Category Archives: Native American medicine

The Last Post

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Patient Reader, I regret to report this is the last edition of the Valley Village View. I have hit the limit of the “storage space” allowed by WordPress for a non-monetized blog. That is, if I wish to continue adding to it, I’d have to pay them a monthly rent. Google’s gate-fee is not cheap; their idea is, it should be a privilege to put the View into competition with all their other products for the world’s eyeballs — and for me to hustle for ever-more readers eager to click-through their ads on my blog.

The View began as a way to share pictures with family and friends about the local and natural history of the place I call home. Very quickly I realized that I knew nothing about it, myself! And I could see that many of the most interesting things about Los Angeles, and especially the Valley, weren’t ‘covered’ online: events weren’t presented with accurate facts, landmarks weren’t honored with clear informative pictures, history and natural wonders were ignored. As my own ‘sense of place’ grew, I realized that I had to work hard to find facts, or forgotten but important names. I tried to tie each blog entry into the important themes and trends I’d discerned.

I am especially proud of the View’s multi-part explorations:



First, the Views of “Beautiful Valley Village” itself, its middle-class history, its walkable scale and unpretentiously homey Mid-Century architecture. I think the photo essay of the once innovative, now abandoned Valley Plaza may be the best visual record there is or was, of the sad fate one of America’s first modern shopping centers; another lost moment in LA conservation history. The low-slung, rock-faced, steel-and-glass rows of shops, booths, and showrooms now are falling, burning, or being allowed to be torn down, for the lack of an adaptive-reuse plan for the site.

“The Theatre of Conversion” series is the most comprehensive general account online of the religious and cultural interface that began in 1769 between the Tongva, Tataviam and Chumash peoples, with their Chinigchinich religion on the one hand, and the Franciscans, with their Christianity. In addition to discovering the amazing lore and ritual of the datura plant, momoy, t was a golden chance to do the kind of history I admire most, a “local history from the soil up” kind of story. Comparing the Indians’ myths, plants, animals, food, medicine, and land-use, with the cultural apparatus and technology which was brought in by the Spanish, opened my eyes to the magnificent chaparral of the California Floristic Province, which was almost wiped out by the invasive Spanish Pasture Mix. Learning about Fr. Lasuen’s grandiose design for the most commodious building in Alta California, the Convento at San Fernando Mission, and the huge amount of quicklime-whitewash needed to cover all that adobe, and the huge amount of oak firewood required to kiln the limestone, and the quarrying of the limestone itself, and wondering where the neophytes got all the resources called for in Vitruvius’s whitewash recipe, led me into the geology of the canyons.

“The Transformation of Lopez Canyon” is an ongoing story that gives me hope for all of Southern California. If this abused, misunderstood sand-trap of hills can spring back from fires and floods and pollution and launch a mighty Superbloom of rare, even endangered species, as Lopez did in May-June of 2020, any place can. The CFP is robust and fit and apt and beguiling, and eager to steal your heart with water-sparing beauty and butterflies year-round, California, if you just let the dumb Connecticut-green lawn aesthetic die already. Of course, Lopez Canyon is also where I realized the Sylmar Hills were remnants of ancient mud volcanoes. This amazing revelation prompted the View to propose “San Fernando Valley National Geologic Monument,” (which is still an awesome idea) and led to a good survey of the rocks and rills round the rim.

I’m really sad to have to leave off “Van Nuys – A Viewing” in the middle. The story tells of how Isaac N. Van Nuys, one of the greatest wheat farmers and agricultural developers in California history, was descended from Dutch wheat farmers who settled in New Netherland in 1651. The story winds around to Brooklyn and New Jersey and to the Genesee Valley of upstate New York — each place, in its day, the center of a wheat-farming bonanza belt. The Van Nuys family story was revealed as a central thread in a much bigger story, that of the Anglo-Dutch commodity wheat culture of the former New Netherland counties. This family-based, small-freeholder, mercantile farming model was the economic and cultural template of settlement of the middle colonies, and it emerged from the English conquest of New Netherland. Wheat agriculture was carefully implanted along with religious freedom, when neither wheat nor free thought was flourishing elsewhere. Eventually, it was the norm that prevailed across the American frontier and drew in millions of immigrant homesteaders eager to copy it. But just as the riled heartland of sober, small-farming, reformed-religious Prairie Populists seemed ready to rise to national power under Wm. Jennings Bryan, the price of wheat collapsed, and the whole family-farm commodity wheat culture retreated. The rush of farm-leavers from rural counties fed the teeming cities. Part of the reason wheat went bust in Kansas and Missouri and Oklahoma, was that one Isaac Van Nuys had athsma, and got the jump on the prairie homesteaders by moving clear out to California. By the 1880s Van Nuys was shipping huge cargoes of Pacific wheat to the grain market at Liverpool, and that encouraged other Californians to go big in wheat. Thus, one of the descendants of the original Van Nuys. who helped found family-farm wheat culture, was so successful he helped strangle it as a settlement pattern. When Ike Van Nuys sold off his massive Valley holdings to developers in 1911, the hay-day of America’s Anglo-Dutch freethinking commodity wheat agriculture was over; exemplified when hundreds of thousands of displaced and dispossessed Okie farmers arrived in the Valley for one last chance at land, and found LA instead. I regret I didn’t get to finish this story of family farms, religious freedom and progressive ideals; but it helped build America, and the future is full of time.

Thank you for following the Valley Village View. If anyone stumbles in here after this, I hope they will find working links and hashtags. I hope the site will still be useful and beautiful for you. I hope it encourages understanding of the phenomenally rich culture of Los Angeles. I hope the photography, especially of the native landscapes, inspires visions of the vast renewal that is waiting for us, could we only learn to give this remarkable land our attention, love and respect.

View Vasquez Rocks

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Where All Good Location Scouts Go When They Die

The Old West as Outer Space. The rocks’ visuals are of jutting planes apparently defying the normal geometries of gravity: like a Bierstadt landscape, hung crooked on the wall.

Unsettled, is built into the suspenseful psychology of the scenery.

Surely, any characters beamed into this disjointed landscape must be in tension themselves; on the brink; at a tipping point.

Today it is a Los Angeles County Park; 1,000 acres spread across 20 million years. The lay of the land is a north-facing slope with a series of hog-back ridges poking up through the slope. North-facing slope means shade, which prospers old-growth mosses and lichens, in dazzling variety.

The sedimentary layers are similar to those in the Valley. The alluvia laid down as sea, estuary, or bay floor make a beautiful sequence of inter-fingered sandstones, siltstones and mudstones. Then, the layers were crunched up into folds and anticlines by compression (between the Pacific and the NA Plates). Then the land got pulled back – extension – and a rift formed. Wet sands were intruded from below by volcanic metamorphic magma. Uplift out of the sea followed, and the hogbacks of harder rock emerged out of differential erosion of the softer rock.

The regional tectonic story is the breakout of the San Andreas Fault. This occurred when the compressive force of the Pacific Plate, partially sliding under the old Rodinian Riviera at what is now San Gabriel Fault, jammed. The old seaward faults (those in LA, e.g.) had been sutured into a mass riding atop the Pacific Plate. The tectonic border moved inland, which became our current plate boundary, the San Andreas Fault, with its dextral strike-slip. (The ’Great Bend’ in the San Andreas is just a few miles northeast of Vasquez Rocks.) Sadly, though unsurprising to me at this point, the visitors center contained no information whatsoever about the geology of the area. Anyone coming to the site of Vasquez Rocks to learn about Vasquez Rocks, will be disappointed.

Above: scrub oak, Quercus dumosa.

It is one of the most fragrant parks in So Cal, thanks to the junipers. Fun Fact: that’s mistletoe dangling from the branches. Who knew it favored juniper?

I liberated some berries to crush into my martinis for a little aromatherapy.

There is a commendable but basic exhibit on the Tataviam, the northern part of whose territory included this gorgeous place. But it is a general cultural overview, with nothing about how or when or why they used this particular site. There are what looked like Chinigchinich-religion-inspired wall paintings on a rock near the entrance, including the Centipede character. I don’t know whether the figures are genuine or graffiti, or what artifacts archaeologists might have found so far.

Why is it called “Vasquez Rocks?”

”Vasquez Rocks” got the name in the 1860s-70s, when the ”gentleman bandit” Tiburcio Vasquez camped here as a hideout. The bandido’s suave Monterey manners, fluency in English, and fine connections among good Californio families give his legend an undeserved air of grace. Certainly he was handsome and of fine carriage; hearing he might be near would cause local girls’ hearts to swoon. Envious or disaffected young men among the lower classes took him for a revolutionary emblem, a folk hero fighting against the Yankee oppressors. This was the defense Vasquez used at his trial: he claimed he did it all as a freedom fighter for California. But there’s not a thing in it; Vasquez’s decades-long string of petty robberies and random hold-ups, interrupted twice by stints in San Quentin, add up to nothing but pointless and not very profitable thuggery. Honestly, he seemed to be in it for the girls — which is how he was caught. He was canoodling with local girls while holed up in Greek George’s adobe, on what is today’s Sunset Strip in West Hollywood.

The posse kept surveillance on Vasquez while he was at Greek George’s (somewhere around the Sunset Tower?), from view-points in Nichols Canyon. Vasquez was held in LA for a week, while adoring senoritas crowded the jail, sang to him, and pleaded for his release. He wrote favored girls little love-verses. He was moved upstate and tried in San Jose, and executed in 1874.

Modernist Meadows

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The Cutting Edge of CFP Container Cultivation

The family — who are keen gardeners themselves — wanted help re-thinking their front yard presentation. All the lavender along the walk, but one, had up and died. They had hoped for birds and bees zooming through the yard, especially since they have a fine raised vegetable bed. They wanted color and flowers, bright and homey. From back East originally, they missed lilac blossoms and fresh scents. The lavender almost fit the bill, until it didn’t. I knew many wonderful California plants could fit the bill too, but where to put them?

I reckoned that the lavender failed because there wasn’t enough soil area in the walkway planting strips, which are only a foot wide. Plus they were covered with hot, dark stones. Underneath was compacted clay soil, almost concrete. (Apparently the people from whom they bought the house had parked cars in the front yard for years.) The hopelessness of the front yard, I understood, was what led them to the solution of the artificial turf.

I never had experience with artificial turf. I was wary at first, afraid that I would accidentally rip it, like billiard-table felt; that it would seal off the yard from air- and water-exchange completely; or that it would act as a hot spot. I quickly learned how practical and comfortable it is, and appreciated the clean lines and modern look. But still, no place to plant. How to bring pollinators, scent, color, and seasonal variety from two narrow, low, clay strips?

I learned the family themselves had built the raised veggie bed, and also the other chic wooden planter boxes scattered around the house. I got excited by the idea, and asked if they could actually make planter boxes that would give enough cubic feet of soil to support Zen meadows, or bonsai arroyos. Even a foot high planter box could raise the level of good soil up over the hot concrete; and support plants tall enough to lure your fluttery pollinators, and also various creepers and wall-hangers to shade the sides of the boxes. I got even more excited when they said sure, they would build such boxes. And I was ecstatic when, two weeks later, I saw how elegantly they did it, shaping the planters to hug the slope. The result added depth at the front gate, perfect to anchor a showy blue ceanothus, which will give the family and the birds and bees, the California version of lilacs in spring.

The parkway strip was a hard-baked adobe brick covered in red mulch. It had only one tree from the city, plus a dying gardenia. These strips are notoriously tough to plant in satisfying ways: neglected in the past, frequently abused in the present; subject to all kinds of city ordinances; subject to wind-blown trash and doggie doo; shadeless and dry. Parkway strips are extremely restricted in plantable soil space. But given the already restricted space for planting, I realized we could double the yard’s total habitat area by contiunuing the Zen arroyo idea out to the street. It would be the week’s work of a Southern chain-gang to break up all thirty feet of that baked clay; but with a pick-axe and some sweat, I filled four small discrete “bowls” with enough good soil and drainage to hold suites of scrub plants and succulents. In between the bowls is like cement, but in the bowls the soil is soft and friable. By watering only in the bowls, and letting the edges bake, the creeping natives, I hope, will have time and space to establish themselves while, I hope, the weeds won’t. The natural look, and weed-repulsion, is enhanced with specimen rocks that will als shade the ground, and provide safe habitat for adorable lizards and birdies browsing for grass seeds. Luck gave me a bone-sere 90-degree day to work the transformation. It was terribly stressful on the plants as well as the gardener. We all shrank. I thought I had lost the yarrow and the buckwheat and the spreading sagebrush. But they are all already showing new growth, and general signs of happiness.

I wanted to continue the modernist avenue of plants — formal but exotic, wild but constricted — right up onto the porch. I wanted also some showy flowers to bring the hummingbirds right to the front door. But the porch is north-facing and perma-shaded. I put in Coral bells with sword fern at the foot of the stairs, which do okay in darker conditions. So do succulents, which I used to create a discrete, but dignified stage. Then I looked and looked for a pair of hummingbird sages, which thrive in deep shade, to fill matching pots I intended for the first step. The only ones I could find, however, maybe the last two in LA, were tiny seedlings no bigger than my thumb. It would be absurd to put them in big pots until they have had some time to grow up a little bit, so I gave them pots ”the next size up” and set them along the window bay, for next year.

It was a fascinating project trying to ”re-wild” such constrained plots. The results, in a year or two when it is all grown in, will I hope pay off.

Designing Heaven

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The Landscape Gardener as God

In recent posts about the Knickerbocker history of Van Nuys, and others about California native plants, I have relied upon two remarkable sources. Both are seminal authorities on their subjects, well known as ”experts.” I’ve been generally aware of their names and work for many years; possibly you will recognize the names too. But despite my great admiration, I realized I knew absolutely nothing regarding their personalities, their path in life, or the full range and scope of their interests. So I looked them up, and was amazed to find a very deep connection I never dreamed.

It’s not such a stretch to conceive of Theodore Payne, of the eponymous Foundation for Native California Plants [where I have learned so much just from browsing their nursery and asking questions of the staff] as an important and influential landscape gardener — that is, an artistic designer of natural open spaces, like the California Native Plant Garden at the Pan-Pacific Exposition pictured in the header.

Theodore Payne brung you a posey! Picked fresh.

But I was absolutely blown away to learn that Mariana Schuyler van Rensselaer, the society grande-dame author of the magisterial 1909 History of the City of New York in the 17th Century, Vols. I and II, was also a famous architecture critic, an aesthetic theorist, and in her spare time a widely-read expert on landscape gardening. She was friends and a collaborator with the Olmsteds and Calvert Vaux; she wrote a classic appreciation of H.H. Richardson, who was then passe. Her articles for Century Magazine did much to educate the public about the aesthetic, holistic and soul-replenishing value of artistically designed landscapes. It was Mrs. van Rensselaer who coined the term ”landscape gardener,” preferring it to ”landscape architect.” She pointed out “gardener” is the correct term for the job, except for the upper-class prejudice against “gardeners” as illiterate servants with dirt under their nails. Thus the profession seems to have settled on being classed as ”architects” because they felt genteel, and educated, and wanted to be conceived as seroious artists by society. [Well, who doesn’t?] And NOBODY, was ever more Society, than Mariana Griswold van Rensselaer…Mrs. Schuyler van Rensselaer…?

Mrs. van Rensselaer, by her friend A. Saint-Gaudens.

THEODORE PAYNE: The Theodore Payne Foundation website http://theodorepayne.org has a great illustrated biography of the man, excerpts of which, below to whet your appetite. Payne was born in 1872, in England, on the Althorp estate in Northamptonshire, had a wonderful Uncle, and went to dreary dismal Victorian schools that had excellent teachers. In 1893 he was journeyman nurseryman who came to America with friends to visit the Columbian Exposition, and never left, but migrated quickly to Los Angeles. Here are some highlights of his American career and life, to inspire Patient Reader: Click and read.

He promoted the Nevins Barberry! I bought mine there at the nursery, and learned by knowing it, how to spot them in the wild, as in Griffith Park. Still rare; but beautiful.

Mariana Griswold van Rensselaer is a, the, indispensible historian of Little Ol’ New York, where she wasn born in 1851, and where she died, at her townhouse on W. 10th Street, in 1934. (Though, after her very influential education in Dresden, most of her life she seems to have lived with her husband Schuyler in New Brunswick. This college town — Rutgers — on the Banks of the Old Raritan, has become something like the Dutch-American capital-in-exile, since, after all, King Charles took New Amsterdam York away from them and Albany! And Albany.) Here are web links and samples from online articles I’ve found about this amazing woman’s other work.

Mrs. vR was very inflential in publicizing and developing the vision of Vaux-Olmsted’s “Niagara Reserve,” New York’s, and America’s, first State Park. The plan preserved and enhanced the view-shed of the famous cascades from all sides and angles, spectacularly landscaping the surroundings with bridges and elegant viewpoints with benches, put to hard use by the newlyweds I’m sure. The awe, the ennobling aesthetic experience for visitors, the majesty of Nature, the freshness of the surroundings, the freedom from turbines and smokestacks and and dark Satanic mills, was the purpose:

WHO KNEW?