursery work the ambiance is real different from the other two institutions the students are of a different sort, and the teaching is much more applied it is not much of a social and hang out recreational place; it is not the ‘college experience’ theres nobody laying around on manicured lawns theres no ragers at a frat house theres limited ra-ra-ra at sports stadiums with everyone wearing matching colors but, it is a place of learning – a place that prepares you for working in the world it is more to my liking as a person; it fits I appreciate the diversity of the students, I like their sincerity of being
Now, you might be thinking or saying ‘community college is for the dummies that couldn’t get into…’ or ‘community college is for a poor kid that can’t afford…’ or ‘community college is just a stepping stone so that you can transfer to a…’ well…maybe you are correct
From my view, the students are a lot smarter, and wiser at the community college maybe not always test taking smart or sit still smart the kinda young person know-everything-whipper-snapper-smart caume laud this or honor that smart but the students are hand smart, experience smart, tactile skills smart smart in the ways of the world smart sometimes wise in the ways of good and evil wise this is so, because there are all kinds of different people who attend our community college
it is a COMMUNITY college here, you are not gaming for a piece of diploma paper with a similar cohort of peers instead, you are actively and closely engaged with people of varying backgrounds and strengths in understanding the world and finding your place in it
Who wants to learn about flowers? And trees? Well, we got high end well educated professionals like my dentist, the doctor from the free clinic, and the patent law lawyer there’s an army scout who knows the weight of an abrams tank, a twenty year Navy pilot, and the electrical engineer on an aircraft carrier we got machinists and diesel mechanics who have done time with heavy heavy equipment as well as folks who’ve spent time in jail cells contemplating, reflecting and, theres a lil’ bit ragged student who’s been dreaming while sleeping on the cold sidewalk there’s bunches of nurses and medics who want to care for a living thing that doesn’t talk back as well as a two or three master’s degrees therapist who is tired of the droning quality of human self pity and inaction into the mix, throw in a retired chemist add an architect discovering nature’s structures, and stir in some managers, supervisors of 10, 20, 100, 1000 subordinates
plus there is that whole generation of students who have been raised on computers, videos and screens, students who have never acknowledged the three dimensional sentient and conscious creatures on our planet, youth who ignore the blur of greenery all over the land and, theres a whole lot of students with a bachelors degree and a student loan students who for four years did not know what they were studying or why they were studying it, and now do not know what to do to be gainfully employed – maybe you can do something with nature? something that brings joy to your heart? something to cultivate beauty in our society? … try the horticulture and floristry department!
Seems that the rightful place of a Community College is – at the center of the community, a college for folks young and old a place that gathers everybody together and improves our day to day world one seed, one sprout, one or two cotyledons at a time there not a whole lotta other countries where such a place exists everywhere else people are enamored with that kind of hierarchy that puts everybody in a slot on a ladder, and you can’t climb up cause you are stuck on your rung this is America we want a just and kind society that is a big ol pie everybody anybody who puts in their best effort can come get a slice of apple pie, cherry pie, maybe rhubarb pie
The community college is a great idea, a grand experiment, it is a temple for lifelong learning and a roundhouse of civic in-person interaction it would be a darn shame if it were to be snuffed out, gutted, squeezed, and relegated to the chop chop ax by uncaring people theres no better place to learn to smilie with all of mother nature’s creation, there’s no more worthwhile crew of students than at City College of San Francisco!!!
I like weeds because they are tough survivors plus they are job security because I am a gardener my favorite weed is the himalayan blackberry spread by birds eating the berries and dropping the seeds blackberry seeds grow into huge thick canes and impassable thickets tips touch the dirt, grow more roots, and up they go again arching into the sky to remove them by hand you need a good pair of gloves and a spade
Find the roots, they look like this you want to get the whole nugget, not only cut the top if you just cut the canes, it resprouts and hunkers down for the fight so dig all around about eight ten inches deep use the spade like a spear in a cutting motion watch out for buried pipes and conduits it is extra difficult when the blackberry root is tangled inside a tree root
When you pull the big root out of the earth it looks something like this
or this try to get as much of the root as possible that will slow it down over time our goal is not total eradication, just management and some control in localized place
if you tug on the small end of the vine where a young stem touched down and rooted the roots may be white and fibrous these fine branching roots are usually pretty easy to pluck from moist soil they havent yet grown that obstinate woody hunk of anchorage
if you are lucky and you pull out the whole vine it is a happy and satisfying feeling like you battled a small beast and won bloody cuts on your arms make sure you soap and clean it later all the way up the forearms past the elbows
then its time to pack em up you fold the vine back and forth same as you would for a 100’ climbing rope or an outdoor extension cord
at the end of the vine I like to use the thin apical stem to tie it together in a neat manner so bundle it across perpendicular to the bundle the spines grab itself and holds it all tight for easy transport you do this for a bit and pretty soon its a whole burlap full of the stuff
thats it! I weed algerian ivy in the same way make little packages of weeds
the ivy pulls easier than blackberry but it is not as fun or as exciting because ivy does not put up a fight as hard as good ol Rubus discolor Rubus armeniacus my favorite weed
Well forgot to press the record button on zoom hence here is an abbreviated version of the lecture for folks who were not able to be present
In a discussion of native vs nonnatives exotics naturalized and invasive species its bound to be rolled up with cultural perspectives and mindsets the emotional attitudes we have towards nature and boundaries right and wrong as well as what is ‘supposed’ to be there that is – the chasm between our expectations and dreams and reality
rather than get bogged down in the language or minutiae or dichotomous keys or struggle with the depression that seems to latch itself onto downward trends we are just going to move forward and see where this takes us with regards to the propagation of california native plants
Theres three parts to this lecture One talks about the growing of plants for restoration and the jobs therein Two is about some local native plant nurseries, and the challenges we run into as we try to cultivate the wild as ornamental garden plants and this lecture ends with a few shots of good ol time california grass lands ranch lands
The structure of this lecture is a loosey goosey style of story telling some anecdotes seem to have no point at all others wrap around at ya when you can see the whole picture like a golden eagle at 800 feet scouting for rodents
okay, press start
In the old times working for the city in habitat restoration we would sometimes work alongside and subcontract with a company called shelterbelt builders they did large scale type native plant restorations bulldozers rerouting streams or channels pounds and pounds of herbicide erosion control and hand weeding followed by the planting of thousands and thousands of native plants plants that were once common, now not so much one of the owners his name is Mark Heath aside from weeding all day long and managing workers to stay on task he taught the hunters education program for fish and game, now fish and wildlife at the lake merced rod and gun club where folks would practice shotgunning clays and meet to chat about the regs well that club is no more lost the lease no more lead in the lake no more hunters ed in san francisco, gotta drive out to richmond or down the peninsula the number of hunters is going down, so say the charts and numbers and fees collected its all online now meat as food its all an abstraction and a non-thought or some kinda savage activity they do in an inland empire, not on the coast
Another fellow that was our bird intern at the time was a locally born and raised nature nut his name is Josiah Clark as the years built he too ended up with his own restoration company doing the wet and dirty and soggy work of crouching on your knees, cleaning out pots and wrestling with eight foot brooms with two inch trunks slashing and grinding weeds out of the earth havent seen him in a bit only scrolled through his facebook posts an eternal photo stream of crab carapaces and salmon scales and kayaks dipping into the sun
The folks I am most familiar with are the city’s restoration crew where I clocked in and out of hours and seasons they was once called natural areas program I liked the name cause the acronym spelled NAP nothing like ten minutes of shut eye after lunch and in spanish it was programa de areas naturales it spelled PAN that is the weird greek nature goat god patron of shepherds but they rebranded themselves in recent years to a more proper sounding name natural resources division now always change the division is responsible for all the wild areas throughout town and a little beyond also spots once too steep or rocky or outa the way to build on places with names like twin peaks or mt davidson and mclaren park the goal is to conserve the natural flora, deal with pest and threats and navigate the sticky and calamitous world of peoples needs balancing it with those of nature really messy business the dirt of mud holes and sap of pines holds no candle up to the grime of town hall meetings and internet lobs of spit n manure yet still, the tenacity and persistence of plants outlasts all the frustrations and unruliness of human follies by thousands of years some of the old timers are still there tucked in the emergency hospital where dirty harry was taken to back in the day 811 Stanyan by the panhandle of golden gate park the boss is LB Wayne, some kinda great horned owl of an athenian lady crew was C Campbell, R Zebell, L DeMeo and friends hanging with em everyday reminded me of a foray in the hills with bear, badger and antelope on the trail scramble up the chert rock, ease down the switchback between the burlaps tarps edged with poison oak and the endless seeds drilled into your socks days flowed like lightning if you want to work in the division, get in as a gardener through sfgov.org then slowly snake your way in with hard work and solid knowledge about the awns of a purple needle grass or the peduncle on a yellow composite flower
One of my favorite spots was working at twin peaks for the obvious reasons – it was really cold, windy and full of steep falling rocks plus I enjoyed wide expanses of lupine grasslands if you go to the peak, on the hillside, in the diagonal sediments, you will find bunch grasses there a native bunchgrass with rough leaves and a relatively wide blade nutka reed grass in nature, it is specific in its ecological preference north side of the mountain, above 400’ elevation thats it so remember that – plants are specific and particular beings they like what they like thats it
Another of my favorite places was out in the southeast of san francisco the neighborhood known as the bayview and hunters pointe it is the site of old time candlestick stadium it is the location of the naval shipyard active from about 1940 -1975 it is the launch spot for fishing the bay for leopard sharks and halibuts with the natural resource division, we would drive the big green ford 350 double cabs out to indian basin, bayview hill, and herons head parks to do restoration work in wetlands and amidst a grove of islais cherry trees weeding and planting we’d be working down the hill from the housing projects with black and brown folks we’d be working on the blue green rock outcrops of serpentine or on the open white sparkling sands of the bay side beaches, while garbage and RVs with peeling panels swirled in the cul de sac dead end street
There is an organization called california native plant society, they are active throughout the state they educate people about the native plants, and protect their homes our local chapter is called yerba buena, named for a little sprawling groundcover of a mint
Anyhow one of their members is named Margo Bors she is one great observer of nature and photographer too so one day she is wandering out there in hunters pointe, comes across one then two then more of a mariposa lily, a shimmering yellow lily with a bulb a bulb that around here, only grows on that serpentine rock, our state rock wow that is an amazing find! there was only one other previous recorded site of this plant in the wild in san francisco also on serpentine rock so in a neglected patch of unexplored forgotten urban world a paved land of almost a million people crushing it nature is still there doing its thing plant maybe been there for 200, 300, 1000 years, or more growing bulbs, making flowers and seeds, dying back in the summer heat into the rocks just chilling, kinda oblivious to all that is going on all around the lesson here is that some wild plants have adapted over eons and can tolerate soils too toxic for other plants soils lacking in nitrogen, but full of heavy metals like chromium and nickel some wild plants need and prefer this sort of soil to survive, otherwise its lights out so unless you can recreate the exact soil conditions in cultivation you will not succeed dont even try to compete with time and geology know that life is ephemeral, and if we run the plant out of town, its gone forever the oldest living thing at the end of this peninsula – a short flower four inches tall that comes out to play a couple of months a year now that you know about it what do you do? multiple choice question: a) go instagram it selfie it and stampede it b) pimp it out as a tourist attraction, make t shirts and hire the local folks as tour guides c) dig it out of the ground and sell it to the highest bidder d) pretend you never heard about this, go about your business as usual with the knowledge that somewhere in the world there is still ancient magic and mystery
The last place I describe here is a lump of a rock of a short lil mountain called san bruno mountain if you came to the bright lights of the City flying on an airplane then drove north on highway 101 from the airport with the bay at three o’clock, you’ve passed right by it but probably never thought to go up there to look around i mean, whats there to see? its a dried up nothingness, boring east west range no majestic trees, no casino, no shows, no bison or elk or big horned sheep just a ugly hill that would have been better scalped for rock fill or flattened for high end development you are probably right
Got involved in san bruno mountain because I was in graduate school studying biology and there was a small blue butterfly there my advisor sent me to work on on the summit you can look west to the city of colma and the acres of cemeteries and the old dump below meanwhile check the pacific ocean for whitecaps and whales
Or you can look east and north towards visitacion valley and mclaren park one day I was out there as usual above this place called dead cow ravine watching the blue butterflies land on the compound leaflets of lupines there was nobody as far as the eye could see, just grass and flittering wings all of a sudden the road, guadalupe canyon parkway, filled with hundreds of cars thousands of people I walked over and said hey whats going on? they told me that the geneva towers, section 8 public housing, was gonna get blown up then there was a kaboom of implosion and a whole lotta hooting and clapping then everybody left again and I went back to counting eggs on the hot dry hillside in solitude
This one part of the mountain was thick with blues dense aggregations of butterfly eggs and larvae it was a low elevation, protected not windy spot rocky thin soils full of silver lupine lupinus albifrons, and summer lupine lupinus formosus it was the best spot on the whole mountain for these butterflies then came the fencing and the dozers and then it was all gone there was no memorial or gravestone or remembrance or songs for the dead just a handful of street signs with names of now gone butterflies I watched it happen, but did not think much of it just so used to human progress and changes in the landscape accustomed to the might of machinery and power of civilization blue butterflies versus humans I know what tribe i belong to, and it sure aint some little bug
Around this same time, it became popular to mitigate for these losses through a practice called restoration that is to say, if you plowed one area, you could then plant it with native plants in another one and be done with it tit for tat, one thing for another hence, over time, growing native plants for restoration became a ‘thing’
The mission blue butterfly is a funny creature cause the lupine eating larvae get baby sat and protected by an ant not just any ol black ant, argentine ant, common hang out in your refrigerator ant it cooperates with a couple of species of native ants, a couple of species out of the some thirty ant species on san bruno mountain one is named formica lasioides, another is named prenolepis imparis that is the general problem with all these endangered species they have a bunch of specific connections and specialized niches and narrow ways of living you start cutting this connection, then sever that one
push em and push em till they are at the edge of holding on then real quick they are all gone and its hard to bridge those connections back again, because they are dependent on one another they are not a field of hybrid corn more like a basket or tapestry made of materials you cannot buy on amazoncom thats the rub
Lupines have a legume fruit and that banner wings keel sorta look to its flowers, like a pea or a bean they are nitrogen fixers, and their tender young seedling leaves are much sought after by nursery slugs and snails to germinate well, they need some help with that hard seed coat scarification in nature, they like those thin hard rocky drained soils where not many other plants can survive say a fresh road cut, or a gouged quarry, or the side of a hot sunny ridge with some grasses in nature, they got long long long roots that go deep deep deep into the rocks in nature, they can be long lived if living in these demanding circumstances hunker down, be quiet, you the boss in cultivation, with that nice rich soft loamy soil and people handling them all the time they grow fast, burst then die – short lived ‘this is not my place, not used to this. let me get done and explode my seeds outa here!’
As the years passed, I ended up surveying for these butterflies all over both north and south of san bruno mountain in other places they were spotty and low in distribution and population the lupines and the insects both enjoy those low hills that used to be grasslands the grassland valleys of the mission district the district that was yelamu ohlone, spanish, polish, irish then latino and hipster tech change, always change, lulls then more waves
The learning point to understand is that this diversity we witness today was of an ancient form and a product of a way of life yes it was managed, but it was not planted and maintained like a garden of today the plants were wild and took care of themselves a once in a while fire was nice, but as a whole, they were a community of close knit beings plucked and persevered from the hardness of life one out of a thousand or two that survived to adulthood you dont have to baby them, or maintain them, give them fertilizer they are tough and adapted to specific places and when they blink out and die, i doubt if they have regrets or change of hearts or self pity they come in as they go out totally in the zone
There are a number of local nurseries that will help you as you cultivate the wild both within and without some countries, notably England, has long recognized the horticultural beauty and potential of california native plants us, on the whole, have come late to the game still gushing about the boxwood hedges and topiary, while others had long gone native One nursery to visit is in the southeast sf, a commercial nursery for native plants: bay natives
Another nursery is somewhere near the eucalyptus forest by UCSF. They grow for both restoration, as well as for the garden. That is a common pattern – expanding your business, widening your audience. Mt sutro native plant nursery.
The federal government, working with local organizations, also has its foot in the game they fund a number of native plant nurseries all along this pacific coast growing plants for the sand dunes, for the redwood forests growing for the coastal scrub of the uplands, and the riparian zones by mountain lake and lobos creek these are not commercial nurseries that sell plants they are for restoration only, and gladly take volunteers
As lovers of plants in the garden, there are a few problems to surmount in propagation one is pests that like sweet juicy underground storage parts like bulbs rats, gophers, and their kin so you may have to grow such plants in a screened container or raised bed of stone or in a buried terra cotta pot and you wanna remember to make sure they do not receive irrigation in the summertime keep them dry, keep them from rot the best garden to go see such plants are at Tilden Botanical Garden in Berkeley or the wild gardens, so to speak, ring mountain in marin or the lost coast of mendocino
Another cool plant that seems to flunk out in cultivation is the tree poppy dendromecon its something about the soil what dendromecon likes is hard and clay and crap hot and dry on the top of a ridge close to the soaring condors like at pinnacles park they do not want that peaty barky perlite potting soil from 4 cubic foot bags, fluffy, airy
So the difficulty in cultivation can be pests, or soils, or temperatures and the need for cold we have collected seed and tried to grow this awesome dogwood from the sierran mountains cornus nuttallii, the pacific dogwood with little success, here on the bay area coast it is simply too mild here, and the plant suffers and dies it misses its mountain home and snow, maybe it even misses its buddies the incense cedar and ponderosa pine and sugar pine and the manzanita scat of bears no luck, maybe you can give it a go and try let us know how it goes
Some native plants take well to cultivation and with the wild meadow of grasses look that is in fashion still grasses take center stage with their billowing inflorescences and steady vegetative presence you can find a number of such species down at our local wholesale nursery at the foot of san bruno mountain – pacific nursery
When I got to san francisco went to work weeding at the botanical garden in cape province south africa with the nerines and also out back in the nature trail with the cattails and red legged frog on the slope there next to white sage was a plant of wooly blue curls trichostemma lanatum from southern california this is one beautiful plant! thing is, again, it does not last long, and fades in the garden then somebody, a breeder down at suncrest, hybridized it with a mexican species its progeny settled down, and took a liking to being domesticated it grows happily next to the oregano and wisteria, keeps blooming, stays alive and suncrest got to name the culitvar, trade mark it, and make a a lil profit to funnel back into more experiments, crossing this with that, seeing what comes up that is the patient and time consuming process of plant breeding
Hopefully this gets you excited and down the obsidian strewn path of native plant propagation must read is from this Dara Emery, where he chronicles seed treatments
Another nice book is this one by Marjorie Schmidt – ‘growing california native plants’. Theres tons of other great books out there by folks like Bart O’Brien, Glenn Keator, and Judith Larner Lowry. All knowledgeable people writing from a botanical and field perspective.
Once you are on this track its likely that you will be doing a lot of walkabouts in the countryside seeing how plants grow in their native community and intact habitats maybe even collecting seed and bringing unheard of wild plants into cultivation to be successful, you will need guides our go to person is Willis Linn Jepson and his Jepson Manual: vascular plants of california a two three inch tome with bout 6,000 native plant species therein you got a lifetime to learn em
then, as you are hiking next to red angus calves and staring at the lowly plants below you may see erodium the little cousin of garden geraniums you may see clovers the nitrogen fixing fodder and amidst these plants brought by the newcomers you may see an old time cali native – the little fringed red maid aka Calandrinia ciliata, still blooming its little head off as they say you may think back to the street islands in SF, planted with that pretty succulent from chile Calandrinia spectabilis is it? thats its name, yup, rock purslane
they are both calandrinias they both have five bright petals, two cute short sepals and you are like, well one is a perennial, another is an annual one is a succulent, the other is not one is from north america, the other from south america but they are relatives, kin at some point in evolutionary history and maybe, if you take the pollen from one, and brush it on the other something might happen or maybe nothing happens, probably nothing happens… they are too different, but who knows?! until you try it and do it nobody knows! this is the challenge of propagation taking a step off into the unknown g luck!
Theres a few lessons all wrapped up together here Here are the main ideas:
Many things run in a circle or circuit round and round (reap what you sow, the circle of life, all that blah blah blah)
In a system, things often break at the junction or the connection. (only as strong as your weakest link)
The more moving parts, the more likely things will break, especially when under pressure or tension, or due to use and fatigue over time. (Nothing lasts forever, ‘its not the years, honey. its the mileage’)
Circuits and analogies:
Water enters the house at pressure, water leaves through the sewer pumps and gravity provide the push and drain
blood leaves the heart through the arteries, returns through the veins the heart and muscles provide the pumps when you are alive you feed on plants and animals and on bits of minerals and metal when you die you feed little animals and plants and go back to the earth
in irrigation, theres a circuit between the timer controller and the valve electricity goes round and round turn on, turn off, turn on, turn off timer controller to solenoid to valve and back again in a loop
Lotta different colored wires, but they all finish the circuit together. In this case along the green common wires:
At the junction analogies:
when you turn fifty sixty seventy years old its knees and hips and shoulder replacements at the joints if you are a butcher without a bandsaw where do you cut? where the bones meet, cut right through the ligaments a few tiny cuts, and bend it back using the bones themselves as leverage and the point as an anchor to work off of
Where do a lot of accidents happen? at the intersection or along a straightaway? where people meet, or where people are off by themselves? wheres is a fight more likely to happen? down at the bar or the nightclub, or in the cabin in the woods? where will you hear the most interesting stories? where people of all the same gender class height and weight gather or where there is a mix of experiences and life challenges?
Where do we trouble shoot irrigation problems? at the valves opening and closing between fittings and connections where two wires are twisted together where the copper meets the brass, or where the brass meets the plastic at the spot with the rubber washer, the plastic flange, the teflon tape at the junction
Here, a waterproof silicon filled connector was not used. So over time water snuck up in there and algae and mosses started to grow:
Moving parts analogies:
I have a little fillet knife a leather covered rapala blade from finland it is the oldest tool I own, about 36 years old its still in fine shape, a blade of stainless steel and a hardwood handle been through the salt and sand and countless fish still works great, no moving parts metal is a bit thinner from filing it sharp, but other than that never had a problem with it
from there we move on to the pruning shears with some nuts and bolts and on up to chainsaws and mowers small machines with moving parts small machines that work well if you take care of them keep em oiled, keep em sharp
In landscape irrigation: that gate valve maybe it crusted over from not being used for fifteen years metal parts all rusted into one another That ball valve maybe it got used too much kids playing with it, on off on off maybe there was high pressure in the pipes 100, 120, 150 pounds per square inch of pressure all that water hammering and stopping and going finally messed up the valve
water carrying lime and iron and bacterial speck sediments full of clogs rats chewing on wires wetness and algae seeping into the electrical wire connectors rain filling up the irrigation box with poor drainage there is a lot happening in the garden where it is not dry and clean and pest free where the sun’s UV lights are beaming during the day, tearing apart atom chains and that cold wetness chill creeps in at night, making things weak and brittle and rotten
Theres some irrigation boxes that are sitting in soil with poor drainage. Often clay hardpans. This is the result:
its amazing with all that is happening stuff works as well as it does until some catastrophic event that is why you build safeguards and repetition and redundancy into the system that is why, if you can, keep it simple and elegant Function is the design
There is a thing called natural contours of the land it slopes and dips and curves this way and that around here with the uplift of tectonic plates flowing rivers and up down of the seas there is not a whole lot of just plain flat land it goes high low everywhere
in olden times that bottom spot where the water gathered would be mostly rushes and sedges, and a sprinkling of horsetails and ferns on the sides of the hills would be coyote bushes and their friend sticky monkey flower as you reached the drier well drained ridges that might turn to grasslands of lupines, and outcrops of sedimentary red rocks
As people settle they prefer flat usable space to walk on, to place a table on they want to build a house that is not tilted a house with a proper foundation so they move the dirt and rock around and change the grade from a slope to a level one the places around town that were too steep or wet to build on, they left them until the engineers could catch up with 15’ tall rebarred retaining walls heavy equipment and pile drivers going deep into the rock to hold back the dirt that wanted to fall down dirt that wanted to recline and rest into a relaxed repose
if you build a retaining wall you cut the soil away, erect a wall, and fill in the pockets behind it you want to make sure the wall is strong and does not tumble forward due to the weight of the soil and water in dry times that soil seems somewhat stable but when wet it becomes a fairly dynamic weight load and will collapse that wall in a second if the wall is not well anchored and sunk deep if the wall does not have some way to release the pressure building up behind it
another way around the same problem of flat usable space is to go above ground, not below it so you pour some concrete footings or piers attach some wooden posts to em, and go high this way you do not have to do much excavation and the water falls in between the deck lumber to the earth below and keeps going down the hill while you can sip your morning brew and enjoy your piece of pastry on the nice level redwood deck
Look around and you will see lots of slopes and how we have transformed the landscape to make it fit our lives plumb and level, flat consistent and regular horizontal and vertical, not diagonal
To navigate the levels, you still need to get from one to another the usual method is make stairs or ramps indoors, architects have a recipe for how big the steps are, and how high each step is tread is where you place your foot, rise is the height between the steps 2R + T = 26, R is rise, T is tread so if your tread is 12”, your rise is 7”, and so on, this is about middle ground average fit if your feet are 14” long, then you want a bigger tread than that obviously you would not want a tread that is 4”, and a rise that is 11”… you do not want just the tip of your foot on that step
Also, you want the step rises to be consistent as you walked up or down the stairs nothing trips up a person more than a step with a rise of 2”, then 4”, then 3”… its not an obstacle course you are building, just a way to get from one elevation to the next
in the landscape, you do not always have to follow the architect’s indoor recipe you can have a long sinewy gentle set of stairs, each with a two foot tread, and two inch rise stairs that wind slowly down to the lakeside you can have stairs that double as seats, serving as an amphitheater for the performance in the garden below or you can have a set of stairs like in the japanese garden of golden gate park, with a rise of over 12”, in order that you pay penance and suffer before your reach the top that is a pagoda or a shrine so the goals, and hence the rules, in the garden are a bit more flexible and variable also we are not as constrained or rigid or boxy as far as stairs are concerned
To measure the slope its pretty basic the rise over the run gives you a number so for example, sewer pipes in the house, plumbers lay that pipe with a pitch of 1/4” per foot that way dish water and poop run out the house, and do not sit there so 1/4” over 12” (one foot) is… take out the calculator .0208333333, that is around .o2, that is a 2% slope you can express the slope as a number, or a fraction, or as a percentage you can express in in degrees also say, a forty five degree slope is a rise/run ratio of 1:1, or 100% slope it dont matter, the numbers and names change but the slope is the same if you are in town and looking for a steep street go to 22nd Street between Church and Vicksburg in Noe Valley that is a slope of .315, or 31.5% slope, looks like a roller coaster
Mission Azul 