Fire Lands

In notes for a Chaparral blog piece I wrote the following bullet points:

• Lacking apparent order or hierarchy 
• Adapted to fire, much of the bio mass exists underground 
• Hard shell leaves, dwarfish forms 
• Chaparral is inimical to human habitation 
• Fire is the great regenerative force 
• The vestibule of Hell 
• A sensual ecology 

One afternoon last summer the wind changed and the smoke from the Guiberson fire along South Mountain darkened the sky. The charred smudging of the sky, the warmth of the air and the smell of the smoke were, for a moment, enough to suggest that here was no paradise but instead the vestibule of hell.

It can be a fretful experience moving through hard chaparral. There is almost always something tugging at you. As Rick Halsey suggests (verbal communication, 2010), If you emerge without scratches and blood then it must have been coastal sage brush or soft chaparral!

This is no ordinary landscape. It is at once a sea of gasoline and intricate habitat to a thousand things that flutter, crawl, shimmy, slither and sidle their way through the almost impenetrable skein.

Learning to love chaparral involves giving up the half a millennium of post Renaissance landscape appreciation classes to which we in the west are heirs. There is no orderly foreground middle ground and back ground; no objecthood - just a frantic gestalt of schlerophytic plant material.

In areas of riparian habitat there appears to be greater order yet this too quickly dissolves into an entanglement of oaks or elsewhere, as now, a leafy blizzard of alders, cottonwoods and sycamores. Just north of the park gate on Sisar there is a stretch of oaks by the Creek that sets up a kind of treed cage in which Great-horned owls (Bubo virginianus) swoop and jink. One afternoon Lorrie and I saw a blue heron (Ardea herodias) glide through the area. Another morning I startled a pair of grey foxes (Urocyon cinereoargenteus): one ran west up the bank, the other darted towards the creek but stopped 10 or 15 yards into the undergrowth, as I passed we locked eyes. I continued, the fox stood its ground. These are rare moments of objecthood inserted into the field theory painting where the matrix of greys, browns and almost greens mess with our minds. This why most people stick to the trail.The yellow strip of sandy track organizes the chaos. it also vitiates the experience of plunging into chaparral that sings to our lizard brain.

There is a mesa that sits between Bear and Sisar canyons which is buttressed to the east of the creek by a steep escarpment. As you scramble down it towards the creek and once within ear shot of the roiling water there is a shelf of head high California sagebrush (Artemesia californica). Passing through it is to inhale air heavy with the scent of the plant and have your face gently lashed by the feathery leaves: this is sage surfing - like being tossed in the ozone-rich foam of a broken ocean wave. Such moments of extreme sensuality may not be experienced by those who stick to the trail!

At some point in the very recent past the mesa above fell victim to a strategy of fuel reduction. It is now mostly low chamise amidst rocks that have been displaced and scarred by heavy equipment. Last year I watched the cutting of a swathe of chaparral along the Foothill trail just east of Stewart Canyon in a futile, but State funded attempt to reduce the flammability of the wildlands as they encroach on suburban settlement.

Rick Halsey, Fire, Chaparral and Survival in Southern California, Sunbelt Publications, San Diego, 2008, points out that the bush ecology is not fire dependent, but fire adapted. Yes, it can be a regenerative force but not one on which the survival of the chaparral is dependent. He points out that, on the contrary, the frequency of mostly anthropogenic fires threatens the survival of the ecosystem. He also argues that the evisceration of the wildlands to which I was witness early in 2009 along the Foothill trail is not the answer. It is self evident that a reduction in the flammability of structures that impinge on wild areas makes more sense than any attempt to reduce the flammability of the wildlands.

In five days last September, the Guiberson fire scorched 17,500 acres along the ridge of South Mountain and down its flanks to the edges of the irrigated farmlands below. One out-building was destroyed. Driving along the 126 last week I looked across at the fresh mantle of green that now covers the old burn areas. I was encapsulated in 4000 lb. of speeding steel, plastic, glass, rubber and cow hide and at a distance of perhaps two miles from the ridge, nevertheless I felt a faint frisson of connectedness to the regenerative powers of the natural world.

It's not all sage-surfing but neither do most of us wildland/urban interfacers spend long in the vestibule of hell although I heard tell, over the weekend, of a Montecito family that lost, amongst its members, five houses in the fires of 2008. Bullet point number four: Chaparral is inimical to human habitation.

Full Metal Jacket

Houses are not consumed by Chaparral fires, but by house-fires started by Chaparral fires.

That may seem like a fine distinction, but it has real consequences when planning for a fire safe residence. There are three modes of attack by these fires on buildings:

• burning embers

• heat radiation

• flame contact.

The CSIRO (an Australian government funded research organization - and full disclosure - with whom I worked for a couple of years in the 1970's at their Canberra Black Mountain Computer Research Laboratory) have generated significant data in their analyses of "How Bush Fires Attack". They conclude that ember attack is the most prolonged and persistent mode of attack, commencing before the fire front and persisting for several hours afterwards. Radiant heat is at dangerous levels for perhaps 5-10 minutes before and after the flame front passes. Flame contact may impinge on the building for just a few minutes. Strong winds associated with fires exacerbate the effects of all three.

We know from anecdotal evidence from those who have seen the fires ravage Upper Ojai that the fire line moves quickly and literally sweeps over structures. In our recent fire-safe building design, we have responded to all areas of vulnerability to fire, but have focused particularly on ember attack.

The re-model across the street that Lorrie and I (operating professionally as dba) designed for Margot is complete except for the fire screens which are to be installed at all glazed openings. Our thinking on fire screens/shutters/doors has evolved since they became one of the drivers for the design of own house on Koenigstein (and is reflected in their evolving nomenclature!). As it turned out, our fire doors were not installed until six months after we moved in and during that time we designed and re-designed the door and track system.

Our house was built with the line of glazing pulled back four feet from the face of the house. The fire doors pull across these 16' wide recesses (three to the north and three to the south) to create a hard shell designed to be impervious to the wind driven embers which can precede the actual line of the fire by up to a mile and arrive with a ballistic force capable of breaking the two layers of tempered window glass now mandated by the California Building Code in high fire districts. When the interior begins burning a house typically explodes in flame and ignites the landscape around it. It is in such a manner that structures - whether the fire line reaches them or not - can actually generate satellite fires that run ahead of the main fire line.

We had initially envisioned all-ipe fire doors for the house. We were early adopters of this tropical hardwood that has the same fire rating as concrete although we had used it for many years, beginning in the mid 1990's, primarily for its natural beauty and structural properties - 3/4" of ipe spans 24" as effectively as a 1 1/2" piece of redwood. Its advantages derive from its amazing density, but the weight of the wood is problematic when being used in a track hung door. Our 16' x 8' doors using a 2x frame with 1x infill would have weighed 800 lb. each.

Concerns with the logistics of hanging these doors and the structural consequences of supporting over a ton off of each side of the building led us to consider lighter, but still fire-resistant alternatives. In addition to their function as a hard shell to deflect embers, the doors also potentially function as barriers to heat radiation. In this latter role it seemed as though a cool roof material could be effective since a material designed to reflect solar radiation would also reflect radiant heat generated by a chaparral fire.

In the event, we chose a 24ga. sheet metal soffit panel in a 'cool roof' finish identical to our standing seam roof. The panels were attached to ipe strips laid into a 1/4" x 3" x 3" steel angle frame. They hang from a continuous galvanized track attached to a 1 x 6 ipe ledger. They are a handsome addition to the building and sit against the stucco facade awaiting their call to action - which we sincerely hope will never come.

Margot's situation, being a re-model of a conventional ranch-style house with a variety of glazed door and window conditions, is very different and requires a more flexible system of fire shutters. In addition, she has the ear of the L.A. County fire chief who has come down on the side of the radiation heat shield function being critical in the design of the fire shutters. Too bad: we were ready to adopt the Aussie notion that the key function of the screen is to deflect burning embers and perforated sheet metal or a wire cloth membrane is sufficient to the task.

The CSIRO addresses the radiation issue and provides experimental data on its impact on the building envelope. They note that at peak levels, radiation can crack and distort windows, doors and cladding materials, allowing breaches of the building envelope and ember attack on flammable framing members. Flame contact can cause building ignition when exposed materials, dried and prepared by sustained wind, ember and radiation attack, are contacted directly by flames.

In Margot's house we have tried to address these issues by using stucco, ipe and flame and ember-proof attic vents as well as installing double glazed tempered glazing at all new windows and doors. Her front door, eaves, decks (including their support structure and the side cladding) are solid ipe. Under floor venting - a typical weak point for raised floor structures - is protected by the ipe deck that wraps the vulnerable portions of the building.

The re-making of Margot's home, which was initially built with flagrant disregard for fire-safety and featured flammable fiber board siding, exposed rafter ends and plywood eave soffits, was an exercise in abating the inherent weaknesses of the existing building fabric.The fire screens will be the final piece of this defensive strategy.

Their design is complete in terms of the sliding mechanisms. We have opted for operable screens; most of the time, they will be parked above below or to the side of the opening they are designed to cover when there is a threat of fire or the house is left unattended. In Australia there is a trend to install fixed mesh screens that attempt to tread the line between view maintenance and fire protection. We believe that the problem is pieces of flaming debris dense enough and moving quickly enough to break through the window glass. We are less concerned, since we are confident in the fire resistive materials we have installed, about wind driven sparks.

Choosing to live in the wildland/urban interface requires a commitment to co-existing with endemic natural cycles of flood and fire. Our goal is to design structures that can endure - in an ecology in which fire is an occasional presence - like the oaks (Quercus agrifolia) that envelop Margot's house and bear the scars from past burns. We continue to wrestle with the precise nature of the fire screen infill.

Today, with temperatures hovering around a breezy 85 degrees, is a reminder that the season which mightily favors that occasional presence is fast upon us.....

Camarillo Brio

Camarillo is three legs of a 'z' from Upper Ojai: south east to Santa Paula, west to Ventura then east to Camarillo. After cascading down the 150 alongside the Santa Paula creek, the last two legs dodge around the west end of South Mountain and travel along Oxnard Plain - the old sea bed and now the richest agricultural land in the state.

Tucked into the eastern end of the plain, where it backs into the western tail of the Santa Monica mountains there is one last alluvial reach, beyond the Calleguas creek and almost surrounded by low rocky hills covered with antic drifts of cactus (Opuntia species). Here, in 1936, the largest mission revival complex in Ventura County was built to accommodate the Camarillo State Mental Hospital.

A Mexican land grant to Jose Pedro Ruiz created Rancho Calleguas in 1837, in the area that is now Camarillo. The town which sprang up in the early part of the twentieth century to serve the local farms grew to cater to the surrounding military and naval installations during World War II and then to support the area's largest employer, the mental hospital. In the 1950's it was split asunder by the 101 freeway leaving its north and south lobes forever isolated; remnants of 'old town' cling to either side of the freeway's embankments. In the mid 1990's work began on a huge outdoor suburban mall which now spreads over formerly agricultural land to the south of the freeway and includes acres of up-scale, designer outlets.

In 1996 Governor Pete Wilson announced plans to close the hospital and at first it appeared as though it would be converted to a prison - but with timely community activism and interest from the California State University system that fate was avoided, and in 2002 the first classes of the new Cal State Channel Islands (CSUCI) were held in the renovated buildings.

The campus maintains an exemplary stylistic cohesion thanks to its re-use of the mission revival buildings from the New Deal era, but at its heart is now a new three level 137,000 square foot library contiguous on three sides with the existing architecture and planted on the site of the hospital's mortuary.The library is, as one might expect from its architect Norman Foster, a bravura exercise in exquisitely engineered glassy minimalism.

A vast flat roof covers the building and, as in some steroidal gas station from the 1940's, it floats out to the west over the entry forecourt which is anchored by a large circular reflecting pool. Formally, the building is a donut, with three levels of offices and stacks surrounding a vast central space that is a reading room  illuminated from an extensive saw- tooth roof skylight system.

30 feet high, the space is reminiscent of a grand railway hall from the late nineteenth century or perhaps one of Foster's recent airports, but here there is calm and quiet with but the faintest of taps and beeps emanating from the students' lap-tops and a low sussuration from the air handling system buried in vertical metal ducting within the stacks.

Foster's design is in the British engineering tradition which stretches back to Paxton's 1850 Crystal Palace and beyond. Nurtured in the leaden skies of northern Europe, its practitioners remain obsessed with day-lighting and Foster has made a lucrative side-line of creating glass conservatory spaces to encase parts of the Reichstag, the British Museum and other monumental spaces.

Here, in southern California where the delightfully thick walled and small windowed mission revival style usefully shelters interior spaces from direct sun, such phototropism is massively inappropriate. Both Tom Mayne's glass skinned office block for Caltrans which sits behind a protective perforated steel skin and the massive wall architecture of Moneo's L.A. Cathedral (two recent architectural favorites) are appropriate to the harsh sun of southern California. Foster's building is blithely indifferent to the local climate - its genesis as a northern european design staggeringly evident as it sits on the edge of the sun washed Oxnard Plain.

Clearly impacted by budget, many of the service spaces are utiliarian in a typical institutional fashion but the building has the virtue of possessing a 'big idea' which survives un-compromised by value engineering. But despite its floating roof, etiolated steel columns, reflecting pool, and vast central hall surrounded by glassy 'servant' spaces, the John Spoore Bloome Library (named after a local rancher who provided the seed money and nominated the architect) is at best an average example of Foster's turn-of-the-century canon and one clearly beset by environmental challenges.

Yet nested into the glories of an intact campus of 1930's mission revival architecture it manages to become something quite extraordinary and a wonderful addition to the small collection of worthwhile contemporary architecture in Ventura County.

Weed World

When we first moved to the property, after an intense 16 months of securing the lot, designing the house and having it built, mustard (Brassica species) was threatening to smother the cut and fill areas where we had hydroseeded as well as dominating the 'weed patch' meadows that line the driveway down to Koenigstein. After destroying a couple of shovels with shallow thrusts at the mustard's tap roots - and hitting rock - Lorenz Schaller advised using a Pulaski.The switch to a fire-fighter's mattock increased the mustard mortality and had the added advantage of its being a tool that appealed to my then seventeen year old son. Together we got the weed under control, and this season there has been very little sign of it - so far. This has enabled me to transfer my weeding energies to erodium.

Walking up the drive recently, I saw some yellowish mustard-like plants growing in some profusion amongst the annual grasses in the disturbed areas to the east of the driveway. Checking with Uncle Miltie, (Wildflowers of the Santa Monica Mountains, Milt McCauly, Canyon Publishing, Canoga Park 1996) I was delighted to learn that they were common fiddle necks (Amsinckia menziesii) which is a native and common to burned or disturbed areas. The flower springs from a spiral raceme and its hairiness gives it the appearance of a coiled caterpillar - with small golden yellow flowers sticking out from its back. Like the larger and later flowering perezia (Acourtia microcephala) it is basically a fire follower but, at a pinch, will become a devotee of back hoe disturbances and has thus found much to like on our land.

Mustards, thistles and filaree (Erodium species) are the current focus of my weeding efforts. The last was likely deliberately introduced into Baja California as sheep forage and was perhaps the first of the exotics to become established in Alta California. These three genera, along with the exotic grasses like wild oats (Avena fatua), ripgut (Bromus diandrus) and foxtail chess (Bromus madritensis) were able to move into the chaparral in the 18th century because the land had been prepared to receive these colonizers by the native american practice of burning the brush. This activity had developed after deer became a primary focus of their hunting with the extinction of the megafauna, such as the mammoth, which occurred somewhere around 11,000 years ago.

Pure stands of chaparral did not support a large population of artiodactyls (deer, goats, antelope and bighorn sheep) until burning opened them up to areas of herbaceous browse. This native practice was clearly built on observation of naturally occurring fires and the complex mosaic of habitats that now exists is the result of this burn history together with more recent anthropogenic fires. This at least, is how Richard Halsey tells it in his pyrocentric natural history, Fire, Chaparral and Survival in Southern California, Sunbelt Publications, San Diego 2008. As dedicated followers of this blog will know (anyone?, anyone?...), others have mused that it was the introduction of Iberian cattle by the Spanish that broke up the ancient soil crust and thus allowed the exotics access. Rick concedes that widespread cattle ranching in the mid nineteenth century exacerbated the situation and he points out that the droughts of the 1860's created a perfect storm for the native flora: overgrazing, the presence of exotic weeds and highly disturbed soil crusts put much of the native habitat into a death spiral.

I am hampered in my efforts at focused weeding by my lack of knowledge. Now, is this a native clover included in the very expensive seed mix or some brutish Trifolium interloper? My rule of thumb is that anything I recognize from my childhood is a non-native. Walks with my parents constitute my early informal education in natural history. I knew, at the age of nine or ten, the common name for most of the west Surrey wild flowers and weeds. Later, an un-tutured appreciation for Australian bush was developed in a few courses at Sydney University to the point where I recognized the invasives such as gorse, lantana, blackberry and bracken amidst the gums (as the Australians call eucalypts), banksias, melaleucas, callistemons and acacias. And now there is my current bout of autodidacticism brought on by owning too many acres of chaparral in Upper Ojai and landing next door to a biologist who specializes in native habitat restoration. Backgrounds in the flora of Europe and Australia, however sketchy, turn out to be useful in California.

The water greedy eucalypt is a particularly vilified non-native and yet barely 100 years ago pioneers such as Abbot Kinney were lauded for their efforts at introducing examples of the vast eucalypt genus to southern California. Whatever home-sickness I suffered when I arrived on these shores in 1980 was usually assuaged by visiting the Huntington Gardens where I could again gaze on a ghost gum. Later, when we moved to Santa Monica Canyon, walks in the Rustic Canyon Park eucalypt grove established by Kinney were again salve to that little piece of antipodean soul that pined for the Australian bush. Gum leaf stencils continued as a motif of interest for me for a few years, and Hank Koning, the Australian born Los Angeles architect for whom I worked in the mid-80's, picked up on the idea and impressed gum leaves into the concrete fireplace hearth of his Santa Monica home.

Chaparral is more enigmatic then Sydney's bush which, while predominantly a shrubland, has glorious discontinuous stands of gum trees providing an open, lacy canopy. But they share the visual confusion they present to the casual observer and both require study to elicit their full charm. Both ecosystems are under threat from (mostly european) weeds and invasive species.

As I look out across the valley from our perch below the Topa Topas, I see meadows in the spaces ripped out of the oak canopy that otherwise covers the north facing damp slope. Here and there is a house or ag building; some horse properties with barns and fencing; at meadows edge some ragged gums (Eucalypt species); lining driveways, rows of cypress (Cupressus sempervirens).

Here, surrounded by chaparral, the emblematic plant community of California, the clearings in the echoing hills of Southern Oak Woodland across the valley - studded with exotic trees, the meadows comprised of exotic grasses -  confirm my attempt to restore our property to something approaching its native state.

Cats and Dogs

Last week I thought I had a boil on the back of my neck. There was a hard swollen area that was sore to the touch and what felt, perhaps, like crusted puss at its apex (euwh!). After a couple of days and no improvement I asked Lorrie to take a look at it. It turned out it was a wood tick, not yet engorged, burrowing its way down to my blood supply. She was able to remove it and still alive we put it in a plastic baggie in case it was needed to id any strange after effects. The back of the neck is a favorite haunt for ticks as anyone with dogs knows. It turns out, that at just about the same time, a larger creature with a penchant for attacking necks was on the loose in Upper Ojai.

Clarissa Cornwell, our neighbor across the way, found pieces of deer vertebrae strewn about the hillside below Sulphur Mountain; later her dogs discovered the deer carcasses which were then inspected for telltale heamatomas and puncture wounds around the neck. The Mountain lion asphyxiates it prey by clamping its jaw around the neck. Their range is typically over 100 miles. The evidence was on the Sulphur Mountain side of the 150. South of the ridge, a little above the Cornwell's house, Wheeler Canyon drops down into Santa Paula and then the alluvial Oxnard plain stretches out beyond - unlikely terrain for a mountain lion. The south facing foothills on our side of the 150 back up to the Topa Topas and thence to the outskirts of Bakersfield in uninterrupted wildlands. The cat came from the north. Its wilderness corridor extends, just within the Los Padres National Forest, to north of San Luis Obispo and if we take its limits as the freeways then it and its ilk can roam west of the 5 all the way to the 580 that runs east west between San Jose and Oakland.

California still offers a remarkably open environment for a rich array of flora and fauna. It is not completely removed from its primal past. By way of contrast, Britain is one of the most extensively re-worked lands on the planet. Effectively deforested during the Roman occupation, and, after a six or seven hundred year respite known as the Dark Ages, consistently patchworked on an ever expanding scale as farmland from the medieval 'strips' of serfdom to the factory farms of today; be-ribboned with transportation networks from Roman roads to motorways, canals, railways and flightpaths; increasingly urbanized from hamlet, village, market town, city to conurbation; industrialized from Cornish tin-smelter to the coal mines and dark satanic mills of the industrial revolution to the present post-industrial age of nuclear power plants, hi-tech clean rooms and the office sprawl of financial services, Britain is a land entirely re-made from its arboreal beginnings. Perhaps it is some sort of atavistic imperative that impels the English, in significant numbers, to flee their patchwork land and find their bliss in Ojai and, more broadly, southern California - for this is a land upon which the hand of history has rested lightly.

The great threats to wildlife rangelands in California are freeways and exurbia. We on the Wildlife/Urban Interface don't help much either. As a top-predator, the mountain lion is key to the survival of southern California as one of the most biologically rich natural landscapes in the world. Because of the pressure that rapid growth has placed on its habitat, southern California has also been the focus of pioneering research into the science of habitat fragmentation and wildlife corridors. Richard Halsey of the California Chaparral Institute, (www.californiachaparral.com) spoke eloquently on the issue in his talk at the Ojai Valley Land Conservancy recently entitled, Chaparral, Grizzly Bears and Condors, the Secrets of Ojai's Remarkable Shrubland Wilderness, February 20, 2010.

Richard is on a mission to raise Chaparral awareness and has now dedicated his professional life to its study, preservation and advocacy. A former fire fighter and high school Biology teacher, he is both an amusing and erudite champion of the elfin forest. His goals include the re-introduction of the grizzly to southern California (please tell me you were serious Richard) and the re-naming of the National Forests in the area to National Chaparral Preserves. He understands that his description of the landscape as a 'shrubland' while technically accurate, can be seriously misconstrued by those of us familiar with the Monty Python's use of the word shrubbery in their Holy Grail movie.

The state of California began working toward identifying priority conservation areas when Assembly Bill 2785 (Ruskin, 2008) was signed into law in August 2008. AB 2785 requires the Department of Fish and Game to identify and compile a database of California’s most critical areas for maintaining habitat connectivity, including wildlife corridors and habitat linkages. It's a start. Locally, Highway 150 is the southernmost of the state highways that currently imperil the mountain lion in its range from Ojai to Bakersfield. To the north is the 166 which runs between El Camino Real (101) at Santa Maria and the 5 at Bakersfield.

I believe I saw a young mountain lion one winter in Will Rogers State Historical Park in Los Angeles. I most definitely saw a full grown specimen outside of Great Barrington in western Massachusetts when it emerged from tall grasslands to run across the trail a few yards ahead of me.They are large animals. I am accustomed to seeing deer carcasses along the 150, killed by passing trucks. I do not want to see a mountain lion similarly destroyed.

Between the mechanical gauntlet that the these two highways represent, any number of hysterical, armed citizens imperil the big cats; and Department of Fish and Game Wardens are understandably risk averse when it comes to 'protecting' local human populations. As we saw with the Signal Street Bear, they err on the side of euthanasia. Upper Ojai Chaparralians live at the southern end of this grand wildlife corridor that supports a creature upon whose broad shoulders rests the health of our entire chaparral eco-system. This is both a privilege and a responsibility.

Clarissa has sensibly put her safety in the hands of her Kangal, the Turkish breed of dog renowned for their ability to mix it up with the big cats.

California Dreamin'

When I taught American History to solipsistic high school juniors I got it half right. I had thrown out the text book - whose cover eerily presaged the opening titles of The Colbert Report, a riot of gilded eagles, stars and stripes - and replaced it with The Peoples History of the United States, Howard Zinn, Harper Collins, New York 1980. Just about mid way through the second semester when Zinn's relentless catalog of the feisty underclass's brilliantly orchestrated demonstrations of people power against their imperial masters began to pall, I introduced the class to Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, J.P. Jewett, Boston 1852.

This can be construed as a primary document in the history of slavery in the United States, albeit one crafted within the comfortable confines of the ecclesiastical middle-class. It certainly fomented anti-slavery sentiment and as Lincoln remarked, "started this big war!" The book is, in its nineteenth century way, an absolute page-turner and is an effective vehicle, I believe, in which to grapple with the very emotional issues of slavery.

And the half I got wrong? I was teaching to a generation for whom books, as a medium, are largely irrelevant. But in our neck of the woods what are the opportunities for hands-on experiential learning for the student of American history?

The kind of experiential learning afforded by mid-coast California has to do with the the unique history and circumstances of this state. 'America' to most young Californians is a foreign land. The state owes its name to this concept of separateness, this island-ness. The myth was established in a novel in 1510 where the Island of California is populated by Amazonians, and was duly sought out by subsequent voyagers.

In 1705, the Jesuit missionary Father Eusebio Francisco Kino proved that Baja California was a peninsula by walking from New Mexico to California. But the cartographic error was persistent enough to warrant Ferdinand VII of Spain issuing a formal decree that California was a part of the mainland in 1747. It remains an "Island on the land" as Carey McWilliams called it, a once and perhaps future, rump state.

In fourth grade, California mandates that school children learn the history of their state. Hands-on learning? What parent hasn't been complicit in the glorification of those damned picturesque missions through the production of scale models? (Tip: carefully separate the top layer from a corrugated board and apply red poster paint to simulate clay tile).

In truth, fourth grade maybe a little soon to introduce the darker side of our history. But given that this is the only time designated for learning about California the end result is that kids graduate with a completely false view of our past based on a romanticized view of the Spanish Imperial adventure; at best a vague awareness of the genocide that, by the mid 1860's had killed more than 90% of the states indigenous peoples; and no awareness whatsoever of the environmental degradation visited upon the state by the Iberian cattle herds introduced by the Spanish and then enshrined in a system of vast ranchos the Mexicans developed through land grants to political insiders and military veterans. By the start of the Mexican-American War, 26 million acres were controlled by just 813 ranchers. The beloved golden hillsides of alien weeds and relict oaks are the entirely unsustainable result.

The one novel that addresses many of these issues is probably not suitable for any but the most precocious of fourth graders, and as previously discussed will be spurned by many older students. Nevertheless, Ramona, Helen Hunt Jackson, Roberts Brothers, Boston 1884, is truly California's Uncle Tom's Cabin and demands to be read by any serious student of our history.

The irony is that although Jackson undertook this 'Romance of the Ranchos' as a serious indictment of the treatment of mission indians and as a study in the race hierarchy of the state - and it can be still read as such - when first published it became a tool of local boosters who populated Southern California's landscape with new, Ramona-related tourist attractions and ultimately inspired another layer of the romanticized history of the state.

Mission Creep

In pursuing the notion that the local presence of erodium pre-dates the arrival of the Franciscans, I was curious to discover the chronology of the establishment of the missions in both Baja and Alta California.

The Spanish made their initial landfall at La Paz in 1683 and in 1697 the Jesuits established the Misión Nuestra Senora de Loreto Conchó. It went on to become the religious and administrative capital of Baja California where eighteen missions along the initial segment of El Camino Real were founded over the next seventy years.

These were outposts of an empire - never truly self-sustaining, they relied on supplies ferried across the Sea of Cortez. In turn, El Camino Real became the supply line to the incipient settlements in Alta California as the missions were expanded northward.

The Spanish colonization of California began with the Portola Expedition of 1769, and I have used that date to mark the onslaught of european species (erodium excepted!) on our native chaparral, but the first mission was not established in our area until 1772, when Mission San Luis Obispo was founded.

The Spanish presence edged closer to Ojai in 1782 when the Presidio Santa Barbara and Mission San Buenaventura were founded, followed by Mission Santa Barbara in 1786. The final missions built in Chumash territory were La Purisima Concepcion in 1787 and Mission Santa Inez, in 1804.

From these five missions the colonial impact radiated out to engulf all of the Chumash peoples: they died, in situ or within the missions, in the ensuing decades, by the tens of thousands and survivors were reduced to a humiliating slavery-like condition. The Chumash fled to these epicenters of disease, mistreatment, appalling sanitary conditions and starvation rations largely as a result of the severe effects of Spanish livestock grazing on the acorns, seeds, and other plant foods that made up a large part of their diet - they were denied their traditional means of subsistence. Missionization was never an attractive alternative - it was the only one given the devastation wreaked on their forage lands.

In the classic, Southern California: An Island on the Land, Carey McWilliams (New York: Duell, Sloan & Pearce, 1946) the author notes,

"The padres built where the Indians were established in greatest numbers. Most of the cities of the coastal region are built squarely upon Indian village sites. The reason is a simple one: the Indians chose the most favored spot with a sure knowledge born of long experience in the region."

The neophytes were thus initially drawn from just those Indian village sites, but as the attrition became evident, the net was cast wider and wider. Births of mission indians in the period 1769-1833 were less than half of recorded deaths, but baptisms, which included the newly missionized, handily outnumbered deaths for the same period. The indian villages of Ojai would not long have escaped the maw of what Williams calls "the chain of Missions along the coast ... best ...described as a series of picturesque charnel houses".

Thus the introduction of alien species and the destruction of the native American subsistence life-style went hand in hand. The dead hand of the missions touched the indigenous human, animal and plant populations.

This was a continuation of the experience in Baja where by 1767 epidemics of smallpox, plague, typhus, measles and venereal diseases had decimated the Indigenous population. Out of an initial population of about 48,000 it is estimated that only 8,000 still remained. The colonial impact on the local flora and fauna can only be imagined, although the greater degree of desertification in Baja may have served as some protection of the native ecology.

On the trek north from Baja the Franciscans must have viewed the edenic grasslands of Alta California as divine providence: too bad they carried the seeds of its eventual destruction.

My Arundo

There has been a fair amount of breeding erodium recently...

...out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain

And frankly, I've had enough of it. It's Erodium cicutarium and it's threatening to smother the emergent bunch grasses on the tilted plane that is the front lawn to our house.

It represents another invasive species that we need to get under control. It has appeared out of nowhere, or more accurately, since the last rains. They spread like a stain. Weeding my way across the slope I have found that each plant usually hides three or four more beneath it and between each such specimen that can be satisfyingly pried out of the ground with a 12" shank slotted screwdriver (with half inch tip), there are armies of fledgling recruits showing just a flash of red foliage, some less than a 1/4" in diameter but already augured into the fast hardening earth with an inch long filament root. It is my Arundo (Arundo donax).

Over the weekend we had Roger Conrad come over to start photographing the house. He used an 8' ladder with aluminum rod clamped to the side rail that rose another 5' on top of which sat his Canon. (He used to be an industrial designer and worked on the glazing systems used in Biosphere 2 - the ill-fated vivarium designed to replicate the biosphere). With a 300 mm telephoto lens to foreground the Topa Topas so that they appear to spring directly from our back yard few will notice the impurities of the canted meadow in his photographs. Fewer still will recognize the area around the house as a managed landscape - as a garden.

But someone has indeed been playing god: deciding what lives and what dies, and in extreme cases, what plants will be introduced. Those of you who have been paying attention will also know that a very visible hand has moved a few saplings here and there.

On November 1, 2009, I planted my first shrubs on a south facing slope close to the house. Up Bear Canyon above about 2500 feet, Yerba Santa (Eriodictyon crassifolium) grows in great drifts alongside the trail. On a visit to Margot's property, I found Lorenz Schaller, the groundskeeper and an old friend, using a pulaski (a combination of axe and mattock originally used by bush fire brigades) to uproot young Yerba Santa from the ground and discarding them. Retrieving half a dozen I transplanted what Lorenz called 'Indian chewing gum' on our property. It is beautiful in the spring through fall and at worst untidy in the winter. The leaves are redolent and brewed in a tea are of some medicinal value. Jan Timbrook reports that Yerba Santa was also used by the Chumash to conjure spirits.

This original effort failed. I have since tried again and one bedraggled specimen might possible make it. More recently I planted three 1-gallon matilija poppies (Romneya coulteri) on the western side of of the bowl that defines the cut part of our house pad equation (theoretically equalling, in cubic yardage, the fill portion that is the tilted plain at the front), and these appear to be flourishing. They were purchased from Nopalito, a native-plant nursery in Ventura.

These were the first efforts at introducing plants to a garden I have been working on for 6 months: chaparral gardening, it seems, is primarily an activity of bio-mass reduction by way of hand weeding, mowing, weed whacking, clipping and chain sawing.

The erodium problem is daunting and requires both the gross motor skills of swinging a pulaski on the larger specimens, the finer skills of plunging a screwdriver through the rocky soil beneath a medium sized plant and the very finest work of plucking miniature seedlings that appear as a reddish flocking over the brown dirt. Sometimes known as Filarees, heron's or storksbill, or scissor weed, they plant their own seeds. The seeds (schizocarps) coil like a corkscrew when dry and uncoil when damp. This action screws the seed into the ground and plants it. The finger-like schizocarps assume an edward scissor hands flourish atop the plant.

Traces of this exotic geranium have been found in the adobe of the old missions; and while It is generally assumed that the invasion of aliens began with the initial introduction of livestock by the Franciscans in 1769 there is pollen evidence which indicates that Erodium cicutarium was well established in the Santa Barbara region several years before the founding of the first California mission at San Diego in 1769. Historical evidence shows that it took the Spanish nearly a decade to develop a livestock base in California. Disturbance by livestock was therefore not a necessary prerequisite for invasion by alien plants. It had spread from the older Jesuit stomping grounds in Baja, where their first mission was established in 1697. Today, back hoes continue the work of facilitating its spread in the chaparral grasslands.

On Sunday evening at around five, Roger returned for some evening shots of the house. He worked deep into the twilight with longer and longer exposures, and late in the session long attenuated clouds appeared in the sky - their undersides suffused with an orange glow like the pale bellies of fresh water perch (Perca flavescens). This was duly reflected in the pool behind the house and committed to pixels.

Lorrie and I visited Roger at his off-the-grid enclave on Monday and reviewed proof sheets of his work. One more twilight session should produce the half dozen shots of the house that we need.

Meanwhile, early mornings and the hour before dark, the magic hours for photography, are reserved for erodium eradication. I am now atuned to its presence -my erodar scans the meadows for the tell-tale dark green discs.

Cool Morning

It was a cool Wednesday morning. There was a fresh sprinkling of snow on the Topa Topas from yesterday's storm, but the day dawned clear. Leaving the house I saw the waning crescent moon rise over the east ridge that throws a protective arm around much of the property. The cold air that rolled down these slopes through the early hours of the morning had settled on the meadow leaving patches of ground frost.

It wasn't a hard frost. There was no ice on the puddles.

We had heard the steady thrum of the heat pump compressor in moments of wakefulness through the night. The nights are quiet here: there is the occasional chorus of coyotes squabbling over a kill, the creaking of metal studs as they contract and, when the temperature of the house hits 64 degrees there's that faint thrum. It doesn't happen very often, and mostly not until 3 or 4 in the morning. But Tuesday had been drab and rainy and passive solar - which we rely on to augment our electric heat, only works when there's sun or, to paraphrase Fleetwood Mac, heat gain only happens when it's shining.

We use the most simple minded passive solar strategy. The house is oriented due south and there are 48 feet of 8 foot high windows that allow the low winter sun to warm the monolithic concrete floor of the house. It is a passive radiant floor system - the heat stored during the warmth of the day is radiated during the cool of the night.

In creating what we hope will be a net zero energy house we knew that it needed to be all-electric. In the 1950's and 60's all-electric was an indicator of modernity and cleanliness - the messy reality of remote smoke spewing coal power plants was conveniently expunged from our mid-century imaginations. While we know now that it is more 'efficient' and certainly cheaper to use fossil fuels directly in the heating of our homes, domestic photo-voltaic power generation has dramatically changed this calculus. The inefficiencies of the heat pump are forgiven, the digital calibration of the electric induction cook top is embraced (despite a nagging nostalgia for the analog gas flame) and that gas starter for the open fire is replaced by a store of kindling. There's no way to offset gas or oil usage - fossil fuels are a zero sum game: you use it you lose it. Photo voltaics, however, in the net-metered grid tied system that we use, directly replace grid generated power. (As of January 1, 2010 the Utilty is mandated to pay the homeowner for any net excess fed into the grid over a twelve month period).

The water heater uses an electric immersion coil and, because of the limitations of the California Code of Regulations (CCR), Title 24, which mandates residential energy performance but does not recognize photo-voltaic offsets, we were required to install solar thermal panels which use glycol as a transmission agent with a heat exchange coil located in the hot water tank. With the solar boost the tank races to 140 degrees. Absent sun, it is limited to 120. We notice in the mornings.

The showers had cleared out by early evening on Tuesday and left a sparkling night sky. A few lingering clouds would have served as insulation, but instead, the meagre warmth of the day ascended into the night. On the east coast there was talk of massive snow falls. Here, in Upper Ojai we are attuned to the nuances of our mostly benign climate.

Living at the ragged edge of net zero energy, where warmth is carefully harvested and cooling breezes assiduously orchestrated our house amplifies the comparatively mild vicissitudes of the climate: it becomes a conversation partner in our chats about the weather.

Flare-up

At night, in our bedroom, before we installed curtains, the room would throb with the pulse of the lurid gas flares across the way on the lower reaches of Sulphur Mountain. Sexy? Not so much.

One foggy night last summer Lorrie, who follows the ancient sleep patterns of the pre-industrialized world where it was usual to split the night's work into two shifts with a couple of hours break in the middle (how else to fill the time between sunset and sun-up?) was certain that our neighbor's house was on fire -a ruddy glow was diffused in the mist and smeared across the middle distance. Alerted from my industrial-age slumbers (where the tyranny of the alarm clock prescribes one's arising well in advance of cock's crow) I was persuaded of the urgency of the occasion and threw on some clothes and with my wide-awake wife careened down the driveway in the SUV. Continuing down Koenigstein, the source of the red-tide crystallizing before us, we were eventually persuaded that it was a damn gas flare that had erupted and bedazzled the night. The take-away? Somewhere between mildly entertaining and profoundly annoying. That flare is associated with wells below Verner Farm Road.

The fact is we live with the daily pollution caused by non-stop gas flaring – where the gas associated with oil extraction is burnt off into the atmosphere. In western Europe 99 per cent of associated gas is used or re-injected into the ground. But in Upper Ojai, despite regulations, licensing and fines, most associated gas is flared, causing local pollution and contributing to climate change. Four solutions present themselves: develop a gas-gathering pipeline and processing plant infrastructure to condition the natural gas for retail use; install a gas fired reciprocating engine to be used for on-site electric generation; develop an on-site small-scale liquefied natural gas (LNG) liquefaction processor or re-inject the gas into the ground. Clearly none of these solutions are currently economically viable, equally clearly one or more could be made so with the appropriate incentive structure.

I am not looking for a cause, but many are. And many of those many are coalescing around such umbrella organizations as the Ojai Green Coalition and, more recently, Transition Ojai. This latter collective follows the principles of Rob Hopkins who has outlined his ideas in The Transition Handbook: From Oil Dependency to Local Resilience (Transition Guides) by Rob Hopkins and Richard Heinberg, Green Books, Totnes, 2008, a work that attempts to answer how a community can respond to the challenges, and opportunities, of Peak Oil and Climate Change.

We live on the energy frontier, where oil still oozes from the ground and natural gas burns, deep in the bush and exuberantly into the night; and where the sun shines perhaps 3,000 hours a year - more than twice as long, for instance, as in the occluded Totnes, England's first 'Transition Town'.

We live in a profoundly benign climate where a simple passive solar strategy of protecting the north and west of the house from the summer sun and opening the southern facade to the low rays of the winter sun can take care of most of a building's energy needs. When soft breezes and mellow temperatures prevail our houses can be opened up to luxuriate in the scents of orange blossom or of chaparral. And, with a handful of chia seeds in our pocket we can run...pretty much anywhere.

But if there must be revolution, let the Transitioners rid us of those gas flares. They're disturbing my sleep damn it!

The Planetary Mind

I am familiar with the word topophilia from my time at Sydney University where I worked with Dr. Terry Purcell, a psychologist specializing in what was then called man/environmment studies. It means ‘love of place’, and was used by the Chinese-American scholar Li-fu Tuan in, Topophilia, Columbia University Press, New York, 1974, a landmark work which sets out to study the affective bond between people and places. For me it opened up a new way of thinking about our relationship with the environment.

It turns out that Li-fu Tuan did not coin the word topophilia. It was used by W.H. Auden in the late 1940's to describe an aspect of John Betjeman’s poetry. Much of Betjeman’s poetry was a valentine to particular places, mostly in England, and it was for this love of place that Auden coined the word. In a piece in the New York Times Magazine, January 31, 2010, titled Is There an Ecological Unconscious? by Daniel B. Smith there are reports of more word coinage to deal with our increased awareness of our relationship with the land.

Solastalgia has apparently gained some traction after being coined in 2004 by Glenn Albrecht to describe the disaffection experienced by those who are displaced from their lands or see their environment destroyed by, for instance, strip-mining.This latter experience he suggests, is a homesickness experienced when one is still at home.The topophiliac is clearly susceptible to solastalgia when his or her environment is damaged. By extension, our minds suffer as our environment is degraded. The article then documents the development of a new field of study and practice: ecopsychology.

But it is Gregory Bateson, (husband to Margaret Mead while she conducted her seminal field work in Bali) who seems most clearly to presage the development of a new consciousness in which there is an interdependence between the human mind and nature based on a deep understanding that they are a part of the same system. Bateson argued, in Steps to an Ecology of the Mind, University of Chicago Press, 2000, that humankind suffers from an 'epistemological fallacy': we believe that our minds and nature operate independently of each other. He argued that nature is a recursive mind-like system with which humans, historically, exchange information. Glenn Albrecht has coined a term for those who seem to exhibit exactly that kind of interconnectedness with their natural surroundings. They are soliphiliacs - those who feel "love..responsibility for a place, bioregion, planet and the unity of interrelated interests within it".

 It seems to me that this behavior is fundamentally human and we don' t need academics who had dictionary pudding for lunch to exceptionalize those who have a natural synchronicity with the wild environment. Nevertheless, words can be useful in opening up a space for new ideas. 'Green' has very little mileage left in it. Soliphilia is a non-starter. 'Eco-consciousness' seems like a reasonable way to describe this integrated world view where the divisions between humankind and nature dissolve into the planetary mind.

Alpine Chaparral

This is explicitly not a blog about running. It attempts to be a blog about a limited spectrum of my interests and interactions that are summed up on the mast-head. But sometimes the interests that I have explicitly excluded come crashing into the Landscape Shelter and Community part. Nothing too exciting here, but this morning is an example of my running opening up some thoughts and observations that seem to fit here - and that require some mention of the context. The truth is I spend more time running through chaparral - or alongside of it than I do walking, but since the runs tend to be repetitive not a lot of new stuff comes up.

This particular run came about because of a walk. Will, who is staying with us briefly en-route to New York, decided Friday after lunch to walk up to the top of the Topa Topas. He took Sisar up to the Red Reef Trail and then turned right towards the peak at 6250 feet. He got within a couple of hundred yards of the summit before the snow and the gathering dark turned him around. He arrived home at about 6:30. Talking to him persuaded me that a Sunday run up to the White Ledge camp site at about 4000 feet would be very do-able since the steeper parts of the trail all occurred beyond this point. In the event it was an easy run but one enlivened by the changing flora at the slighly higher elevations.

My more usual higher elevation run is up Bear Canyon and the trail terminates at Bear Creek at around 3250'; the scree slopes here are sparsely vegetated save a few scabrous firs - almost certainly bigcone Douglas Fir (Pseudotsuga macrocarpus). I remember talking to Peter Jump - our resident entomologist and he corrected me when I spoke of pines up in Bear Canyon - no he said, they're firs. I'm not sure the difference really resonated at the time. I now know from Quinn and Keeley's excellent handbook, Introduction to California Chaparral, U.C. Press Berkeley, 2006 that the bigcone Douglas fir is part of what is called a relict distribution - in other words they are the last and few of a species that previously extended right through Southern California and beyond to Baja. Right around 3000' they showed up off of Red Reef Trail and continued on up.

Once I'd left the fire road and was on the single track trail I also began to notice the Manzanita. It is a beautiful tree, multi-trunked with almost red-vines licorice colored bark and sometimes with the same twisting form. The pale celadon leaves are almond shaped and, at this time of the year, the branches are heavy with clusters of creamy pink urn-shaped blossoms. I shoved a little evidence in my running shorts and when I got home referred to Milt McAuley's Wildflowers of the Santa Monica Mountains, Canyon Publishing, Canoga Park, 1998.

Milt died last year but his book lives on as the best guide to the local chaparral plants - it grew beyond its wild flower title and is now available as an i-phone app. I was surprised that there are only two local manzanitas and the one along the trail is Arctostaphylos glauca - bigberry manzanita. it is a large genus that likes the cold so most varieties are further north. (Every 100 miles north is equivalent to 1000' feet in elevation). However, on a Ojai Nature Conservancy walk we saw a manzanita growing wild along the Ventura River just north of Meiners Oaks - the seed had presumably washed down the river. So, they will grow here at lower elevations (there are many dwarfish varieties at the Santa Barbara Botanical Garden) but do not usually flourish. Walking or running up to 3000' or so is a small price to pay, particularly for those of us in Upper Ojai, to enjoy this signature plant of the alpine chaparral.

A few scrub oaks (Quercus dumosa) along the way and masses of mountain mahogany (Cercocarpus betuloides); along the banks the pretty chaparral sweet pea (Lathyrus vestitus), yerba santa (Eriodictylon crassifolium) and all those wild flowers that even with Milt's tutelage I barely know the names of - but mimulus would have featured and perhaps other Phacelia (yerba santa is the lone shrub variety of this huge genus).

California bay (Umbrellularia californica) thrives all the way up Sisar and at the White Ledge turn-around camp it was dominant, with just a couple of oak and sycamore interlopers. Interestingly, it is the California bay which is the most aggressive re-colonizer at the fire stricken Botanical Gardens.

Mining Gravel

It is gratifying to use local materials: Elderberry, (Sambucus mexicana) which grows profusely on the property is currently blooming and the flowers are capable of making a white wine that has the potential of rivalling a fine Sauvignon Blanc from Sancerre. This is a potential, I hasten to add, that my father in his wine making experiments with the European elderberry in Surrey, England, never seriously approached. The terroir of Upper Ojai is of course superior to the Surrey clay and drizzle - we get a little more sun, so perhaps we should continue the effort.

The Chumash were inveterate in pursuing altered states of consciousness but the technique of alcohol production apparently eluded them: perhaps they preferred the rocket fueled ride to a parallel universe afforded by the Datura (Datura wrightii) or the slower rush of endorphins produced on their Chia (Salvia columbariae) provisioned marathon runs. They understood the usefulness of the elderberry strictly in terms of making whistles and flutes. (Music, of course, can be totally transporting). My father also made a red wine from the berries which appear in the fall. For a British wine of the time it was excellent. But only those who have tasted the delights of VP sherry and the such can truly understand the import of this evaluation.

A couple of years ago the elderflower liqueur St-Germain was popular. Here is Married with Dinner's (the blog) somewhat arch description of its charms,

"....... hand-picked wild elderflowers are macerated and combined with eau de vie. The result is a liqueur that balances citrus and floral notes as gracefully as a skilled waiter carries a tray of cocktails. A heavy hand with the sugar is perhaps the liqueur’s only limitation; you need a steady resolve and a miser’s touch to make a drink that captures St-Germain’s floral notes without edging into tooth-aching sweetness....."

I have long threatened to make acorn beer. Why? Because they are here. Which is precisely how they became a staple in the Chumash diet. While acorns were of great nutritional importance to the Chumash, their consumption came with a heavy price by way of gastric discomfort (Jan Timbrook's wonderful Chumash Ethnobotany, Heyday Books, Berkeley, 2007, details the many plants that were used in the attempt to correct stomach disorders). They were also of some significance in the late nineteenth century development of Ojai providing food for John Meiner's pig herds that, acorn fattened, were then driven overland to Port Hueneme for shipment to the bacon and ham factories of Los Angeles. The lesson here is: work with what you've got. 

Locally, oil was the real economic driver in the late 19th century and it is fitting that Edward Doheny the oil baron upon whom Upton Sinclair loosely based his 1927 novel Oil! (subsequently made into the turgid movie There Will Be Blood) chose to build a house on the old Ferndale Ranch in Sulphur Springs, now St Thomas Aquinas College and originally the site of the Chumash village, Sisa. There is a plaque on the 150 highway a little east of Koenigstein that marks the first oil strike in Ojai made in 1867 and Doheny undoubtedly was aware of the proximity of his estate to this first gusher. He, of course, had made his fortune in the oil fields of Los Angeles. The oil that seeps in rivulets along the 150 as it begins its headlong descent to Sulphur Springs is rivaled only by the La Brea tar pits in the obviousness of their dumb show: stored hydrocarbons available here.

Agriculture makes use of the native soils and the water shed, but those Ojai oranges, avocadoes and even the famed Ojai pixie tangerine are hardly indigenous. Oranges arrived sometime in the 1870's after the cattle and sheep operations on the erstwhile ranchos had dissolved in the dust of the disastrous droughts of the late 1850's and early 1860's.

Grapes are indigenous to the local mountains but the fruit of Vitis girdiana is lillipution at 1/4" in diameter. Wine grapes have a checkered history in the valley. In the 1980's Adam Tollmach began a fairly ambitious vineyard in Oak View only to see his vines decimated by the glassy-winged sharpshooter, Homalodisca vitripennis, that somewhat benignly chomp grape leaves but more malignantly infects the plant with Pierces disease which attacks the root stock. The critter was introduced into the area in the 1990's and since then viniculture has been somewhat blighted. However, there are successful vineyards - the Roll ranch in Upper Ojai is carefully managed and now supplies grapes to Adam's Ojai Valley Winery. Here Adam extolls the virtues of its rocky soil,

"Roll Ranch is located beneath the dramatic face of Topa Topa Mountain in upper Ojai-a hanging valley 700 feet above Ojai valley proper. The soil at Roll Ranch is a decomposition of the mountain itself and is poor in nutrients, which makes it perfect for syrah grapes. Syrah is naturally vigorous, and the poor soils allow the vines to spend more of their energies on the fruit rather than on shoot and leaf production."

Bruce and Marie Botnick have a beautifully tended quarter acre of Syrah in Ojai's East End and their 2007 bottling, Chat Lunatique, is a wonderfully fresh, fruit forward wine. Richard Lyons is growing the Italian varietal, Barbera with some success on a hill perched above the old Doheny Estate within earshot of the bells of the Chapel of Our Lady of the Most Holy Trinity and the base notes of the adjacent oil fields.

Our neighbor Dr. Margot Griswold formerly farmed in the central valley and has experience of growing grapes for the table, for raisins and wine. We have a few acres not doing much on the west meadow of our property and Angela Osborne, assistant winemaker at Casa Barranca and vintner of her own delightful Grenache ( a wine named for her grandmother Grace and available at the Ojai Beverage Company and served at The Treasure Beach Cafe) was early in encouraging us to grow grapes. She kindly arranged a dinner with Adam - who we knew from our days at UCLA School of Architecture when we had taken his brief for a cellar, production facility, tasting room and winemakers residence as a major design exercise under the tutelage of Australian architects Brit Andresen and Peter O'Gorman. He was generous in sharing some wonderful wines from his library but was blunt in doubting the wisdom of growing grapes in Upper Ojai. Margot and Angela are more sanguine on the prospects.

Meanwhile, we mine the soil for gravel. And here we are not without experience.

Our previous house was in Santa Monica Canyon. It was an old single-wall beach cottage that reputedly had been built by the Crenshaws. Quite who the Crenshaws were was never apparent but they were of sufficient note to have had a Los Angeles street, and in turn a district named after them. The house was built before the First World War and at that time an un-paved road and a creek shared the canyon bottom. in the 1930's, as part of a Publics Works Administration program, the year-round spring-fed creek was channelized. The road was then called either West Channel or East Channel according to its relationship to either branch of the creek. All of this occurred close to the ocean and it was the West Channel branch whose job it was to dump the water and waste into the Pacific at Will Rogers Beach.

The house was literally a stone's-throw from West Channel and about ten feet above the channel bottom in elevation. In the fifties, heavy winter rains and a fallen eucalypt in the channel had caused the canyon to flood and the house was inundated. When we first moved in, in the early 1990's the house would flood every winter, less dramatically, but insistently, because the brick terraces in the back yard had been incorrectly graded. When it became clear that we were not going to tear down the old cottage and build our dream home, we removed the terraces and re-graded the back yard.

The house was essentially sited on an old river bottom - the soil was thin and heavily graveled. We planted Sycamores (Platanus racemosa) and surrounded them with the gravel we mined on-site. We made our own sieves out of hardware cloth and 2x4's and my older son and I went to work. In the heaviest rains of 1998 and 2005 the gravel would momentarily pond in the down-pours but the house never flooded again. Eventually we tired of the stony field and replaced it with a native meadow of bunch grasses. The gravel was carefully removed and placed in the front yard where our attempts to grow grass had been defeated by the heavy shade of palms, eucalypts and cotoneaster.

Thus it was that gravel-mining was second nature to me and my two sons when we confronted the issues of grading around the Upper Ojai house. We had already established the 'gravel plinth' which surrounds the house to a width of either eight or four feet and provides drainage for the roof. Here we used 3/4" crushed rock. For the pool terrace we imported 20 tons of Felton Gold 3/8" crushed rock from up-state. The boys and I wheel-barrowed it into place atop the area drains that are connected to the outfall above the seasonal creek to the east of the house. 

At the terrace surrounds and beyond the pool we used site specific, mined gravel and, at the east end of the house, we are slowly covering the mud patch with a mixture of our own gravel and grapefruit sized rocks which we have congregated along the drainage path which makes its way southward past the house.

This is not glamorous work, but the aesthetic results can be quite pleasing.

The Timeless Land

I arrived in Australia in the antipodean spring of 1969 and left for California eleven years later. I have not been back, comfortably living with memories of that country as it was in my youth, rather than up-dating them to the globalized, asian inflected country it now is.

Eleanor Dark wrote a novel of Australia called The Timeless Land (Collins, London 1941), but for me, Australia will be forever the 1970's. You may remember that this decade was,

"....... the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope.....

But most of all it was the age of Disco. For me, it was also a decade of surfing, and as the 70's began to wane, an age of enlightenment. Sometime in the middle 1970's I became aware of Glenn Murcutt's Terry Hills house. And then I went to Architecture School.

This was the beginning of Murcutt's epochal work. I rode by the house, quite regularly, on my motorcycle, on the way to work. It was not by the side of the road, but you could see it from the road, sometimes with its roof top pond sparkling in the sun. Basically, it was off in the bush, asking for trouble. It was at the urban wildland interface before there was such a thing. But in many respects it came prepared. Murcutt eschewed wood and built a Miesian pavilion of steel and glass. It came with the roof top pool and a broad surround of brick at the ground plane.

Thirty five years later, Lorrie and I built a house that attempted to respond to many of the same environmental imperatives that influence Murcutt, who quickly moved beyond Mies and adopted an aesthetic that was more responsive to energy considerations. In 2002 he was awarded the Pritzker Prize and in 2009, the AIA Gold Medal.

Firestorm in Mission Canyon

Quite simply, the Santa Barbara Botanical Garden was destroyed in the Jesusita Fire of 2009. It is naive to pretend otherwise. The firestorm that swept down Mission Canyon in May of last year effectively obliterated whatever was left of the original design by Beatrix Farrand and Lockwood de Forest, Jr.

Amazingly, the Garden is still open to the public and last weekend we paid the price of admission and wandered the wasteland. For a little while, as we began our by now traditional tour of the meadows, we pretended nothing was amiss. A forlorn hyper style hall with sod roof stood redundantly at the north east corner of the meadow. Not so long ago a beautiful woven willow building had stood in the same place: this replacement was a travesty - and the capriciousness of the fire was fully reflected in its survival.

The lack of maintenance of the meadows and the muddy mess of trails that now meandered meaninglessly through the plantings eventually indicated to us that all was not well. New openings to the surrounding hillsides above Tunnel Road, ravaged by the fire, have changed the sense of orderly enclosure that carried one down into the canyon bottom and the redwood grove. The site has lost its structural integrity - destroyed by these visual openings to the razed houses on the hills or, here and there a surviving late twentieth century mission style mash-up that remains as testament to the fire's lack of aesthetic judgement.

Mission Canyon is significant to the history of the Mission for it was the water source for the irrigated fields of wheat, barley, corn, beans, and peas as well as the citrus, olive trees and vines overseen by the Franciscans. Mission dam and portions of the aqueduct are now a part of the Botanical Garden site. At the time of the Garden's design in the late 30's these water works were likely a ruin buried in a riparian woodland long left untended and without the benefit of a scouring fire. Overrun with poison oak, probably blighted with homeless encampments and festering, perhaps, with feral pigs and goats - vestiges of the mission herds, the Garden was a staggering achievement of the imagination.

From the very beginning this was to be a garden of native plants. It was the first of its kind in California and realized at a time when the model of Victorian Imperial plant collecting was alive and well. As Charles A. Birnbaum, Founder and President, The Cultural Landscape Foundation notes in a letter to Elleen Wyckoff, Chairperson of the Santa Barbara County Landmarks Advisory Commission, expressing his concern about changes to the Garden, two years before the fire,

"Lockwood and Elizabeth de Forest used the Garden as a laboratory and classroom to promote the use of native plants and promoted these ideas in the monthly periodical, The Santa Barbara Gardener. Produced from 1925 to 1942 by the Community Arts Association, the publication was aimed at educating Santa Barbarans on appropriate plantings and horticulture for the new architecture and the mild climate of Santa Barbara."

Nevertheless, the ideas of localism have progressed since the inception of this native garden. As visitors to it will know, it was always something of a California grab bag and made no real attempt to describe the plant communities of the Santa Barbara hinterlands. Instead, one was treated to a collection of redwoods, ceonothus hybrids and a Japanese pavilion.

The destruction of 10,000 accessioned plants is thus an opportunity to begin anew with a more rigorous program of locally indigenous plantings and one designed to embrace the occasional fire that gallops down the canyon. Certainly the Jesusita Fire should alert the Garden's Board of Trustees to the wrong-headedness of embedding a teaching garden in an eco-system that relies on fire as a regenerative force without making plans for, at the very least, creating a teaching moment amongst the ashes.

Water World

On Monday afternoon, when the rain had let up, I walked our property to look at it in its drenched and watery glory. I took the loop around each of the meadows, through our oak grove and then along the nameless spit of Koenigstein that serves half a dozen houses back in and above Bear Canyon.

Crossing over Koenigstein proper I walked through Margot, our neighbor's property where Lorrie and I have recently finished overseeing an extensive re-model. The original ranch house was beautifully sited, nestled by three oaks and a fourth within spitting distance of the north east corner, and I was curious to see how the grounds had handled the steady down pour.

The compacted track carved by the Dodge Rams and Ford 150's beloved of contractors and their subs was ponding and between puddles the beginnings of a rivulet was developing. Absent the surrounding grass ground cover, the down-trodden dirt was now captive to the erosional energies of the winter rains. And, closer to the house, where once had been a brick garden path (removed a year ago) the compressed soil hosted an incipient lagoon.

But the wisdom of the original positioning of the building on a mildly sloping meadow was indicated by the general indifference of the site to the five inches of rain we had experienced in the first two days of the January storms.

Bear Creek, which defines the western border of our property, is the eastern border of Margot's land and it was roaring, at a distance of something like 50 yards from her house, invisible in its deeply carved stream bed. There were no contributions to its intensity from her property and the roiling water made its way directly to the stream that runs along the 150 and feeds Santa Paula Creek towards Sulphur Springs.

Returning to our driveway, off Koenigstein, just above the Bear Creek Bridge, I walked the western 'grass' verge and pulled remnant Russian thistles (Salsola tragus). They had originally sprouted sometime in November and although a little prickly their light attachment to the soil (allowing them to roam and tumble in spring) meant that they had largely succumbed to my diligent weeding. To the east I pulled Italian thistles (Carduus pycnocephalus), which in the soaked soil offered little resistance to a firm tug. Ultimately, however, their sheer numbers will defeat me. I focused on the lone thistles (wolf-thistles?) - those that had set up shop showily and apart from their brethren - like precocious children finding space for themselves in a crowded playground.

A little way along the driveway and at the bottom of the long sloping approach to the house, the seasonal stream to the right veers under the drive at an Arizona crossing. The stream was in full spate but on this Monday remained contained in the 36" plastic ribbed culvert. The Baccharis salicifolia, recently standing on either side of the crossing, was almost flattened by the torrent but we can expect it to spring back when the deluge recedes. Close by I saw blue dicks (Dichelostemma capitatum) emerging and higher on the driveway verges were native peonies (Paeonia californica) drooping demurely.

Approaching the house, I crossed over the rocks that had been shunted to the east of the meadow in the original developer grading which had sought to showcase a potential house site, and scrambled down the bank to the seasonal stream. Our fire clearances extend beyond the stream as it slides by the house, and the slope beyond the stream had recently been manicured to the requisite twelve feet from shrub to shrub. Between the wisps of chamise (Adenostoma fasticulatum), mountain mahogany (Cercocarpus betuloides), ceonothus, holly-leaved cherry (Prunus ilicifolia) and buckthorn (Rhamnus crocea) the spongy undercarpet was re-vegetating with mallows, grasses, lillies, peonies and the prolific wild cucumber (Marah oregana).

The stream had by now begun to run clear and the architecture of boulders, chutes and waterfalls revealed itself. I stepped from rock to rock moving up-stream exultant in the beauty of the water, the canopy of the oaks above and the plunging stream banks. I continued through the oak grove until poison oak (Rhus diversiloba) spread fully across the ravine and prevented further progress.

From previous explorations, I knew that the stream continues through sage brush (Artemesia caliofornica), toyon (Heteromeles arbutifolia) and laurel sumac (Malosma laurina) through a gently rising upland which, five or more years ago had been 'grubbed' by the developer, in the attempt to provide 'open space' for prospective buyers. This tangle of sage brush is the first stage of the chaparral succession. The stream originates in a gully wedged into the corner of south and west facing hills that top out around 2000 feet and represent the high point of our property. Here, the chaparral is mature old-growth and the oaks that line the stream bear the scars of twentieth century fires.

I returned, climbing back over carelessly tumbled rocks and now, above the house, crossed over the arc of concrete 'v' ditch that diverts water from the meadow that rises behind the building, and clambered down to the gravel terrace which, at the height of the storm had been a shallow moat but was now again its placid zen-like self.

Tuesday will bring more rain.

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.