Look who's back (sort of)

The last thing I want to do after a lengthy absence from here is end up here, so I'll spare you all excuses and apologies, as well as any promises that I will ever post more often. But I just included a link to this semi-comatose blog in a little mini-essay on WNY garden walks/tours I wrote for my day job, so I figure anyone who ends up here through that deserves to see something new.

When in fact all you're really going to find here that's new is ... this! Which is merely steering you right back here! It's an internet mobius strip as vexing as the original Planet of the Apes chronology.

Since you're here, and since we are here to discuss nocturnal gardening, allow me to put in yet another plug for the two nighttime garden walks in the greater Buffalo area: a new one in the Kenmore/Town of Tonawanda area on Saturday, July 23, 2011 and a fairly long-running one in Black Rock on Saturday, August 6. The latter I've been to before and can gladly vouch for; the Ken/Ton one sounds promising. I gather night walks are big in other parts of the country, and I'm all for 'em. (Got two words for ya, but keep 'em under your hat: Open bar!)

The hosta-riffic photo above is from the Parkside walk I wrote about in the Spree post that shamed me into writing this one; that's only a small part of a lush shade garden. For the record, I've got plenty of photos of the Black Rock night tour, and it would be mighty tempting to share some of them here ... but that would involve promising you to stay tuned, wouldn't it? The mobius strip twists yet again!

Attention, internet-savvy deer

Appearances to the contrary, this is NOT a delicious blueberry:



Please share this information with the rest of your herd.
Many thanks, and happy belated holidays,
Ron and Don

Happy Curb Day!

I first read about today's first-ever nationwide Curb Day in the Buffalo News earlier this week and have been excited about it ever since. (This link will likely expire in a day or two.) Sounds like a terrific idea--but the kind of thing that will only work if it truly goes viral offline as well as on, so I'm doing my bit to help spread the word (at the last possible minute, granted, but better late than never).

The predicted crappy weather around here may put a damp-er (sorry) on the fun in WNY, but it's worth a try. I meant to gather up some curbworthy donations tonight and then it slipped my mind. We've got a copy machine up for grabs if the rain lets up. This all strikes me as an ideal use for what Yankees call "the hellstrip" and Louisianians refer to as "the neutral ground"--that no-man's-land between your home (reservoir of clutter that it is) and the street. Here's a chance to turn it into every-man's/person's-land.

CURB DAY BONUS LINKS:
•Nike will take your old sneakers (any brand) and transform them into material for playgrounds
•Radio Shack will recycle old rechargeable cell phone and laptop batteries
•UPS will take back all those obnoxious styrofoam packing peanuts they use.

Of doo-doo and Doo-Dah

I hope to be back in blogging shape again soon, but a family emergency has occupied most of my energy and time of late. Even so, I can't resist calling your attention to this wonderful reprint (repost?) of Daniel Chamberlin's profile from a 2007 Arthur of "Sodfather"/"California compost wizard" Tim Dundon. The main focus of the piece is a wild tale that, "like any good gardening story, encompasses Hollywood producers, fires, suicide, PCP injection, a nude Quaker iconoclast, standoffs with city officials and a violent pet coyote." But just as fascinating--to me, at least--is the way Chamberlin interweaves an entire scientific/socio-political history of organic farming/gardening dating back more to approximately 2400 BC. The prose is both witty and informative, as we see in this passage that explains what all those creepy crawling things are up in my compost pile:

The first stage of decomposition in composting is chemical: microscopic organisms flock to the dead thing and start to secrete enzymes that break it down on a cellular level. As bacteria, saprophytic mushrooms and other fungi eat and digest, they give off considerable heat, causing compost piles to steam and occasionally even catch fire from the trillions of tiny post-dinner bacterial farts. ...

... As the chemical decomposers make the dead organic matter a bit more malleable, the physical decomposers start to show up. Millipedes, sow bugs, springtails and snails are happy to chomp up the plants. Flies arrive bringing more bacteria to the buffet, leaving behind eggs and maggots for spiders, centipedes, mites and beetles to eat. Ants replenish the fungi, transport minerals from within and without of the pile and eat plants and insects. But the most accomplished of all the decomposers is without question the earthworm. ... These original slimy alchemists eat dirt and shit out the organic equivalent of gold: castings, also known as vermicompost. Castings enrich the soil with nitrogen, calcium, magnesium and other minerals, in addition to increasing its ability to retain water. And they attract more earthworms, too.

Speaking of alchemy, Chamberlin begins his piece elaborating a connection that has long been implicit and intuitive to me:

Alchemists were up to plenty of things, many of them having to do with relating to the natural world—and understanding its processes of transformation and transmutation—in philosophical and spiritual dimensions that transcended traditional religious thinking, both Christian and pagan, and preceded modern scientific thought. The whole “lead into gold” thing was but the most lucrative of the alchemical —or hermetic—practices in the eyes of the monarchs and rulers. Alchemy’s material prima as Peter Lamborn Wilson writes in the recent collection Green Hermeticism: Alchemy and Ecology, “can be found ‘on any dung hill.’ Hermeticism changes shit into gold.”

In short, the article suggests bridges between all kinds of things I'm interested in (see the tags/labels below), and makes a perfect capper to my reading of Amy Stewart's earthworm book, which I've been intending to write more about--and which I surely will write more about when the time is right.

Down time #2: Into the woods and on the waterfront

In our last episode, our humble narrator found himself with a rare day off and a burning desire to freeze his ass off in the wilderness, or a reasonable equivalent thereof, so he set off for Woodlawn Beach and the Buffalo and Erie County Botanical Gardens, both located in or near Lackawanna, N.Y., not far from the ruins of Bethlehem Steel and the shores of Lake Erie. We join him at the precise moment when any sane person would have called it a day. But not our hero!

The Botanical Gardens closed at 4, and it would still be light out for almost two more hours (thank you, sun-orbiting planet) so I decided to advance to Plan C and check out Tifft Nature Preserve on the way home. There's a good chance I visited Tifft at some point more than 20 years ago, but the memory is so fuzzy as to be nearly nonexistent. Here was a golden opportunity to take in more chilly scenes of winter:



Here, too, was precisely the kind of place I'd been looking for since I took a trip to the Muir Woods outside San Francisco back in the early 1980s: somewhere relatively near my home with manageable trails suitable for a non-hiker like me to explore on a whim. But not today: By this point, the temperature was dropping into the teens, and the thin gloves I was wearing did little to shield my shutter-clicking fingers from the bitter cold. I walked just far enough along the nearest muddy path to conclude this would be much more fun in warmer weather, then get nervous that one or more heavy gates would be locked before I could escape. Besides, I wasn't really feeling up to the challenge of subsisting on nuts and berries overnight. Even so, I appreciated yet another opportunity to place myself far from the madding crowd (of orchid lovers). Too bad there's no way I can include the sound of this babbling brook; the photo looks grim, but the actual site was more Currier & Ives.



This shot reminds me of those early Soviet films singing the praise of the village's new tractor:



Behold, comrades: three different kinds of compost pile!



Finally--to make up for the spartan nature of those other images up there--here's one I really find quite lovely:



Another wrong turn, this one more or less on purpose--I love taking the "wrong" road and then seeing where it will take me, although I harbor an irrational fear of South Buffalo and related areas--and I gradually made my way through the part of Buffalo that once held the notorious "Infected District," site of yet another video shoot. (I collaborate on a regular basis with a deeply demented man with a fondness for shooting footage in rustic sites on extremely cold days.) I realized it had been quite a while since I'd driven along the waterfront near the Erie Basin Marina, so I thought, what the hell? I even stayed in the car for the most part.

Thus, one final frosty vista ...



... and I was on my way back home at last--home to a new week which thus far has included dentistry, a wake, family politics, and other fun. Thank heavens for down time!

Down time #1: On the beach and under the dome

My schedule has various built-in peaks and valleys, and the last few weeks have been all peak: catchup from two weeks out of town, busy time at the day job, nightly four-hour rehearsals for a rather elaborate performance I am part of, news that my 88-year-old father's health has taken another turn for the worse, news that a beloved artist friend I've known for at least 15 years just passed away. So this weekend I really needed some serious down time--a concept I've never been entirely comfortable with. Saturday was built around sleep and low-key socializing, but Sunday I vowed to spend by myself, entirely on my own terms.

Up until recently, I would automatically have spent such times in a book or music store, at a movie or a concert, or in a gallery. I still love all those places and events, mind you, but lately I find myself wanting to go for a walk or a drive now and then--to surround myself with living things that don't speak or bite. (An artist friend whose day job is working for a community garden organization mentioned in our last conversation that he secretly prefers the company of plants to people, and I totally understand what he means.) When I got a membership to the Botanical Gardens here last year, I vowed to go there as often as possible, especially in the winter, so that's where I headed for the second time in a month.

As luck would have it, confusing signage and construction made me miss my exit, but no matter: I'd already been toying with a Plan B--heading a few miles farther down the road to Woodlawn Beach. I'd been there in the fall for the first time in a couple of decades to shoot video for another performance project, when its new(ish) nature center and boardwalk had looked intriguing. I've always been fond of beaches in off-peak seasons (down time of a different sort), so it was a treat to see Lake Erie in all its bleak wintertime severity, even though both the buildings and the boardwalk were closed.



In a few months, this shore will be filled once more (pending funding, as always) with people sunbathing and kids splashing around in the waves, but on the first day of March there were just a handful of fellow travelers (more than I expected, though) and these wind turbines, which have become a local icon in the last couple of years, bearing silent witness:



Even the trees are sparse this time of year, of course, which helped these brilliant red seedheads stand out amidst the bare branches:



Lest you think I was off in the middle of nowhere, this image pretty much puts Woodlawn in its proper context:



Mind you, it was just over 20 degrees out there, so I decided to continue on to the Gardens for their incomparable mix of rainforest humidity, arid desert air, and other forms of midwinter heat. The annual two-day Orchid Show (partial inspiration for my trip) was in its final hours, meaning the parking lot was full and the already cramped space inside was packed:



Here are a few obligatory shots of the featured attractions. (If you're looking for actual orchid info, click here.)





As it turns out, my travels for the day were hardly over yet, so stay tuned for the thrilling conclusion of "Down time," coming soon to a blog near you.

Vegas 4: Red Rock Canyon

It's surely a sign of major change in my life that, faced with a couple of unstructured days in Sin City, the two solo activities I'd seek out would both favor Nature over Culture. (Granted, I'd already seen the Strip and the Liberace Museum on an earlier trip many years ago, and besides, most everything was a half-hour drive from our spasinotel.) I've already written about one of my field trips; the other was a mere five minutes from the hocaspino, and shared its name.

After about 72 hours of noisy slot machines, smoke-filled casinos, interchangeable suburban housing developments, and motivational speakers (at the convention that had brought us to town in the first place), I was eager to head for the hills and get away from the crowds. People, people, everywhere! Envisioning solitude and a chance to contemplate my meager existence in the face of desert nothingness and the majesty of the mountains, I packed my journal, a book to read, and some water (despite the fact that I had to return the rental car and meet my husband back in the catelspa in 2 1/2 hours). So it came as a bit of a shock to discover that, first, the city of Las Vegas extends right up to the very edge of this National Conservation Area--past which they are not supposed to build--and, second, the Canyon itself, on a sunny day, can get as crowded as a shopping mall parking lot the week before Christmas. The following scene was unavoidable at almost every single turnoff along the 13-mile scenic drive:



Enough cynicism. What's everybody staring at, photographing, videotaping, and snacking in front of? Why, this, of course:


and this:

and this:


The composition of that third image is intentional, because (inspired in part by Fran Sorin's writing) I've been paying more attention lately to the way plants actually grow in the wild, especially the spacing between them. Not having much previous up-close experience of a desert, I was interested as much in the vegetation between the road and the horizon as in the mountains themselves, spectacular as the latter were:



Time did not permit me any hiking (and I'm not much of a hiker to begin with, though I appreciated the temporary visitor center's annotations of 19 trails, rating them from easy to strenuous), but I did manage to get personal with a succulent or two:



I wish there'd been more time, and fewer people, but then this is pretty much the way it goes when I hit the road. I may harbor fantasies of trekking through the mountains, but deep down I remain perfectly content to view the whole thing through a car window with some appropriately moody classical music playing, particularly when the visitor guide warns

Watch where you put your hands and feet. Rattlesnakes, scorpions, or venomous spiders may be sheltered behind boulders or under rocks and shrubs. Do not touch, collect, or try to kill these animals.

Let the record show: there are no such warnings in the Liberace Museum, though I imagine Lee faced many a rattlesnake in his time. On the other hand, the chances of getting slapped with a palimony suit in the Canyon are slim to none.

(PS. Slightly different set of photos, with value-added Unhelpful Captions, here.)

Vegas 3: Springs Preserve

Faced with the prospect of four days in Las Vegas mostly on my own, I did a little online research and turned up the Springs Preserve, a two-year-old combination nature preserve/botanical garden/hiking opportunity/playland/future home of the Nevada State Museum. I initially thought the garden portion was free--and that the whole thing was on the outskirts of town, out where our hotel/spa/casino/conference center was located. Wrong on both counts! The Preserve, which is not far at all from the Strip, will set you back nearly $20 ($4 off with AAA membership), but it was worth every penny. I spent over four hours on the site and still didn't manage to cover everything I'd hoped to. (Guess those hiking trails will have to wait till next time.) This place is immense!

My favorite way to describe Springs Preserve is with this SAT-style analogy:
SP is to the average botanical garden as Cirque du Soleil is to Ringling Bros. This is plant geekdom, Vegas style. But even to call it a garden is to distort the focus: there's a section on the Hoover Dam, a display of gila monsters and other desert critters, a million-year history of Nevada (narrated by President Martin Sheen, no less), a research library, a garden-design clinic, two gallery spaces, multiple performance venues, a locavore-focussed Wolfgang Puck (TM) restaurant, a swank gift shop, and lord knows what else.

I've posted lots of annotated photos here, but there are plenty more where those came from, so here's a mini-tour in words and pictures, starting with a rooftop overview of the entryway ...



Here's the sort of planting that greets you early on, and is omnipresent throughout:



The entire facility has a subtle, and sometimes not-so-subtle, didacticism--the punchline is basically that, hey, Vegas is in the middle of a desert and the planet is on the verge of death and thus it would behoove us all to use less water and less everything. (Works for me!)

I was happy to see a compost-themed playland for the kiddies, encouraging them to enter a simulated pile (shortly after frolicking in an actual garbage truck full of simulated trash).



Compost is also stressed in the grown-ups section, too: one display (which didn't seem to be active during my visit, but it's a great idea) demonstrated how the same plant grows in regular desert soil and in organically amended soil.

Dr. Greenthumb's Plant Hospital was closed during my visit, but I'd love to check out one of these giveaways. (There's also an annual native plant sale.)



It's all very hands-on; in one interactive display you're invited to take a drink of water ...



... and when you do, lights on the other side of a two-way window/mirror are activated and you find out just where in Vegas that water comes from, and where it goes next:



It follows, then, that even the (water-saving) bathrooms are gorgeous::



(The truly cool part--long tubes that emerge from the ceiling and send jets of water onto sinkless sponge pads--is included in the Facebook photo gallery.)

It struck me as typical of the Wild West that, once you enter the main gate, you can explore the territory any way you like. There are maps, but there's no single direction to head. You're totally on your own, free to create your own "experience," as heavy or light on gadgetry as you desire.

I've got even more to say about this place, so watch for future posts. And start planning your own trip.

Vegas 2: Real or Fake?

Time for another exciting round of everyone's favorite Vegas quiz show, "Real or Fake?" It's your call, contestants, as we try to sort out the simulated sights from the homegrown ones in a desert town obsessed with both perfection and water conservation, starting with the plant (?) life (?) outside our hotel ...



... the foyers leading into each room ...



... and planters in the lobby ....



Next, on to the Mirage (also home of Siegfried and Roy's Secret Garden, which we'll omit for this round) ...



... before wrapping up tonight's episode with an easy one :



Thanks for playing, folks, and remember: there are no right or wrong answers, only True ones and False ones.

Only in the Las Vegas Airport

I"m not suggesting that the baggage claim section of the Vegas airport (which looks exactly like a casino, btw) is the only place in the world you can find a vending machine dispensing fresh cut flowers, but it's the only airport baggage claim section I've ever seen that features such a machine.

Two, in fact.

"I am the water that joins your land to other lands"

I saw a performance by the wacky Spanish performance group La Fura Dels Baus ("Rats from the Sewer" to you) almost 20 years ago in a gigantic, then-abandoned movie studio in Queens. Found it simultaneously fascinating and a little empty, as I recall. Mostly I remember performers emerging from the ceiling and then chasing us around with chainsaws or something, and a guy in a huge fishtank. (For the record, they were on the cutting edge of that whole suspended-from-the-ceiling craze, which is now so ubiquitous that I caught some other wacky performance group doing it during one of the Inauguration Day balls on the way to a commercial break on NBC. No chainsaws or fish/human hybrids, though.)

Tonight I stumbled upon a YouTube video of excerpts from a much more recent outdoor performance by LFDB. Judging from brief snippets of other pieces, it looks like they've gone in a more Cirque du Soleil direction of late, although this one is not in that mode so much, and the English-language text makes the political/ecological theme way more explicit than what I saw all those years ago. (Visually and verbally, it's not that far from the recent Day the Earth Stood Still remake. Check out the Gort!) Feel free to fast-forward now and then, but prepare to be dazzled:



Spectacle on this scale often evokes fascism to me, but then these folks' parents and grandparents lived through the real thing, so who am I to talk? There's one moment where you see that the seedlike dots in one huge, vaguely flowerlike form are actually human beings, which made me think of this blog title I love so much.

Everything in its right place

I was a fan of the print version of Arthur, and just wrote about its (hopefully temporary) demise on my music blog a couple of weeks ago. In the meantime, I've grown fond of its blog, Magpie, which is still going strong. The focus of both is broad: mostly ultra-indie music, but there's also a fair amount about theater, psychedelic culture, visual art, politics, and other loosely interconnected subjects--dubbed "homegrown counterculture" in a shout-out to an earlier wave of organic gardening and wispy bearded folkie singer-songwriters (both of which are now popular again with The Kids Today).

Even so, I was taken by surprise by this Magpie entry exhorting readers in frigid NYC to visit the Brooklyn Botanic Gardens (especially on a Tuesday, when it's free).

For one thing, given the mag's neo-hippie vibe, I had always assumed it was based out west somewhere. But what really took me aback was the sight of a site I've always linked to music suddenly addressing another, more recent passion of mine. Talk about crossover! It's funny: since at least the late 70s I've devoted my energies to trying to bring things together, to blur or ignore boundaries, to search for connections (between people, between ideas) instead of differences--but when I started blogging, it seemed wiser (or at least simpler) to separate out my diverse interests (music here, gardening here, one kind of performance I'm involved with here, a personal/political account of getting married here, and so on) rather than trying to lump them all together. And then along comes something from the music pigeonhole advising me to "spend some time communing with the cacti, ferns, and bromeliads." Crazy!

As luck would have it, I'll actually be in New York next week, though a bit too busy on Tuesday for a visit. But after paying a too-brief visit to Buffalo's equivalent a few days back, I'm awfully tempted to find some way to the BBG during my stay. I was only there once, back in the early 80s, and was even contemplating a return trip the other day.

Who knows--maybe they even sell CDs in the gift shop.

Art gardens, past and present

Nice segment on this past weekend'sVictory Garden (a rerun, I'm sure, but I hadn't seen it before) offering a tour of Cornerstone Gardens in Sonoma, CA. Never been, but this quick glimpse certainly makes me want to plan a trip out west.

With its assemblage of outdoor installations fusing "nature" and "culture"--or "gardening" and "art"--Cornerstone also makes me wax nostalgic about the late 70s/early 80s heyday of Artpark, about 20 minutes away from me in Lewiston, NY. (The place is still there, mostly as a music and theater venue, but it's a shadow of what it once was--a state park where every summer you could find folks like Chris Burden and Vito Acconci working away on large, one-of-a-kind pieces.) The principle difference between the two organizations seems to be that, from what I could tell on tv and the website, Cornerstone's 17 or so installations are intended to stick around for the long haul, while the majority of those at Artpark (with some notable exceptions) were only made to last a single summer. In that regard, you might think of Cornerstone as a museum with a permanent collection, while Artpark was more like a contemporary gallery. Or perhaps you could think of the content of the former as perennials and the latter as mainly annuals.

While show host Jamie Drury and venue founder Chris Hougie talk a lot about blurring the lines between visual art and living things, and they refer to the individual works as "gardens" rather than "installation," most of the works at Cornerstone as VG portrayed it seem quite clearly to be art about plants, in many cases involving little or no organic plant material, as opposed to plant art. I'm not familiar with any of the artists, landscape architects, designers, and others who have created "gardens" at Cornerstone, so I appreciate the fact that the somewhat skimpy descriptions of their work on the main site are supplemented with links to their own sites. That way I can learn more about, say, Pamela Burton's recessed "Earth Walk" and other projects of hers.