Last Year’s Chinese Garden Trip – Modified

Posted on March 25, 2013 by Steve

The Sun came out today in Portland. Bar none, every man and woman Jack and Jill made their ways outside just to feel the strangeness. I took my standard half day trip to the Pearl District and the Portland Chinese Garden.

Remarkable stuff happened there.

(enlarge pictures by clicking on them)

For examples, ducks were born overnight – or during the morning…….. Check the little pile of brand new ‘expanded family’ under the yellow Kerria. Enlarged is best.

We got a splendidly elegant visit from a big Blue Heron……who swooped on in magnificently as we watched.

He preened for the multitude, shamelessly……….and we were quite grateful. What a gorgeous bird.

There have been some trees added since we worked on making this garden. Naturally, time and weather, accidents and bad luck accompany the lives of plants here, just like real life. But the exquisite care and thought put into the updated plantings must have been thrilling for those responsible for replacements. They have done well indeed.

This weeping tree illustrates perfectly my point. What a stunning decision and oh how correct this setting, seen here in a closer perspective than above. This is a brand new plant for this aficionado and I am very captivated by its placement.

The pathways and surfaces of this splendid garden have always riveted my attention. I recall when they were first being installed, how the Chinese workers would be such intense studies in concentration but who also showed a stunning skill and speed. The failure of the first walkways to pass the City Inspection grabbed everyone’s attention. Having installed perhaps 300 square feet of surface, the indentations between the small pebbles were ruled “too deep” (at 1/4 inch) for wheelchair comfort. While we gnashed our teeth at having to see such a marvelous product literally ripped out – some was merely grouted deeper – the Chinese workers remained cheery and philosophical and simply went back to work with a new template. And asked for another cigarette, lol.

Below, we have a superb planter with utter professionalism extended to not just the choice of plant – a Wysteria, of course – but in it’s classical stylistic pruning and placement. This is beyond the Bonzai look – more utilitarian in releasing it to achieve a larger influence – and perfectly set against the amazing wood-working of the entire garden. The wood finishes are an absolute highlight anyway.

As yet another splendid example of the obsession with uncommonly gorgeous classical Chinese wood-working, check out this indoor section of the garden and the superb little chair and table set in the little building designed to look like a barge afloat in the lake.

I’m just having fun with diverse images at present, focusing on just a few little delights I encountered. I will post yet more pictures tomorrow and probably the next day. Lord knows I took enough pictures – I think something like 127 while there. 😉

Needless to say, it’s one of my favorite-ever pastimes, this garden, and a huge treat I indulge in every visit.

Here’s a gorgeous Crabapple I obviously couldn’t get enough of. I just absolutely adore the bloom color, to say nothing of the setting.

Nice, isn’t it?

Told you I adored it.

There are innumerable newer plants with whom I am not that familiar, such as this beauty below.

A strictly personal note: When I visit here, I almost always tend to recall my incomplete plant knowledge, having invested so much of my landscaping history into the processes of actually getting to the point of finishing rather than of relishing the finishing itself. Yes, it has become lazy of me to express so little interest in plant types – nor is it true at all, not really. The right plant in the right place – and their stunning diversity – is a thrill of its own.

My crews were less than pleased finishing jobs with me on the sites we worked. Ha ha, finally, they forced me off the site, onto the next place, just to be rid of all my angst. An unfortunate factor of my construction persona was always about how epic-ally well I began projects and how frustrated I was at the always-slow process of finishing. I have often hired appropriately, using some ‘human backhoe’ with me at the next start and leaving experienced and more patient people to finish up.

Yet another gorgeous beauty of an early bloomer –

Finally, today, a word about the “windows” in to this little slice of Paradise. The following 3 pictures are taken from the sidewalk outside the garden. As one can readily see, each opening is unique, offering a fresh peek into the courtyard, hinting superbly to what interesting things lie inside.

Blooms, water, foliage and even the patterns on the windows themselves are just a terrific example of how special the designers wanted this city block in such a busy down town area to be.

Seasonally different yet promising, the views from these spaces were always designed to be alluring and tempting to step inside and experience the Peace and Serenity which is emitted from every single item of this great urban space.

Ruminations On Work

Posted on March 21, 2013 by Steve

This post was made a while back. For those who wonder, it shocks me to think I began my book project that long ago. It has become something more than I thought it would, for the record – and it makes my original expectations about the difficulty of getting it right pale in comparison to what my more developed expectations are now. Much of the free time I envisioned did not completely pan out, either, as the need to make a living has often intruded into periods of intense and productive writing. At any rate, this post was written to honor work itself – it’s own sets of trials and successes. I still honor work and I shall always hope hard work is rewarded in kind.

There are also lessons in here for those who feel confused about career advancement in an era requiring so much more sheer adaptability. It’s astounding how few of us will end up in the direction we began. It once was that a farmer knew where he was going. For a few generations, factory personnel in company towns well knew what was in store in their golden years. They could accumulate toys and friends pointing to all that, should they survive their work. This no longer applies. That fact speaks loudly to our present modern circumstances. We will all become more creative and far, far less certain of our individual and collective futures. The world went and changed.

I’m making a prolonged stab at writing a book. I was approached to put something together for my old high school coach, Jack Hicks (who I featured right here in this Blog, click here for the link to it) and I may very well proceed with that, even congruently with the current project. I have a respect for Jack and for sports in general – and even for my sports-mad former hometown of Owensboro, Kentucky – which are somewhere outside the average envelope.

I have recently felt a bit of a ‘higher calling’ in a sense, in choosing to write on another subject – landscaping – about which I am so familiar. I will write to explain its ups and downs, ins and outs and to present the trade itself in as honest a picture as I can draw. I do it for a variety of reasons, among which are to present this interesting trade to young people who might consider it as a trade and career option. I hope it gets some attention because I do believe what I can offer is a sort of blueprint of expectations in as many ways as I am allowed to present.

Like anything, we gain most from the people we associate with. I believe it was Will Rogers who said “the best way to become smart is to hang out with smarter people.” This has been my way and I have to suspect it will never change. The one way in which I do feel quite intelligent is in dealing with the entire concept of “work”. In the end, development in any trade requires the application of energy and the absorption of the lessons from our everyday experiences. The slow curing of a landscaper encompasses so many various trades and weirdly-connected abilities, it’s nearly mind-boggling in its entirety. But, above all, hard work is what one takes from this field, no matter what level one eventually reaches.

So, in this particular edition of philosophizing, there’s really nothing fancy here. This is about work. It’s about our perceptions of work and how we value it. If I never contributed anything else in this life, my body of work and my relationship to it would stand as my most forceful feelings on our mutual human existence I could ever imagine. I feel that work is such an integral part of our existence that it becomes literally heroic and worthy of all the praise we can find to lavish upon it.

No one has ever asked me more than I have asked myself why I stuck with a trade which consists – even at the top – of such enormous quantities of hard physical labor. I have felt a failure so many times, at every turn in this working history of mine. Yet, when I look back at this life and times, I find moments of such exalted clarity of purpose and literal accomplishment, it humbles me.

Here then is a passage recently worked on towards that end:

The arrogance of writing…………presumes one has something to say which will be of interest or have meaning to others. Let’s face it, it’s either that or else it is pure speculation based on a egotistic, self-congratulatory technique of little originality and even less profundity. Vanity is a highly dangerous solipsism and it somehow seems an unfortunately perfect analogy in that case. It requires a strict judgement to discern the difference.A perspective which can make the mundane seem thrilling is the alchemy most writers seek. One accomplishes this by ingratiating oneself into the passions of others, then extrapolating a known reward for a perceived mutually-rewarding projection. Facts, in non fictional writing, become a currency of highest merit, made alive by good writing.

Actual history then follows as a means of illustrating a felt picture of events and premises which refer to the theme at hand.Presenting a life in a trade which is probably beset with a ratio of 70% hard labor to an audience wherein labor itself has become not just undervalued but literally pilloried as an unintelligent career option just seems wantonly self-destructive. Americans have a love/hate relationship with work at this sort of level. It is often humiliating owing to the values we have somehow become most familiar with. The constant refrain demeaning “ditch diggers” being somehow “less than” educated office personnel is a meme of decades-old consistency. It’s as if the truth of hard-working Americans being the the backbone of the world’s most productive economic engine is some form of myth. One has to wonder if this attitude indeed has led to our own self-destruction, implicitly disregarding hard work as somehow useless and defective, simply because of the effort required.We attend self-help seminars by the hundreds, where we are told of “attitudes” and perspectives which will make us more successful, as if some magical mental elixer allows us to bypass what has worked so well in he past. Suddenly, beset with Mental Coaches and Spiritual Advisors, we find ourselves “pumped up” with quasi-mystical solutions to what are actually the simplest problems we could possibly face.

A trade such as Landscaping can be an unappealing trade when one considers the sheer level of labor involved. And, make no mistake, there are days and even weeks in landscaping where it seems truly endless – the constancy of wheelbarrowing materials into back yards with tiny gates, really bad weather from too hot to too cold, rain, snow, wind. Any assessment of landscaping as a career option should include all this. There are minor and, unfortunately, sometimes major injuries. Backs need attention almost daily, simply as cautionary provisions regarding survival and long term health. We stretch, those of us who know, so that the effort required and our often-straining output keeps us strong and healthy.

Make no mistake: those who landscape can be the strongest and healthiest. Working outdoors, far from being a severe sentence for the mentally-deficient, offers a level of oxygen, ozone and pure heart-pounding pleasure that even those who relish so little of it in their explanations of the trade, continue to show up for work, to entertain one another and regale their peers and captains with the standard humors and bad witticisms which are the province of the completely wry. There is a quiet acceptance of an endorphin high one reaches 2-3 times a day which makes for a ‘drug experience’ of ineffable self-production. The same high runners experience – and athletes of all kinds – perform a like process in landscaping, offering surprising mutual experiences which are nearly embarrassing in their felt effects. It makes for a muted, odd and rewarding sensation not experienced by everyone and is humbling in gratitude. I have often thought Walt Whitman’s great and memorable poem –“I Sing The Body Electric” was written for us guys in “the trade”…..

”

I know a man, a common farmer—the father of five sons;
And in them were the fathers of sons—and in them were the fathers of sons.

This man was of wonderful vigor, calmness, beauty of person;	35
The shape of his head, the pale yellow and white of his hair and beard, and the immeasurable meaning of his black eyes—the richness and breadth of his manners,
These I used to go and visit him to see—he was wise also;
He was six feet tall, he was over eighty years old—his sons were massive, clean, bearded, tan-faced, handsome;
They and his daughters loved him—all who saw him loved him;
They did not love him by allowance—they loved him with personal love;	40
He drank water only—the blood show’d like scarlet through the clear-brown skin of his face;
He was a frequent gunner and fisher—he sail’d his boat himself—he had a fine one presented to him by a ship-joiner—he had fowling-pieces, presented to him by men that loved him;
When he went with his five sons and many grand-sons to hunt or fish, you would pick him out as the most beautiful and vigorous of the gang.

You would wish long and long to be with him—you would wish to sit by him in the boat, that you and he might touch each other.

I really adore that passage of that brilliant celebration of Man and Woman Kind. Whitman humbles us all in his frank appraisal that work is noble and healthy.The respect from earned accomplishment has no peer in my lexicon of achievements. I believe it can be the hallmark of character as well. The efforts and accomplishments form our legacies and they outlive us. The beauty of soil and its amazing and totally predictable products – of the art of design itself – and the work of amusement and labor are the game we play. It is as if being human sometimes seems unfair to our original assumptions, at times. Like a cosmic joke, our sufferings become something more, ennobled by caution and the conservatism of the March of Time and of Education.

Drainage Issues in a Landscape

Posted on March 11, 2013 by Steve

Today – this morning – I was thinking about how lucky I am to have the friends, the family I have and the life I have led. I reckon I have dodged my share of dreadful misfortune. I mean, I have also had some of that. But I am still lucky. Who knows what I truly deserved, in the end. My essential Denial is handy and applicable here, and I am sticking with that.

It’s just a sentiment, in the end, nothing more. But I suspect I also live for sentiment. Tacky, simple-minded and a clumsy attempt to love others around me and to compel them to love me, I am not sure I care whether someone doesn’t care for all that. I am stubborn in my resolve to spread some emotion.

So, if you have come this far, and if you don’t retch over emotionalism, cue up this tune as you read about the cut and “not-so-dried” logic behind water and what it’ll do to you if you are not paying attention. Multi-task with me for a bit……………

All the pictures in this post enlarge with a click, providing great detail and explain as much as the words themselves. The problem is if you click while the song is going on, the music will stop. Yes, this is a true First World Problem!

Hey – come back to them later. 😉

Back to water – here’s a wee bit of it now! Thank you, Hokusai!!

How nasty would this scene look in your front lawn?

Recent storms here in Louisville have acquainted me with some local issues of drainage which some folks encounter with real regularity and sometimes even sad results. The one interesting similarity that the local climate has with, say, a desert town like Reno, Nevada where I also labored, is in the occasional deluge. In the North West, the “deluge” lasts 7 months – it is just consistently raining, often all day resulting in a quarter of half inch of accumulation – certainly enough to get you wet and definitely enough (take it from yours truly) to make real honest-to-Gosh mud. Oh, it can get serious. They sometimes get a 2 inch day. But we recently had a 7 inch day here in Louisville and it didn’t even rain all day! We’re talking rain drops that could pull a covered wagon – or destroy one.

It brings to mind efforts we always considered in our constructions. Where the heck does the water go? In these days when lawsuits over property lines commence at the drop of a hat, water and retaining it on one’s property have become more and more important. There are regions where people have been sued over their neighbor’s lack of control of their property’s run off – and, the truth is, it’s honestly the way it should be.

I once did a huge project of 10 acres where the uphill neighbor lost control of his retention of water and it resulted in the flooding of nearly everything we had constructed down below. The place was inundated with torrents of mud and debris, ruining about 3 months worth of hard work. I should also add – it got expensive. Fortunately, we were able to redo it to some degree but we now faced an additional concern of the event happening again, no matter what the neighbor tried in his attempt to resolve the issue for the future.

These events happen. What I always strove for was some element of control which could somehow pre-empt the worst results . It could mean virtually over building a project. Even using real, real big machinery. 😉

In places where new developments flourished and bumped into each other in the process, like Reno, the land provided is nearly wholly flat with bare percentages of fall, generally 1-2 %. This required some creative solutions which often ended up being interesting landscaping special effects, introducing dry creek beds into the mix in a hopeful bit of artistic style.

Sometimes these small drain courses intersect in a strange bit of mating complexity, forming junctions and joining forces to conduct water away from homes.

Take a look at this patio as we approached the base-rock elements for the eventual pavers to go above. Note the number of pipes involved – and bear in mind, this is very flat land, nothing like he dimensions of re-working and over building that occurred at the more problematic site above.

Notice the larger pipes in this picture, both black ones and white ones. (Smaller pipes, of course, are for something else, either irrigation or conduits for electrical services.) The 4 white pipes nearer to the home are drain pipes which either catch the rain from gutters or else catch the water we channel to them via this drain system shown below called a “channel drain” – where we purposefully slope the bricks away from the home into the drain, or else do the same, back from the pool.

In many ways, it is – hopefully – deceptive in that every single inch of that patio is engineered around the concept of where the water will end up when it comes down. What seems an imperceptible slope really does function as a most-vital conductor of water. Here’s another perspective:

Indeed, even the driest landscape effects – pure desert looks – must be drainage-aware. This meandering dry creek reveals our efforts to plumb even the most inhospitable-appearing plot of land into a manageable and drainable situation.

And here, it runs the other way, in a virtual loop, both systems draining back yard ground water collected from rainfalls and snow melt down, around the home and into the street out front.

In landscaping, literally everything slopes. Water is truly The Man. It determines so much more than meets the eye. Stuff like those pipes shown above represent a day’s work, some definite expense and will never be seen after the pavers are placed. It is also one of the many reasons one tells a client – “Landscaping is 80% preparation and 20% finishing.” We make messes but we actually don’t do it for pure recreation.

Well, most don’t anyway. 😉

The Role Of Landscaping – And The Future

Posted on March 5, 2013 by Steve

What is the role of what we call Landscaping?

It’s an intriguing question and one that gets bandied about now and then by observers and those involved in the field itself. Guys like me. In the end, there are only a few perspectives available in the most general sense. One argument seems to admit the role of “Beautification” as the penultimate goal, seemingly assuming that there are cultural and intellectual advantages in “Beauty”. While I can’t argue that, I am one who believes there is a far more universal impact even yet to landscaping. I just feel assigning Landscaping to a cosmetic existence, while somewhat accurate, honestly misses the larger point.

When we take in the larger effects of landscaping – such as dealing with Urban Planning, for example – we cross a threshold into judgments as to whether the cities we live in are toxic in any form or fashion. When we then analyze what this toxicity really means, we find that many cities began and unfolded almost completely unplanned. What happened was that the rush to Industrialization begat more crowded cities as people desired to live near where they worked. Naturally, transportation was always an issue as well, from the days of the individual horse, the buggy, the trolley and to the currently very ubiquitous car.

Of course sometimes we hearken for those Olden Days 😉 even amidst modern ones………

In the late 1800’s, urban planning began taking flight in the US as towns and cities began realizing what a complete cluster they had inherited. Entire city plans were then bid, submitted and enacted, impacting hugely cities like Louisville, Montreal, Baltimore and many others.

Suddenly, sensible plans began emerging on how to get humans from one point to another, because the plans included such provisions. Also, the development of the City Park became seen as absolutely necessary. Why?

Isn’t that “just landscaping”?

It turns out, certain general criterion began appearing as absolutes in the “livability” of cities. A useful guide in this enterprise is Kevin Lynch’s A Theory of Good City Form (Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 1981). Lynch offers five basic dimensions of city performance: vitality, sense, fit, access, and control. To these he adds two “meta-criteria,” efficiency and justice.

As Cliff Ellis opines here:

“For Lynch, a vital city successfully fulfils the biological needs of its inhabitants, and provides a safe environment for their activities. A sensible city is organized so that its residents can perceive and understand the city’s form and function. A city with good fit provides the buildings, spaces, and networks required for its residents to pursue their projects successfully. An accessible city allows people of all ages and background to gain the activities, resources, services, and information that they need. A city with good control is arranged so that its citizens have a say in the management of the spaces in which they work and reside.”

Pretty dry stuff, but it applies.

The Future

The picture below also dealt with something to add to the 5th largest city in Japan – Sapporo. What designer Isamu Noguchi was asked to do was to produce a vision, reclaiming what was once the garbage landfill on the finished site shown below, which is now the world-famous Moerenuma Park. It was one of his final projects and a very noteworthy one.

Noguchi called this park a “lung”. The presence of air-cleaning and ion-producing carbon-based plantings cause not just an innate sense of space and beauty, they also tend to act to make us plain healthier, both mentally and physically. It seems we crave such things, dating undoubtedly from our origins as land walkers, nomads and hunters. We surely crave them with a near-visceral sense of attachment. Speak with any older group of baseball fans from Brooklyn or Boston and among the first things you’ll hear is how luscious the fields looked at ball games. The grass was literally nearly and end in itself.

Here, in this futuristic park, the contrived features resemble ancestral images, while at the same time – at least here – promoting a futuristic sense of possibility. The clean lines of this pyramid remind us of what is timeless in design and most attractive in dimension. The smells alone would make it pretty.

Recently, Huaxi, China held a confab inviting the world’s best young architects to devise individual buildings which could comprise the new elements of the already-celebrated city. From the event: “The site of Huaxi is famous for its dramatic and beautiful landscape, as well as a diverse mix of minority cultural inhabitants during its history. Its future is defined by the local government’s urban planning as a new urban centre for finance, cultural activities and tourism. MAD brought the young architects together here in the summer of 2008, for a 3-day workshop to create an experimental urban vision for Huaxi.”

What they came up with was wild:

Their question: “Are we going to continue copying the skyline of Western cities created over a hundred years of industrial civilisation? Will Manhattan and Chicago continue to be our model city, even after 15 years of urban construction in China? Is there an alternative future for our cities that lies in the current social condition, where new technologies leave the machine age behind, and where the city increasingly invades the natural space? Based on an Eastern understanding of nature, this joint urban experiment aims to explore whether we can use new technologies and global ideas to reconnect the natural and man-made world.”

Let’s face it – it;s not as if efforts to get to exactly this end have not proceeded apace. Frank Gehry’s designs for buildings and grounds show exactly the same non-conforming principles as those wildly “impractical” designs from the MAD Group of Huaxi.

Except for this –

Frank Gehry’s actually already exist!

Do they ever!

Also from the Huaxi Group’s statements: “In the past 15 years, around 10 billion sqm of built space has been created in the urban areas of China. In 20 years time, another 200 to 400 new cities will be built. Until now, the results of this overwhelming urbanization have been defined by high-density, high-speed and low-quality duplication: the urban space is meaningless, crowded and soulless.”

“The city is no longer determined by the leftover logic of the industrial revolution (speed, profit, efficiency) but instead follows the ‘fragile rules’ of nature.”

Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain.

The Walt Disney Concert Hall in downtown Los Angeles:

An apartment complex by Gehry:

The paradigm seems to be shifting yet again and this time the most fervent hope is to provide alternatives to the prior style of efficient function, elevating us all into an appreciation for Nature’s intrinsic delicate nature, embodied by – of all things – the buildings around us and their grounds. Nature is also accidental, cruel, aristocratic and occasionally homely. It’s just the way it is. Integrating Truth into everyday passages asks us to provide a Nature which is every bit as inspiring and dominating as nature herself.

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Monthly Archives: March 2013

Last Year’s Chinese Garden Trip – Modified

Ruminations On Work

Drainage Issues in a Landscape

The Role Of Landscaping – And The Future