Garden Rant

I find this stuff so you don't have to: Gorilla in the Greenhouse and Singing Plant

First Gorilla in the Greenhouse: Although I found this intensely annoying and barely got past the intro, it does have the virtue of being intended to help teach kids about sustainable living. It doesn’t look that far removed from morning cartoons, which I only see because sometimes my husband watches them, so I guess they’re on the right track. The little animation and interactive website tell a story about how kids can help address the problem of plastic bags, as well as generally raises their awareness of environmental issues. HT Reality Sandwich (which is a very cool site) for the link and info on this.

I also found Singing Plant on the RS site. I’m always on the lookout for nature/gardening-based conceptual art installations (I may be in a very small group here), and this one seems kind of wacky. From what I can tell, stroking some of the plants, including a sansevieria (certainly a plant that can take the punishment) and a guzmania, among other plants, cause all kinds of far-out sound and light effects to occur. I’m all for anything that gets people into their local botanical gardens, which need their attention and support. This one is in Copenhagan, but I can see something like this being the attraction for a cool party/benefit at our local gardens. And, again, fun for the kids.

Nice hat!

“The key to good millinery is spontaneity.” I liked that phrase, found in a Telegraph review of this book: Natural Fashion: Tribal Decoration from Africa, by Hans Silvester (Thames & Hudson).

The book documents two African tribes in the Omo Valley (at the borders of Ethiopia, Kenya, and Sudan): the Surma and Mursi. As far as I could tell from the coverage—I have not read the book—these people adorn themselves with fantastically inventive headdresses, neckpieces and less classifiable ornamentation purely for the beauty of it. And wow is it ever beautiful, judging by the pictures I have seen. The materials include leaves, stems, flowers, roots, feathers, snail shells, butterfly wings, boar’s teeth, seed pods, and various pigments made from organic sources.

There were likely very specific reasons for all this, but the origins have been lost over the years. One thing is certain: this is also an area that increasingly threatened by warfare, climate change, and international tourism.

Guest rant: I love the lightlife

Here are fellow writer and gardener Ron Ehmke's thoughts on holiday lighting as installation art—Eliz

This is the photo I’ve been promising Elizabeth, that she in turn has been promising to share with GR readers:

Turns out it’s just as hard to photograph an over-the-top lighting display as it is to shoot an elaborate garden, so you’ll have to trust me when I say that photos don’t quite do this monster justice. Same problem with this beauty, located at the end of my block:

In this case, for instance, you cannot sense the stroboscopic effects or the synchronized aspects, and you cannot hear the accompanying music broadcast on Christmas Eve.

I haven’t actually been to this house in Holland, NY but I’ve seen it on local TV, and any home display that merits its own website and DVD is gonna catch my eye. If you missed my link to it in a comment on one of Susan’s recent posts, here’s another shout-out to an absurdly ambitious four-home collaboration in Ontario that can only be described as an interactive digital art project.

And that’s where I’m heading with all this: as I’ve noted elsewhere, I really do see holiday light displays as one of the few occasions when average citizens—people who don’t otherwise consider themselves “creative”—feel empowered to think and act like artists. Gardening, it occurs to me more and more, is another such opportunity, and it makes sense that many gardening centers raise extra income in the winter by hawking Christmas decorations. True, the possibilities for garishness and mindless consumerism are endless in both cases, but the same is true of capital-A art, too. (For the record, the examples of excess I’ve cited above just happened to be handy; I have no way to document the beauty I saw last night, in which the façade of a house and its surrounding landscaping were entirely bathed in two shades of blue LEDs, giving the home a dreamy, surreal glow that clearly bore the mark of a thoughtful designer—not so far, I’d suggest, from the work of an artist like Dan Flavin.)

Yes, excess electricity use is a bad thing, and I applaud people actively seeking creative alternatives. (Most of the homes above are moving to LEDs, I see. I'm still not convinced their appeal won’t fade along with most other mass-market trends, but if nothing else they expand the available palette in interesting ways.) As another GR commenter has pointed out, this is a time of year when we Northerners can use all the light we can get, whether from displays, candles, or fireplaces, and light is as promising a medium as greenery is in the summer. Shine on!

Heroes of horticulture

Maybe you’ve already read in Garden Design about the 2007 Landslide winners. Since 2003, the Cultural Landscape Foundation has been selecting a roster of endangered cultural landscapes, calling for nominations that adhere to a specific theme. This year’s theme was Heroes of Horticulture: “significant horticultural features that have stood steadfast in the face of almost insurmountable natural and cultural odds”

This is an interesting program that I’d never heard of until now. I became aware because photography of these heroic cultivars is on view at the George Eastman House International Museum of Photography in Rochester, NY, starting December 1. The show is up through March 2, after which it may travel. You can view all the heroes online at the link above, or you can see one or two of them in person—they’re distributed throughout the country.

I’m showing favoritism by spotlighting Buffalo resident John Pfahl’s shot of a rhododendron collection in a Meadville, PA cemetery that was planted over 100 years ago. There are 1,500 plants and some are 35 feet tall. (Meadville is also where you went to view blacked-out Bills’ games in the pre-satellite era, if you were that rabid.)

And here is Mark Klett’s photograph of a wild-growing Desert Ironwood (Olneya tesota), that has survived all kinds of natural and manmade vicissitudes and is now a treasured feature of the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum. Here are a couple more of the heroes:
Tree Peony Collection, Pavilion, NY
This started out as a nursery in 1935; now it is an amazing collection that many of my friends have visted. I am hoping to finally see them this spring.
Bamboo Groves, Avery Island, Louisiana
Jungle Gardens was also started in 1935, and contains bamboo and other species from all over the world, some of the earliest introductions in the US. Tropical storms and lack of skilled maintenance contribute to the collection’s fragility.

There are many others, all beautifully photographed and each with a fascinating story. Many are not actually at risk right now, but they require care and stewardship to stay that way. Next year, the Landslide awards will go to “marvels of modernism,” so if there’s an a circa-fifties/sixties abstract/geometric park or playground near you that may be fated for the wrecking ball, contact TCLF by April 30.

Actually, I think I know of one, and it has been threatened. I’ll be posting on it soon.

More garden art

Roberley Bell’s Flower Blobs are part of the Beyond/In Western New York group exhibition, a massive collaboration of almost twenty area galleries (large and small) held here every year. It opens this weekend, and the goal is to get to as many of the opening events—held over a twenty-mile area—as you can. I fantasize about being able to create this bright, crazy look with plants. Bell is known for juxtaposing the natural and manmade worlds in her sculpture and installations, but this time it really looks like she’s having fun with it. Art can be fun sometimes. Not too much, of course. You don't want to go overboard.

Not coming to your closest cineplex - Plant Pornogr*phy

WE'RE NOT MAKING THIS UP.  Honestly, could we come up with a story about the "world's first plant porn movie, "Cinema  Botanica"?   Featuring "uncensored pollination" and coming soon to "the world's first porn theater for house plants"?

We wish we could link to the actual story, but it's not available on the Washington Post site, so here's the gist. Conceptual artist Jonathon Keats decided to try to entertain plants with a film he's projecting onto their leaves "so they can absorb it."  The subject matter? Sex, of course.  "I knew enough about their reproduction process to make an educated guess at what might titillate them, and that was pollination."  His six-minute-long movie is "very boring, but that is part of the essence of pornography, that it is very repetitive."  We assume he's speaking for himself.

Well, one final attempt to find the article yielded this blog about the article, with lots of interesting links for the plant porn fans.

So why the asterisk in the title?  Because we've written about n*aked gardening and been inundated with comment pornogr*phy, that's why.  Just trying to foil a certain type of web-surfer, that's all.

Here's a related story, about art and bugs, this time with bugs wielding the brushes.

All that glitters …

... is pure gold in terms of the daily enjoyment I get from walking by this object and its identical companion. We had fun talking about outrageous garden practices in the deep South and elsewhere, but sometimes the things you might not do yourself are admirable in others. And I must say the rest of this front garden is equally formal. (I don’t know what he does, but he has the only lush grass carpet on the block.)

The thing is, it’s hard to stop with this sort of embellishment once you’ve started. This, its mate, and their surrounding wrought iron fence started out pure black, but have been getting shinier and shinier as the summer has progressed. Even the formerly somber planters on the porch have been detailed. You have to wonder where it will end. Is the house next? That would be awesome.

Guest rant: When worlds collide

A tableau from the "Garden Talk"performance: Buffalo Infringment Festival, 2007

Here's a guest rant from Buffalo-based performer, writer, and editor Ron Ehmke (originally from Louisiana). Ron is an enthusiastic novice gardener whose plant obsession grows by leaps and bounds daily. I, god help him, am his gardening coach.For more of Ron's writing, visit his personal website and the Infringement Blog.—Elizabeth

You’ve already heard plenty about Garden Walk, but the same weekend also happens to be smack dab in the middle of the Buffalo Infringement Festival, an 11-day celebration of “art under the radar”—theater, music, dance, pyrotechnics, puppetry, video, visual art, you name it. I am, roughly speaking, as heavily involved in that one as Elizabeth is in the Garden Walk, which means, among other things, that I have never had much time to enjoy GW. But this year, as I’ve been evolving into a plant geek under her tutelage, I was every bit as excited about strolling through strangers’ yards as I have always been about watching people sing/act/paint/whatever, so last Saturday and Sunday I made a point of devoting the first half of each day to GW and the second half to BIF—from 11 a.m. to 1 a.m. It may sound exhausting, but when the weekend was all over I felt totally exhilarated and further enlightened about the many intersections of art and gardening.

Plenty of the artsy-fartsy types sneer at Garden Walk as yet another opportunity for timid/clueless suburbanites to invade the hipper part of town for an afternoon, while many of the gardeners and walkers are probably a little wary of the performance-art weirdos, if they notice them at all between the ponds and flower beds. But the long-established Walk could serve as a rough model for Infringement. Both are essentially uncurated, community-generated undertakings—if you want to be part of either, you’re pretty much in. Both grow larger every year (roughly 250 gardens this year, roughly 250 individual performances and other art projects). Both invite lots of roaming around to seek out hidden treasures (a secret backyard garden on a side street, a cool-looking video installation in someone’s dining room). And both—let’s be honest here—attract their fair share of eccentrics, oddballs, and utter lunatics as both participants and viewers. They tend to be outnumbered by entirely competent, innovative, extremely talented practitioners, mind you, but they’re out there. Oh yes, they’re out there.

During the GW portion of my days, for instance, I encountered one proud woman who corralled unsuspecting guests and practically forced them to eat selected samples from her herb garden. And an infuriating iPod-bedecked Walk attendee who found it necessary to stop in the middle of an incredibly skinny pathway between two houses—with approximately 45 people behind her and another 45 heading straight toward her—to get a closer view of a clematis.

Then there was the yard paying tribute to bowling, featuring four bowling balls used as gazing balls, another nine employed as a border, and half a dozen simply buried at random points throughout the yard. (To be fair, that one was not an official stop on the Walk, but at a certain point it all starts to blur together.)

More silly things you can do on the web

Ok, we’ve done the walkable neighborhood game, and discovered its imperfections, so I thought I’d share some fun I had with creating my own superhero. This is actually quite old, but I was reminded of it when we Ranters were discussing how to recreate ourselves as Simpsons characters and show the images on the blog. (I have not been able to make that work.)

I tried to create a gardening-related superhero, but the two concepts don’t really accord all that well. A gardener doesn’t really use the same weapons or armor, and I couldn’t get the background to disappear, and I forgot to give her a fleshtone, and, and …. But I did the best I could and here is:

Garden Girl!

You can follow the link above to do a better one, if you like. Actually, there's a new version of the game now, but it didn't have a stake, so I kept this one.

Tree Art for the People by Jim Calder

This prominent story in last Saturday's Washington Post about a 16-foot carved dragon in my town of Takoma Park got everyone's attention and because it gave the time and address of the naming ceremony to be held the next day, I was there.  So were about half the town's residents, all oohing, ahhing, and swigging back sangria and lemonade.  It was quite a festive event.

THE PEOPLE'S REPUBLIC
I'll get to the dragon but first a word about the town.  Here's what the Post had to say about us: "Most burbs and boroughs, believe it or not, do not have many dragons these days. But this is not any suburb. This is Takoma Park. Proudly known by many longtime residents by the prefix 'The People's Republic of.' "  Well, I'm keeping track and can tell you that every single time the Post mentions Takoma Park they include either the "People's Republic" quip or the hilarious fact that we're a nuclear-free zone.  Ha-ha-ha, those crazy lefties!   But that's okay; we laugh at ourselves, too.  We're an easy target.

HIRE A CALDER
It all started when Lew Morris and his wife Louise decided to do something more creative than make logs out of their dead oak tree and Googled for woodcarvers.  The search produced Jim Calder, Jr., Master Carver and Sculptor - "It's my job to amaze you" - great-nephew of Alexander himself and living in Chesapeake, Virginia.  After a career as an engineer, he's turned his hobby into a full-time job these last two years and lets everyone know that "commissions are accepted."  Next up for Jim is a book about woodcarving for beginners.  As you can see from his website, he's passionate about it, his mission being to "teach carving with no reserve (no holding back) and keep the art alive...growing...and useful in the world."  Right on.

A GOOD DRAGON
Now I'll tell you some things the Washington Post didn't. The dragon idea came from the teenager in the family, Michele, and her inspiration was the book The Dragon and the Pearl.  It's the story of a good dragon, a water-god that makes rain for the benefit of all living beings.  And the highlight of the Naming Ceremony was the announcement of Michele's choice of names for the dragon - "Herlong," which means "river dragon". 

The dragon was treated with one coat of stain and the rest of the tree with linseed oil, which Jim assured me would prevent woodpecker intervention. Boric acid was applied at the base to ward off termites.  So here's my question: What about letting the woodpeckers have at it?  According to this Forest Service site - Snags for Wildlife - thousands of species of mammals, amphibians, reptiles and fish get food, shelter, or nesting sites from snags.  (Snag - a funny word for a standing dead tree.)  I'm not suggesting that Herlong be exposed to the ravages of nature but what if you hired Calder to just carve a face on one side of a dead tree, as Morris urged his neighbors to do, and let Woody Woodpecker and his buddies work their will on the rest of it?  You know, a collaboration with the local wildlife.  Now let's see if the sculptor will respond to this wacky notion in a comment.  Jim?   

COMMUNITY SENSATION
According to the Post, "Three weeks ago, Calder arrived to start carving, and the dragon quickly became a community sensation. He has this little gaggle of moms and kids and hippie guys coming by every day and telling him, 'Right on, man, it's Puff the Magic Dragon, man,' says Morris."  Luckily for the neighbors, the dragon's home is a very visible spot on a corner lot, quite unlike the expensively landscaped but walled-off gardens in Washington's tonier suburbs.  Nosiree.  Art for the People!

Photos from the top:  Herlong, Calder, and Calder with Louise, Michele and Lew.