DryStoneGarden

Dynamic Reflections

I managed a quick visit to the San Francisco Flower and Garden on Thursday. My personal highlight was not a garden, but rather Bee Chama Honey who comes out from New Mexico most years and has about a dozen different kinds of honey (my favorite was oak, followed by Sage/Willow and Meadowfoam). Anita was a judge at the show this year and was especially impressed at the quality of the gardens and the craftsmanship. I agree, though I thought they weren’t quite as memorable or dramatic as some other years. They were well designed and really nice and it takes a lot of effort to do such good work. I haven’t added links to all the garden creators, but you can find that info at the show’s garden creators webpage. Also there’s some cool stuff at the show’s Facebook page, including a timelapse of a nice, relaxing garden that I didn’t photograph.

Dynamic Reflections again

Dynamic Reflections had the most stone interest. Its by the same designer who did angled walls a few years ago. They’re pretty cool. There’s a heck of a lot going on in these walls, with a ceramic face, a container, various slabs and boulders, more than I would want in a real wall, but probably the right amount for a garden show. I found myself wishing more of the other gardens were more over the top this year.

Dynamic Reflections again

Savannah

Savannah was the other garden that felt satisfyingly over-the-top. It was done almost entirely with grasses, a narrow path through a tunnel of grassy foliage. It was a distinct experience, with crickets and other sounds created by a guy does garden sound for a living. It was a hard thing to do it justice in a photo, but this blurred photo sort of gives a sense of it. I felt like it was far and away the most interesting garden and the main one that offered a distinctive experience you wouldn’t see in a real bay area garden. It was also the only garden that truly felt like it was about the plants.

Windows

Windows was more about the hardscape and the design and making a real outdoor space with good attention to materials and details. It swept the awards from the ASLA, CLCA, APLD, and Sunset, all the groups that are focused on making real residential gardens.

Serenity Lounge

I liked the Serenity Lounge also.

Serenity Lounge again

Urban Habitat on the Left, Sculpture Party on the Right

I also liked the big dragon and the juxtaposition of it next to the graffiti garden. I guess there was more over-the-top things than I remember.

La Vie en Vert

The pendulum and the little gabians in La Vien en Vert are the last of my photos. There were other nice gardens — almost all of the gardens were good this year — but I didn’t photograph them for some reason. I guess I spent a lot of my time tasting honey.

La Vie en Vert again

SF Gate has a slideshow here.

I almost included this in my post about the Richard Serra sculpture at the Stanford museum, but it seemed like it should get its own post. It’s Stone River, one of several Andy Goldsworthy pieces in the Bay Area. The others are Drawn Stone at the De Young museum and Spire in the Presidio. This one is my favorite of the three. I love the snakelike form and the stylized coping stones. Vertical coping stones along the top of a wall are common, especially in Europe, but I’ve never seen them quite like this. It’s all built from rubble the university saved after the earthquakes of 1989 and 1906, 128 tons of stone, 320 feet long.

The whole thing is set into the ground with the top of the wall at grade. Because the color of the stone and the dirt match so closely, it sort of feels like someone took a big scoop of dirt and compressed it into the stone for the wall. I like to see how far I can get walking along the top (not very far).

This warm weather and lack of rain has me a little unsettled. I remember some winters like this when I was growing up, but that was before my gardening days and I don’t remember how it affected the plants. I guess I’ll be finding out. In the meantime, I’ve stopped at Tilden several times this winter to check out how the manzanitas are responding to this lack of a winter. I thought I could look at past photos to see if the different varieties are acting any different this year, but I couldn’t figure out anything conclusive. I think I’ve seen bigger bloom clusters in other years and I think they started blooming a couple of weeks late this year, but I couldn’t say for sure. In any case, they’re looking good right now in the heart of manzanita season.

The one in the photo below, Arctostaphylos montana-regis, has one of the best tree trunks I’ve ever seen. This little cluster of trees is probably my favorite spot in my favorite garden.

The next thing to keep an eye on is when everything deciduous wakes up. A few things in the garden had buds, but nothing had broken into leaf yet.

I really like this photo by a photographer from the UK. It’s great how it plays with my eye, but also how it seems to satirize or exploit the practice of painting tree trunks white. He has more photos on his website.

This little jetty sticking out into the mudflat (click on all of these to see them bigger) is a memorial to one half of the Bay Area’s largest and most ambitious drystone construction, the Oakland Harbor Training Walls. It’s in Oakland’s Middle Harbor Shoreline Park, which is a rather incongruous park. The park is out in the middle of the port surrounded by industrial activity, there’s a ton of lawn which no one ever uses and in fact the geese have turned rather unusable, and there are a bunch of big landscape elements that reference the history of the port: the shade structure in the photo below, a concrete path that marks the footprint of a giant 19,000 square foot building that they took down, and the rock jetty that commemorates the port’s north training wall.

The harbor’s north and south training walls were two long jetties designed to ‘train’ the tide. Unlike a typical riprap jetty made of haphazardly dumped piles of rock designed to absorb wave or tidal energy, each rock in the training wall was fitted by stoneworkers to give the wall a smooth face that would accelerate the water instead of slowing it down. Back in the 1800’s, Oakland’s harbor was shallow and it tended to fill with silt; ships could only enter it during high tide. The idea of the training walls was to channel the tide’s energy so that when the tide went out it would also suck all the silt out with it, reducing the need for dredging. The walls were started in 1874 and took twenty years to build, with some impressive stats: 310,000 tons of stone, 500,000 square feet of wall, 20 feet wide at the base, 8 feet wide at the top, 6 feet above the low water point. The north wall was 9500 feet long, the south wall 12,000. Apparently the walls worked; the signage says the port’s activity went up 2000% after they were built.

The south wall is still there, but the port the north wall out in 2001 when they widened the channel so bigger container ships could use it; as part of the approval process, they used some of the north wall’s rock to build this memorial. I didn’t do all that good with my photos of it (there’s a better one at Oakland Geology) and I might try again some time when the tide is in or I might try to find a good view of the south wall. Honestly, though, I think the appeal is more intellectual than aesthetic.

It looks a little better with some sun flare drama. You can see the contrast between the training wall’s fitted stone (above) and the riprap’s rough faces (below).

Overall, though I said it was incongruous, the park is also pretty cool. The ships and cranes and machinery right next to the park are all impressive. There’s also a habitat planting with some natives struggling against weeds and a path out to a great view of the Bay Bridge and the city. The water area of the middle harbor is being converted into a mudflat, slowly getting filled with the silt from dredging of the channel. It’s a good place to see water birds.

And the park is a great place to see the sunset. Information and a map of the park is here, a historic photo with the training walls visible on the left side is here.

For my first bit of ‘culture’ in the new year, I checked out the Richard Serra installation at the Stanford museum. I can’t say enough how much I liked it. Richard Serra can be a bit hit or miss in my experience, but this one is great, a moebius-like double figure-eight of curved walls made out of Cor-ten steel; the steel walls form two open circular spaces surrounded by a narrow walkway. At first I thought Sequence was an odd name, but watching people walk through it, I realized that there is indeed an actual sequence to the piece, that everyone does the same thing in the same order. Everyone looks at the walls in the first open circle, then they walk through the outer figure-eight which has a disorienting feel as the walls sinuously narrow and widen, then in the second open space everyone stares up at the sky, and then when they walk back again through the outer figure-eight they tend to keep looking upwards at the sky. As you follow the sequence, you can feel it change from an object to a space around you.

There’s a slideshow with some great photos at Stanford University News and a time-lapse of the installation at Daily Serving. It’s going to be at the Stanford museum for five years before eventually moving permanently to the SFMOMA to a new wing that is under construction, but this time of year, with the sun lower in the sky so you can look up and not be blinded, is a good time to see it.