A Note from Joan

In the seclusion of this kind of rural life – where the nearest neighbors are coyotes, rattle snakes, spiders, quail and hawks –the home has a particularly intimate connection to its inhabitants. It is the first and last line of defense against the rigors of the wild environment – there is no sheltering community of similar buildings as in a suburb, no carapace of urban environment as in a town, not even the protection of surrounding yards, fields and out-buildings as in a farm.

At the extreme, it represents a moving from the cenobitic experience of the community to the eremitic experience of the hermit’s cell. But it also represents a new opening to the natural world unmediated by the infrastructure of development. In this context there is both a turning towards an interior life and a reaching out to the biosphere.

This living at the urban wildland interface encourages the contemplative review of one’s interior life and impacts even weekend guests, particular those attuned to matters of the body, mind and spirit.

Joan Diamond visited the house early in August 2009. An old friend, she has been associated with the Cumbria Alexander Training school in Kendal, U.K. for nearly twenty years where she is now a senior teacher. She is the author of Understanding the Alexander Technique available from Amazon.uk.com

The Alexander Technique teaches a non-invasive pathway towards achieving a natural posture that stresses an axial elongation of the spine. It is applied for purposes of recovering freedom of movement, in the mastery of performing arts, and for general self-improvement affecting poise, impulse control and attention. The technique takes its name from F. Matthias Alexander, an Australian, who first formulated its principles between 1890 and 1900.

She reflected on the time she spent with us:

"As someone who has taught meditation on the bones; how to enter the ribcage and look around, much like Jonah might have entered the whale and looked around, the house made me feel that I was inside the body human, looking out. Like a large body lying on its back, the house was allowing the landscape to enter and influence those who lived inside.

Coming up the drive from the outside world I entered the “pelvis”, the living room. Light through sliding doors that filled both walls on either side, let me see chaparral, rolling golden hills and the rising bluff of the Topa Topas in the distance. Flowing along an open hallway I came quickly to the “belly” the dining area opening to the hills through sliding doors on one side and the comfort of a potbellied stove on the other. Indirect light through partitions led to the ‘heart’: the kitchen. Here again completely open views on either side allowing the landscape to enter as we cooked.

Continuing further along the ‘spine’ I came to the ‘throat’: the studies for communication, writing, less open here, ordinary windows, sliding panels, options for more privacy, more thought and for bathing oneself; dressing, preparing, organizing and finally flowing further along the ‘spine’ to the ‘head’: the master bedroom. Again the sliding doors and windows allowing both sides to be completely open to the landscape. A place for rest, for quiet conception, space for the creative ideas to emerge between these two architects, these two friends, these partners at work.

During my stay in Ojai, walking the landscape I realized this was also the home of Aldous Huxley: the great writer but also someone who practiced the Bates Method; the ‘seeing without glasses’ in this landscape.

Over days I came to understand what he must have found so special about this light splashed land. In the foreground, the large light reflecting boulders gave the eyes their initial focus. Shifting the gaze to the mid-distance one found the rolling golden hills, the dark green scattering of native oak. Shifting the focus again to the far distance one found the mountains beyond, the light reflecting bluffs of the Topa Topas. And finally, allowing the focus to soften altogether and widen out to the peripheries, one found the chaparral; the dry grasses, the rocks, the scrub trees. And then back again to the original focus: the light reflecting boulders in the foreground. Everything the human eye needed to shift between to remind itself of its natural capacity.

And here was a house, like a body resting open, allowing the landscape in, allowing the human vision to expand outwards."

Dowsing

Last Thursday, bright, clear and windy after a brief storm on Tuesday night and lingering cloud Wednesday, Sarah Munster - friend, landscape designer and dowser - helped me find locations for three oak seedlings (Quercus agrifolia) and a young black walnut (Juglans californica).

I had already found the prospective walnut transplant beneath the oaks to the north east of the house and cleared away a couple of rocks to be sure that I had a reasonable chance of getting most of the root. Sarah confirmed that this sapling would be amenable to being moved. I showed her the approximate area that I was thinking of for the new location and she pin-pointed a likely spot.

The oak seedlings had been collected a few weeks earlier from beneath the meadow oak below the house and were planted to the west of it. Sarah, via her 'bobber' dowsing implement deemed only one of the four worth leaving in-situ while the others were to be moved to the south east of the parent tree. Scrambling through the rocky field she located the three planting sites. We marked each with a small cairn of stones.

With massive rains scheduled for the week, I knew that Sunday morning, cloudy and still, presented a prime opportunity for the plantings. The walnut had rooted deep beneath an immovable rock but with some energetic bar work and hand removal of earth I was able to reveal most of the tap root and I lost only an inch or two to the rock. The sex organs - the trunk and leaves - were about 18" tall and the root measured from elbow to palm. I carried the bare root stock the hundred yards to its new location and got it into the ground with a minimum of trauma. (Easy for me to say!). I used the dark loamy soil from beneath its host oak to fill the hole and give the root some semblance of familiar surroundings. The tree, if it prospers, will find the soil beneath and beyond the planting pocket much more sandy but with the typical quotient of rocks around which moisture migrates down into the earth. The oaks, having been recently transplanted, were relocated without drama.

While working on removing the walnut I had seen another sapling close to a multi-trunk oak lower down and almost in the seasonal creek bed. Confident now in my extraction technology and aware of the character of the walnut tap root I ended the morning by removing it - again leaving the last few inches of root wedged under a rock - and planted it 10' -15' away from the first. They will eventually linkup with 3 or 4 existing walnuts along the rocky spine that divides the east and west meadows to create a casual arc of trees. The three oaks will form a complementary arc lower down the meadow. A little after mid day the rain began, and as I write this in the early evening, it continues.

Sarah was in England recently and she acquired her new bobber dowsing technique from a seminar in Wales. She spent much of the summer in the Cotswolds and Wales is an easy drive west. Her initial forays into the dowsing world were made, more prosaically, in the San Fernando Valley and she had previously practiced dowsing for water (or water witching) on our property. The local well-diggers, the Hansens, use dowsing and old man Ralph has the gift. It skips generations apparently, but his grandson Brandon continues the tradition. I remember my father showing me how to dowse in England when I was 9 or 10. We used, I think, a hazel twig with the traditional pointer and branched hand holds. I am not clear whether my father had the gift or if this was merely a technical demonstration of the tools used in the art.

Sarah has expanded her skills beyond searching for water and she follows the modern notion that dowsing is equivalent to, for instance, strength testing in Kinesiology or any other technique used for accessing the networks of energy and information that pulse through all of creation. To that extent it is equivalent to the predictive aids such as the i-ching and the tarot deck. She has demonstrated to Lorrie and me the technique for ascertaining whether foods, drugs or supplements are helpful whereby a simple rocking of the body can be used as an indicator of the yes/no which is at the heart of dowsing.

The bobber is a flexible rod (such as a straightened wire coat-hanger) with a plastic vial at the end. An up and down motion is initiated by the dowser and this changes to a circular motion when the energy network is approached for wisdom - one direction indicates yes and the other no. The plastic vial can be filled with a substance, such as water, that the dowser wishes to locate; otherwise it serves as a weight to facilitate the bobbing.

Sarah, then, follows in the tradition of those who have been characterized through history as diviners, dowsers, soothsayers, seers, mystics, mediums, clairvoyants, shamans, witches, wizards and, most often, charlatans. Like Dorothy Maclean, whose work with devas, the intelligences overseeing the natural world, resulted in the amazing cooperations with plant life that established Findhorn on the north east coast of Scotland as a magical place of giant vegetable production, Sarah claims to have long communicated with plants in her work as a garden designer. Similarly, the native plant ecologist Dr. Margot Griswold, communicates with grasses, trees and shrubs.

Maclean conversed with the devas and even experienced them in something akin to human form. Sarah tells the story of a meeting with a wood nymph when she was a child. Maclean had an assignation with Pan in a London park. Krishnamurti communicated with the oaks at the Oak Grove just west of Ojai where he gave his talks and was concerned not to interfere with their relationship - he avoided, for instance, walking directly between two oaks.

Dowsing introduces the certainties of binary answering, but is limited by the intelligence of the question. The emphatic graphic indications of the device are reassuring, however, and avoid the interpretive steps of a more intuitive communication with the animal, vegetable or mineral spirits.

It continues to rain, after a brief respite that allowed Lorrie and me to wander down to the perimeter gate and lock it for the night, so the five trees I planted are getting a thorough soak. Their future is not assured, but I feel confident that we are, at some level, working cooperatively with them and that our various energies are intertwined to some small extent.

Blowback

Part of the blowback of the Seven Years War 1756-1763, which had begun locally in the conflict known as the French and Indian War in 1754, was that Spain, having lost Florida, decided to strengthen its hold on the west coast remnant of its empire - already threatened by Russia at the Northern fringe - by sending in the Franciscans. The support infrastructure required of this endeavor forever polluted the pristine perennial bunch-grass meadowlands that were set like emeralds (or golden tourmalines - depending on the season) in the dusty green of the dominant sclerophyllus vegetation of Alta California.

In a war that ranged from the Americas to almost all of Western Europe and beyond to India, and has plausibly been called the first world war, Britain emerged dominant in India and established the export markets that would drive the Industrial Revolution; the British conquered Canada setting up the re-match with France a few years later - commonly called the American War of Independence; Spain was weakened and ceded Florida to the Brits but, in turn, received France's territories west of the Mississippi; and Prussia emerged as the dominant German state.

For our story it was the Spanish decision to monetize and proselytize their holdings north of Baja that has resonance. Both activities required military back-up and vast logistical support. Beginning in 1769, on a route still celebrated along our state highways by mission bell icons, the Spanish established their supply chain larded with settlements that still largely represents the nexus and nodes that make up urban twenty-first century California.

Along with this overt colonization of mission and presidio came the subtler subversion of the land through the introduction of 'old world' crops and weeds. The character of the grassland was to be dramatically altered when European livestock entered Southern California, with native meadow lands replaced by the yellow undercarpet of bromes, oats, fescues, barleys and mustards that gave rise to the notion of a 'golden' California - not withstanding the discovery at Sutters Mill in 1848. It is to the edenic pre-1769 state that I wish to return the meadows of our property in Upper Ojai.

This historical construct does not go unchallenged. Some have argued that this land was formerly a riot of wildflowers not of bunch grasses. If that is the correct forensic interpretation of the early 18th century meadowland then I have spent many hundreds of dollars on the wrong seed mix.

Fantasy or not, it is the bunch grass theory that forms the background to my exercises in weeding. Think of it as exorcising the ghosts of the black crows - the priests that herded the native americans, broke their bonds of community, dispelled the certainties of their animistic spirit, and introduced the diseases of a world that had been co-habiting with its livestock for far too long - for it was these diseases bred between domestic animals and their human community that decimated the native peoples as much as the destruction of their familiar environment.

I was going to say natural environment, but the tribes of California were vigorous modifiers of the found environment. From fire clearance, casual aggregation of useful plants, hunting and gathering to rock art, painting and primitive water works they forever changed their forage lands. Even now, of course, I am separating the human culture from the natural. As David Bohm, the quantum physicist, has pointed out, fragmentation as a way of thought is profoundly divisive and handicaps our world view to the point of impotence when confronted with problems that are systemic and requiring of a globally united resolution.

Be that as it may, I am pursuing the reactionary position of attempting an arguably pre-1769 meadow as the natural setting for our new house in Upper Ojai. It is to this vision that I have dedicated both my weeding and seeding. Gardening is ultimately a political act: it requires the taking of a position.

Chaparral Gardening

Chaparral Gardening is informed by the twin imperatives of weeding out non-natives and establishing fire clearances. As fate would have it, these two activities are not complementary.

Opening up the continuous cover of the chaparral plant community - as one is compelled to do in order to achieve fire clearances - is an invitation to invasion by thistles, mustards, and other exogenous weeds. At best one can expect a smattering of the usual fire-followers to establish themselves in the disturbed soil as the first stage in the restoration of mature chaparral, but their hold is precarious amidst the vegetal stigmata of European colonization - the weeds feeds and crops brought by the Spanish soldiers, priests and their livestock now thoroughly naturalized at the traumatized edges of the California wildlands.

Withering penalties imposed by California Fair Plan State Fire Insurance for clearances of less than two hundred feet from buildings and the requirements of the local fire department - alongside of an educated understanding of what is reasonable for the preservation of one's life and property - leaves no alternative to the removal of most of the foundational plants that make up the mature chaparral eco-system in areas close to buildings. If one starts from the premise that the experience of living at the Urban Wildland Interface is at least partly about proximity to the naturally occurring landscape and, that as part of a presumed responsibility to the vestiges of naturalness that remain after the depredations of developing buildings within it, one will only nurture, seed or plant locally occurring natives there develops,at the heart of the endeavor I have called Chaparral Gardening, a profound paradox. In chaparral, to disturb is to destroy.

Gardening, of course, is defined by the meddling, muddling, and nurturing of something that stands in opposition to the wildlands that, historically at least, have ever threatened to invade and retake what man has wrought. It is an inherently oppositional activity. Chaparral Gardening attempts a cooperative strategy that nonetheless involves a level of destruction, modification and re-making. It is the trials, errors and successes in this process that I intend to document.

Kaffe Fassett

Kaffe Fassett grew up in Big Sur at Nepenthe, the restaurant his parents built overlooking the coast. He was offered a scholarship to go to Happy Valley School in Upper Ojai where he graduated in the early 1960's. After a brief sojourn at the Boston Museum School he went to England a painter but shortly discovered his true passion: the colors and patterns of textiles and fabric. Britain has adopted him as a favorite son, where he is famous as a knitter, needlepointer, quilter, author and media personality.

I met Kaffe at a gathering in Hope Ranch, Santa Barbara organized by Besant Hill School (previously Happy Valley) on a Saturday in January and found him to be both pleasant and slightly patrician. We discussed his complaint that after 40 years in England his accent still marked him as an American -I countered with the news that after a similar period away from England I was considered an American in my homeland and would forever and a day be considered a Brit in California. Such is the fate of the ex-pat. I briefly enquired of his art - knowing him only at that point as a fabric artist - and asked him if he was represented by a gallery. He responded by mentioning that he did "books" and his work was typically purchased by museums.

The following evening Lorrie and I journeyed back to Santa Barbara to hear Kaffe's presentation at the glorious Marjorie Luke Theatre on Cota Street. The room was crowded with upwards of 250 people almost entirely bereft of the 'Y' chromosone. I suggested to Lorrie that perhaps there was a football game on TV that had depressed the male turnout. I understood, however, the reality that at this point in time, in our culture, real men do not turn out for a presentation by a gay man who makes his living knitting.

They missed an amazing performance by a truly protean creative spirit who lives and breathes color, texture, pattern and visual imagery. I don't think I have ever been in the presence of such a purely creative spirit. At the same time he was funny, self deprecating and warm. He has eschewed certain trappings of modernity - computers, motor cars and television to focus on his artistic passions. Enormously productive, with an output that spans from mosaics to neeedlepoint, he consistently dazzles with his sense of color, pattern and compositional bravura.

As an architect who is constrained to work in white, neutrals, earth tones and taupes, his presentation was a rare tonic. As an erstwhile painter and sculptor who, in the heat of artistic inspiration, was capable of bending everything and everybody to his creative will, I was reminded of what I had lost by embarking on a profession that values restraint, moderation and structural integrity. As I reviewed my recent work with my partner Lorrie Brown I comforted myself with the thought that we had really cut loose of late and actually used four different gravel textures in a project. Each of the gravels was, of course, a similar hue. Baby steps.....

Chaparral - Got to go through it

The well known children's book, We're Going on a Bear Hunt, Helen Oxenbury (Illustrator), Michael Rosen (Author) features the refrain,

Can't go over it,

Can't go under it,

Can't go around it,

Got to go through it

In the book, a family embarks on a walk in the English countryside - an activity that has bored generations of English children and is enlivened here only by the spurious presence of bears (not seen in the wild in England for over a millenium) and the conjuring of apparent topographical impediments to the hunt. The irony implicit in Rosen's work is that the wild in England has been mind-numbingly tamed over roughly the same time period that has seen the extirpation of Ursus arctos and, only slightly more recently, the wolf (Canis lupus) both staple bogey animals of fairy tales.

Very little fictional embellishment is required to establish Southern California's chaparral as a landscape epically unconducive to human passage. I like W.S.Head's description of it as vegetation that is too high to see over, too low to go under, and too thick to get through, (The California Chaparral: An Elfin Forest, W.S.Head, 1972). And it is this triumverate of impedimenta that put me in mind of Rosen's children's classic.

Winfield Scott Head's title suggests, by implication, that Southern California's signature landscape is a dwarfish, mystical ecology. He was following the terminology developed by Fred Gordon Plummer in a U.S. Forest Service Bulletin of 1911. (Plummer, F.G. 1911. Chaparral - studies in the dwarf forests, or elfin-wood of southern California. USDA, Forest Serv. Bull. 85:1—54.) The dominant trope here, of course, is the stunted form of chaparral trees - yes, they are mostly over head height but they are dwarfish in comparison to the forests of Europe or the east coast of the United States -presumably the botanical and cultural touch stones of both these writers.

In terms of its impenetrability, the reality is that sometimes you can go through it, sometimes you can shimmy on your stomach and go under it, and usually there are rock outcroppings or boulders that afford a view over it. In any event it's tough going. Absent the bullocking of the grizzly - the game paths are both intermittent and discontinuous. In my experience, the black bear favors more open terrain, and may be surprised on trails and in canyon creek beds more regularly than in the denser chaparral. In any case they do not have the massive body weight of the grizzly to impose their will on the thorny underbrush. Similarly we humans usually stick to the open trails, fire roads and creek beds. Yet the density of the canopy ensures that there are few plants that can survive on the chaparral floor - it is a world of birds, rodents, reptiles and insects; seeds, leaf litter and dead branches. Chaparral plants self prune - limbs wither and die if there is insufficient light and it is this last characteristic that at least affords an opportunity to limbo through the brush.

Well nigh impenetrable, thorny and pestiferous - but strangely wonderful even when viewed, as it most often is, from the margins. While arguably made less wild by the absence of Ursus arctos horribilis (the grizzly was rendered extinct in California at the beginning of the last century) it is still a stunningly alien environment when confronted in its midst. The rasping of chamise (Adenostoma fasticulatum), the burs of buckthorn (Rhamnus crocea) and the serrations of toyon (Heteromeles arbutifolia) and of holly-leafed cherry (Prunus ilicifolia) conspire to inhibit human progress but not totally deny it. The toxicity of poison oak (Toxicodendron diversilobum), the venom of the rattle snake (Crotalus viridis) and the thrashing mandibles of mountain lion (Puma concolor), bobcat (Lynx rufus) and coyote (Canis latrans) further threaten the chaparral explorer. And yet, like Rosen's family of bear hunters, the obstacles can be confronted and the chaparral explored by walking, crawling, limboing and bullocking one's way through it. It is an activity not to be missed.