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Archive for the ‘Miscellaneous’ Category

Root work

Posted in Deb's posts, Materials, Miscellaneous, Plant management, Plants, What we're thinking, tagged , , , , , , , , , on September 5, 2012 | Leave a Comment »

Contractors, arborists, and landscape architects in Massachusetts would do well to check out the Ecological Landscaping Association’s September events list.  The ELA is offering a number of really good workshops, on topics ranging from Boston-area restoration projects to the use of fire in landscape management, as well as a two-part, two-day workshop on root issues.  

One day of the root work will focus on soils(f you’ve read any of this blog, or Taking Place In The Trees, you’ll know that I’m interested in roots.)  In the air tool workshop, entitled At The Root: Air Tools Workshop, Rolf Briggs and Matt Foti will be talking about using air to work in the root zone, to decompact soils, to transplant trees and shrubs and also about how to plant nursery-grown stock properly.  

Matt and Rolf have done a similar workshop for the Mass. Arborists Association in the past, and Matt holds an annual workshop on proper planting techniques.  Being able to see what a root system looks like is eye-opening.  Learning — not just from written specs or a generic tree-planting detail — how a tree or shrub should be planted is essential, and well worth the price of admission.  I have been to at least three of these workshops, and learn something new at each one, and so can say that this workshop is one every landscape architect who designs plantings, and every contractor who sells plantings should attend.

Michael waters in a hemlock whose root flare has been excavated with air.

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Weeping willow — the nature of the beast

Posted in Deb's posts, Miscellaneous, Plants, tagged , , , , on June 30, 2012 | Leave a Comment »

A year ago I wrote a post on dappled willows (Salix integra ‘Hakuro Nishiki’), comparing one rigorously maintained specimen and one planted-and-forgotten specimen. Two takeaway points from that post (I hope): 1) plants in a garden usually require at least some maintenance — more or less, depending on the genus and its role in the garden; and 2) willows really want to grow.

Here’s a photo illustrating the second point. This willow — I think it’s an old weeping willow (Salix babylonica) — clearly had started to break apart, and had apparently become fairly hazardous. Its owner whacked the entire top off, and the willow responded with this explosion of shoots. Willows grow fast and grow weak, but they’re vigorous enough to continue growing even if they break up, fall over, are pruned to the nth degree, or are cut down, which is what makes them such great coppicing plants. But that’s a topic for another post…In the meantime, enjoy the photo, which I took in a New Hampshire seacoast town.

Cartoon character or tree? Weeping willow growing into a new form after having been topped.

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Thriving live hemlock

Posted in Deb's posts, Gristmill, Miscellaneous, Plants, What we're thinking, tagged , , , , , , on October 28, 2011 | Leave a Comment »

That last post made a good point — sometimes the leftovers in a landscape can be used as a feature in and of itself — but I much prefer the photo here. This hemlock is very much alive, and lives outside of Boston on private property. Carl Cathcart, Consulting Arborist, took me to see this wonderful tree last July, and you can see more photos of and information on the tree at Taking Place in the Trees.

To get an idea of the scale of this tree, look just to the right of the tree's center; Carl Cathcart is standing on the ground under the tree's canopy, and his legs are just visible.

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a friendly, interested advocate for what seems most alive

Posted in Landscape architecture, Miscellaneous, tagged on August 21, 2010 | 1 Comment »

From poet Mark Doty, on teaching:
All I can claim to have done is ask questions and make some statements about what I saw in the poems before me. I try to be a friendly, interested advocate for what seems most alive in the work at hand. My ideal is for the writer I’m working with to feel thoroughly SEEN — that someone (me) is looking very closely at what they’ve made and are trying to make, and attempting to articulate that project with them.

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Landscape is a process.

Posted in Landscape architecture, Miscellaneous, tagged on August 17, 2010 | 1 Comment »

Two stories from the front page of the New York Times say it better than I could. Whether it’s the trees in Central Park or the geese in Prospect Park, the Times seems to get that when it comes to landscape, change is built in.

Of course, they’re not alone.  Thomas Rainer gets it, and so does Meg Muckenhoupt.

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both/and

Posted in Landscape architecture, Miscellaneous, Plants, Toby's posts, tagged on May 15, 2010 | 1 Comment »

I should have known, of course.  In a recent post on trees and pollen, I wrote:

Bee-pollinated trees don’t bother to release the kind of pollen that makes you sneeze, and wind-pollinated plants don’t bother to attract bees. (There may be belt-and-suspenders plants out there that can be pollinated by wind but would like also to be pollinated by bees, but this non-botanist isn’t aware of them. Readers?)

I like taxonomy and either/or, but nature likes redundancy and both/and.  Nature is right; I stand corrected.

Species with a Plan B tend to stick around longer. So it turns out at least two genera of New England trees (and probably many more elsewhere) are both wind- and insect-pollinated. Maples and Willows have small but clearly visible flowers that are pollinated both by wind and by insects.

Our native Columbine, Aquilegia canadensis, has a back-up plan too. Its long red nectaries attract hummingbirds and its yellow bits attract bugs.

Thank you to Frances Clark, in her excellent Wildflowers of New England class at Garden In the Woods, for cluing me in on this.

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Ceci n’est pas un arbre

Posted in Deb's posts, Gristmill, Landscape architecture, Miscellaneous, Questions, What we're thinking, tagged on May 1, 2010 | Leave a Comment »

Or, ‘This is not a tree’.

Thinking again about, and then past the pollen issue, I wonder if humans had such strong allergic reactions in pre-industrial times. In much the same way that we have been using the world’s oceans as a dumping ground for every substance we don’t want to deal with, we have been pumping fine particulates into the atmosphere in ever-increasing quantities since the start of the Industrial Revolution.

Maybe pollen's not the real problem. Photo courtesy of The Library Of Congress, via Flickr.

We breathe oxygen. Oxygen shares atmospheric space with pollen and with myriad other particulates; our bodies work to filter out the particulates as we draw in oxygen.

Certainly, pollen poses challenges to the smooth operation of the human body. And planting fewer pollen-abundant trees might help breathing conditions to some extent. But really, now — shouldn’t we also look at the overload of particulates continuously (not only seasonally) streaming into our breathing space from coal-fired power plants, miscellaneous smokestacks, vents, trains, trucks, buses, and cars? And act to place more stringent limits on emissions from all those sources?

Making the natural world the culprit is easy. Calling ourselves to account for the consequences of our much more harmful actions may, as painful as it is, may be the more responsible and fruitful response.

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Then he took Berlin

Posted in Deb's posts, Gristmill, Miscellaneous, Places, Walls, What we're thinking, tagged , on March 30, 2010 | 1 Comment »

Brian Rose’s website, the subject of yesterday’s post, also features his photos of the Berlin Wall and its environs before, during, and after its fall. He writes about the experience of place in Berlin, and for anyone whose knowledge of the Wall is limited (mine was derived mainly from watching Wim Wenders’s Wings of Desire and Faraway So Close — wonderful movies, in which the Wall is a character, but not the main character in them), Mr. Rose’s chronicle, called The Lost Border; Photographs of The Iron Curtain is well worth exploring. Don’t miss it, in fact — it’s an affecting series that depicts and describes how the Wall and the zone around it informed, and in ways continues to inform — the national consciousness of the once-divided and now unified Germany.

Photo by Svenwerk on Flickr

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First he took Manhattan…

Posted in Deb's posts, Miscellaneous, Places, What we're thinking, tagged , on March 29, 2010 | 2 Comments »

A friend recently sent me a link to the website of Brian Rose, a New York photographer. Mr. Rose’s work is worth a look (or two or three); his photo series called New York Primeval chronicles his exploration of ‘wild’ parts of NYC. Knowing that Manhattan, at least, has been invaded with all sorts of extremely competitive plant genera (to see examples, take a look at Leslie Sauer’s The Once and Future Forest, which among other things describes the restoration of some of Central Park’s woodlands), it’s absorbing to study the Rose photos and try to figure out what plants make up today’s wildness in them.

This series, with its horizontally scrolling format, also affords a gratifying graphic experience: by grabbing and dragging the scroll bar beneath the photos in each of the three sections (‘One’, ‘Two’, and ‘Three’) it’s possible to scan through all the photos in that section, and to recognize the horizon line as a datum for the whole collection. I can think immediately of two other artists — Saul Steinberg (see this link) and Andy Goldsworthy — who have used a single line to organize a series of disparate items. Steinberg drew his lines, Goldsworthy builds his with stone, stems, shadows, flowers, ice, wood, or leaves. It’s a pleasure to see the line used here to link all photos.

Pebble spiral done in tribute to Andy Goldsworthy; shadow makes the line. Photo by Escher on Flickr.


Andy Goldsworthy's The Wall That Went For A Walk at Storm King in upstate New York. Wall as datum, organizing, defining, and questioning the edge between woodland and meadow and land and pond. Photo by Dr. Curry on Flickr.

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strange but not a stranger

Posted in Miscellaneous on March 25, 2010 | Leave a Comment »

An extended quote, here, on collaboration:

Why collaborate at all? One could conceivably make more money not sharing the profits — if there are any — so why collaborate if one doesn’t have to? If one can write alone, why reach out? And besides, isn’t it risky? Suppose you don’t get along? Suppose the other person decides to take the thing in some ugly direction?

… One big reason is to restrict one’s own freedom in the writing process. There’s a joy and relief in being limited, restrained. For starters, to let someone else make half the decisions, or some big part of them, absolves one of the need to explore endless … possibilities. The result is fewer agonizing decisions in the writing process, and sometimes, faster results.

Another reason to risk it is that others often have ideas outside and beyond what one would come up with oneself. To have one’s work responded to by another mind, or to have to stretch one’s own creative muscles to accommodate someone else’s muse, is a satisfying exercise. It gets us outside of our self-created boxes. When it works, the surprising result produces some kind of endorphin equivalent that is a kind of creative high. Collaborators sometimes rein in one’s more obnoxious tendencies too, which is yet another plus …

But one might also ask: Is writing ever NOT collaboration? Doesn’t one collaborate with oneself, in a sense? Don’t we access different aspects of ourselves, different characters and attitudes and then, when they’ve had their say, switch hats and take a more distanced and critical view — editing and structuring our other half’s outpourings? Isn’t the end product sort of the result of two sides collaborating? Surely I’m not the only one who does this?

David Byrne, from a longer meditation on his creative process.

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