In the Weeds

This has never been a how-to garden blog, but maybe in this case, I'll make a grand sweeping exception. If there is one thing I can teach all of you to do, it's how to be in the weeds in your garden. With the grace of my rough and rebellious American hand we'll brush off the argument that my garden is a mess, and I'll show you how to do so from the zero gravity chair I pretty much live in for the majority of the gardening year. So yes, today, I am playing as the armchair garden philosopher. 

Our passion vine (Passiflora caerula 'Blue Crown') is a bit wild. I blame all of those young adult mystery books I read as a child. I think this might be called Scooby Doo Chic. 

If there's one thing I've always been good at it's been taking on far too much. As a kid, I'd often have to give up an activity or two, but up until the last decade, I'd usually toss everything up into the air and over time, it would all work out.

When I was in college this nasty little habit of mine helped me to get my work done. Integrating unrelated information worked for me, but in the art history department I pushed beyond its unstaid envelope everyday and not all of the other students enjoyed or understood my work, and a few of the professors tended to think of my presentations more as mental acrobatics than as real academic work. And to this day, I will never understand why not a single art history professor ever assigned a philosophy book. Since the entire field has its origin in aesthetics, this was always very sad to me, but the same thing goes for garden design. Yup, it too is based on aesthetic theory and philosophy too. (Don't groan. I can hear you and the chorus of other groaners out there.)

I am in the weeds.

And here we go, I'm at it again. I'm about to wrap this egg roll right up though so hold on tight.

I realize now that stasis (in a Greek philosophical sense) has always been important to me, but I didn't know what to call it until I was introduced to Giovanni Bellini's St Francis in Ecstasy and the study of ontology in high school. I could write a tome about this painting, but I will attempt to resist in this post, and save that for later. 

I was able to go on a little pilgrimage to The Frick Collection to see this painting with an art history classmate while she was still living in New Jersey. She'd moved to the NYC area to pursue her graduate studies and I am so proud of how far she's gone in her career. (I am also happy she's now a gardener.)   

I find that I now tire of the same thing in garden design that I used to find dull and problematic when I studied art history and that it's not just illness and broken fingers which has led me to being in the weeds. Instead, what's been holding me back is my inner battle with mimesis.

Internally, yes, I struggle, and with this post, as well as a few others, I've exposed myself as a bit of a navel gazer who prefers to build her castles in the sky rather than on dry land, but that's because of my struggle with beauty, representation, design, art and reason. 

Like that overwhelmed server in a busy restaurant, I am so far behind in my garden that our green customers have overwhelmed me and are attacking. Well, so what if I'm in the weeds in my garden? Maybe I want to be the oldest kind of garden designer of all, not a farmer, but the kind of person who let's nature grow up against her. It just so happens I'm in a city though, but I'm not afraid of the chaos of nature and you shouldn't be either. We've been mimicking her since to dawn of man and I'd rather mimic her than the newest garden design fads.

So that's enough for now. We'll flog this not yet dead horse again soon. 

Golf Course Garden Inspiration

OK, so if you didn't know this, we live and garden at the base of an extinct volcano (Mt Tabor) in the city of Portland, Oregon. This volcano of ours is a cinder cone, and at its top we have trails, a park, and picnic areas—among a variety of other cool things. From the swings, for instance, on a clear day, you can see Mt St Helen's.

Mt St Helen's as seen from the street above our house.

The foster kids love to be on the volcano, looking at the other volcano, but as cool as it is, when I need to walk now, I actually drive a few miles away from my home to an amazing exercise trail that encircles what I would consider to be a well-designed golf course—though I am far from an expert! Call me crazy, since I have this amazing neighborhood of bungalows to wander around, but something tells me I like the trail not only because I was a runner in my youth—and I enjoy being around others who can still do this activity—but it is due to something else. Big surprise that the main impetuses for me are the non-stop native plants and amazing vistas!! (Oh, and this trail is heavily used so I feel far more safe—sort of...)

If every golf course looked as good as Glendoveer, I might consider taking up golfing, but for me, gardening will always be my sport and I cannot afford another. In the meantime, I will simply enjoy what this fine course has to offer from my trail on the outside of its splendor.

View of the East Course.

Though not native, this is a highlight of the walk all summer long. They have a very long fence covered with hardy Passion Vines.

I admit it! I snag these for seed saving and seed germination experimentation.

Our native shrub Oceanspray or Holodiscus discolor.

On the Web site it says that John Stenzel redesigned the East Course in 1928 when the West Course was added. I couldn't find any information about this man, but I would like to know more about him since he did such an amazing job as not only a golf course designer, but as a landscape architect as well.

Native Vine Maple (Acer circinatum) under the mostly Douglas Fir (Pseudotsuga menziesii) canopy.

Native Thimbleberry (Rubus parviflorus).

Native Snowberry (Symphoricarpos albus). I love to collect these inedible berries too.  I always remember for some reason that this plant was written about by Lewis and Clark in their journals. Maybe it was because specimens collected and propagated ended up at Thomas Jefferson's Monticello and he wrote that he thought the berries were some of the most beautiful he had ever seen. He then forwarded cuttings to his friend Madame Noailles de Tessé in Paris. This may explain why I love the plant since the history of its propagation can be traced, and in my world, all roads lead back to France for some reason. 

To the left of this is the golf course. Well designed, isn't it?

Happy trails to you, and just out of curiosity, where do you find gardening inspiration in your daily routine that takes you to places away from your garden? I am so spoiled with parks and recreational and/or natural areas that I truly take for granted the beautiful scenery I live in! Do you feel like you do that too?


Here is a link to the nature trail provided by our elected regional government METRO,
http://www.metro-region.org/index.cfm/go/by.web/id=158

Here is a link to the Glendoveer Golf Course, est. 1927,
http://www.golfglendoveer.com/rkonly.asp?HID=591

Amazing slug and snail hunters out for a walk too. 

Platitude of Plant-itude

For me, asymmetrical items are always attractive and I suspect it comes from growing up in a home of perfect symmetry, or maybe, I am just a child of advertising post-Salvador Dalí. For some, balance is considered a perfect pair, a straight line, rhythmical echos of shapes and/or shades, and that funny concept of what we call and consider harmony. My mom would say that things have to match and that is often how many people feel. But what does match really mean?

Harmony stretches though to what is called the atonal, and although this is typically used to describe musical pieces with harmonies without tonal centers, I feel that it very much can be used to describe design, and in this case, garden designs. Since garden harmony means so much to so many, harmonies we sometimes see and feel in gardens, can reach down deep inside of us, touching the harmony and/or discord we have inside of ourselves from our own experiences. Some people can really be either personally offended or else irritated by what other people might consider "matching", while the same scene might make another deeply serene. It could be too cold, or simple, maybe even too messy for one, perfectly in harmony for another.

I see symmetry as peas and pods and sometimes even worse. It is as the Comte de Lautréamont once wrote in Les Chants de Maldoror: "...beautiful as the chance meeting on a dissecting table of a sewing machine and an umbrella." I have not yet installed the dissecting table in the garden for the sewing machine and the umbrella, but I will make an effort to do so, somehow. For me the match is not about a direct line, but an indirect one, and although that is a personal choice, it does help in a small garden design since folks seem to take it in slowly. I like to see them walking in circles reading what I have left for them to read.

This lovely plant device my gardening buddy found for me at a garage sale for my birthday is a perfect foil for my ongoing adventure in marrying my interests in French and Spanish Surrealism with my current world that is so far away from my old academic haunts. I think that for any of us suffering early in life from chronic illnesses and pain, when we are ready, we must begin to reinsert those things that once mattered dearly to us into our garden work and designs. I've begun to unpack the past that had to be put into storage, I had considered it a painful loss, but now, unpacked and ready to head out to my garden, these memories and concerns will only grow bigger and bolder with this reassertion of what has really mattered to me all along.