the parsley.blog.landscape.life

I stole the title for this one from one of my weekly podcast fixes, the Scientific American podcast.  I’m listening again to a podcast from April, in which Martin Blaser of NYU talks about the “changing human ecology.”  which is in fact a reference to our internal ecosystems and not the ones out the window.

lately I’ve  been thinking about all these populations, these communities that are living inside us as well as the ones that are living outside of us.  the term I’ve learned is “residential organisms.”  or “indigenous microbiota.”  some of them live with us all our lives, having the same lifespan; some of them last only a couple of months or weeks.

there is a bacteria that lives inside us, Helicobacter pylori.  it lives in our stomachs.  apparently we don’t have as much of it as we used to.  the later you were born in the 20th century the less likely you are to have it; only 5% of children in the developed world have it, but it used to be incredibly common.  having it (or certain strains of it) apparently increases your risk of stomach cancer and ulcers; not having it seems to be associated with esophageal cancer, acid reflux, childhood asthma – all conditions that are on the rise.   lacking this bacteria may also affect the production of hormones by the stomach,  leptin and ghrelin and other hormones that regulate energy homeostasis – that is, appetite, fat storage, obesity.  there is still a lot that is not understood about the effects of this partiuclar inhabitant of our bodies, but it seems that it is disappearing rapidly, with effects that are unknown and quite possibly more detrimental than positive.

Dr. Glaser went on to mention the human microbiome project – an effort to catalogue the organisms living within us and without us.  he said the h. pylori is disappearing at a rapid rate.  and, like mysterious species deep in the rainforest, others may be disappearing before we even get a chance to identify them, let alone understand all their complicated interlocking effects.  some things we think of as ‘infections’ might just be an imbalance, something overgrowing the niche it’s supposed to live in, maybe because something else is missing or in decline that would normally keep it in check.  some things we don’t fully understand, or might have attributed to other causes,  may be intimately connected to changes in our internal ecosystems.

up at the top there, I posted a picture of coastal sage scrub, our rare and endangered California coastal ecosystem.  most of us in urban coastal California live in an environment once occupied by coastal sage scrub.  it’s both an incredibly fragile and incredibly tough ecosystem.  it lives in an environment with very little rainfall and difficult soil types.  it has certain adaptations to our Mediterranean climate and drought cycles; it goes dormant in the dry season and a lot of the plants drop their leaves.  but there are other members of the coastal sage scrub community, not immediately apparent to the eye, that are helping hold the whole system together.

here’s a little piece of remnant coastal scrub clinging to the western edge of the Baldwin Hills, smack in the middle of the urban megalopolis, next to a roadway and an urban oilfield (the largest in the United States), on a highly erodible slope made of silty soils.  elsewhere in the Baldwin Hills, you can very clearly see just how erodible the soils are.  the intact parts of the coastal scrub seem to be holding things together; but where it’s missing or damaged, things have a tendency to just let go.

and the other things on my mind this week, so many to do with bodily functions; grappling with restroom issues at work.  when you work with parks, you gotta deal with restrooms.   (I really did not get into this profession to spend so much time thinking about waterless urinals, and yet, there they are on my desk.  well, the cutsheets anyway) also, on a multifamily residential project, we are struggling with the knotty problems of using greywater systems, reading all the vivid descriptions about what’s really in greywater.  there’s skin cells and diseases and stuff.  and shampoo.  after a long afternoon of dealing with this, I’m ready to announce my conclusion: greywater is PEOPLE!!

greywater, it seems, is pretty poisonous.  or toxic.  or whatever.  there are a lot of elaborate precautions you have to take in order to irrigate a landscape  with greywater.  it’s a daunting prospect.  I am told, you must consider the toxicity of all the things that go into people’s drains.  soaps, detergents, shampoos.

I do consider those things.  and to me it eternally begs the question, what are we doing marinating ourselves in all those things in the first place?

here’s a little bit of public art at a Metro stop near Lincoln Heights.  she’s carrying water.  still a huge part of daily life for many people around the world, particularly women.  it used to be that nature delivered the clean water; never as much of it here as in other places, but certainly enough to support the systems that evolved under those conditions.   nobody fully understood how it worked or where it all came from; attributed, perhaps,  to divine providence, or whatever the equivalent concept would have been for the native people.  thought of, anyway, as a gift to be grateful for.

what produces the clean water, what holds the hillsides up, what makes us healthy or not healthy?  lots of things, apparently, not visible to the naked eye.  wetlands filter water (and are often compared to our kidneys); there are a lot of symbiotic organisms living on the roots of wetland plants that help make this happen.

the intact sage scrub community holds the hillsides together, not just with a diversity of plant types and their roots, but by supporting a soil crust made up of bacteria, lichens, mosses – called “biological” or  “cryptobiotic” soil crusts.  they are a common characteristic of arid environments.  they don’t look like much, at least not at our accustomed scales of visual importance.

“cryptobiotic,” by the way, means hidden life.

just as hidden as the stomach bacteria and the other stuff that’s colonizing our various personal niches and crannies.  perhaps our need for ecoliteracy extends inward as well as outwards.     life crosses every boundary that we might try to draw between inside and outside; between the house, the body, and the world.

Neukom Vivarium, Olympic Sculpture Park, Seattle, WA

at one corner of the utterly fabulous Olympic Sculpture Park in Seattle, you will find this structure.  its real name is the Neukom Vivarium.

Neukom Vivarium, Olympic Sculpture Park, Seattle, WA

it is an artwork like the sculptures and other works in the park, and I note from the description on the Seattle Art Museum’s site that it is “a hybrid work of sculpture, architecture, environmental education and horticulture that connects art and science.”  it is an 80 foot long greenhouse that contains a 60 foot long “nurse log,” picked up from a forest and transported here.  I understand that the building was actually constructed around the log.

Neukom Vivarium, Olympic Sculpture Park, Seattle, WA

a ‘nurse log’ was a term I hadn’t heard before.  it’s a fallen log that then goes on to nurture and support other plants and fungi and things. which is a fascinating thing to watch, and the purpose of this vivarium is to encapsulate this process for display.

of course, to use words like ‘nurse’ and ‘support’ and ‘nurture’ is all very culturally loaded.  there is really no intentionality here, not in the sense that humans would understand it.  you could as easily, and as misleadingly, call these nice bright green sprouts and mosses ‘scavengers’ or ‘carrion feeders.’  you could be powerfully reminded of mortality and the brutal struggle for existence when you view this log slowly mouldering and being consumed.  but for some reason the greenness of the scenario does not remind us too much of our own vulnerability to death and decay.  it seems a benign vision of abundance, life, growth.

Moss Garden (Richard Haag), Bloedel Reserve, Bainbridge Island, WA

I always sort of furrow my brow when I get to the bit in Cradle to Cradle about how trees produce more than they consume, about how they generously provide all these things – food for other creatures, energy, cooling, habitat, etc. etc.

now, do not misunderstand me, I find the book to be excellent and valuable and extremely important, but it loses me a little when it gets going on all this language of benign intentionality.  if there is balance in nature, ‘no waste’ as the saying goes, I don’t think we are correct to imply that it is that way out of lovingkindness.  it’s just the way things are.  something drops a leaf and something else eats it.  it’s incredibly fascinating and complex the way all the different systems interact and interlock with one another, but it’s not about altruism any more than it is all about struggle, exploitation, murder, deceit, cannibalism.  we invented all these concepts; they have no meaning in nature.

in fact the word “nature” itself is so loaded as to be almost useless, its meaning degraded, exploded by the sheer amount of projection we do every time we even hold the concept in our minds.  the fact that we even need a word for “nature” to me indicates that our essential alienation from it is probably incurable.  although of course, my idealism compels me to believe that we can improve this relationship, which although damaged and degraded, remains inescapably intimate.

Black Mountain, NC, April 2009

coming from the aridity of southern California into an environment with lots of rain is always a shock to the system.  I felt it in the Pacific Northwest when I was there and just now, on my short trip to North Carolina, in the rainy mountains.  the slopes around our mountain cabin were soggy with rain, with lots of little streams and springs and seeps coming out everywhere, and I spent some time examining the thick cushions of moss growing on the rocks.  under some of the moss, when you pressed on it, you could feel loose rocks grinding around underneath, held together by this green blanket.  it seems like such a comforting and benign thing, but it’s just a trick of perspective – moss can just as easily mean decay and decline, neglect, a place where humans have failed to take proper care of something. the works of humanity are very vulnerable to excess moisture; in the architecture field, we all know that water is the enemy if it gets into your structure in unauthorized ways.

so, is the aridity of my southern California habitat a deprivation, or a preservation?

Neukom Vivarium, Olympic Sculpture Park, Seattle, WA

I enjoyed seeing the Neukom Vivarium, and certainly admire the technical achievement it represents, but as a work of art, I found it a little too calm, too straight-faced, too orderly.  it didn’t evoke the unsettling otherness of nature, the two-faced duality of death and life, decay and growth.  i’ve seen other  installation art pry into these themes more effectively.

not to mention, on that same trip, at the Bloedel Reserve, the Richard Haag gardens – the moss garden and the reflection garden – are both astoundingly beautiful and deeply frightening.

although my trip to Seattle was mostly sunny (my Olympic Sculpture Park pictures are gleaming with it), I saw the Bloedel reserve on a day of heavy rain.  the moss garden is a landscape created by editing; it looks like a forest that just grew that way, until you realize that the understory has been completely snipped out.  it’s a subtle effect, not something you would even begin to understand consciously unless you really noticed the difference from other parts of the property where the forest grows in the usual way.

Moss Garden (Richard Haag), Bloedel Reserve, Bainbridge Island, WA

the reflection garden, unlike the beauty shots you always see with the pool a reflecting pool, framed a muddy brown square under a dark sky.  the friend I went with didn’t even want to go in; she found it too disturbing.  the Bloedels, in fact, are buried here.  I never figured out how, given how high the water table is.  perhaps it’s better not to know.

Reflection Garden (Richard Haag), Bloedel Reserve, Bainbridge Island, WA

Aloes at the literal zoo - San Diego Zoo

when I took Plant Systematics in college, purely for unscientific fun (I was an American studies major, and didn’t have any requirements to fulfil) I did OK, but I was a killer at the quizzes.  we were given plants to identify, but only had to get the family right, not genus or species.  nothing to it, once I had learned all the family names (and Zingiberaceae is still fun to say), because I was a plant geek from a young age, and knew a lot of plants already, enough to kind of recognize a lot of their characteristic forms.

the proper, scientific way to go about plant identification is to count the sepals and so forth, and there would be a ‘plant key’ that would give you the procedure for doing the steps in the proper order, but usually I’d just look at the plant and say “Looks like the fig family,” and move on.   my professor called it ‘identification by gestalt,’ and while she didn’t exactly approve, she couldn’t mark me down for it either.

I still I.D. plants that way – the overall quick impression, the form, the broad strokes, the personality.  the only drawing class I truly enjoyed in design school was a tree-drawing elective.  we drew leaves and twigs, extreme closeups of flowers, extremely fast gesture drawings, extremely slow contour drawings.  I spent hours sitting under a leafless weeping willow at Descanso Gardens – it’s not so easy to find weeping willows in Southern California, but I got a bug in my ear about wanting to draw this specific tree, so I did – tracing the long dangling branches up, and down, and up, and down…and finally coming to understand how a weeping tree is structured. it’s actually a vase shape underneath, like an American elm, and then the branches dangle down from there.  I was quite pleased with myself for this discovery; anatomizing trees made me feel like a renaissance art student, without having to engage in all that grave-robbing.

plant geekery comes from somewhere deep in the bones. I can’t explain it; there were some garden aficionados in my family but my parents weren’t among them.

of course landscape architecture is only partly about plant geekery, and some people skip the plant geekery altogether and just focus on urban design, but most of the people in my field have some degree of the geekery, like the friend I went to the Huntington Gardens with, and who was only too happy to make a detour through the succulent show.  you know, like a dog show or cat show, only with succulents.  with succulents, a lot of the time, you just have to know what family they are from: the first one here, the ever fabulous Euphorbia obesa, most people would never guess is in the same genus as a poinsettia, but it is.  you can see why the obsessive collecting urge is particularly strong in people who are into succulents.  could there possibly be a purpose for all these forms, besides pure weirdness? some alien visitation?

I heard recently about an online project called the Galaxy Zoo.  apparently, astronomers who need to classify large numbers of galaxies by shape decided to put up the pictures on a web site and let volunteers comb through them and classify them, looking for the patterns.  the scientist who gave the interview that I heard said that people are much, much better than computers at pattern recognition, and could do this work much faster and more accurately than computers could; the volunteer laypeople who are classifying the galaxies have even made some new discoveries, noticing certain strange patterns that repeated but had as yet  no explanation.

the innate ability to recognize patterns, I think, must be part and parcel of the evolutionary heritage I alluded to in an earlier post, called rogation – the fact that we evolved as hunter-gatherers with an exquisitely tuned ability to read our surroundings, landscapes, living things, and find the details and the patterns we needed to know about in order to survive.

long ago I read a theory about why people slow down to stare at auto accidents – I’m sure most people assume this is some ghoulish quirk of human nature, some evidence that we are morally faulty.  but this author said, We look at auto accidents because we want to know what happened.  we want to analyze the causes, look for the chain of events.  because on some level we know, there safely in our own cars, that we are vulnerable to the same fate at every moment, and we need to gather information about how it happens.

this doesn’t mean, of course, that everyone is truly attentive to the information they subconsciously feel they need, or that we make the best use of this information, or that we have learned that we really ought to take seriously the fact that we are steering thousands of pounds of metal and glass, and get those phones off our ears; just that the urge to gather the information is there within us.  sometimes I think we feel ourselves disconnected from the reasons why we look for patterns, and lose that exquisitely tuned attentiveness that we were meant to have.

of course I spend much of my time looking for patterns, both cultural and natural.  cities carry their own set of traces, patterns, scars, and evidence; the term they teach us in landscape architecture school is “palimpsest,” the term for a parchment or other writing surface that gets erased and then used over and over again.  of course, nobody actually knows this word except medieval monks, word geeks, and landscape architecture students; I wish I knew a better one to explain what I’m getting at, what I’m looking for in the patterns underneath the patterns.

this year, I very much regret that I will not be getting out to the Antelope Valley to see my special obsession, the poppies and all their friends.  the poppies have had a good spring, apparently, but have peaked early; and I’ve been working too many hours to find the time to drive out to the desert before my imminent trip to North Carolina.  fear not, though, I have enough pictures from my last few visits to keep recycling them for a long, long, time.

last year I went to see the poppies with a very scientifically minded friend; she is a much more knowledgeable photographer than I am (which, trust me, is faint praise for her very considerable abilities) and also much more interested in taking extreme close-ups than I am; I’m usually taking longer views of the landscape.   the scale of the macro photograph is not as useful to me, as beautiful and interesting as it is.

nevertheless, my friend was very happy to join with me in a deeply geeky exercise of looking at the poppies and the other flowers and trying to see the patterns in where they chose to grow;  some on north slopes, some seemingly needing to be more protected by the wind, some perhaps in drier areas or areas where the soil composition changed, and the elusive owl clover, that we couldn’t find anywhere until I remembered where they were before, in a soggier part of the reserve.

every year the mix is a little different, depending on exactly how much rain fell, and when, and the temperature, and a bunch of other factors that we probably couldn’t realize right away.  some years there’s more variety, some years there are huge stands of almost nothing but poppies.  sometimes there’s a yellow poppy in among the orange ones.

chasing these details and trends up and down the hillsides is endless fun; but then you have to step back and take in the overwhelming impact of the whole, which could easily break your camera, or let your mind abruptly veer off its scientific course.

science is long, hard, slow work.  so is art, for that matter. but some things are just a whack upside the head, an instant moment of recognition. an identification by gestalt.

you may later spend a lifetime figuring out what use to make of that moment; but it takes less time than we can measure to recognize when we have found something we really, really need to see.  I believe we’re built for that.

Learning to live off hundreds of species of plants and animals required an attention to color, light, shape, and motion that must have bordered on obsession.  No wonder we began painting in such fine detail so early in the course of human events.  It is as if we were brimming with observation and had to let it all out.  The way we preserved our species during our formative years not only made us hunters and gatherers, but painters, singers, and poets…

- Richard Manning, Against the Grain

at one time, the Los Angeles basin was home to hunter-gatherers.   this seemingly barren ‘semi-desert’ produced such an abundance of food that agriculture wasn’t necessary, at least not to support the levels of population that existed then.

almost all physical traces of these people have been removed from the landscape, and the culture of the Tongva (known as Gabrielinos) suffered a very early and very thorough obliteration.  the Tongva don’t seem to be quite as well-documented as some other Southern California native groups (there is a lot more literature to be found about the Chumash, for instance) but there are still survivors, and a fair amount is known about how they lived.

a little while ago, I went on a quest to find out more about the native plants that people ate and used here, and the way they lived in relationship to the plants.  at the San Gabriel Mission one day in October, there was a native plant expert with a display of plants and native foods, and I went to see her.  the display was quite beautiful:

I asked her right away:  Have you eaten acorns?  because I’ve never eaten acorns!  there are no acorns at the health food stores!  it was the most important food for native people almost everywhere in coastal california, and yet we have completely forgotten how to eat them.

she said:  yes, I have.  frankly, they are pretty bland!  but then she went on to describe all the different plants and seeds that might be used as seasonings; and how some plants might even be burned, and the ashes used as seasonings.  about this she knows probably more than anybody; but I imagine the total body of knowledge is lost.

one thing we know about hunter-gatherers is that they typically eat hundreds of species of plants, whereas most agriculturalists live off about a half-dozen at most.  even our modern, affluent “varied diet,” in which we foodies might congratulate ourselves on picking up kumquats and cherimoyas at the farmer’s market and actually knowing what to do with them, consists of such an impoverished few kinds of plants compared to what hunter-gatherers know of their landscape and what it can provide for them.

I read in the LA Times that today is the blessing of the animals down on Olvera Street.  this must be when the Catholics do it; I recall from my Episcopal upbringing an observance called Rogation Sunday, when we brought our pets in to church for a blessing; it’s held on a different date, later in the spring.  of course, as you can imagine, hijinks ensued.   I remember trying to bring gerbils, and cats on leashes, and lizards and various things;  did we ever bring fish in a jar?  we probably wanted to, but the parents may have vetoed the effort.

of course, originally the observation of a rogation day was a blessing of the crops, of our agricultural efforts – plants and animals.  “rogation” is one of those oddball words you’d only know if you have a churchy background;  it was a humble supplication to God not to come down and destroy everything, which so frequently tended to happen.  the observation of rogation days was accompanied by a solemn procession around the boundaries of the parish.    rather than a cute Keystone Kops scene with kids and their pets, it must have been an occasion of the greatest solemnity and anxiety.  the whole agricultural enterprise has always been so fragile and vulnerable; it is as if we balanced a rock precariously on top of another rock and then prayed that strong winds would not blow it down.

consider how we live in los angeles: at the base of steep granite mountains, prone to violent flooding, like looking up the barrel of  a cannon; in the midst of extremes of dry and wet, drought alternating with torrential rain alternating with harsh desert wind, and prone to wildfires, made much worse by the changes in vegetation we have wrought on the hillsides and our habit of building up into the canyons. we’ve channelized our rivers to preserve all our investments on their banks, magnifying the effects of the floods when they come.  we’ve paved, and we suffer the consequences every time it rains.

surely a little rogation is in order. we have put ourselves in a highly vulnerable position.

the tongva, somehow, survived all the violence of this environment, and by all accounts were fairly peaceful and content.  they must have had rough years, but they knew how to work around them in ways that are no longer available to us.  they did not depend on the massed monocultures of industrial agriculture; they had options, not just plan A and plan B, but hundreds of plans, different paths through the rough times.

it’s not my intention to be sentimental about the native americans’ mystical balance with nature; there is a lot there that I don’t have access to, and I wouldn’t claim to have the right to go on and on about it.

but I recognize, in myself, the hunger for knowledge, images, sensory experiences, as being tied to those primal evolutionary urges; when we evolved as hunter-gatherers, as Manning describes, we evolved the ability to collect, store, catalogue, cross-reference, and synthesize information gathered through all of our senses.  and we are, perhaps, happiest when we are exercising those abilities to their fullest.

the Rogation Sunday prayers ask for mercy, but also for justice; it seems to me there is no justice without understanding.  we lost a lot of living things when we paved; but we also lost a lot of knowledge, perhaps never to be regained.