Accidental Tourism – Part Two

Posted on September 29, 2015 by Steve

As a pageant, football has few rivals. And high school football has its very own style, especially in growing small towns still large enough to have 3 other major rival high schools. Bands, cheerleaders, big dances after, all the somewhat drunk or just fun-loving friends going purposefully loco, already in party mode, City fathers, businessmen and their families, families of teachers and girl friends – just packed with respect for and and enjoying participation as good fans of the team. Cheering for them. Good times. 😉

This is the part where I discover my 155 pound self at Owensboro Senior High wearing pads, a helmet and curiously enduring the weird surprise of finding my ankles being taped in serious manner by the team manager, minutes before one of those Friday Night football games. Having endured the “game meal” with the other guys – super dry burnt steak and other forgettable tasteless items – in the cafeteria and having hung out for long hours, just laying down and relaxing to an illegal degree which a home game allows – the forced relaxation of the powers that be – and then finally the lights come on, a crowd can be detected and we run out onto the field to wild applause.

(I remember thinking how the crowd often seemed to determine the play, which I know is bunk, but the sheer scale of this event seems so overwhelming at times. It’s a pretty awesome experience – like a shower of manna on an apprehensive head and shoulders – and which seems to gift an unparalleled ferocity when it is required. It also awards a feeling of invincibility, for better or worse. These are your 100% moments. For real, some of the accomplishments of players are way beyond what they do in practices.)

I touched the ball in actual games 3 times as a high school football player. I caught a pass and ran back two kickoffs, one of them opening a game in Tell City which I ran back 45 yards. We were rather, ahem, run-oriented with Dicky Moore and Frank Chambers in the backfield. One would gain 200 yards in a game and the next week, the other one would. We basically battered teams into the ground. Even weirder is the fact that our other back, a guy named Wee Wee Moorman, weighed 220 pounds and could run with the force of the sun. Wee Wee was the biggest guy on the team. I know his body well – these guys are who I tackled in practice for 2 long years. Scrimmages were live in practice and “game situations” were always played. 1st and 10, 3rd and long – that sort of thing.

Here is what football taught me: The human thigh is the biggest and baddest muscle in the human body. Tackling guys like our very excellent backs who were the dual offensive feature of that team – as well as tackling Wee Wee – took place 2-3 times a week in live, full-on, vicious scrimmages. The only compliments one got on defense were for hard hits and bring downs, smiling while the guy in charge of blocking you got chewed out for screwing up. It gets a bit contagious. Memories of practices are fairly vivid actually, at least generally. I remember dirty white practices jerseys, complete with some remnants of soil already earned. I remember developing strategies for facing these running backs, playing as either a safety or cornerback in the practice defense. I remember my first collision with Dickie, facing an incredible force which hit me lots harder than I hit it. I bounced off of him but managed to catch his foot and trip him. I thought it was fairly creative of me. It was always a mnemonic highlight for me, that little series. Like a hidden secret but real success.

The first time I got either knocked out or just slobberknocked into and out of the pain world was actually in junior high when I broke my nose courtesy of a middle linebacker as I ran the ball up the middle and who hit me in the face mask, lol – with his. I have been knocked “woozey” a few times. It seems to me to be the nature of the game. But the King of My Hits came in a game in Louisville, played at Atherton High. We played Louisville St. Xavier, a state power at the time.

For some reason or other I started the game on a defensive kickoff. I remember feeling strange. As we kickoff and the ball settles into the returner’s – Dicky Lyons of UK and Oakland Raider fame – hands, the play develops where my man somehow got completely lost and I found myself facing a dude packing the ball, coming straight at me. I ran forward and launched myself into him, head-on. I made the tackle – I hit him right solid on the thigh -.and someone said I got all sorts of props for doing it running back to the bench.

But I wasn’t there.

I remember next seeing the time left on the clock from the sidelines and wondering where the first quarter went. I had been out on my feet for a half hour at least. It was a completely weird situation and then the coach called my name and back out I went. I couldn’t shake the weirdness, but I played OK and quite a lot in a tight battle that we lost, 13-7.

On the ride back in the team bus, I remember I faced a serious anxiety about vulnerability. I felt incredibly alone. My head began hurting about halfway through the ride and it stayed that way for the next day. That collision began my divorce from the sport, which I formalized my senior year, quitting the team at the start of practices.

I never even mentioned it, aside from telling my friends how weird it felt. I actually considered it normal – which it was, lol, among players – but I remember the resulting anxiety to this day. I remember Coach Gerald Pointer had someone go out and find me following my not reporting for play at the start of my senior year. I was definitely penciled in as a starter. Ironically, I was playing around at baseball with friends at the Wesleyan diamond when Jimmy Musick rode up and told me the coach wanted to see me. (We had just that week finished a long and fairly successful American Legion baseball season, losing in the State Final to Ashland). When I got in front of the coaching staff at our practice headquarters, Coach Poynter (who I have always liked immensely unto this very day), went ahead and asked why I didn’t report.

“I’m a baseball player, coach.” Then I smiled (like a real baseball player would). 😉

I looked them all right in the face and I told them that I was investing in something I do well. I don’t want to get hurt for playing a sport I really don’t much like in the first place. I mentioned I like the team and that hurt the most about quitting.

They gave me a pass. They listened and understood. I have zero bad feelings about any of them – to the contrary.

My father, however, was incensed, and probably more because he knew I had made what he thought was a rash decision all on my own. The truth is, that’s true. Before I sat in front of the coaches, my decision on the matter may have been 2 hours old. But it truly came from the heart, that’s all I can say.

I had a great fall, doing things normal people do, lol. I even got a job pumping gas. Marcia Roby and I made a few road games together. Good times. 😉

at least until baseball season. 😉

Regional Blooms – My Favorites

Posted on September 21, 2015 by Steve

Landscaping for me has been an inter-regional experience. From my origins in the trade dating from 1971 in Vancouver, BC, to my move to California in 1985, to Reno, Nevada just after the Quake, lol, interspersed with Portland, Oregon a couple of times, I have encountered widely varied climates and geologies. Discovering the “fault lines” of zonal horticultural tolerances never had a more avid experimenter. Sometimes, of course, this might happen by accident.

(Click to enlarge)

Grasses might seem like a strange introduction to “bloom designing”, but color in a landscape is everything. Note also, a splendid shape also satisfies the senses. Mixed with exotic coloring, grasses are absolutely the equal of any bloom, anywhere.

Above………………..This gorgeous Purple Fountain Grass performed as an annual in Reno, dying out – literally – as the cold, dry Winters there reduced their distribution to “annual-type” plantings. A hardier version, of course, has been hybridized since I was roaming the dirt at my old pace. But what I found to lessen the pain was courtesy of Francis – I began replacing the Purple Fountain Grasses with “Muhley Grass” – an exceptionally satisfying alternative. Time and experience taught me much – including some face-saving error replacement. 😉

Planted even just casually to take up some space, this grass became a huge favorite of mine, offering an incredible and long-lasting hot pink bloom for – often – a couple of months at a time.

The Northwest US and Canada

Amateur climatoligists and horticulturists are often amazed at the immense diversity of available plantings in what would seem cold and hostile Northwest environments. Everyone of course understands the “rain issues” as a given there, but what they may miss is the moderate nature of the climate in general. It rarely freezes hard owing to a benign ocean current which is not only responsible for bringing clouds and rain, but also for keeping Winter temperatures far more moderate than those of their cousins to the East.

Yes, there is a definite season of Winter, involving very cool temperatures and a ton of rainfall for long months, but what results is a horticultural Heaven. The mad insane tampering with rhododendron hybrids of the English for a few centuries, fresh from the exports of Tibetan color, where the rhodies do not just bloom the local native purple of the United States, have resulted in absolutely stunning bloomage.

Such a wild variety of color splashes lasting weeks is the Springtime unfolding of the Northwest floral bounty.

Other plants join in forcefully, as they mature as street trees and border plantings…………

Here, a venerable Vancouver side street shows off its street plantings in dramatic fashion:

Actually, Vancouver is nearly over planted in Springtime blooms, if such a thing can be said.

The classical mixes easily with the ultra-modern, as Vancouver so often presents………..

Reno also has a mad love affair with blooming Cherries and Chinese Pears, especially along the River Walk..

I have added to Reno’s affair with blooms in designs of my own:

I have always tended to plan for “the profuse” look at blooms in projects of my design. I enjoy experimenting with variegated plantings, mixed with off color conifers like Atlas Blue Cedars. Variety, sometimes aroma-driven depict my own personal style, an amalgam of experience and shameless puttering.
That’s it for now……….I’ll fly away soon………

I mean, there are so many options out there….which way to go??

Great Walls

Posted on September 15, 2015 by Steve

Not of China, although that is sure a great wall.

(I have adapted an older post into what follows in a bit more detail. Please note that one can click on the pictures themselves to enlarge them.)

No, these walls are of a smaller niche, involving landscaping and the pressing need at times to fit structures into our dwindling resources of available land. More and more impossible building sites are becoming completely practical as we erect structures which can hold back and cut into slopes, rendering them usable. They result in a raised area, flat and of planes with which we can live.

Some most unusual solutions have arrived which now not only perform the task of extending a building’s footprint but which also extend or reduce an area to be landscaped. They can also end up looking fascinating. This stacked concrete block wall at the University of Oregon’s Athletic Complex is rather ultra-modern in that it replicates the roughness of natural rock in purposefully random ways and yet is engineered on the back side completely perfectly. This look is a bit bizarre, I admit fully, but I enjoy the effort, if nothing else.

The changing levels of a landscape provide an interesting counterpart to the more mundane roads and walks of our lives, offering visual interest as well as often featuring the walls themselves as art. Traditional dry-stacked native rock walls are a technology as old as society itself. From prehistory until now, gorgeous examples of this technological social skill exist on every continent. Modern landscapers have resurrected this low-tech formula into some really beautiful wall series. Here’s one I took part in. It’s purpose, too, was to extend the landscape out from the home level and then drop the 3-4 feet to another flat plane of lawn and green, lush color in a warm contrast of natural textures. Other walls made of rock have similar purposes in function but often offer almost breathtaking purely artistic license………hilariously and rewarding tweaks on the theme. Michael Eckerman of Santa Cruz, California provides scintillating river and coastal rock edifices of breathtaking form and function. A true stone mason unlike myself, Michael has pioneered his own art form in stone in ways which we can only admire. Michael approaches his walls with a deepest love for the Ocean in mind, being a Santa Cruz surfer boy at heart. His sense of crashing waves and moving surf is evinced in all his work from a certain period and thence morphed into the concept of motion in general, later on. But I can hear the ocean in his retaining walls built in the hills surrounding Santz Cruz! A closer look………… From the sublime to the more normal, we visit a modern development in wall-building which has made life yet easier by substantial degrees. The preformed cement wall block has been engineered to perform incredible feats of retention and grade changing. It is somewhat “plastic” in its ability to meander along the lines of whimsy as well, providing landscapers wonderful opportunities to soften lines and to create more pleasing environments. Below are a couple of angles on a Reno project we did, from the start to a more finished look.

Other cement wall edifices performed other duties, although grade changes were always a primary goal. On the one below, we look down a wall put in more for security purposes than the art. A look at the precipice leading away from the landscape shows its functional safety feature.

I often semi-gag when I realize how incredibly raw things began on these projects………

Here is the eventual disposition of that dirt above………….

This one features 2 Falling Water fountains embedded in the forward wall. This is a Winter Time look back at the fountain as we completed the project. The owner was delighted and he has re-landscaped nearly everything from these basic beginnings. The water is running here in exactly the “sheet” we expected and designed. This was a fascinating gig.

Meanwhile, some “walls” can show an investment in the motion and kinetic energy of water, while still retaining the earth behind……..

For the longest while, in the early 80s in Vancouver, we were building walls almost exclusively of Railroad Ties – huge, 150 pound creosote-soaked uglies 8 feet long which made the most incredibly sturdy walls of the era. One had to drill holes to pound in the 1/2″ rebar to connect these edifices, complete with “dead men” sent perpendicularly back into the soil in a Tee, for anchoring. But one could also be creative, even here. Note the sets of stairs in the distance in this picture, a system of walls a quarter mile long on two-and three-levels. The use of angled off-shoots to the walls provided an architectural joy for the builders and made them as interesting as they became later as the plantings overtook them.

Wall work has always been challenging and somewhat fun, actually. As permanent structures, their solidity and form provided ample rewards for those who made them the right way.

From the front, the items below began quite a bit less tidy………..note the trees on the berm are all blooming cherries. It makes quite a show in Spring….all bloomed out.

This became this………………

The above were right next to a walled hole in the ground – to the left – which we attempted to make solemn, quiet and reflective for our very devout Catholic client……. Bo wanted his very own personal “Grotto” – a challenge I could not resist. 😉

Sometimes, we make walls which aren’t totally walls, lol:

This is a “Hybrid”, owing to the available material left behind………….these boulders perform the trick as a “rockery” – semi-retaining a fairly serious slope and providing anchors where the roots of the eventual plantings knit a more serious retaining capacity.