It’s springtime.  I wish I could mount a short offense against the Miracle-Grow/Scott’s approach to the landscape I’m forced to watch on the tube.  In my mind, to break down the ad-hoc, trial and error, de-facto string of decisions that’s landed us here at this present point in human endeavors is to go back 200 years or more and rethink the breadth of humanity.  Not a short bite to say the least.  To think we can pour out from a bag all our natural system interdependencies and make every landscape thing  just fine is absurd to say the least.  Barry Bonds teaching us about the real game of baseball is a workable analogy.  Makes me militant.

Did anyone catch the Miracle-Gro commercial where they are both cutting Daffodils and picking Tomatoes?   It bends time as well!

I’m hesitating here.  I know I started this blog about landscape design and the broader elements that dovetail into it, so this may be a little out of the loop.  But I do believe that everything influences everything else, what ever it may be. 

I’m a cancer survivor.  I had Testicular cancer in the early eighties (I’m 55 now).  It had already spread into my lungs when they found it.  Fortunately, they had just worked out a successful treatment about the time I was diagnosed.  They perfected it right here in Indiana (where I’m from), and my doctor trained on the original team that worked out the cure.  Good luck for me.  It never came back.  A little replacement hormone and I’m fine.  I think being threatened with premature death does shape your outlook or worldview to some degree, no matter how you look at it.  Being in the moment has more meaning when the moments seem limited.

I’m a double cancer survivor.  In 2005 I was one of the lucky 1800 or so men to get breast cancer.  I had one lump, and it had moved into 2 lymph nodes.  Stage 2B Estrogen positive for those who know about such things.  So I endured a bunch of ‘ectomies’, did the chemo thing (much easier than 25 years ago) and the follow-up therapy.  I know when you look at it, the hormonal connection is difficult to avoid.  My doctor closed my file after the initial breast cancer treatment and said, “Garth, you’re making me sweat”.  I really appreciated his candor.   They really have no idea why, or why those two cancers.  If it’s Karma, I have to wonder what the hell I did.  A little bizarre.  I woke up with a start after my breast cancer diagnoses and thought “I can be on Oprah!”  Then, on second thought, it sounded more like Jerry Springer material.  If there’s another cancer for me down the road, I’ll have 25 years if the time interval holds true.

The best image I could come up with

Well, I have to adjust my time frame.  I had a little chest congestion and cough, along with what I thought was a pulled back muscle starting about 5 weeks ago (Jan, 2011).  I went to the doc: they followed up and pulled back to find the cancer has spread to my lungs, spine and liver.  I hit the Breast Cancer Trifecta.  Stage 4.  They can slow it down, but they can’t stop it now.  The life expectancy mean is two years, but we think 3 to 5 is more like it.  I have lost a zero, going from maybe 40 years of life remaining to 4 or so.  It’s taking a little getting used to, but I’m ok with it for now.   I like Elizabeth Edward’s line: everyone’s going to die, I just have a little more information.   It’s the people you love, the people you leave behind that hurts the most.  Telling my mother was not easy.  I do have family, friends and one extraordinary mentor/friend to share the experience with.  I wish everybody the same.

I had a decent year last year in the business, and it looks strong this year as well.  I still look forward to good design, seeing them installed and mature, and seeing where the world is going.  For a while anyway.  So if the blog shifts a little from time to time, I hope you’ll understand.  I have to keep things interesting. 

 Garth

UPDATE:  Easter, 2011.  Maybe ten years is more like it, after considering all things further.  Not bad.

I live in the Midwest, and that means my business slows down in the winter.  I may be designing at a reduced pace, but I’m not installing or seriously managing any projects for about 4 months.  I like this down time.  I can work at broader elements of the business, catch up on some continuing education or other pursuits (my piano time always increases), and even get away somewhere warmer.  

I’ve always thought about the idea (not mine) that temperate climates yield smarter cultures.  It’s all in the down time where we can sit back and reflect, meditate, be in the moment more than the rushed warm season.  Something about building long-term connections we can then act upon when things thaw.  Something like that.  Anyway, winter for a green industry type gets one to thinking about warmer, greener days.   You end up thinking about the landscape.  You end up thinking about plants.  That’s where plant catalogs and their images come into play.

“We tear down mature, diverse, high-functioning

bits of ecosystem and replace it with a rebuilt mix

of foreigners and pretty natives that function

at a fraction of the ecological level of the original site.”

The photography of plants and gardens is always an idealized effort.  To try to capture a momentary, multi-dimensional/sensual experience and then portray it as a flat visual for the eye is an exercise in approximation at best.  Photography is a great expressive medium.  It’s an art form.  I enjoy working at getting good photos when I’m behind the lens.  But it is second to the real thing.  As I am working up a new project, gathering the essentials for a base plan through numbers, sketches, inventories and pictures, I always stop, put it all down and just walk through and experience the site as it is.  Like a photograph, the breakout of the bits and pieces that make up the starting point for a new landscape design is not the landscape you have.  Documenting the moment changes the moment.  It’s the Quantum thing where observing changes what is observed.  I recall the joke asking your friend” how was your vacation”, and he replies: “I’m not sure, let me get the pictures”.  When it’s beige or beige-white outside, plant catalogs and a good book or two with a different approach to the garden (with lots of excellent pictures) can turn the days warmly greener.  Part of the visual process is that it’s a starting point for the mind.  A good picture depicts an idealized view of a plant or landscape, energizing us with promise.  It’s the flip side of the above where the generic experience of the landscape is drawn upon to fill in the gaps in the photo.  We become junkies when we love what we do.

The practical matter here is that plant catalogs offer more than just a reference to a given plant we know, but an idealized and sensationalized image to get us to act.  Page after page of variations on a theme.  Pick your type.  Which one does it for you?  I want that plant.  When it’s a new plant, one we don’t know or a variation on one we do, the image is it.  We get excited filling in the rest of the mental picture.  We can see it, feel it and taste it in our gardens and landscapes.  I want it.  That’s plant porn.

Stepping back from the emotional reaction, I’d like to ask how many more Heuchera, Hosta or Daylily variations do we need?  Is our quest for a “new” plant experience that powerful?  Have we idealized individual plants to the point where they are the prime focus of the landscape?   I can get by just fine with 20 Daylily and Hosta varieties each.  My design approach is more environmental/ecological in that habit, texture, community and time are  just as important as color or the individual show.  I have not added a Daylily or Hosta to my designs in two years.  It’s just the way it’s worked.  Neither of them are native and both are dreadfully overused.   That’s a conscious consideration in my designs.  Nothing else wrong with them.  I have them in my garden.  I’ll use them again somewhere. 

Another problem I have with the trafficking of plants is the international scale at which it operates.  The mixing of genetic types from all around the world has consequences.  A key element of SITES and a goal of sustainability is the restoration of our landscapes back to (or at least toward) a native-based ecology.  Hostas, daylilies and the rest of the foreign palette do not have a place in our local ecosystem.  The work of Dr. Douglas Tallamy should be a wake-up call for the entire green industry.  We tear down mature, diverse, high-functioning bits of ecosystem and replace it with a rebuilt mix of foreigners and pretty natives that function at a fraction of the ecological level of the original site.  Our native ecology pretty much ignores the foreigners.   Most of the mobile participants in the local eco-community move on elsewhere.   They just do not make connections with the strangers.  And elsewhere is getting really small.  Like the rest of the planet, our local ecosystems diminish in diversity and in the capacity to support and sustain the natural world every year.  I asked John Greenlee, the excellent grass ecologist, plant breeder and designer, if he thought it was a problem scrambling plants from all around the world.  He said in essence that the cat was out of the bag, and there’s no going back.  Yet, every year our diversity diminishes a little more. 

I’ve said I’m not a native purist, and it’s true.  If we can get back to 80% natives, I’ll give space to the showy denizens from foreign lands.  My guess, somewhat educated, is that we reside at best around a 50-50 ratio of natives to non-natives in our built landscapes, especially if you include the turfgrass lawn.  That’s not acceptable, nor is it sustainable for our ecosystems in the long run.

I was at the APLD Dallas convention last year, and one of the sessions was with a leading plant breeder/grower talking about the new stars bubbling up through the tens of thousands of hybrid crosses his company alone is currently working on.  He was giddy and goofy talking about his new creations.  Just wait till gene splicing gets going.  You’ll see a blue flowering dogwood that blooms twice a year.  Plant of the year 2027.   It will make millions for somebody.   I hope it doesn’t get to that.

I occasionally skim the comments sections of various places I visit online.  Most sites I look at have a dedicated purpose and generally get an active set of comments from whatever community it relates to; decent conversation on matters of substance.  Sometimes I participate if I think my point is relevant.  On the other hand, general blog and news sites tend to also attract a different set of responders: people with no point to make, just the need to scream something into the digital ear, or those so wound up in there beliefs that they have to declare every utterance as polemics: right or left, patriotic or anarchist, wingnut or just plain Obama something or other.  They tend to live in those sites.  Shoot-the-messenger logic is always found within that mix.  It’s just too hard to debate ideas, so I’ll attack YOU.  You know the lines. 

I started posting on my blog about three weeks ago.  This is my fifth post.   I’ve had eight comments on my various entries.  I had no expectations.  Seven have been of the no-redeeming-value category of response.  “Bobble head”, ‘what kind of poop is this’, ‘blah blah yada yada’ are typical lines.  I’ve noticed the majority of their emails are from commercial entities like “buy a used vacation trailer from me.com”, “cheap crap.com” or the like.  What a pastime, looking for new places to mark with their verbal urine.  And I don’t aim to demean canines.  I imagine some employer is paying them a wage for their time.  Must be a few of them out there.  They’ve already found my little voice on all the web.

Part of what I’ll be saying will be political, anti-something and will piss somebody off.  They will be wrong, but that’s the point.  Debate me on the ideas.  I’ll tell you if you have a point.  I want to see some logic in the banter.  And if you can’t quite fire up your other neuron, skip to the next site.  I’m certain there are throngs who will appreciate your wit over there.

I did have one woman (I gathered from her email address) that said the site was interesting and she had just started a blog of her own and she got some ideas from me.  And she said that in more than one sentence!  It was nice, but I thought not quite relevant to the blog.  Now, I wish I made her comment the official first.  She deserved it, just by rising above the rest.

I bet I’ll get them now.