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?

A Walk, a Wall, a Wash: Tujunga

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Unusually dark, almost black squirrel. Portola seems to point to that squirrel; his gesture is a message for the Indians! Hallo; Portola didn’t explore California in a ship. Nor did he wear a Conquistador’s moro. Hmm..I suppose it’s meant as Portola, the embodiment of Cortez, still in the eighteenth century savaging the continent, still seeking Califia and her gold-banded viragoes. Hmm… the art made me think. So I guess the squrrel was just a McGuffin?
  • Homeless campfire scorched half the ”greenway.”
    Sigh.

I went over to check the the other side — and sort of cheered up…

  • Mulefat — Baccharis salicifolia. Salicifolia = ‘leaves like a willow.’ The gorgeous pink flower — somewhat a variation from the usual white — was the last bloom of summer on the Wash. The other blooms had already gone the way of all pretty pink panicles.
  • Cholla. Sweet and tasty; eat like watermelon. Peel the red skin and spit out the pits.

Growing up and through the arms of a sheltering white sage, I found a saltbush. I had just seen one on Sugarloaf last week, and tried to research the species name by using the usual head-banging method: stabbing words into the search engine, which you think would describe the plant to a botanist, if you were trying to think as botanists think. Chaparral erect shrub; numerous spikes cones inflorescences small yellow flowers; leaves dull green like oak but pointy spiny spiked pike-shaped lobed; September flower. Try! If you pull up saltbush I’m a Dutchman. I finally gave up and went to check the Linnaean for mulefat; and up came a random nature page that said it featured mulefat — but not showing mulefat at ALL. But there was a saltbush in the corner of the shot, and they, mentioned it the caption. So now I know! You too. Check out the fabulous leaves. They’re soft, not sharp at all.

Like almost every plant in the CFP this could easily be a prized garden ornamental. I went to Home Depot today on a yard-redo-job, and in their entire enormous garden wing, they had NOT ONE CFP plant for sale, except the remote possibility that some of the succuulents might be CFP cactus. But they didn’t even carry cholla! (I doubled right back to the Theodore Payne Foundation, nevermind the traffic, and got the right plants for a California garden…) My California Initiative — PLANT YOUR FUTURE! STATEWIDE, NO SALES TAX ON CFP PLANTS! Write your assemblyman. California plants hardly need water and don’t need any fertilizer or soil amendments WHATSOEVER. Every nursery in California should have them on prominent display, instead of their fifteen aisles full of butterfly bushes and pesticides and hi-nitro jump-juice that are poisoning the world. A CFP yard is practically free and brings butterflies and birds and bees TO LIFE and TO YOUR DOOR; a ‘conventional’ garden (lawn; plus your normal hyper-toxed beds-and-borders full of showy exotics) is expensive and KILLS LIFE DEAD. It’s as simple as that.

  • Toyon, Heteromeles arbutifolia. Gasp.
  • LA’s official city (native) tree!
  • Holly-leaf cherry
  • Yummy. An Indian staple. The flesh is a thn rind, sweet for sucking when almost black. Inside is a nut like a macadamia. eaten ground as flour for atole.
  • Prunus ilicifolia. (Holly is an Ilex; hence, ilicifolia, ‘leaves like holly’.
  • This looks like blueschist, super-metamorposed from Pre-cambrian Mendenhall gneiss. ”Fancy Rock” from the Limerock Cyn assemblage?
  • I don’t know why I never looked at the rocks and boulders on the surface of Tujunga Wash, since this has been the main drain for some of the most fascinating and complex geology in the country for millions of years. Many of the rocks are a very sophisticated gray-blue granite or granodiorite. Of course the Army Corps and the Greenway builders displaced the whole site of then concretized River; but it defies Occam’s Razor to imagine they carted in a bunch of rocks from upstream or off-site. I’ve read reminiscences of Baby Boomer local kids, who remember whining with boredom when their parents shopped at Valley Plaza, so they’d send kids off to play in the parking-lot-adjacent Wash.
The tan-yellow veins in the schist were dazzling with mineral sparkles in the afternoon sun; but the sparkle never comes out in photos. Gold-bearing ore? Gold Creek is a Tujunga Tributary.,.

Speaking of Cathay, Speaking of Trade, Speaking of Hudson…

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Replica of De Halve Maen.

in 1609 Hudson was an unremarkable English seaman working for Dutch masters, doing the unremarkable (to them) English/Dutch sailing captain’s job of finding the Northwest Passage to Fabled Cathay. He failed of course but everybody did at that job, and they didn’t mind; they kept hiring him anyway. In the short and medium term, the real job of these voyages was the job of finding new wijk ports to extend the English-Dutch common trading network. As we know, Hudson’s inestimable success was in finding the Valley that bears the River that today bears his name. The North River, as the Dutch called it, has a perfect configuration for a wijk, or indeed, for many. It has deep harbors in a wide central bay at its mouth; for a long way upriver, there are vigorous tides for the effortless ebb and flow of traffic; and it is directly adjacent to willing and eager trading partners. The City, the cities, built on this estuary made the Hudson River the New Money River in the world, supplanting the Rhine. Hudson didn’t build New York, but he and his men did bring back plenty of extraordinarily soft beaver pelts. In Mokum they sold for a pretty stuiver soon after landing, to the keen-eyed merchants who crowded the Damraak and maybe slipped the Half Moon sailors and stevedores a little something to get a peek into their cargo. Several of those merchants immediately chartered ships of their own, and there were Dutch traders smoking with Mohawks at Albany and Raritans on Staten Island from 1610. What made the amazing pelts so soft, what made them valuable, what gave them the perfectly trimmed nap, was that they had previously been worn by the Indians as their clothing. The most important and successful wijk trading city of them all, was built on carving the percent out of dealing in the Native Americans’ own second-hand jewelry and their own second-hand rags. Both industries, of course are still huge in New York. But if we take the Half Moon as a metaphor — Hudson certainly did find a route for Dutch-English trade to illuminate, penetrate and dominate the distant hemisphere, through the traders who built in his wake. It just took The Whirligig of Time, and a Gold Rush, and a whole lot more capital, for the wijks to open the passage to Cathay.

Full Disclosure: Bait and switch. The wise homily above was merely a ruse, to get Patient Reader to click on Michael Hudson’s latest interview on Nakedcapitalism.com. It is a sharp non-jargony reading of the China Question. He is that rare economist in America who actually seems to know and follow, and who cares about, where China is actually at…versus, where America is at, and how where we’re at is so far out into the Swamp of Ignorance, that the rest of the world has not only stopped following, but has given up even waving and calling out from the shoreline. Hudson explains why America’s plutocracy is just not where it’s at, for China, or the world, or the wijks, anymore. In other words, Hudson explains why China has de-monetized the Money River of Hudson.

Michael Hudson on Renegade Inc.: China’s Fortune Cookie Crumbles

Here is a link to Mr. Hudson’s excellent blog, full of the best of modern economic thought.

https://michael-hudson.com/

September Waves Her Magic Wands

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THE TRANSFORMATION OF LOPEZ CANYON

I’ve learned this is wand buckwheat, Eriogonum elongatum. The wands wave in wild winds on wuthering heights…whereas, workaday wooly buckwheat is wont to wallow a world away, in washes and wadis:



CalFlora.net: Eriogonum – from the Greek erion, “wool,” and gonu, “joint or knee;” that is, wooly puffs on jointed stems. Fasciculatum – ‘the one clustered together,’ fascicular = in bundles or clusters.
Sawtooth goldenbush, Hazardia squarrosa. Lopez Canyon is where I first marveled at these elegant Asteracea, waiting along the side of the road as if I were the parade they were lined up to see. They are so common, yet so erect and poised…as if a fleabane or back-alley dandelion got into a Swiss finishing school. Its prickly holly-leaf is the convergent evolutionary choice of many chaparral plants, to retain water and deter browsing. Convergence makes it easy to confuse all the weedy yellow asters and false dandelions. For instance, one kind of goldenbush is called grindelioides, which means “like a grindellia.” And there is a grindellia with holly-sharp leaves just like the sawtooths, called Grindellia squarrosa var. serrulata. I think below is an example of the latter. Anyway, they’re all lovely.
From CE Conrad’s 1987 US Forest Service field guide to chaparral. Note the taxonomy change: the genus was Haplopappus and the species was squarrosus, not squarrosa. Zheesh! Botanists.
“Medicinal Uses:  The medicinal use of gumweed dates back to Native American and folk times and it was listed as an official drug in the United States Pharmacopoeia until 1960.  The slightly bitter and aromatic tea may be used for bronchitis or wherever an expectorant is needed; as an antispasmodic for dry hacking coughs (alone or often combined with Yerba Santa).   It is believed to desensitize the nerve endings in the bronchial tree and slow the heart rate, thus leading to easier breathing; it merits investigation as a treatment for asthma.  The tincture is useful for bladder and urethra infections. Tincture or poultice may be used topically for poison ivy and poison oak inflammations.  Other indications include bronchial spasm, whooping cough, malaria, other chronic and acute skin conditions, vaginitis and as a mild stomach tonic.  Native Americans (tribes including Pawnee, Cheyenne, Sioux [Lakota and Teton Dakota], Crows, Shoshones, Poncas, Blackfeet, Crees, Zunis and Flatheads) used preparations of curlycup gumweed both internally and externally as washes, poultices, decoctions and extracts to treat skin diseases and rashes, saddle sores, scabs, wounds, edema, asthma, bronchitis, cough, pneumonia, cold, nasal catarrh, tuberculosis, gonorrhea and syphilis, menstrual and postpartum pain, colic, digestive ailments, liver problems and as kidney medicine. The fresh gum was rubbed on the eyelids to treat snow-blindness.   
Effects:  stimulant, sedative, astringent, purgative, emetic, diuretic, antiseptic, and disinfectant. 
Primary constituents:  Tannins, volatile oils, resins, bitter alkaloids, and glucosides
Other uses:  Ornamental- it produces flowers over along period, even when the soil is poor and dry; young, sticky flower heads can be used as chewing gum; leafless stems can be bound together to make brooms.
Contraindications:  The herb is contraindicated for patients with kidney or heart complaints.   There may be concentrated levels of selenium as it is a facultative selenium absorber.” — http://ayurveda.alandiashram.org/ayurvedic-herbs/grindelia-squarrosa-gumweed

Jepson’s doesn’t cite the common name for this flower, which is curlycup gumweed. (Maybe they were too embarrassed to mention it.) One might choose to chew the sticky flowers as gum; it’s also called Tarweed.

Chalcopyrite?