DryStoneGarden

The presidential sinkhole wasn’t the only pit to open this year. One of my gardens had a sinkhole too, even huger than his. It happened in a garden I planted a few years ago. A culvert runs along the property line carrying storm runoff from the street out to a creek behind the garden. A lot of water was going into the pipe every time it rained, but it turns out PG&E had accidentally punched a hole in that pipe and so the water was running underneath the pipe instead of inside it, carrying away the soil and forming an underground gully which eventually turned into the sinkhole. No one was hurt when the sinkhole opened, but a large section of fence collapsed and a mature oak tree moved six or eight feet from one side of the property line to the other and had to be removed. Pretty scary to think of an oak tree moving so far, it was tall enough to fall onto the house.

The sinkhole was especially frustrating because we’d noticed the problem a couple of years earlier and submitted an engineer’s report to the town and utilities to try to get someone to address it. But it would have been expensive and a hassle to fix, so, unsurprisingly, no one wanted to take responsibility and nothing happened. Of course, in the end it was even more expensive to fix and an even bigger hassle and we lost the oak tree. Though to be fair, I don’t think anyone was expecting a giant sinkhole.

This is my nearby planting — the two furthest sections of fence in this photo are the rebuilt sections of fence that collapsed, the Loropetalum in the background is about six feet from the edge of the sinkhole — looking relatively unaffected by all the drama beside and below it. The underground gully extended underneath this planting and several tons of concrete were pumped under here to fill it. But it always stayed like the calm surface of the water, not showing the currents below. The plum trees are probably the only ones with roots deep enough to reach the concrete.

A side note, this garden is the home of the basalt pieces I used as a kickboard in the garden show a few years ago. They’re not especially noticeable while the Nepeta is blooming, but they’re pretty unique, two nine foot long sections of basalt to edge the lawn. It might be interesting to do a post showing where all of the garden show materials ended up.

During the week I’m staying at a house in Richmond that doesn’t have internet or cell reception, which is probably a healthy thing overall but has been a distinct hindrance to my blogging. I still have several stone posts from Oaxaca that I want to do, but spring garden season has swallowed me up and I’m going to shift my focus to that. Stone is timeless; I can do those posts later this year when I’ll probably want to imagine myself back on vacation. In any case, it’s been a busy spring with lots of gardens looking good after all the rain and I photographed a couple of them last week.
Before I get to that, this photo shows a stone that I’ve been carrying around in my truck to weigh down tarps. I left it at a job site over the weekend and came back to find it had been appropriated into the oevre of a six year old artist during my absence. Modern in its conception, I see echoes of Basquiat, maybe a little Cy Twombly or even Jim Dine. Definitely the most charming thing to greet me at a job site in a while.

Another highlight of my Oaxaca trip was a visit to the Oaxaca Ethnobotanical Garden, inside the 16th century complex of the Santo Domingo Cathedral and monastery in the middle of the historic district. It’s a tremendous garden with a unique setting. All of the plants are from Oaxaca and have an ethnobotanic significance for Oaxacans, but it was also laid out with a strong sense of design. All of the paths and many of the plants are laid out with straight lines and ninety degree angles, which is based on traditional Oaxacan design ethos but also made it feel very contemporary. One of the things that most imoressed me about Oaxaca — not just in this garden but running through virtually everything I saw — was how modern the traditional Oaxacan elements feel. My photos are below. Read the rest of this entry »

I spent a week hiking in the Pueblos Mancomunados a couple hours by bus into the highlands above Oaxaca City. The Pueblos are a group of 8 towns communally organized with tourist cabins and a place to eat in each town. They’re about ten to twenty kilometers away from each other so it’s easy to hike from town to town with just a daypack. It’s pretty country, a nice easy walking tour, and the highlight was a section of pre-hispanic trail between Lachatao and Latuvi. My photos and watercolors from the hike are below. Read the rest of this entry »

While I was in Oaxaca I tried to do a watercolor every day. I didn’t quite manage that, but I was quite prolific by my standards. Kind of fun, I’m hoping to continue maybe once a week throughout the year. This isn’t every single watercolor I did — I did a few others that I’ll mix into my upcoming posts — but it gives a decent overview of my trip while I work on my more targeted posts. The first one is from the Oaxaca Ethnobotanical Garden in the center of town inside the walls of the historic cathedral complex. It’s a fantastic garden; I’ll do a post about it soon. The others show the main cathedral and a booth selling clothing near a side entrance. I painted a lot of agaves and palms while I was down there. Gotta like agaves and palms if you’re going to watercolor in Oaxaca.

Read the rest of this entry »

Happy new year. I’ve been on a trip to Oaxaca, skipping out on a lot of the rain and mudslides we’ve been having. I’ll probably have some posts related to that at some point — among other things a sinkhole opened in one of my gardens where EBMUD punctured a storm drain — but for now I’ll be posting about Oaxaca. Oaxacan stonework, ruins, art, and plants are the stuff DryStoneGarden dreams are made of.

One of the first things I did was visit the Tule Tree, a Montezuma Cypress with the world’s widest tree trunk, 46 feet across at its widest point, 147 feet total in diameter. I recommend clicking on the photo to get the full size view. The people in the left corner give a sense of scale.

The tree is beside a church in the center of a town. One legend says it was planted 1400 years ago by a priest of the Aztec wind god, another legend says it was a walking stick planted by a king or god. More recently, someone planted hollyhocks, roses, and a lawn around it, creating a distinct ‘world’s biggest ball of twine’ vibe. The topiary collection includes a dinosaur, a teddy bear, and kissing ducks.

But in spite of that, a 1400 year old tree has a presence powerful enough to overcome any indignity presented by its surroundings. The trunk is truly superlative.

And even more than the trunk, the canopy is magnificent, like an entire forest in a single tree. The branches droop down nearly to the ground, giving a wonderful sense of enclosure, and the trunks rise up like the clustered columns of a gothic cathedral.

I’ve been in groves that felt like a cathedral, but I’d never had that feeling from a single tree.