DryStoneGarden

On my Italy trip I went to Brion Cemetery, the chapel and memorial garden Carlo Scarpa designed for the Brion family on a parcel of land adjoining a smalltown cemetery. It’s a family memorial, but it’s also a de facto Carlo Scarpa memorial, a destination for the legions of Scarpa fans, which now absolutely includes me. I knew of Brion, but didn’t know where it was, just that it was in an obscure town in the Venezia, and it didn’t seem like somewhere I could easily visit on the bicycle. But then as I was riding along, I randomly saw a sign for it and immediately detoured. Pure happenstance.

It’s hard to overstate how glad I am. I’d seen photos, but it’s fantastic in person, a tour de force of concrete detailing. There’s symbolism and a narrative to the garden, but what fascinates me is Scarpa’s ability to execute variations on a theme and to incorporate eccentric design moves into a cohesive design. It’s all very quirky, but it all works.

It also struck me that the concrete feels like it is built out of discrete units, there’s a respect for each element of concrete and the joints that bring everything together. You get a sense of the construction of the place and the hand of the designer and workers that created it; it’s as if the wood used to form all of the board-formed concrete still has a presence in the garden. I studied the joints to try and figure out the process, and I’ve seen some of the construction drawings, but I would love to have seen the forms. ‘Damn, he had a good concrete person,’ was one of the first things I said as I walked around.

Brion has been photographed a great deal, but never by me, so I’m indulging myself. An excess of photos are below. (more…)

Five Seasons: The Gardens of Piet Oudolf documentary trailer from Thomas Piper on Vimeo.

The Piet Oudolf movie, Five Seasons, is coming to the Bay Area this week, with showings in Berkeley, San Rafael, and San Francisco. I haven’t seen it yet but I’ve been anticipating it for quite a while now. Oudolf is probably the single biggest figure in the plant world and I’m excited to see his work up on the big screen. It’s not to be missed. There are details about the showings at the movie’s website.

‘I am not a painter, I am a poet.
Why? I think I would rather be
a painter, but I am not. Well,

for instance, Mike Goldberg
is starting a painting. I drop in.
“Sit down and have a drink” he
says. I drink; we drink. I look
up. “You have SARDINES in it.”
“Yes, it needed something there.”
“Oh.” I go and the days go by
and I drop in again. The painting
is going on, and I go, and the days
go by. I drop in. The painting is
finished. “Where’s SARDINES?”
All that’s left is just
letters, “It was too much,” Mike says.

But me? One day I am thinking of
a color: orange. I write a line
about orange. Pretty soon it is a
whole page of words, not lines.
Then another page. There should be
so much more, not of orange, of
words, of how terrible orange is
and life. Days go by. It is even in
prose, I am a real poet. My poem
is finished and I haven’t mentioned
orange yet. It’s twelve poems, I call
it ORANGES. And one day in a gallery
I see Mike’s painting, called SARDINES.’
Frank O’Hara

This poem by Frank O’Hara is my favorite description of the creative process. I love the way its irreverent tone and seemingly arbitrary decision-making belie a seriousness of purpose. I’ve also thought that O’Hara’s Lunch Poems, what he called his ‘I do this, I do that poems’, with their casual accumulation of meaning were one of the great antecedents of blogging.

I thought of this poem recently because a project began with an orangish-colored wall as a possibility in the design, but somehow by the time everything was done the wall was olive green. Probably too literal a connection to the poem, but it gave me all sorts of amusement. I even wanted to include sardines in the design but realized of course it would be too much.

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.

For the past year, the Clinton campaign has reminded me of Grey Davis (victorious and then recalled). It turns out she is more like John Kerry (loser). Donald Trump reminds me of George W. Bush (the worst terrorist attack in our country’s history, two failed wars, Katrina, the worst financial meltdown since the great depression), but it’s possible he will be more like Schwarzenegger (struggled to pass legislation, rode around in Humvees). Supporters and detractors of them can ignore or interpret that as they choose. Personally, I never liked any of them.

I was getting ready to start posting again and I have a couple of posts half written, but it’s going to take a little while before I am ready to move forward. Leaving my garden after ten years, moving to a cabin in the foothills felt like the end of an era; Tuesday night exacerbated that feeling. My head hasn’t quite embraced the new one.

Instead of stonework and plants and gardens, after Tuesday I feel like posting photos of cowshit. This was a cowshit election with a cowshit result. The place I’m living has two cows, Pedro and Pearl, so I have a good supply to photograph. It starts out dark and gross, but it fades to gray, and in the end it helps the grass grow green. Maybe our politics will be the same.

gardenfarewell5

gardenfarewell6

gardenfarewell7

gardenfarewell1

gardenfarewell2

gardenfarewell8

gardenfarewell4

gardenfarewell3

“It ain’t the leavin’ that’s a-grievin’ me
But my true love who’s bound to stay behind” Bob Dylan

We’ve moved. Our garden is no longer ours. One of the underlying facts of the garden has always been that we were renters, and now our landlord has given us the boot so his daughter can live there. Which is okay. As this year’s Nobel laureate says, don’t think twice it’s alright.

We moved out a couple of months ago. The new place where we’re living is quite different from the old one, and I’ll have some blog posts about it at some point. I also might do a retrospective on the ten years at our former garden, but I’m not quite ready yet. Moving, after ten years in one place, has been a lot of work and I’m still catching up on everything. In the meantime, these are a few photos from the garden as I was doing my final walk-thru. It looks a little sad and barren — a potting area with no pots in it, a veggie garden with no veggies, perennial beds with the perennials lifted out — but maybe the new tenant will fill it with plants and it will bloom again. I had a lot of fun with it, with luck I’ll have as much fun with my next one.