lawn

Lawn Of Plenty


It was about mid-May when I decided to carve five small rows into the front lawn for this year's vegetable patch. It is the sunniest, flat space on the land here. In the distance, the driveway and a hedgerow of Hydrangea arborescens -a solution to coarsely articulated snow-plowing and a mass of foundation plants in the way of a future house project. Seven weeks from the day the tiller expressed itself, the vegetables are taking advantage of our long, northern days.



My first round of green beans didn't arrive, quite possibly because I didn't water the seeds enough or maybe due to three year old seeds. They were all French beans, ones that trialled well, hmm -three years ago. So I bought new seed from the big box (so many home projects!) and planted those. Meanwhile it had been raining heavily for a few days -that's when some of the old seeds showed up, 'Velour,' I think. So far no problems with bunnies -or deer, raccoons, hedgehogs, and whatever other vegetable munching varmint one can have. So lucky -that's all it is.


One four inch pot of flat leaf parsley has become eighteen by twelve inches of parsley -use it daily.


One four inch pot of cilantro has become two feet by twelve inches of cilantro -makes a nice pesto!


The garlic is still green, but I know well enough to start harvesting them. As these go, their rows fill with herbs, green beans, and eventually those brassicas I fully intend to start one of these days...


Four pepper plants from a cell pack of four heirloom varieties. This one set fruit super early.


A cell pack of Japanese eggplant have provided us with an orb -not the usual thin and elongated fruit. What gives? I do prefer the way less seedy elongated varieties. Oh, Japanese eggplant doesn't always imply elongated fruit? These are 'Kyoto,' a round eggplant, and I ashamedly renounce my ignorance!



One four-cell pack of, hmm, I forget the name, but cucumber. I do recall it saying compact, and this one is definitely compact. We grew them in pots, elevated off the ground in metal pot stands that happened to be here. A couple of things to point out: these four plants in two pots have been productive for their size and have not succumbed to mildew. They have yet to reach the ground and have many flowers per vine. I recall googling the variety at the nursery, Shady Acres! Ahh, they have a plant list- It is Spacemaster. Pick them pickle size for best flavor.

A word about Shady Acres. Heirloom. That's the word. Seriously, Minnesota has some catching up to do when it comes to organic garden supplies and heirloom vegetable starts. It is very difficult to find what I came to expect -even at Larry's on the corner in Brooklyn (Best Deal on Bloodmeal!). I edify every nursery I come into contact with, including Shady in regards to fertilizer choice. I heard about Shady Acres from my neighbor who is busy trying to grow Minnesota's largest pumpkin, and was grateful for the recommendation -they carry heirloom vegetable starts. For me this means they have a variety of tomato beyond Rutgers, Beefsteak or Early Girl for the person who simply didn't get to starting his own.


Potatoes. They grew incredibly tall, so high that they could no longer be soil-mounded. Then a week of heavy thunderstorm rains, about seven inches in all, ensured that they would lay flat until they turned back up toward the sun, which they have, albeit more prostrate than before. They have been flowering for a few weeks now, with new potatoes sure to be available soon. I've decided to wait on those, aiming for the bigger potato of the future.



The tomato plants are some of the healthiest I've grown. Again, an heirloom variety pack from Shady Acres provided the starts. Ours have been in the ground for about five weeks, have grown over thirty inches tall, and some are producing tomatoes. We also have a grape variety, four plants in total. We won't get a ton of tomatoes out of four heirloom plants, but this year required low input, experimentation, and observation.


What is remarkable is the health of each plant. No visible disease, no wilt or cankers, no blossom end rot (can we thank high Cal-Mg soils?), simply robust plants. Look at that impressive stem. It helps to be gardening in a spot that has yet to see any vegetable growing. We haven't had any Colorado potato beetles either, so here's to hoping that our little clearing is protected by the woods and wetlands that surround it.


Lastly, the bug-eating army of amphibians can't hurt. And what of the pansies? It hasn't been a very warm summer so far, but plenty of days in the lower eighties. Here it may be that pansies just won't quit.



Our Vegetables

My attitude about garlic growing is considerably more casual than in previous years. So far these varieties have shown excellent progress without more than a dose of blood meal and liquid fish fertilizer. The French grey shallots have done exceedingly well with little maintenance but the occasional weeding.



In fact, since the top photo was taken, they have lodged -meaning it is near to harvest and hardly any different from the time frame of my 2012 upstate New York growing experiment. These will be cured on the porch.





Very few interesting things going on with the garlic. They are taller, lankier than my Long Island grown garlic, although these were planted from my own LI grown heads. Each variety made the transition, so far, from coastal New York to Minnesota pretty well. There has been one interesting thing -the strange appearance of dead flies on some of the leaf tips.



They seem glued in place. Has another creature done this? Saving them for later? Or has the garlic done them in? No answers, yet.



About a month and a half ago I planted potatoes. They appear to be doing exceptionally well, with each rain adding another few inches in the last three weeks. No Colorado Potato Beetles yet and I can't keep enough soil on hand to mound up!

Of course, we put tomatoes, peppers, and eggplant in two weeks back. They were planted in 14-inch wide strips tilled into the front lawn -the only place sunny enough for vegetables. So far no creature has come to eat. I'm wary of adding green beans knowing how well rabbits take to those tender seedlings. Deer have not browsed, although we do have a resident raccoon living in a big, old maple in the woods about 75 feet from the garden. So far she's only been good for digging up a single, just-planted spud and harassing Betsy by tipping over her newly planted coleus.






99.44 Picturesque or Notes On Michael Pollan's "Against Nativism"




Below is an excerpt from the 1994 NY Times Magazine article by Michael Pollan on the subject of the native landscape movement. I came across it in a comment by Susan Harris of Garden Rant under the post Pollan Takes On The Great American Lawn. Although Pollan's article goes on to describe other complications (xenophobia) of the nativist movement, he also touches on some aesthetic themes I've been thinking about for some time, and my focus here is on these.

The quote:

"Environmental pretensions aside, the esthetic of the natural garden would appear to represent an extreme version of the 18th-century picturesque-gardening style, which was the first to maintain that gardens should closely resemble "natural landscapes." It turned out, though, that the natural landscape the picturesque designers strove to emulate was one they found not in nature but in the 17th-century landscape paintings of Claude Lorrain and Nicolas Poussin. Although today's neopicturesque garden designers claim to be emulating actual natural habitats, they too seem to rely on an artistic model. Instead of landscape painting, however, these gardens aspire to the condition of a contemporary nature photograph, an Eliot Porter, say, or an Ansel Adams. Whenever I visit a natural garden I can't help thinking I've walked into the pages of a Sierra Club calendar."

The first "natural picturesque" landscape design that comes to this Brooklyner's mind after reading the above quote is Prospect Park in Brooklyn, NY. When I look at Prospect Park, designed by Olmsted/Vaux, I see emulation of the picturesque, in this case its the picturesque, trancedentalist realism of the Hudson River School style, an American offshoot of the European, largely English, picturesque. Vaux was English, Olmsted had studied in Europe, both well known to Andrew Jackson Downing, the son of a horticulturalist and progenitor of the Hudson Valley's Romantic-Picturesque architectural style out of Newburgh, NY. All three would have been well acquainted with the work of the Hudson River landscape painters. Inherent in the work of all these 19th century landscape practitioners are romantic elements that I cannot ferret out of new native landscape design.

Fallkill Falls, Prospect Park


Kindred Spirits by Asher Durand, 1849

In defense of Pollan's assessment, I hazard that one reason landscape projects of so many current day "natural" garden designs resemble picturesque forms is that most suburban, domestic landscapes already emulate that form. Designers retool the familiar formal structure with meadow instead of lawn and native woodland understory plants instead of the typical azaleas and pachysandra.

Maybe today's natural gardens are not at all "neopicturesque" as tagged by Pollan, but instead are neo-realist. It was the Realist painters of the 19th century that imagined what was actually there, as opposed to artful conventions and idyllic representation. Of course, Realism was not at all real or virtuous, yet the pretense disturbed many taste-makers, artists, and critics. It was also no coincidence that this realist painting rose alongside, and was influenced by, the invention of photography.

Gustave Courbet's Young Ladies of the Village, 1852
 Asher B. Durand's Interior of a Wood, 1850

In the words of Kenneth Clarke, landscape painting "was the chief artistic creation of the 19th century," but the burgeoning process and product of photography (see William Henry Jackson) began a process that eventually pushed painting away from verisimilitude. By the time we see the work of the photographer Ansel Adams, 1902-1984, we see that 19th century romantic landscape eulogized in the stone monuments of the American West. Eliot Porter, 1901–1990, strikes me somewhat like J.J. Audubon with a camera -his interest was almost taxonomical. Pollan is correct to see in Porter's photographs a dialogue with our current conception of landscape "naturalism" because taxonomy is necessarily put into the service of ecology. What Pollan rejects is the photographic conventions represented by the work of Porter or Adams as a model for designing parks and gardens. More precisely, he rejects the notion that our relation to nature as represented by gardens should be mediated by pictures at all. The garden, itself, is the mediating space.


Gates of the Valley
Ansel Adams' Gates of the Valley, 1938
Book cover of Eliot Porter, 1987

Photography supplanted painting as the choice medium of landscape imagery in the 20th century, but for many photographers the beauty of natural scenery became all too common and suspect -as did the photograph as a means of representing truth. New themes in landscape photography rose out of this: human changes to the landscape, machines in the garden, the overwhelming tide of waste and spoil, beauty and the brown field, and the mundane. Photographers who come to mind are Robert Adams (b. 1937) and New Topographics, Mark Klett (b. 1942) and the Rephotographic Project, Robert Glenn Ketchum (b. 1947), Richard Misrach (b. 1949), Edward Burtynsky (b. 1955), and many others.

If designing "natural" landscapes has been shaped by 20th century photography, then what of the work of these mid-late century photographers? They turn the American wilderness and Old World pastoral conventions on its head, but where does that leave landscape architects and garden designers? After all, they need to create landscapes that attempt resolve the crisis highlighted in the work of these photographers without resorting to old forms.

For many, the ecological restoration landscape -a landscape garden version of the photographic "realism" alluded to in Pollan's essay, has been the answer. Ecological parks and gardens, landscapes of verisimilitude, are a reaction to the conception of a spoiled landscape. I am not as sour on this movement as Michael Pollan may be (or was in 1994). It offers a new motivation for developing new parks in and around our cities. If our conception of urban parks was only 19th century picturesque strolling (Central Park) or 20th century athletic leisure (countless athletic fields, Flushing Meadows-Corona Park), we would find it hard to develop new parks within the limits of available urban land. Ecological-restoration offers motivation for the building of new parks in niches previously undesirable for park development.

There are fifty-one Forever Wild parks throughout New York City. Although NYC Parks chooses to call these "preserves," most are anything but that. These parks are created or "restored" out of spoiled but not yet "developed" regions in each borough. A majority of these parks are on the waterfront, an outgrowth of the decline in commercial shoreline activity, the public enjoyment of water, and a concern for sea level rise and storm surge attenuation. Consider the possibility that a park can function for the public outside of the context of individual or group pleasure, as a protective formation for the public good that also happens to provide habitat for migrating species, strolling, and ecological awareness.

Yet, we shouldn't fool ourselves into thinking we're about to restore nature to a "pure" state in any park. Restoration gardens and parks are created out of a set of intellectual and financial limitations and should only be taken on with humility. Added to the garden is an understanding of our role in changing ecosystems and an awareness of the value of the system to our own needs, beyond accepted forms of aesthetic pleasure.



How This Article Hurts My Brain or The Savannah Hypothesis




Garden Rant picked up on a story from the Boston Globe Ideas Section titled, "How the City Hurts Your Brain." I do not disagree with the idea that we need to immerse ourselves in natural habitat. I would like to make the point that most of what this "Ideas" article is attempting to drive home, through simplified science, we already understand intuitively.

Some things I need to go on about:


"The brain is a wary machine...The mind is a powerful supercomputer...easy to short-circuit..."
I really don't like the consistent "mind as machine" analogy in this article. Its not even about philosophy or a mechanistic view of nature, but more like writing as if the reader really couldn't understand it any other way these days -oh God, aren't we so like machines nowadays. Lets leave the mechanistic ideas in the 20th century- haven't we given enough to our dear machines already.


"Imagine a walk around Walden Pond..."

This is artful. The evocation of Walden Pond without any mention of our nation's most famous nature hermit, Thoreau, who brought to the fore the idea of the poetic, transcendant escape from urbanity? Just mentioning Walden Pond, sans Concord no doubt, evokes our landscape escape fantasy. And Emerson? C'mon. Of course, Emerson owned property outside of the city to escape to.


"It's not an accident that Central Park is in the middle of Manhattan...They needed to put a park there."
At least the article mentions Olmsted (though forgot Vaux) -someone who actually envisioned our cities with a more complex environment. Marc Berman, the psychologist the article quoted (above statement), is right, but not for the reason the article implies. By no means did Manhattan look like it does now; it grew up around Central Park and with it. Which, incidentally, had many farmers and gardeners and an African American community living within its future bounds before construction. Ultimately the siting of the future park was an administrative, government decision.


"...research has demonstrated ... the mental demands of being in a city -- makes people more likely to choose chocolate cake instead of fruit salad..."
How do we account for all the overweight people in the countryside and the overall fitness of those in cities. Nature makes us slimmer? No, but exercise does, and I sure do walk a lot in the city. So I guess we eat chocolate cake -so what, we walk it off.

"...found less domestic violence in the apartments with views of greenery."
How many times do we need to say that correlation is not causation? Couldn't there be some other factor involved in higher domestic violence rates that also correlates with less trees, grass, and parks outside our windows and doorsteps?

"...most urban greenspaces are much less diverse. This is due in part to the "savannah hypothesis, which argues that people prefer wide-open landscapes that resemble the African landscape in which we evolved."
And finally, my favorite -the "savannah hypothesis." Not to put too fine a point on it: BUNK. Its obvious why people like low-clipped lawns today: clear sight lines, clean for laying, sitting, soft underfoot, and you can kick a ball around, etc. The deeper connection we have to the lawn has more to do with miming the tastes of European aristocrats of the last few hundred years. The aestheticized, pastoral landscape was born out of the estate home with its view of the shepard, his flock and the grass -grazed short by sheep. Central Park's Sheep Meadow puts it in name. Economics don't trickle down, but aesthetics sure do. Let us thank ingenuity for the IRON SHEEP, our lawn mower, or we'd be listening to bleats all day. The lawn is the image of order in the landscape, with its clear sight lines and simple aesthetics. I don't think many people are conscious of the roots of their landscape aesthetics, but mime them anyway.


The savannah landscape has unclean sight lines to any pleistocene man, who's greatest enemy may have been a low-stalking lion or hyena, it caught fire often, and who knows what else - so its no front lawn. Another point I'd like to make is that wealthy aristocrats had great landholdings and would have farmland, grazing land, and wooded lots for hunting, logging, etc. While we can mime the lawn aesthetic, we cannot maintain the forest that stood beside it on our little plots -its one or the other and we've largely chosen the other to our detriment.

Below is a quote from Henry Miller's Tropic of Capricorn (beware *# language). After about one hundred pages of manic ranting:

"...The city grows like a cancer; I must grow like a sun. The city eats deeper and deeper into the red; it is an insatiable white louse which must die eventually of it is inanition. I am going to die as a city in order to become again a man, therefore I close my ears, my eyes, my mouth.

"Before I shall have become quite a man again I shall probably exist as a park, a sort of natural park in which people come to rest, to while away the time. What they say or do will be of little matter, for they will bring only their fatigue, their boredom, their hopelessness. I shall be a buffer between the white louse and the red corpuscle. I shall be a ventilator for removing the poisons accumulated through the effort to perfect that which is imperfectible. I shall be law and order as it exists in nature, as it is projected in dream. I shall be the wild park in the midst of the nightmare of perfection, the still, unshakable dream in the midst of frenzied activity, the random shot on the white billiard table of logic, I shall know neither how to weep nor protest, but I shall be there always in absolute silence to receive and to restore. I shall say nothing until the time comes again to be a man. I shall make no effort to preserve, no effort to destroy. I shall make no judgements, no criticisms. Those who have had enough will come to me for reflection and meditation; those who have not had enough will die as they lived, in disorder, in desperation, in ignorance of the truth of redemption. If one says to me, you must be religious, I shall make no answer. If one says to me, I have no time now, there's a c*#t waiting for me, I shall make no answer. Or even if there be a revolution brewing, I shall make no answer. There will always be a c*#t or a revolution around the corner, but the mother who bore me turned many a corner and made no answer, and finally she turned herself inside out and I am the answer.

"Out of such a wild mania for perfection naturally no one would have expected an evolution to a wild park, not even I myself, but it is infinitely better, while attending to death, to live in a state of grace and natural bewilderment. Infinitely better, as life moves toward a deathly perfection, to be just a bit of breathing space, a stretch of green, a little fresh air, a pool of water. Better also to receive men silently and to enfold them, for there is no answer to make while they are still frantically rushing to turn the corner.

"I am thinking now about a rock fight one summer's afternoon..."

After this passage, Miller turns to reflect on his childhood, calmly. Its an intense shift, all turning on a park, a wild park.


Gas Cans & Gas Don'ts

A tip from the Yardener/Gardener blog, I thought I may bring this to your attention. We all know about the millions and millions of gallons of gasoline spilled at service stations every year. How about the gas spilled from filling lawnmowers? Right, sure you've done it. Now its been a long time for me -not having mowed a lawn since, I dunno, I was 20. But I remember the headache of blind filling. Apparently we spill 17 million gallons a year this way. So Consumer Reports tested a few no-spill gas tanks. If your mowing, maybe you could get one. They may be regulation soon.