More Little Gardens

These ones were created by some very clever person in the holes at the ends of a concrete drain cover. The mushroom is a nice edition - gives it that little touch of individuality.

Very very very samll gardens

Some gardens are so small you don't see them. For three weeks I've been walking over the top of these beauties . . . in my own backyard.

Kinjarling Walk Trails

I'm not in Albany, but I can't stop thinking about getting back and how great practicing there as an embedded landscape architect will be. My latest excitement came when Sarah Toa told me there are moves afoot to establish Kinjarling walking/story trails around Albany. I think "through" Albany. Lines that cut across York street, through the middle of Woollies, lines that walk you next to the war memorial on Mt Clarence...
How to show these on the ground? A bit of dirt where you least expect it, a section cut through the asphalt, a tiled pattern meandering past the deli counter that reminds you of a songline that still exists, and will still exist long after honey ham is no longer sold there.

Connect this image with parks and gardens breaking their boundaries and getting smeared across streets and through corners of buildings.

Maybe a paving type like this


in a 20m wide strip across York street, just at the cross walk:



Alison Hartman Gardens breaking free from her confining edge.

a week in albany

internialities

some thoughts going through my head tonight:


embedded practice_working directly in the community in which you are living
hold the whole system in the mind; is this future a system small enough to fit?

intensity_of settlement.
(what is a city?)
regarding settlement patterns as areas of intensity and dispersal how can we reconfigure our settlement patterns in a more effective, creative and sustainable way?
on a continuum most least intense dispersed
moments of intensity within boundaries which limit geographic spread.
boundaries in time, boundaries in space.
without boundaries, but within "zones" of intensity. i don't like that word here, sounds too geographically deterministic, but moments is too ephemeral. it is geographic, it is fixed in a place for a time, and it reflects temporal opportunities
refiguring the urban/rural binary as moments of intensity in a field of possibilities.

all to the purpose of allowing other species to flourish for their own sake.

maintenance is the most import pattern information we can use to define the use and uselessness of the landscape.

what is landfill but an opportunity for life, an intensity of potentials, millions of potential sites for organisms so flourish?

Green Gutter

Walking the streets and laneways, coming across one of these beautiful gardens is such a joyous moment!

Ella's site

Discaria pubescens, Hairy anchor plant.


Ella and I went for a drive to get out of the city today, to visit her site, near Marmsbery.

A line made by walking.

"...he walked backwards and forwards until the flattened turf caught the sunlight and became visible as a line."

Richard Long

A Line Made by Walking 1967

Photograph and pencil on board


Hearing about Richard Long's Line was one of the first things that made me realize I was a sculptor. Such banal everyday practice was what people were calling art? Then ok, I am an artist! This guy, and all those British land artists like him, Hamish Fulton, Ian Hamilton Finlay etc, were so influential on my gentle practice, and what I love.

Pick a daisy, one for each day of your life (this makes an empty green spiral in a field of yellow cape weed daisies, and your hands are sticky with yellow pollen and white sap)

So how come this didn't come out in four years of design exploration studies? It is a gentle, subtle thing, and I never felt like being a design student was either gentle or subtle. Even the word designer sounds hard to me, smooth, grey and perfect... none of those things is me. I like the process of designing, but don't want to be one. I'd much rather be a sculptor, rough hands, moving clay around and hammering chunks of wood. Or a land artist, walking in the dewy grass. Walking in circles.
And what has happened to my sculpture practice? Ah, now that is a long secret... some stupid idea about not documenting stuff. But if you can't show it to someone, maybe they don't believe you did it. So just occasionally you feel like maybe you didn't do it. And sometimes that thought spills too far, and you just stop talking about it, and then you stop doing it all together.
And do you stop loving it, too?

Quote and photo from the Tate Modern website: http://www.tate.org.uk/servlet/ViewWork?workid=8971, Accessed 21st August 2009

Inefficiency

Inefficiency is inherent to sustainable design.

the Arithmatic of the Suburbs

But examples of sustainable gardening in suburban situations are of limited value. In the arithmetic of the suburbs, where each positive sits between two negatives, opposite at least one negative and within an infrastructure of negatives, the net gain is never greater than zero. What is of greater importance is to change the infrastructural numeric.

Small Gardens.