Where Native Meadows Come From

It was probably 8 to 10 years ago that we first started looking for land. That's not counting the time, perhaps twenty or more years ago that we noodled around Ojai and Santa Paula - and by chance saw a land for sale sign at the foot of Koenigstein in Upper Ojai and drove up the road. This is a hazy memory but I do know that the then visible oil wells were enough to forestall any further enquiries.

The trip we made, sometime at the beginning of the century, was based on the notion that we needed a weekend getaway that would expand our lives and relieve the pressure from our Santa Monica House and Garden which we were forever remodeling (and worse, re-programming the three buildings that made up the compound). We targeted the areas north of Santa Barbara up to San Luis Obispo and seaward to Cambria. The explosion of grape growing was, by this point, well and truly under way and it was soon apparent that land in these areas was too expensive. After driving up the PCH to the 101 through Santa Barbara, we took the 154 inland and by lunchtime found ourselves in Los Alamos.

We were essentially exploring real estate through AVA's ( American Viticultural Areas) - Santa Barbara County contains the Santa Ynez and Santa Maria Valleys, and San Luis Obispo County Arroyo Grande, Edna Valley and Paso Robles.

Perhaps I should back up. What was this fascination with the wine growing regions? Why didn't we, like our design-head cohort in Los Angeles, go exploring the desert? Why were we not imagining some colorful casita in Joshua Tree or Desert Hot Springs? We had the desert credentials. We regularly visited Two Bunch Palms in Desert Hot Springs in the early eighties and once we had children we visited the more raffish MaHaYa close by the spa that April Greiman and Michael Rotundi would make chic and around the corner from Hope Springs that English designer Mick Haggerty and Steve Samiof designed as a hip minimalist overlay on a 60's googie spa, and which close friends bought with two partners a few years ago.

One reason is that the desert spooks Lorrie, another is that the drive from L.A. is tiresome and a third is that I have watched as the smog creeps over the pass between the San Bernardino and San Jacinto Mountains and it is like the vaporous spirit of Los Angeles coming to wreak vengeance on those who dare try to leave the valley of the smokes (as the Gabrielenos called it). There is certainly some powerful ju-ju in the desert, perhaps not all of it bad, but it gives one pause. The wind scoured Marmol Radziner Modular Pre-fab house that sits in the Desert Hot Springs bad lands - un-sold, un-tenanted and un-loved is a warning against the hubris of architects who believe they can tame the desert - and its demons. The John Lautner motel suffered a similar fate although his is a more modest building and less offensive, perhaps, to the Shoshonean spirit walkers.

But the most powerful reason for Lorrie's and my fascination with the vinelands is the romantic association with our (comparitive) youth together. Truth be told, we were both in our thirties when under the aegis of UCLA's architecture design program we toured the vineyards of Santa Barbara County to prepare for a studio based on designing a winery in Ojai (Mining Gravel 2010-01-30). It was probably the first time I had ventured north of Point Dume and it was at a time in my life when I was palpably enraptured by California. In a UCLA issue van we drove as far north as Cambria and then wound our way back through San Luis Obispo, Santa Barbara and Ventura Counties, ending up in Ojai. A friend and I spent an evening watching The Great Santini at the Ojai Playhouse and in the morning I drove out to Rincon to surf. Lorrie had already bailed and was on her way back to Los Angeles. But we shared enough on the trip for it to become a touchstone in our relationship. A year or so later, we served Zaca Mesa wine at our wedding because we had both loved their winery in the Santa Ynez valley - of which Adam Tolmach, our putative client for the UCLA design exercise, was an alumnus.

Our search for land echoed this trip and like it, ended in Ojai but not until some years after we had driven through the central coast AVA's and right at the point where we had started two decades previously, on Koenigstein Road.

Last Friday, Lorrie and I found ourselves, by happenstance, back in Los Alamos in the Santa Ynez Valley. We breakfasted with Margot and her brother Craig (who joined us from Morro Bay) at the Quackenbush cafe. We were on our way to S&S Seeds who were holding their annual open house and barbecue. It's located just off the 135 in broad flatlands that rise to the east towards the 101, in the northern most portion of the Santa Ynez Valley. A few miles before Los Alamos, on the 101, we had passed the turn off to Zaca Mesa.

As we drove up to the S&S ranch house we passed fields of needle grass waving softly in the breeze. Here too, were fields of purple owls clover, glistening rows of goldfields, blue lupines and phacelias. We toured fields of native grasses, muhly, saltgrass, fescue, melics and brome all fated to be harvested and threshed and sorted in the seed shaking barn where the often minute seeds are teazed out and packaged. This is where the seed is grown for the state, county, institutional and private campaigns to remediate development scarred lands, create and maintain native landscapes and substitute natives for exotics at all scales of garden design. Rarer natives, or those not amenable to agricultural production, are hand collected in the wild and processed in the seed shakers.

Paradoxically, S&S thrives on the destruction of California' s wildlands: governmental requirements to remediate the disturbed soils have been at the core of their business model. But remediated landscapes are not the equal of undisturbed soil crusts that have supported evolving native ecosystems for 30,000 years and more. In recessionary times of reduced development there is less pressure on our wildland/urban frontier and an icreasing temptation for S&S to sell the land for grape growing. Zaca Mesa perhaps?

Fields of Gasoline

I received an e-mail this week from Wendy All, a colleague at the Rock Art Institute at UCLA, who mentioned that she and her husband Jay had visited the Carrizo Plain over the Easter weekend to look at wild flowers.

Having recently blogged about the Carrizo Plain as the dead heart of contemporary California (Cave and Rock, 2010-03-30) it was encouraging that someone was at least visiting the shriveled organ, brought low, in my estimate, by its isolation from the state's contemporary arteries of communication and trade. Wendy reports that the wild flowers that decorate the grave site are particularly vibrant this year. She referred me to a wild flower website which is replete with startling photos of yellow, blue and purple fields, many taken in the northern end of the plain around Soda Lake.

We should, of course, be thankful that this forgotten prairie exists in something approaching its primordial condition, for here perhaps, is a reminder that much of California was once a flower pasture. But as I indicated in Weed World 2010-03-08, to suggest as much is to enter into a debate about California's ecological heritage. Richard Minnich, in his recent book California’s Fading Wildflowers, University of California Press, Los Angeles, 2009, argues that California's wildflowers are a lost legacy and that,

"The long-believed bunchgrass theory, and its conversion to exotic grassland through overgrazing, encouraged people to take for granted the rapidly fading wildflower heritage......We need to recognize that California was not all grasslands in the past...”

It seems to me that Minnich is setting up something of a grass man here: can't we all agree that California was a botanical mosaic with chaparral, forests, grasslands, desert and forblands? Furthermore, grasslands and forblands co-exist now and, it is reasonable to presume, then.

Minnich also weighs in on the wildfire issue,

“We need to reintroduce fire into ecosystems.. we should work toward a Mexican model, which will become a low-maintenance management system...Land-use policies that permit building in indefensible spaces exacerbate the problem"

and then, echoing bullet point number 4 (chaparral is inimical to human habitation - see Cave and Rock 2010-03-30)

“You can’t live in nature in Southern California...You can save structures in an urban setting because they’re surrounded by pavement and watered lawns. In wildlands, you have solitary structures in the middle of a field that behaves like gasoline. It is indefensible and should not get public support. We’re burning billions of dollars (on fire suppression) in the western United States."

As an ecologist, Minnich indicates a rare show of support for irrigated lawns but seems to believe that solitary wildland/urban interface structures are doomed, awaiting their fate in fields of gasoline. One wonders how the pre-contact population of Native Californians, which by some estimates approached half a million, managed, living in their incendiary homelands with nothing resembling 'pavement and watered lawn' to save them.

We are indeed trying to 'live in nature', and as a part of that intent are developing needlegrass meadows close to the house which then shade to chaparral about 200' out. Immediately adjacent to the front of the house is an eight foot swathe of crushed rock with twenty or more feet of 3/8" gravel at the back - our pool terrace. At the west end is an abbreviated chip seal gravel 'auto court' and to the east is a natural gravel terrace. The house itself is built according to dba's fire-safe protocol .

Fescue is sprinkled within the needlegrasses and between them all is an opportunity for native perennials and annuals such as tarweed (hemizonia fasciculata); common fiddleneck (Amsinckia menziesii); blue eyed grass (Sysrinchium bellum); Lupin (Lupinus bicolor); Coulter's lupin (Lupinus sparsiflorus); purple nightshade (solanum xanti); owl's head clover (Castilleja exserta); wild sweet pea ( Lathyrus vestitus); peonies (Paeonia californica); perezia (Arcourtia microcephala) and the bushy deer weed (Lotus scoparius). All the above have made an appearance with the exception of the blue eyed grass, which although seeded was out-competed, I suspect, by the rampant erodium.

A good year for rain has meant that clover (Trifolium species) has colonized large tracts of our meadow lands and has now superseded erodium as the weed of the moment. I have succeeded in clearing most of it from the so-called tilted plain or 'front lawn' but have yet to tackle the bowl which rises up beyond the pool.

Somehow, a balance needs to be achieved between grasses and (mostly) perennial wildflowers. With our 'fields of gasoline' it's too soon to tell, but I am encouraged that there is developing something approaching a simulacrum of native prairie - at once grassland and forbland.

White-Out

Recently we visited the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. The heavily patterned red brick building was completed in 1995 and designed by the Swiss architect Mario Botta. At this point the Botta building is a bit of an embarrassment. A very late example of his post modern work it is a poster child for everything we now hate about that era. The building is replete with the cultural tics of the time - like banded black and white granite and elaborate ziggurat-like stairs that every architecture student of the 1980's attempted to include in their designs. Away from the decorated core of the building, however, the galleries, roof top garden and cafe show a stylistic evolution towards his later, more purely modernist work.

Architects now under consideration for a planned 100,000 sq. ft. addition include Renzo Piano, Rem Koolhaas, Peter Zumthor, David Adjaye, Steven Holl, TEN Arquitectos, Foster and Partners; Norway's Snohetta; and Diller, Scofidio & Renfro. No real outliers here - although I had to remind myself of the work of Snohetta.

After the despicable Broad addition to LACMA Piano should be excluded from any consideration, and having made the mistake of choosing an architect the first time round who epitomised the (fading) zeitgeist of the time, the Museum might be well advised to choose one of the less usual suspects like Adjaye or Snohetta.

The current Galleries work well and we began on the top floor with the Luc Tuymans retrospective. His work combines blurry abstraction with what David Shields' calls 'reality hunger' - he lards his almost monochromatic canvases with images from World War II, the Belgian Congo and contemporary politics and culture. The result is unnerving primarily because of his skill as a painter - Condaleeza Rice (the emblematic image of the exhibit) is entirely subsumed by the subtlety of his brush and color work.

Nazi war criminals are literally neutered when surrounded by Tuyman's neutral palette. He embraces the current zeitgeist - in my experience pioneered by W.G. Sebald in his stunning series of novels in the 90's - characterized by the notion of sampling or pastiching fragments of reality into a work of art, and ironically, since he uses the greys and whites of a printed page, his work almost looks like a page torn from a Sebald novel. Like the novelist's, his technique produced in me a somber, almost elegiac reflection on the nature of our small lives and their connection to the larger historical record of our times.

His limited palette of whites and greys bending seemlessly into the yellow and violet parts of the spectrum produces an effect that is both romantic and naturalistic. It is a palette that can be experienced in nature under certain circumstances. I am reminded of those white-outs on grey days of sitting in the surf line-up at Topanga moving gently with the greasy swell and watching as the yellow sunshine tried to creep under the ghostly mantle. Or, just last Saturday, on a scramble up Bear Creek.

Lorrie's cousin Ellary, partner Ethan and her daughter Odile were visiting and I was in charge of providing a local hike. On a previous occasion I had taken them to the look-out a few miles up Sisar. This time,we all drove up to the Greenburgh's avocado ranch at the top of Koenigstein in Griffin's white 1977 C-10 Chevy truck, and then walked alongside the ranch by the pomegranate hedge past the turn off to Leo Lockwood's avocado farm and then up through the sage and across Bear Creek. The creek was flowing and at its muddy edges we saw bear tracks.

Power lines and mostly broken irrigation pipes accompanied us to a point where the track again crosses the creek and where, reputedly, the Greenburgh's had considered erecting another house for, a half mile or so into the walk, we were still on their in-holding. It is here that the tangle of white 4" abs terminates and the creek widens to a gravelly wash before turning sharply south at the foot of a near vertical cliff face that rises a couple of hundred feet out of the chaparral. The path continues to the north but Griffin was intrigued by the possibilities of following the creek.

Thus it was that despite my dark warnings about poison oak we began bouldering our way up Bear Creek. Heads down, calibrating every step against the lie of the next foothold and the gravitational penalty of achieving it, we were enveloped, as ZZ Top once sang, in 'A World of Swirl'.

The sky was mostly absent. But hints of its blue were provided by overhanging bowers of ceanothus (Ceonothus oliganthus?). Underfoot the yellow, gray and white gravel, mostly yellow to cream sedimentary rocks and the occasional basalt-like black igneous boulder echoed Tuyman's palette.

Where the stream ran there was an orange cast to the iron-rich water. But often the water disappeared - running underground - and then would remerge in its rusty channel higher up the canyon. Everywhere were the bleached trunks and branches of trees up-rooted and hurled down the canyon when the winter rains engorged the creek.

Along the way mugwort (Artemesia douglasiana), lupine and chaparral pea, blackberry and yes, poison oak but entwined by the beautiful native clematis called Virgin's Bower (Clematis lasiantha) its creamy blossoms (fringed with yellow stamens) on long axilliary stems. 

Higher up Bear Canyon the creek becomes more truly a gorge - more pale rock, gravel and to the left as one ascends, dark rust colored shale that lies at its angle of repose and threatens with every footfall to slide into the creek. Here the spring fed water course heads off to the west in a narrow channel while the gorge heads on up and becomes more dramatic in its rock-strewn topography.

On the right there is an opportunity to climb up the bank and re-enter the chaparral above the creek and, with buckwheat beneath our feet and with sage, yerba santa and ceonothus at our side, we returned.

Cave and Rock

We are creatures of the savannah –and where it does not naturally exist we have created it. Sometimes it is achieved by casual or deliberate deforestation; sometimes pasture animals fulfill the role of making the wildlands grasslands; and sometimes fire does the job.

Now: imagine a house that exists under a floating and flat roof (supported on freestanding steel columns)  in a sheltered, topographic universe. There is ‘un-conditioned space’ – that is areas that are shaded but part of the common air (and its disturbances) and enclosures that are glazed or solid as their use requires -   all supported on a structural concrete floor.

This floor responds to the underlying topography of the site and to a topography of utility. A pool impinges on this scheme and is thus partly shaded. There are sit walls, ramps, steps, half walls and full walls. Enclosures are ceilinged, but a space exists between ceiling and roof protected from nesting creatures by stainless woven-wire fabric. Conditioned air is distributed in the space between ceilings and roof by a branching of duct work fed from a mechanical room.

This is an architecture not of object (a rock) but of anthropology (a cave). It is our next house. It is in the savannah.

We live, for the moment, in a box that is rendered translucent to the north and south in three of the six 16’ bays. The conceit is that the landscape flows through it. Grading and fire clearances have assured that we are surrounded to a distance of 100 feet or more by a rock-strewn weed patch. Slowly, we are attempting to turn this area into a pre-1769 grassland. For California is remarkable in once possessing native, prairie-like grasslands that supported herds of artiodactyls and the predators (including humans) that fed on them.

A few weekends ago we watched with friends as a young doe scampered across the tilted plain that is our front lawn and took off up the slope to the east. Jokingly, I said,

"now let's watch for the mountain lion right behind Bambi",

immediately over the ridge came, not a single mountain lion but two coon hounds slavering in pursuit of their supposed supper. I called their owner, Peter Jump, and told him that his dogs were heading east and would shortly be in Santa Paula. His wife Harriet had, sometime previously, showed off pictures of a mauled (and very dead) coyote that was the handiwork of the hounds. They would make short and wet work of the deer. I understand that the doe outlasted them and the dogs returned home exhausted and still hungry. They clearly had not been trained in the art of persistence hunting by which, according to recent theory, our aboriginal ancestors had succeeded in catching faster prey - human 'doggedness' ultimately triumphing over the swifter sprinters. By such episodes are our atavistic memories of the chase reawakened.

Driving north recently, California's deforestation is much in evidence for those aware that the rolling hills of alien grasses, mustard and the occasional oak are not the primeval landscape of the 'golden' state. Nevertheless, they do represent a kind of bastardized nature that stands in opposition to the urban, suburban and exurban development of the last century or so that otherwise lines the 101.

There are the missions, mission bells (those glyphs that line the road and never peal) Taco Bells, military bases, medical facilities and monuments of incarceration; and scattered campuses of tertiary education that feed these various beasts. In between is an industrialized agriculture; at the interstices are the premium outlet malls that represent the cutting edge of bricks and mortar merchandising in the 21st century. Scattered along the arterial roads and off across the plains and up into the hills are housing units.

Driving by: an abandoned military base; housing that seems at first abandoned but signs of life processes - of washing strung along a line or cars and trucks nestled against the wooden walls - suggest inhabitation; farm towns lost in time; farm-workers still inhabiting the world that Dorothea Lange documented but with newer cars; Gilroy's garlic, the cabbagelands of Monterey County; grapes - clinging to trellised armatures and to the drops of moisture borne inland by marine layer mists.

And then, Palo Alto - signs of enterprise, of intellectual activity amidst the gnomic names of applied digital technology companies.

Returning from San Francisco on the 5, we turned off at the 119 and joined the 33 at Taft then drove to Cuyama and down to Maricopa, Ventucopa, through the Los Padres National Forest (skirting Pine Mountain, center of the Chumash world) to an elevation of a little over 4000 feet and then a long and winding descent into Ojai.

To the north of Cuyama is the Carrizzo Plain occupying what in contemporary terms is a dead zone between the 101 and the 5. This is the area west of the Sierras but east of the 101 given over to ranching, oil and parkland after briefly being the breadbasket of the state when large scale mechanized grain farming attempted to take advantage of the prairie-like plateau.

Dryland grain farming and ranching developed in the late 1800's; in 1912 mechanized agriculture brought scale to the endeavor. Rusting harvesting equipment still litters the grasslands and stands as testament to the unreliable rains of California.

Before the arrival of the Spanish, the Chumash, Yokuts, and other Native Americans hunted and traded on the Carrizo Plain and the Chumash memorialized a vulva shaped rock outcropping with richly painted motifs. I visited the site a couple of years ago and found it much vandalized but still a magnificent presence. The graffiti had a history of its own going back at least 100 years. This so-called 'Painted Rock' is at the far north of the plain located between the Caliente Mountains to the west and the Temblor Range to the east with Soda Lake just to the north. The area is now administered by the BLM (U.S. Bureau of Land Management) and, running north-south sits squarely atop the San Andreas fault.

An essential node of pre-Columbian civilization in mid-coast California where gatherings connected the peoples of the coast, inland valleys, desert and forested highlands, the Carrizo Plain is now a wasteland, the empty heart of a State whose arterial system is composed of concrete roads, cell towers and fiber optic cable rather than the ley lines of ancient culture that connected community to community and all to the psychic beacon of the Painted Rock.

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.