The Hepatica leaf pool

Hollywood, California: Philip Ilsley estate, Hepatica-leaf pool.

While doing research for an article about free-form pools, I found this amazing picture of a pool in form of a Hepatica leaf. It looks so completely whimsical and irrational and I've never seen anything quite like it. Still, it is a merry pool, and I can easily imagine myself in it, happily paddling my way from lobe to lobe past the gently curving sides of the pool.

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Philip Ilsley, who built his pool in 1949 on the Hollywood Hills overlooking the San Fernando valley, insisted that it was both beautiful and functional. He explained, that "the Hepatica shape provides the most swimming and diving space for the least water. Its three lobes separate the sun-tanners; who like to loll on the warm brink without getting wet, from the divers, who splash and splash around the springboard on the opposite side, while the athletic types who like to swim can tee off at the far end of the leaf and paddle right up the stem..."

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A eccentric pool for an imaginative person, it seems, but this eye-catching form was made to grab attention, which it did very well, as several articles were published about it. Ilsley was an entrepreneur who revolutionized the construction of pools using pressure-sprayed-concrete (Gunite), which made them affordable even for the middle classes, making Ilsley's firm the largest pool-building company in the US. He became the preferred pool-builder of the rich and famous in Hollywood. Many film stars wanted their pools to be unique, and Ilsley was able to meet their dreams with creations like the piano-shaped pool he built for Frank Sinatra in Palm Springs.

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What I find intriguing is that a fashionable pool-builder like Ilsley chose the leaf of the humble, small Hepatica as a model for his own pool. Being so sought-after by the stars of the old Hollywood, why didn't he choose something more glamorous, like the old symbol of fleur-de-lis, that could have stood for Iris douglasiana, the beloved native iris of California? What was his relationship to the dainty little liverwort that needs cold winters to thrive and therefore is not even suited for the warm Californian climate? I guess I will never know, but I still find the Hepatica leaf pool quite attractive in its own, quirky way.

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Thomas A.P. van Leeuwen: The Springboard in the Pond. An Intimate History of the Swimming Pool.

MIT Press, 1999.

Rancho Santa Ana Botanic Garden

Yucca brevifolias, like rambling, shaggy sculptures in one of the Plant Communities areas at Rancho Santa Ana Botanic Garden.

Winter seems to have forgotten Seattle, but we still had a 'mid-winter break' from the schools, so I made a short tour to Los Angeles and surroundings with my family. As I walked out from the plane into the glistening sunshine at the tiny Long Beach airport and felt the balmy winds caress my pale cheeks, I once again wondered why we ever left Melbourne and settled into the chilly climates of Stockholm and Seattle, when the southern zones are so much easier for your mind and body...

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A member of the genus Mimulus, I had misplaced my notes and can't find the right name for this...

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Arctostaphylos tomentosa, the woollyleaf manzanita, also member of the heather family.

A small mishap on the agenda made my planned visit to Huntington Botanical Gardens impossible, so instead I made a surprise visit to Rancho Santa Ana Botanic Garden in Claremont. Covering over 86 acres, Rancho Santa Ana is the largest botanical garden of California, exclusively dedicated to native California plants. Its was founded in 1927 by Susanna Bixby Bryant, a member of one of California's pioneering families, who was worried about the rapidly disappearing native California flora - an amazingly visionary deed at time when most people and even scholars had no interest for the local plants. Originally founded on her ranch in Orange County, Rancho Santa Botanic Garden was relocated in 1951 to Claremont College campus to be part of its graduate program in botany.

One of the plantings in the Plant Community areas, with yuccas and cacti.

Located on a plain of the San Gabriel Mountains, the paths are laid out in meandering circles that cover three different areas. Indian Hill Mesa with its dense clay soil is planted with California wild lilacs, Manzanitas and other mature cultivars of native Californian plants. The East Alluvial Garden contains the desert garden and the coastal plant collections, including the Californian Fan Palm Oasis, where native palms have been allowed to keep their skirts of dried, brown fronds; a surprising reminder of how palms really should look like. The third area is the Plant Communities display. Here, Californian natives as cacti, yuccas, pines and the legendary Joshua trees cover a huge 55 acres, all planted in habitats that looked so naturalistic that it was difficult to believe them to have been planted by people.

* Fremontodendron 'California glory' (flannel bush) in the California cultivar garden, where new varieties of native plants are selected and grown for commercial use.

Wandering through the winding paths of the Plant Communities, I was happily reminded of some of the hikes I have made in South Eastern Australia and in the Big Sur area in California; so far apart from each other, but still so similar in their nature. Only a few people were out in the gardens, so I was left to my own devices, admiring all the members of Californian plant families, represented there in all hues of green from ashen grey to the deepest emerald. Only some 20 miles away from the bustling LA, Rancho Santa Ana was filled with sparkling birdsong. As the sweet scents from the aromatic plants filled my lungs, I felt well compensated for my disappointment for not seeing the Huntington gardens.

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Overview of the Plant Communities area, with San Gabriel Mountains as a majestic backdrop.

Freeway Park in Seattle

The rectilinear forms follow through all parts of the Freeway Park in Seattle; the pathways, water features, planter boxes are all made of concrete.

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Seattle is a city full of contrasts. Situated on steep hills, Seattle overlooks the crystal waves of the Puget Sound, and wherever you look, stunning snowcapped mountains fill the horizon. Several lakes weave into the scenery, creating a rich tapestry with the lush, majestic forests of this evergreen, rainy part of the world. In this magnificent setting, the city centre is something of a visual shock: a high rise jungle of asphalt and concrete, with a train track and two major freeways, I-5 and the Alaskan Viaduct, cutting through it. There is very little greenery, only minor plantings dwarfed by the high buildings, and a few street trees struggling to keep alive in the harsh environment. With few exceptions, the best way to catch a glimpse of the city, the residential areas, the mountains and the sea is to drive through Seattle on one of the freeways. It feels like the early Seattleites, eager to tap into the natural riches of the area, forgot everything about the principles of good town planning when they started carving their mark into the landscape a bit over hundred years ago.

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Above: Part of the path around the park. Below: The park seen from the University Street ramp leading to the I-5 freeway.

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Freeway Park, situated in the heart of Seattle city centre, was designed in the early 70s to reduce the impact of the the I-5 freeway and to reconnect the city centre with First Hill, an older area on the east side of it. Landscape architect Laurence Halprin, who designed the park with Angela Danadjieva, wanted to integrate the I-5 freeway into the park and to emphasize the highly urban nature of the site. A result of their creative work, Freeway Park is a rectilinear board-formed concrete maze that sits like a monumental lock over the freeway. The passing cars below make a constant, obtrusive element of the park. To mute the sounds of the traffic, Halprin and Danadjieva included several fountains, many of which are now defunct. The largest one, the American League Fountain, is a huge, concrete canyon on several levels that was inspired by the waterfalls of the Cascade and Olympic mountains that surround Seattle. The vegetation is planted in large, concrete containers and consist mainly of native evergreens and shrubs, chosen because of their ability to survive high levels of pollution. Only a few flowering cherries and Magnolias add a seasonal, softer note to the otherwise quite static greenery.

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The American League Fountain was designed like a huge canyon and Halprin wanted the immediate sense of danger to make people cautious; therefore, no fences were used. At least two people have died by falling from the concrete platforms and steps of the park, so the renovation project will address the need for increased safety.

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The Freeway Park opened in 1976 as part of Seattle's celebrations of the U.S. bicentennial and was an immediate success that attracted large crowds. Later on, its maze-like design turned out to be a magnet for the criminal elements of the city: all the turns and nooks, designed to inspire intimate meetings between law-abiding citizens, showed to be a perfect place for robbers and murderers to hide and attack their offers without being noticed. The zigzagging design made it difficult for the victims to escape and the cascading fountains together with the neverending roar of traffic drowned effectively their cries for help.

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Emergency call buttons can be found in several places. They remind vividly of the many murders and robberies that have taken place in the park, adding a disconcerting feel to a visit there.

The Freeway Park, celebrated as a breakthrough in urban design in the 1970s, fell fast into disrepair. Later on, it was often referred to as one of the most unused or even hated parks in Seattle. First in 2006, The Cultural Landscape Foundation profiled the Freeway Park in its Landslide program for endangered cultural landscapes. This prompted Seattle Parks and Recreation Department to start a project for making it safer and more usable together with the people living nearby the park. When I visited the park yesterday, no results were visible, only several yellow signs and a large project presentation plan announced that repair works were on the way. Walking through the concrete paths in the rain, with the defeaning noise filling my ears, I had a slightly creepy feeling thinking of all the unlucky incidents that had taken place there. The Freeway Park felt like a place that was born out of idealism, but fallen deep into the raw reality of life. Still, with all the work that is going into reviving this people's meeting place, I hope that the Freeway Park will again be the urban oasis to "encourage meditative thought, excite senses and celebrate life" that Lawrence Halprin and Angela Danadjieva envisioned it to be.

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Later update (Feb 22, 2010): The Cultural Landscape Foundation just published an interview with Lawrence Halprin on their Oral History Project part of their website.

Fergus Garrett, the gentle keeper of Great Dixter

Fergus Garrett, the Head Gardener of Great Dixter, changing the bedding plants in the huge borders. East Sussex, England, 2006.

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Yesterday, I visited Seattle's Northwest Garden & Flower Show mainly for one reason: to listen to Fergus Garrett, Head Gardener of Great Dixter, the house and garden of the late Christopher Lloyd. We were handed out an almost stressfully long list of pictures Fergus was going to show, but there was no need to worry: his presentation was an amazing voyage through the past and the present of Great Dixter, all delivered at an enjoyable pace. The storyline flowed lively from historical black and white pictures of the Lloyd family via glorious garden imagery from different periods of time, to touching, personal details about Christopher Lloyd, the legendary gardener and writer. Seeing Christopher's old, worn out shoes with his note to the housekeeper about getting them mended, or his letter in perfect handwriting, when he as 6 year old thanks politely for the Viburnum carlesii he'd got as a present, are details very seldom seen when these legendary gardens are written or talked about. And yet, they give such an intimate picture of their owners as personalities and human beings, adding an important layer to our understanding of their achievements.

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Great Dixter during the hot, late days of June 2006. The ancient house with its steep roof and high chimneys forms an architectural background for almost every view of the gardens.
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Fergus Garrett's presentation was a personal and sensitive account about the enormous responsibility of preserving a national cultural treasure like Great Dixter. Fergus gardens, lives and breathes Great Dixter, and he was a close friend of Christopher's, with whom he "gardened in the fast lane" for a long time. All of this I keenly felt when he talked. Preserving an estate as dynamic as Great Dixter, where experimentation always was a defining characteristic calls for a deep understanding of the place; it still needs to be Great Dixter, the garden of the legendary Christopher Lloyd, but at the same time, it can't be preserved in aspic. For not lose its heartbeat and become a living museum, it has to move with the times, keeping its experimental nature. As Fergus mentioned, Christopher Lloyd accepted no rules, no fads and no fashion: he never went for perfection, but for excellence, and there is a significant difference.

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Osthouses for drying hops, an important function in the old days of Dixter.

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Fergus talk was wonderful, personal and knowledgeable, and the pictures were a joy for the eyes of anybody who loves gardens. Christopher Lloyd's intensive, overblown cottage garden style on the grand scale is not everybody's cup of tea, Fergus said, but everybody who is knowledgeable about gardening must admire the talent and skill needed to create it. As he pointed out, many forget that Great Dixter is not only about the house and gardens so well-known from countless pictures, but also about a carefully balanced natural ecosystem of meadows, ancient woodlands with orchids and other rare native plats, all surrounding the great gardens, and all in need of care and consideration.

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One of the long borders in late June 2006, with Allium christophii and Ammi majus in the foreground.

Christopher Lloyd's wonderful, witty and knowledgeable writing had made me love Great Dixter long before I first visited it in 2006. I walked along the paths and admired the scenes, so familiar from his books, but they were different: Christo was not there any more, he had died in January the same year. I felt like I had lost a friend, even if I had never met him. And that is what truly good writing does: it makes the writer and the reader to meet in the text: it is an intimate contact and dialogue between both participants, their thoughts and ideas. Christo was able to do that with his millions of gardening readers. As Fergus gently pointed out at the end of his speech, Great Dixter remains a living testament to Christopher Lloyd's life as a remarkable gardener and writer. And in Fergus Garrett, Great Dixter has a talented and gentle keeper, hopefully for a very long time to come.

My girls wandering through the stone paved paths of Great Dixter in 2006.

See also my previous post about Great Dixter, Meadows, meadows everywhere from July 2008.

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