Exploring a bit of Atlanta - Day 1

We made it to Atlanta!

Is it just that I am old now that a flight across the US utterly knocks me out? It ends up being an entire day of travel, and then I am left feeling grubby and dehydrated.

Before traveling, I tend to do a lot of googling of the location, and I made a saved places list in Google Maps. After I figure out the hotel, I google to see if there are any gardens close by or any gardens/landscapes in the city that are noteworthy that I think I might want to see. In this case, I settled on the Hotel Clermont - a refurbished motel and apparently a local iconic establishment. There is a local neighborhood shared garden just around the block! Perfect! What else looks good? The Atlanta Botanical Gardens and some place called Fernbank. That is really all we'll have time to squeeze into this visit.

Anyhow, we made it here, and I LOVE our hotel. It is so freaking cute. Great details, lobby is super nice, a bar and a restaurant, and a rooftop bar as well. Did I steal a Clermont Hotel pen? Yes, yes I did.

two happy looking people relaxing in a hotel lobby holding plastic cups of champagne.

We arrived, checked in, dropped our stuff off, and headed to the bar where we had some delicious cocktails. Then we walked down to the Atlanta Goddess Garden - https://www.goddessgardenatlanta.com/about. The weather here is... sultry. It all feels sort of primally familiar even though I am no longer acclimated to this kind of humid heat. It's nice to have a warm evening walk though.

This garden has a wild and overgrown feeling. Walking along the paths, there are many small shrines, seating areas, and spaces for growing edibles. There are also a lot of rats scurrying in the undergrowth, so I'm unsure how they can sustain any veggies or herbs!

Here is the description from their website:

"Created by Shasta Zaring in 1990, the Goddess Garden Atlanta is an urban wilderness habitat and healing sanctuary nestled in the heart of the City of Atlanta. It is a sacred space dedicated to the Divine Feminine in all religions, paths and cultures. Altars to Goddesses from various world cultures adorn the paths and are tended by the Garden's keepers.

This one-acre private preserve, open to the public during daylight hours, is cultivated without the use of pesticides and herbicides and is a certified Audubon Society Wilderness Habitat. Located just off the Atlanta Beltline, the Garden is in walking distance to many city attractions, such as Ponce City Market, Historic 4th Ward Park, Carter Center and Little Five Points."

So it is privately owned but publicly available space. I wonder if they have to worry about insurance. Apparently, they have classes there, an attached AirB&B, and does seem like a nice place to go and chill in some lush green space! i can see that it is def. a labor of love for people in the neighborhood!

After our stroll we headed back to the hotel, drinks on the rooftop bar, and some dinner.

Garden Tour - Keelya Meadows

I absolutely love the book Fearless Color Gardens by Keelya Meadows. I knew she was a local designer because she has a little exhibit at American Soil and Stone and I knew her home garden was open sometimes but I was not sure of the details. I joined the Garden Conservancy this year and lo! her garden was on the Open Days list! I made T. come with me.

I love all the quirky paving, concrete forms, and amazingly fun use of color. I wish my own garden was just like this. It was a bit over the top for T. though and I suspect he will object.

I’m desperately in love with that leopard-spotted Ligularia and must acquire one for myself immediately.

Discovering the Extraordinary Playscapes Exhibit

During our trip, we had a totally unexpected but amazing moment. We stumbled upon The Boston Society for Architecture's Extraordinary Playscapes exhibit while walking around Boston. As someone obsessed with playscapes, I was thrilled by this discovery!

The Science of Play

The exhibit was extensive, filled with information mostly about commercial play spaces but also delving into the reasons for play and how play spaces influence child development. There were interactive exhibits, outdoor installations that I couldn’t visit, and plenty of beautiful drawings, plans, and models.

We spent a lot of time at the "Imagination Playground" exhibit by David Rockwell. This featured large blue foam blocks that you could manipulate. Much like small-scale building blocks, these large ones allowed you to create your own world and build your space. I loved how these blocks enabled people (kids and adults) to interact in various ways. Whether you’re a builder, a zoomer, or a quiet hider, you could use these blocks to play for hours.

I just love plan view drawings. They are one of the reasons I was attracted to the career. :D.

Nature play is near and dear to my heart. Not only did I create a forest pre school for my kid but I also worked on the play environment at his k-8 school. I also have a whole workshop I have taught at the Mothership Hackermoms in Berkeley.

Here is a link with exhibit info:

https://www.architects.org/exhibitions/extraordinary-playscapes

https://www.architects.org/about/bsa-space/visit

Honeysuckle Sipping, The Plant Lore of Children

My previous post about Making Daisy chains reminded me of this book I’ve been meaning to review: Honeysuckle Sipping The Plant Lore of Children by Jeanne R. Chesanow

What is my plant lore? It’s not much, really. How to braid pine needles and attempt to weave them, how to use a blade of grass as a whistle, making play environments for my glass animals with moss and flowers and sticks and stones, where to find the blueberries and chipmunks at my grandparents house… dandelion seed heads, maple seed ‘rhinoceros horns’, what else?

I had a suburban upbringing. But it was the 70’s and 80’s and supervision was lacking in comparison to current times. As I read through this book I kept saying to myself, ‘Oh yeah! I did that too!”. I think that, anyone who reads this book will have those moments of remembering too and it will bring joy.

I just love this book. The author sent out a call for people to remember and write to her about the plant lore of their own childhoods and she amassed a lovely set of stories and reminiscence.

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In the intro and through out the book she mentions more ancient childhood plant lore. And, I would like to point out here, MOST of this book is white, European and European-American childhood plant lore. There are some mentions of Indigenous North American children, however. I would love to read about other cultures nature play. Note to self: see what you can find about this!

One of my favorites mentioned is a game from ancient Greece in which the kids throw a nut into a circle. Sounds a lot like the (horribly named) game cornhole, doesn’t it?!

Here is a link to a whole scholarly article about play and childhood in ancient Greece!

I’ve mentioned before that I worried about this a lot when my kid was an infant and small child. What would my kid’s childhood plant lore/memories of time spent in nature end up being?! We lived in a loft in West Oakland and there was concrete for days!

I feel lucky that my mother’s group ended up creating a Forest Pre-School which we called ‘Oakland Urban Forest Community’. We hired a Waldorf teacher and spent a ton of time trying to make it work. It DID work for quite a while and then it didn’t and I can’t even remember why! I do know that my kid spent three days a week in nature with other kids, guided by like minded parents and a teacher. They made boats out of bark and sailed them, created puppets out of natural materials for plays, went on nature walks, and many other things.

This is also one of the reasons I sent him to Park Day School in Oakland.

At home we had squirrel tea parties with flowers and seeds as the meal, we picked and ate ‘sour grass’ (Oxalis) on our walks in the neighborhood, and we made roly poly houses with natural materials, so I hope he remembers those things!

New skatepark landscape

I noticed the other day when I stopped at CVS on San Pablo that they added a really interesting skatepark along the parking lot to this strip mall. What a great use of space! I really love the large boulders they used.

Designed by Wormhoudt Inc.

Here is a cute SketchUp walk through of the concept. They did include one female presenting entourage with a skateboard!

There is a you tube video of the grand opening here.

I stopped to walk through it and took a few pictures.

The SF Wave Organ

My sister and I jaunted over to SF to visit the Wave Organ in January, sketchbooks and coffees in hand. How had I never been here? All the years I was living in SF and specifically exploring everything I could and I somehow never ended up here. Anyway, I went now and it was a beautiful winter day with the sun shining. It was so nice to just sit and draw in my sketchbook listening to the waves and people and sea gulls.

Sun shining on an open sketchbook with a pen and green pencil. There is a pen drawing of the wave organ in the sketchbook

Sun shining on an open sketchbook with a pen and green pencil. There is a pen drawing of the wave organ in the sketchbook

The sculpture was delightfully like an ancient ruin. I do love a good ruin. A real ruin not to miss is the Sutro Baths. I go there all the time and I should post some pics of that landscape.

This wave organ is a sound sculpture made from reused items including stones from an old cemetery. I love that and it makes for some very interesting sculptural stone work. The actual organ pipes are PVC and concrete. I think it sounds kind of like rubber bands!

Panorama picture with a woman with purple hair pointing a camera , the Golden Gate Bridge in teh background, the smooth waters of the San Francisco Bay and then some palm trees and a sea wall on the right.

Panorama picture with a woman with purple hair pointing a camera , the Golden Gate Bridge in teh background, the smooth waters of the San Francisco Bay and then some palm trees and a sea wall on the right.

Little Free Libraries

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Little Free Libraries are small personally managed 'take a book or leave a book' libraries. They are usually adorable. You can look at their Flickr gallery to see some examples of the awesomeness that people create.If you want to have your library registered and affiliated with the site you need to pay a small fee. They send you an official plaque and list your library on their map so people can find you.I would like to make mine with a green roof! I am not a builder type though and have no tools. I have a couple of friends who are and I plan on commissioning them to make this for me.

Here is my final concept:

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Lagurus ovatus

Laguras ovatusLagurus ovatus, or bunnytail, in my yard last Spring.Lagurus ovatus is highly adorable. I had it planted in a couple of containers this summer, including this old colander. Most the kids who visited my yard made a beeline for it and spent some time petting it.I like this in containers and used as a border. It self sows though, so if you don't want to see it in the next year you can trim the seed heads before they dry and blow all over the place. If you do want to see them next year let the seeds dry and then collect them.How do you store seeds?I often use old pharmacy medicine bottles.

Christmas day nature art

I bought myself the book Land Art in Town: Simple Inspiration Through the Seasons for Christmas this year. It is an awesome book. The author, Marc Pouyet, hung out in cities across Europe and made and photographed his land art. I call it nature art and think of land art as bigger earthworks type stuff. I'm more drawn to this smaller scale, urban, unexpected art using nature.Here are some of the things my sister, son and I created.

Olive Percival and her children's gardens

The other day in a used bookstore I came across a book called 'The Children's Garden Book' by Olive Percival. I now know this is only an excerpt from the full, never published, manuscript.The first line of the forward is, "This is a book of suggestions for children to whom destiny has given such golden things as a plot of ground and many hours, or several years, uninterrupted by the city's call (ever more insistent, clamorous) to indoor amusement".And further down, "If, for the first ten or twelve or fourteen years of life, the children of today could have personal flower gardens in which to play, to study, to read, to work, to dream, the world tomorrow would be greatly lightened of it's ugly and menacing burden of materialism and general faithlessness".The next section of the book are thoughts and notes to the "to the young gardener".Here is an example, "Long ago, in Elizabethan England and when our colonial history was just beginning, a bouquet was not called a bouquet nor a nosegay nor a boughpot by those of highest fashion. It was called a tussy-mussy! Nobody seems to know why."Thanks to the internet you can read all about tussy-mussies!The books goes on with more tidbits and advice and then she shares her garden plans for children. Things like "the Fairy Ring", "The Kate Greenaway Garden", and "the Moonlight Pleasance". Each garden comes with a plant list, and illustration and planting plan and text describing details of the garden.

"In this our lovely and bedazzling world - a perplexing world that deafens and deadens us with screaming sirens, rattling dragons, many toys, and noisy amusements (omg, girl, you have no idea.) - we contrive to to remain avowed lovers of flowers, even if allowed little time or place to make plants grow and willingly or unwillingly come into blossoms."

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It is so sweet. I fell in love with Olive Percival. Besides being a gardener of some fame and a published writer and poet, she was also a book and doll collector, an antique hat collector AND a milliner, an expert on Chinese and Japanese art, a traveler, and a photographer and generally a mover and shaker amongst the intellectual set of southern CA.I love her because not only was she sweet and all into flowers, paper dolls, cats and 19th century children's books but she was also a feminist and could bust out a bit of snark. We would have been friends for sure. Here's a quote from an article she wrote for the LA Times in 1910,

"As for equal suffrage, I have never in my life heard one sane argument against it. I think the only argument that men who are opposed to the measure have ever advanced in justification of their unfair and un-American position, is that they do not want women to lose their delicacy and charm by rough contact with matters political. This is not 'sentiment' but sentimentality. . . . There is no sense or intelligence about it. Women must live in the world as truly as men and in many instances they are as well equipped for the actualities of life as men. . . ."

I have acquired one other book written by her, "Our Old Fashioned Flowers". The Huntington Library in Pasadena, CA has her diaries and photographs.I may have to road trip to the Huntington Library to see her photographs and all the gardens and art that it looks like that museum and botanic garden have. It looks awesome! They have a tea room! Maybe I will go by myself for my 40th birthday (fast approaching). - Olive May Graves Percival (July 1, 1869 - February 18, 1945).You can read more about her here.I HIGHLY recommend listening to this 30 minute talk about her life. *sniff*Oh, and someone's term paper on her life here.The more you read about her the more awesome she gets.

Hermit crab cityscapes

Okay, this contains many of my favorite things.Amazing tiny things!Small animal!3D printing!More miniature things!Art idea that most people would think, "What?! WHY?"windmill_webArtist Aki Inomata creates beautiful plastic shell for hermit crabs that are crafted into elegant cityscapes.You can watch a short video here.Reading articles about Ani's work led me to this article on Inhabitat about Maker Bot's Project Shelter and the shortage of hermit crab shells.

Progressive School Natural Playscape - Stage One

This is a great project off to a great start. Stage One has been completed with much community help and the kids have been having a blast exploring it.This is an under used area at a progressive private school (grades K-8). K and 1st grade teachers have requested this area be transformed in to Create with Nature and natural playscape area.After meetings with the teachers and Landscape Committee I came up with a fun plan that can be completed in various stages as budget become availablemap-01Teacher Requests- Largish circle of stumps (in combo w/ plants) to enclose the Create With Nature Zone- Create ‘Storage Library’ for loose parts and tools - organized baskets of materials- Ability to take over that whole space - involves moving nursery area- Moving the mulch pile over- Barriers to keep kids out of parking area and out from under delicate oaks- Incorporation of other play elements -- Water, Playhouse, Interesting plants, PathwaysZones- Create with Nature Zone - Enclosed by plants and stumps, inside are some movable stumps and some larger immovable stumps to build on- Loose Parts Library - Includes wicker baskets, wine crates or other containers with well organized loose parts- Mulch Mountain - Large persistent pile of mulch to be replaced as it breaks down or is used elsewhere- River Bed - Includes child friendly hand pump to access water, water flows into basins or sluice and down into dry river bed w/ bridge for crossing- Pathways - Mulch pathways, include two clear entrances, pavers under oaks through plantings, pavers for a curvy path leading to living willow tunnel- Barriers - Natural fencing (willow or branches) along parking area, low mosaic seating wall at south edge, under oak plantings- Playhouse - Small 3 sided playhouse made from natural materials - willow or branchesStage 1 - Oct 6th - Main goal is to build Create with Nature Zone and Library of loose parts.Stump circle - Arrange and dig stumps as we have into largish area surrounding treeLibrary - Low, kid accessible shelves for storing baskets of loose partsLoose parts - Tree cookies, tree blocks, smooth river stones, twigs, pinecones, bamboo pieces, interesting seed pods, any interesting plant materialTools - Small brooms, rakes, trowels[metaslider id=746]Next Stages:Stage 2: move mulch pile, create fencing along parking area, build willow/branch playhouseStage 3: plantings and pathwaysStage 4: incorporate water, boulders, watercourse and bridgeStage 5: K and 1st students create mosaic tiles, organize community mosaic buildAlso viewable on my Projects page!

Accessible playgrounds in the Bay Area

I want all children to have access to playgrounds and nature. One of the main problems I see with accessible playgrounds is that the designers lose site of the whole nature part.How do we make sure playgrounds are inclusive of children of all abilities but still include all the the things kids need to play and learn?How can it REALLY be done? Not just following the letter of ADA compliance that result in playgrounds with no nature and too much hot plastic surfacing?I'm reading and thinking on this. Playgrounds can be crazy expensive. Natural elements might seem to imply too much risk, uncertainty and unrealistic upkeep needs. Why? And what to do?Is no playground better than a playground some kids can't access? Both scenarios are disheartening.Some interesting resources:Bay Area Accessible Playground Finderhttp://www.accessibleplayground.net/Magical Bridge Playground in Palo Alto, CA

A Starling Murmuration in Downtown SF

This is amazingly beautiful! A murmuration is a flock of starlings flying around in sync. They create beautiful patterns and it is lovely to watch. I love that this beautiful natural phenomenon was captured happening in bustling downtown San Francisco.Here's an article in Wired about scientific explanations for these murmurations.