Alcatraz: An Inspiration

These are images from my last trip to Alcatraz a few years ago. At that time I had already been ill for a few years. Seeing the gardens in bloom, being brought back to life, really blew me away. I felt kinship with the place in a way. My hereditary angioedema has made me a kind of prisoner too and gardening really opens up the world to me too. The cell I sit in is right here with my laptop, in a zero gravity chair, looking at my walls, flipping through library books. To escape the pain, suffering, and isolation of chronic illness, gardens and plants are the only things that don't make me dwell in the darkness of my own thoughts for long. (Having seen depression and anxiety already, I know how dwelling can make it worse.)
Later, before we boarded our ferry back to San Fran, I bought a book about the gardens of Alcatraz and their history and development. I read it from cover to cover in one night when I couldn't sleep because my legs were so swollen. It freed me in so many ways and it inspired me to keep going. I wish more people understood how wonderful garden therapy can, or could be, for so many different situation and folks.
Funny too when I look back to my first trip to Alcatraz over 10 years ago. One of the few pictures I took that day was of the old greenhouse. I wonder now if I somehow sensed what was coming. At that time, I was nowhere near gardening. My love was for literature and art history. (If you haven't been to Alcatraz—go! It is amazing!)

Hollyhock House Hollyhock

A few years ago I attended a conference in Los Angeles hosted by the Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy. While there, we visited all of the cement block homes in the LA area, including the Hollyhock House. Although not my favorite structure due to the confusion of the architecture—too many hands in any project can do that—I still enjoyed it. Their gift shop at the time had only one small object I could afford. Seeds are always just the right price in my book. After some delay, I finally planted some at home, and this is a bloom from one of them. I'd show you more, but due to some neglect, they are not exactly upright citizens in my garden and tend to nap a bit too much. Hollyhocks are, for some strange reason, a favorite of mine. A traditional cottage garden plant, they can be difficult, but I'd rather have them any day over fussy hybrid tea roses.

My Two Worlds Collide, Oh My!

Anyone reading this—who actually knows me—will love the excerpt below which I pulled from the introduction of a book I recently read. The book is one in a series of classic garden literature, edited by Michael Pollan.

"For what other pastime has spawned so many fine books? Only fly-fishing comes even close....Which is probably no accident: for gardening, like angling, engages us with the natural world, as actors rather than passive spectators. Both put us smack on the frontier between nature and culture, which is always an interesting place for a writer to stand. And both literary traditions pose practical and philosophical questions about how we might better go about rhyming our desires with nature's ways, questions that only grow more urgent with time." -Michael Pollan (Introduction to the Modern Library Gardening Series)

My jaw dropped when I hit this section. Maybe in some strange way I am more like my father than I already thought I was. His life has been dedicated to the dissemination of fishing information, and sometimes, even what might be called literature too. Growing up, I met many famous fly-fishing writers and never thought a thing of it. Even famous folks my father didn't publish, knew him, and they've always appreciated what he has done for the sport over the years.

I always liked the writers a lot, but fishing was not my thing, especially when it came to spinner and/or bait fishing. (Let's not even go into the bass crowd. They are from a whole different planet.) Instead, for my outdoor fix, I chose hiking and climbing mountains. This worked well for me before the illness kicked in.

Now I am back where I started at age 18. I want to write, am still afraid to do so, and find myself interested in something, no anything, related to the natural world. Originally, I'd wanted to write about the scientific natural world, and now I am narrowing that focus to the natural world around a house, my house. Somehow, in trying to figure out what all of this meant to me, and how I should go about it, I picked up the garden writing series and started reading all of the texts. And what do I find? I found fly-fishing! Life really isn't a linear progression, but a series of circularity reminding us daily that we will always be lost in our fruitless and relentless search for meaning.

The Green Rose

This is a bloom from a Rosa chinensis var. viridiflora. Ours is still young yet, but it is by far one of my favorite garden plants. Registered in 1830, it is an unusual China rose, with no petals, just a lot of sepal. The blooms are often hard to notice at first, but then you can see them all over. What makes it even more exciting is that it smells of black pepper.