Welcome to the blog of writer and musician Andrew Martin. Here I'll post original photographs and observations as I encounter the history and culture of the San Fernando Valley, the City of the Angels, Alta California and the far-flung Pacific Rim… but mostly the Valley.
Enjoy this treasury of photographs showcasing the geology, botany, and fascinating social history of LA’s greatest park, now celebrating its 125th birthday.
My favorite picture ever, I think. A bride escorted by her dad up Fern Dell. I had just passed the wedding party and officiant at the top of the trail, nicely kitted out, waiting in excitement. The bride was grimacing with fright as she caught the light. What a spot for a wedding! What a spot for anything.
TRAILS CAFE
The rancho adobe (in some form, since 1795!) was preserved as Park Ranger HQ.
This unbelievabvly rich land was Rancho Los Feliz — “the Felizes’,” the first (or second) rancho grant in California. It was granted as a reward to a retiring military intendente of Los Angeles. The Pueblo was successfully settled and competent, the Tongva successfully relocated to San Gabriel, and happy Mexican farmers were churning out grain in the vast riverbed. Griffith J. Griffith bought the rancho from Yankee speculators for a song, and when he offered it to the City, with his grand visions of civic adornment and classical education and human uplift and ecological connection — he practically had to beg the City to take it. They were afraid to take Griffith’s gift, thousands of untouched watershed acres, because Griffith personally, had problems… it turns out,he shot his wife in the face, in a hotel room on Santa Monica Beach. The City Fathers were afraid the voters’ wives’ ministers’ wives would reject the City Council socially, if they shook hands with a beast like Griffith. He did two years in Q.
This photo is from the California Department of Corrections online article about Q’s famous alumnus, which tells the whole lurid story! Click, Baited Reader, click….
It took decades before Victorian propriety thinned out enough for the City to take possession, and it took decades more (1930!) for them to get around to building the Observatory and the Greek Theatre; both were stipulated in the conveyance. The delay was a good thing too, architecturally, for the Observatory — by then, the grace of Art Deco had come in to soften the Greek of Griffith’s preference, and the Federal Fascism that looked forward to Roosevelt’s New Deal; and it could all coalesce with modern engineering. It is one of the most iconic buildings on planet Earth (which it turns out is where we are; go inside and they’ll explain.)
The Griffith Park Merry-Go-Round. Since we’re nosing into the Holidays anyway (Sinter Klaas, Dec. 5), and there’s apparently no other footage anywhere of the Merry-Go-Round, and the dead operator who loved and maintained this instrument for years can be seen in the video in his Sinter Klaas cap, here is Jolly Old St. Nicholas, with bells and whistles, and the moose bugling along. Enjoy the View Walt Disney had, a bench in the Park, watching his Merry- kids -Go -Round, and see if you dream up anything as lucrative as Disneyland, like he did. Dream harder…
“Griffith Park is 125. It looked 125 five years ago. It will look it twenty years from now. I hate parks.”Holly-leaf cherry, Prunus illicafoliaToyon, Heteromeles arbutifolia. It is the official native plant of the City of LA.Covellite, a secondary volcanic rock.The gorgeous Nevins Barberry, Mahonia nevinii, is one of the rarest plants in the California Floristic Province. Around 500 wild individuals of the species are recorded, and most of those occur in Griffith Park.
A keystone species in the ecology of the Santa Monica Mountains; it puts the Laurel into Laurel Canyon. Not really a laurel of course; but a sumac. (‘Early Settlers’ thought the leaves looked like European bay laurel (Laurusnobilis, Apollo’s bay, the leafed-crown-of-Fame. This seeing of bays everywhere was a trend…as we’ll see later.)
Peritomaarborea… the bladderpod. An Aristotelian freak, a kink in the Great Chain of Being, a living koan, Stoic philosophy in a shrub. I’ve read online, that the bladders make a spicy, crunchy snack, but you’ve got to first get past the offensive, orduriferous scent of the leaves to collect them. Consider that irony; you’ll go mad if you do, be tortured if you don’t.
CONSIDER THE BLADDERPOD
All that there is to know, the bladderpod knows.
Only consider, and you’ll know all the bladderpod knows, too.
The middle canyon (above Fern Dell, below the Observatory) is dominated by an olive grove. I’m almost certain the gnarled trunks and gray-green leaves signify Oleaeuropaea — the gift of Athena to the polis of Athens on the day of its founding:
(The new citizens of Athens got to choose who would be their chief patron god. The field included all the local favorites, but in late polling it was neck-and-neck between Athena and Poseidon. To curry citizens’ favor, the Sea-god’s gambit was a violent earthquake that sent a hot salt-spring geyser gushing up through the Acropolis rock, running through the city and foaming through the agora. You could hear one hand clapping after this spectacle performance. Then Wisdom upstaged Poseidon completely by merely extending her bare arm, and offering the olive tree, which took root right there in the cleft rock. Critics raved, civilization ran, and word-of-mouth was great.) I have no idea why a grove of olives (wilsonii fruitless, I hope?) should prevail here, but maybe it was planted to offset the parchitecture for postcards. (Or they might be invasives…beware of Greeks bearing gifts. Maybe they’re Russian olives..I don’t think they’re Mission olive descendants.) Anyway, the grove is cool and lovely and thought-provoking to be under, and half-way hikers will be glad of the shade.
We have Plato to thank for the simple idea that God is perfect, and what is perfect is God, and nothing we see or do here on Earth is perfect, since we are not God, but we may glimpse intimations of perfection in nature and understand we must be in the presence of the divine, and are then capable of being invited to imagine the Ideal World of Forms just beyond the grasp of our physical senses. But if we can’t glimpse such perfection, and aren’t able to image the infinity of God’s Ideal Forms, we can still imagine that we can imagine perfection, from seeing things that aren’t perfect but maybe just awfully pretty — and hope and grace will do the saving rest. That’s the idea, anyway: add water and olive oil and it makes Western Civ. This graceful specimen is close to the Ideal Form of the lemonade berry tree. It is the Heddy Lamar of all the lemonade berry trees, balanced, tapered, stacked. Bright green leaves, vigorous growth. This is the kind of ideally beautiful lemonade tree, that fills the other lemonade berry trees with self-loathing and despair, and leaves them feeling stunted and hemmed-in and mis-shapen and cheated by life and doomed to hell, for sure. Rhusintegrifolia, the lemonade berry, from which berries in winter, a sweet-tart drink can be pressed.
THE STAR OF THE OBLONG THICKET
Patient Reader, recall that oblongthickets are good structures to look at, to spot rare chaparral plants. Here’s one such thicket just off the trail — and by gum there’s a Nevins barberry gesticulating proudly at the uphill end (and maybe another peeking out the back)! One of the rarest plants on earth, this example was not noted on the Griffith Park specimen map. This whole park, this gift of Griffith, this grant to Los Feliz, this Tongva glade, this wee bit hill and glen, just happens to hold the preponderant remaining world community of this dazzler of the CFP.
THE SPICY SCENT OF A BAY GROVE — Another CFP plant reminded California immigrants of Apollo’s noble bay tree, so they called it California bay. This magnificent tree is a bit similar to the European laurel, but it is completely unrelated. What is most remarkable is that this tree, by convergent evolution, exudes that heady bay fragrance, just like culinary bay, from oils in the leaves. Just like a grove of laurel in a Roman garden, Umbellularia californica perfumes the area under its canopy with divine scent.
“INSPIRING QUOTE HERE”: Col. Griffith J. Griffith made some inspiring statements when he donated the land for the park. He argued eloquently for the education of the masses in natural history, and uplift!, and progress, and trusting to nature’s regenerative powers. I know the quotes, but not verbatim. I blogged about them years ago, but couldn’t retrieve that article from my own blog. I may have reluctantly deleted the post when I temporarily ran out of space. Anyway now, those quotes, common coin for conservationists and reproduced in print and on bronze and terracotta plaques for 100 years, no longer exist. So I can’t document and illuminate for you, in his words, how much Griffith admired the Greeks and their democracy, and stressed common equality of access to nature and the good things of the polis. But I found out today we can no longer cut-and-copy blocks of text; you have to transcribe the whole text yourself from one screen to another, if you can even manage to hunt it down unedited and in one piece.
Fern Dell, the park’s prettiest grove, and a living museum.
Nor will Google bring up entries anymore for the old public domain books, histories or articles micro-fiched generations ago from moldering leather-bound tomes, which reproduced those remarks. Indeed, you won’t find any reference to a book or record that isn’t physically commercially in print by a major publisher and for sale (If the book’s for sale NOW on Amazon, Google will let you know it exists, but not let you see the text.) If nobody else has noticed what has suddenly and quietly happened, the View has. This is outrageous, this is Orwell; this is Himmler, this is the sack of the Alexandrian Library, this is rentierisme, this is the Dark Ages for man, this is the Inquisition, this is the final snuffing out of any hope for democracy. It is the Inquisition for our common knowledge, a permanent trap-door slide for our species down to eternal barbarism. If an individual fellow can not organize his own information, researching inexpensively and at his own pace and direction from the public sources bequeathed to us by Franklin and Jefferson and generations of scholars and dedicated public servants, but instead must crawl to the bot, taxed and tolled and kept ignorant of the richest sources, it is death for America. Here is the enclosure of the human mind; a kick in the head for public education, and the fatal blow to our common civic heritage. If this sticks (and some of Google’s outrageous ‘innovations’ mysteriously don’t), there’s almost no point going on from here. Sigh. With that, enjoy the the plants, they might not be here very long either.
The Valley Village View 