Plein air lanscape paintings from Santa Barbara and beyond…
Here is a photo of the view I as I saw it and the painting I made on an afternoon hiking with my family in Cold Springs Canyon last weekend. In most sections, the creek is dry still, but in this narrow spot there are several springs and the water is running. The whole hike is still beautiful nonetheless. I was happy to feel some raindrops today, if only a few.
8×10 ” Casein on Panel
Click to Bid
Gardeners of the world unite!
Let’s slip out in the full moonlight
with seeds in hands
and watering cans
And garden spades stashed out of sight!
For our first organic plot,
lets sneak into a parking lot
and plant fruit seeds
so folks won’t need
To go indoors for apricots.
Street medians we will reclaim,
This public land won’t look the same,
We’ll line each route
with herbs and fruit
Overflowing into the lanes.
Three sisters: corn and squash and beans,
Are now sprouting outside Dairy Queen,
They have no clue,
that it was you,
And nice touch with those collard greens.
And if we have any luck,
Children will soon learn to pluck
free string beens,
climbing the swings,
And extend recess and save a buck.
Once we’ve pulled out all the stops,
Who’ll want those corporate monocrops?
No genetics here,
And we’ve got beer-
Once we harvest that creekside hops.
We’ll pry concrete with fig tree roots,
We’ll enlist scrubjays as recruits
to plant an oak
at every stroke,
And give new meaning to “grassroots.”
Let’s plant city parks and vacant land,
With a living, humming garden stand,
Let’s teach the youth
with food and truth,
That what sustains them is in their hands.
Let “Compost! Compost!” be our cry,
It’s a freedom none can be denied,
To love the ground,
and help it rebound,
Gardeners of the world, unite!
You can tell by the gathering thunderheads
that enough modern day shamans must have performed
today’s most effective rain dance rituals—
either by washing their cars
or planning outdoor weddings in the spring.
Not to be superstitious, but let us not jinx this
by looking at the weather channel
rather than stepping outdoors to feel the air.
And quick, before the sky opens,
let us reroute these aluminum gutters,
street side gullies,
concrete culverts,
dikes, ducts and drains designed
to protect us from flood by dehydrating the landscape.
With some reverse engineering,
backwards pioneering,
and a handy undo-it-yourself mentality
we can turn convention on its head
like an upside-down umbrella
and slow, spread, and sink this sweet rainfall.
Let’s dig us some swales
swollen with saturated sponges
of punky wood and mushroom mycelium
and strengthened with the rebar-like roots of resilient plants.
Watch as these drops filter through the earth
to fill our emptied aquifers,
those underground rivers thirsty too long now
under impervious parasols of parching pavement.
Shakened and awakened by the thunder on the horizon now,
why not go out barefoot in these cold showers,
quench our skin,
celebrate
and sing our appreciation with the frogs?
Cul de Sac Here you see a fifth acre of desert scrub. A black plastic weed barrier buried under decomposed granite with soggy cactus, overwatered mesquite, and Mojave natives poking their heads through circular holes. A tall century bloom swarms with hummingbirds. Next door, you find a formal lot imported from colonial England, with gingerbread epoxied to the stucco. A trimmed lawn with an ornamental plum sprouts bushes and hedges trimmed like lollipops. A red-brick walkway sways pleasantly to the red front door. Apparently, a fifth acre chunk of Hawaii has been excavated shipped overseas, and dropped into the plot next door... Plop! Bermuda grass, palm trees, ginger flowers and trailing bamboo... (the curse of colonial England next door) all flank a pink mailbox in a pad of black lava rock. Down the street, an awkward crispy orange pine tree and some ceramic squirrels create the high mountain ambiance of a Swiss glen. The Dutch annuals explode along the sidewalk like red, yellow, blue and green fireworks (miracle-y growing so far from their Nordic relatives) with their plastic name and care tags sprouting from the salt-and-pepper soil like fuses. The Hawaiians, Mexicans, English and Swiss gossip in their driveways, rolling eyes and cursing the house at the end of the block, so flagrantly violating the HOA... Just look at its weedy, unwatered yard going to seed: an unpruned wild oak planted by jays, dandelions, chickweed, lambs quarters, Red Maids and coastal sage overflowing the mowing strip... No gardeners here but the wild birds. Look at them munching wild seeds, checking their migration maps, and wondering “where on earth are we, anyway?”
Oh, give me a home where the windows won’t close, and there’s wall-to-wall carpet of weeds no one mows, where the lighting is solar, when the ceiling’s not stars, and you can get there by foot, but there’s no path for cars. And let me rest in a bed, of dry leaves and duff, and think of how nothing can be more than enough. Let my only plumbing be rocks and a spring, and the only evening news be what the birds sing. Let me leave boards for fences inside of the trees. Let wild space be my blinds when I want privacy. I’ll dig in the humus and see what roots linger, when I want the whole World Wide Web at my fingers. Sure I can’t own a place, that already owns me, but I’ll still mind the mortgage compassionately. So before I die, I can write in my will, “Kids, you were born with nothing-- you have most of it still...”
Nature is a Gardener
Plants are her purest expression,
spending their days eating sunlight and
expelling a dazzling display
of scents,
colors
and flavors.
Gophers are just tools to plow the earth.
Birds and squirrels sow the seeds.
Deer are nice quiet lawnmowers.
Owls, snakes and ladybugs? Pest control.
Goats do the pruning.
Beavers are merely complex irrigation systems,
and bees... the hardworking genetic engineers.
Everybody does their share of the fertilizing
and composting
at one point or another,
but other than that, I have to ask,
“What kind of gardening tool am I?”
Kevin Gleason Art 