California Dreamin'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mission Creep

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My Arundo

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cool Morning

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Flare-up

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Planetary Mind

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

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

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

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

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

Alpine Chaparral

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mining Gravel

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Timeless Land

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

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

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

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

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

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

Firestorm in Mission Canyon

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Water World

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tuesday will bring more rain.

A Note from Joan

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

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

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

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

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

She reflected on the time she spent with us:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dowsing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Blowback

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chaparral Gardening

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

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

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

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

Kaffe Fassett

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

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

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

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

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

Chaparral - Got to go through it

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

Can't go over it,

Can't go under it,

Can't go around it,

Got to go through it

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

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

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

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

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