South End Nursery
Posted in rantings and ravings on June 6th, 2013 by skeeterBefore half the South End converted their gardens and basements and outbuildings to medical marijuana production, the era of the boutique nurseries flourished. They specialized in everything from stingless nettles to thornless blackberries, figuring the hordes of immigrants new to the area would welcome their hybridized species.
Some folks, like Camano Natives Nursery, sold only what was here already. Oh, the salal was popular, and some folks bought little potted sword ferns, but most of them just let the back forty spread to the lawn if all they wanted was the local horticulture. Island Botanicals went the other direction, marketing everything from blue poppies to swamp cypress. The first hard freeze or month long drought or hurricane force winds usually killed the little transplants, but then a lot of the newcomers had had enough too and moved on to more exotic climes where those plants were already Old Growth.
Avant-Gardens, a co-op run by artists with a chartreuse thumb, more hortichuckle than horticultural, sold an eclectic variety of strange herbs, quasi-hallucinogenic plants, odd garden ornaments and large variety of found objects, weird art and advice for alternative living. In a few years they were broke and discouraged and scattered to the far ends of the known universe — well, mostly scattered down here on the South End.
I guess Avant-Garden was where the 60’s hit the Sound, scarcely a sizzle when their cooling lava reached the beach. Their commune broke up, their greenhouses tilted and fell, their yurts and tipis and geodesic domes finally succumbed to the weight of moss and leaf mulch and the neighbors’ hostile gossip. If you know just where to look, you can find a path that starts near the Head and winds through the nettle forest past a couple of VW vans peeking headlights through the blackberries and finally you’ll arrive at a clearing by the bluff. The ragged polyethylene of the greenhouses wave off their bent PVC poles like Tibetan prayer flags of the insane or hopelessly lost. A few beds of periwinkle have escaped into the woods. Some lilies of the valley made a stand next to the big cedar and in the spring, the native bleeding hearts carpet the clearing, their pink flowers a nostalgic reminder of the dead dreams of so many of us old hippies back then.
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audio — if a tree falls in the forest
Posted in audio versions ---- the talkies on June 5th, 2013 by skeeterIf a Tree Falls in the Forest ….
Posted in rantings and ravings on June 4th, 2013 by skeeterMy little brother was just down touring the redwood groves near Eureka. Like almost any six foot human he was mightily awed by a living thing 300 feet high, wide as a 747 fuselage and older than almost anything living on the planet. These are magnificent beings and amazingly, we didn’t cut every damn one down for Malibu decks and the furniture to adorn them.
I guess the photos of these arboreal giants he sent via his smartphone camera made me dig out an old burl a sculptor friend had given me, a remnant from her countertop she’d slabbed onto an ugly one and pretty much turned her kitchen into a work of art with one fell swoop. That’s kind of what artists do, take something the rest of us never notice, then make the ordinary into the extraordinary. And more — they make us take a second look at the ordinary, the banal, the day to day until we see it differently too. This is what we call inspirational, meaning, it inspires us to reimagine the world around us.
So I dragged out this big slab of redwood burl, almost 40 pounds, a tiny sliver of some behemoth California old growth three plus inches thick, and I thought, I wonder what it would sound like? I had to cut an edge off with a chainsaw, then I smoothed two sides flat and then I carved out a banjo neck, sanded it, oiled it and thought, holy cow, what a beautiful dark red wood, all kinds of figuring, birdseyes, tiger striping, gnarls, knots and grain. So I continued on, cut out the foot round pot from one piece, sanded and oiled it, then stood back in awe the way my brother did from the living tree.
I’m a week into this now, making parts, working the wood, watching it come back to life. In a few days I’ll assemble the parts, all re-imagined, and then I’ll string it up. There will be, I have no doubt, a sublime moment, one only heard by me, when a tree that fell in the forest after growing a thousand years, makes the sound it’s held until now.
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