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Lost in the Landscape
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Subtitled, "Musings of an artist loosed in a garden," this is a wide-ranging, free-associating blog dedicated to the intersections of gardening, art, photography, landscape, and nature.
Recent Posts Tagged With 'rambles'
back fence/black fence
I don’t know about you, but certain kinds of basic household maintenance can seem about as uninteresting as watching beige paint dry. To keep me motivated, I sometimes offer myself little reward...
critter problems
The last of the tomatoes were starting to looked snacked on. And then there was this blatantly half-eaten apple leaning over the fence from the neighbor’s. The fruits and veggies in my yard...
as if by magic
I was in the front yard this morning, watering in some new native plants that I’d planted a couple weekends ago. It was a few minutes of quality time, me with the plants, crouched down, the hose...
inspired by nature: patterns
I picked up a book the other day, Inspired by Nature: Plants : The Building/Botany Connection, a translation of a Spanish architecture book by Alejandro Bahamón, Patricia Pérez and Alex Campell...
more on quilts and nature
Thanks to Linda, I’m holding in my very hands the exhibition catalog to the Quilt Visions 2002 show. This is the show that had a bamboo-based quilt design that I really liked. Looking through th...
chairs: style vs. comfort
Here are notes that on a small handful of chairs that we’ve tested. Most are in the style-fetish school of modern furniture design. With the exception of the first model, all are chairs that we...
cheap comforts
Whenever I go looking at garden furniture I’m struck by a) how expensive much of it is, and b) how inexcrably uncomfortable most of it is. As far as b), while I know Americans tend to be a littl...
microchips for your…plants?
Scooter, my cat, is microchipped should she ever get separated from home. But implanting microchips into plants? It’s not like they wander away on their own. The practice seems to be catchi...
from 8.8.88 to 8.8.08
Although this is not a political blog, it’s a space that acknowledges that you can’t escape the world, even nested within the walled confines of your privategarden spaces. An event that crept ...
plants in high places
A few weeks ago, walking on the UCSD campus, I noticed an interesting bit of agriculture taking place: Why let a lack of soil and a third-floor location deter you from having a nice crop of sweet corn...
odds and ends
Most of the time I have to devote to creative things like photography or blogging is Friday, Saturday and Sunday so I can be a little slow catching up to what’s happened during the week. Here ar...
matters of taste
Rebecca Solnit wrote an essay for Extreme Horticulture,* a book by photographer John Pfahl who was the subject of one of this blog’s first posts. I bumped into the essay again as I was skimming ...
tomato sculpture
I was browsing the web for recipes for caprese salad, the classic salad of Capri using plum tomatoes, mozzarella, basil, olive oil salt and pepper. I didn’t encounter any revelations as far as i...
i’ve been tagged!
Thanks to Mary Ann at Urban Garden Journal, this blog has been tagged. Actually, it’s the second time I’ve been tagged. (Thanks, In the Garden!) But I was swamped at the time and didn̵...
garden color
Color of course needs to be an important consideration in planning the garden. You may be familiar with Gertrude Jekyll’s important book devoted just to the subject, Colour Scheme in the Flower Gard...
more thoughts about gardens
I quoted recently from Robert Pogue Harrison’s recent Gardens: An Essay on the Human Condition. Here are a couple more passages that I liked. …[I]n the final analysis we must always r...
humility 101
Most of [Czech author Karel] Čapek’s commentators consider The Gardener’s Year a minor work, but as Verlyn Klinkenborg remarks in the introduction to the Modern Library English editio...
barbie’s excellent garden adventure
Realtors have their location, location, location mantra that they recite as the factor that contributes most to a property’s value. A similar thing could be said for predicting how well a plant ...
a cool idea for garden shade
Maybe a year ago I was reading about a parking lot in town, at the local Kyocera corporate headquarters, where they’d installed what they were calling “Solar Trees.” (They actually t...
celebrating summer—medieval-style
Ah summer, the season when the meadow blooms and the stag farts! Here are some sprightly words celebrating the season we’ve just begun. They’re the lyrics to a bouncy little ditty circa th...
“eucalyptus autumn”
The Japanese language has many poetic names for the seasons. One phrase that I’ve found particularly beautiful is take no aki, or “bamboo autumn.” It refers to the period in middle- ...
virtual vacations: then
In talking about visiting places virtually it’s easy to get caught up in our totally cool advanced state of technology and forget that this sort of visit-by-proxy has been going on for ages...
niagaras of the east and west
Earlier I posted a couple of my tourist pictures of Idaho’s Shoshone Falls, the “Niagara of the West.” I’ve just begun to scan and print the negatives of the large-format work ...
long shelf life for seeds
When I’d heard years ago that a lotus seed from China had germinated after laying low for 1300 years I was pretty amazed. That was from seed collected in 1982 when Shen and Miller at UCLA sprout...
more about golf: virtual and in pictures
In South Korea 200,000 golfers a day are discovering that they don’t need golf courses to play the game anymore. The New York Times site ran a video piece on how virtual-reality golf is taking t...
soil problems
So you think you have problems with uncooperative garden soil? Here’s a juniper trying to hold on to life at Mammoth Hot Springs, in Yellowstone:...
teed off
In wildness is the preservation of the world. —Thoreau In a desert, golf is the utter ruin of the known universe. —Me This is the week of the U.S. Open golf tournament here in San Diego. S...
on the road—part 1
I guess it’s comforting that the blog doesn’t have a mind of its own and just write itself while I’m away on vacation… Well, I’m back from points north, including 8 days in Yellowstone....
destination: yellowstone
At the risk of sounding too much like Christian on Project Runway, I’m about to embark on a little “vay-cay.” I leave San Diego on Wednesday in my old Jeep Cherokee for what could be...
those arrogant humans…
Are gardeners more humble people? Do we know things a lot of others don’t or believe in things others choose not to believe? Here are a couple thoughts for Earth Day, the first one a soft feathe...