gardens
Chef's Table: Jeong Kwan
What this site is
The man of the pot
Each ruler commissioned his own garden
Getty Center Central Garden
What can be called a response
With living, though unconscious, matter, the creator must still adapt the work to the material, though here he experiences something that can without undue anthropomorphism be called a “response”; plants “respond” to cultivation and cross-fertilization in a sense rather different from that in which iron may be said to “respond” to hammering.
Shortlist of interesting spaces
We must cultivate our garden
‘You must have a vast and magnificent estate,’ said Candide to the turk.
‘I have only twenty acres,’ replied the old man; ‘I and my children cultivate them; and our labour preserves us from three great evils: weariness, vice, and want.’
Candide, on his way home, reflected deeply on what the old man had said. ‘This honest Turk,’ he said to Pangloss and Martin, ‘seems to be in a far better place than kings…. I also know,’ said Candide, ‘that we must cultivate our garden.’
Secret garden
Pattern 7.7 – There is also one garden, so secret, that it does not appear on any map. The importance of the pattern is that it must never be publicly announced, and must not be in site plan. Except for a few, nobody should be able to find it.
Waiting to repay the gift of vision
Like a forest or a garden or a field, an honest page of letters can absorb – and will repay – all the attention it is given. Much type now, however, is delivered to computer screens. It is a good deal harder to make text truly legible on screen than to render streaming video. Both fine technology and great restraint are required to make the screen as restful to the eyes as ordinary paper.
The underlying problem is that the screen mimics the sky instead of the earth. It bombards the eye with light instead of waiting to repay the gift of vision – like the petals of a flower, or the face of a thinking animal, or a well-made typographic page. And we read the screen the way we read the sky: in quick sweeps, guessing at the weather from the changing shapes of clouds, or in magnified small bits, like astronomers studying details. We look to it for clues and revelations more than wisdom. This makes it an attractive place for the open storage of pulverized information – names, dates, or library call numbers, for instance – but not so good a place for thoughtful text.
Turn them into cycles
Permaculture systems seek to stop the flow of nutrient and energy off the site and instead turn them into cycles, so that, for instance, kitchen wastes are recycles to compost; animal manures are directed to biogas production or to the soil; household greywater flows to the garden; green manures are turned into the earth; leaves are raked up around trees as mulch.
Has it begun to sprout?
"That corpse you planted last year in your garden,
Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?"The garden is a riot
In conventional agriculture, vegetation is kept at the weed or herb level using energy to keep it cut, weeded, tilled, fetilised, and even burnt; that is, we are constantly setting the system back and incurring work and energy-costs when we stop natural succession from occurring.
Instead of fighting this process, we can direct and accelerate it to build our own climax species in a shorter time.
There is no attempt to form the garden into strict neat rows; it is a riot of shrubs, vines, garden beds, flowers, herbs, a few small trees, and even a small pond. Paths are sinuous, and garden beds might be round, key-holed, raised, spiraled, or sunken.
The office landscape
An organic, almost forest-like office layout.
There is an affinity with certain planned “landscapes” of the natural world – namely, the classic Italian Baroque garden. In the sample plans the Schnelle brothers devised, the arrangement of desks seems utterly chaotic, totally unplanned – a mess, like a forest of refrigerator magnets. But, as with the seemingly “wild” overgrowth of a “natural” garden, the office landscape is more thoroughly planned than any symmetrical and orderly arrangement of desks. Imaginary lines wend their way around every cluster, delineating common pools of activity; between and through the undergrowth of clusters are invisible, sinuous paths of work flow.
172. Garden Growing Wild
Problem
A garden which grows true to its own laws is not a wilderness, yet not entirely artificial either.
Solution
Grow grasses, mosses, bushes, flowers, and trees in a way which comes close to the way that they occur in nature: intermingled, without barriers between them, without bare earth, without formal flower beds, and with all the boundaries and edges made in rough stone and brick and wood which become a part of the natural growth.
Verona gardens
Snipping the dead blooms
A Quote by Robin SloanI recognize this is a very niche endeavor, but the art and craft of maintaining a homepage, with some of your writing and a page that's about you and whatever else over time, of course always includes addition and deletion, just like a garden — you're snipping the dead blooms. I do this a lot. I'll see something really old on my site, and I go, “you know what, I don't like this anymore,” and I will delete it.
But that's care. Both adding things and deleting things. Basically the sense of looking at something and saying, “is this good? Is this right? Can I make it better? What does this need right now?” Those are all expressions of care. And I think both the relentless abandonment of stuff that doesn't have a billion users by tech companies, and the relentless accretion of garbage on the blockchain, I think they're both kind of the antithesis, honestly, of care.
Philosophy of life and gardening
A Website by Steve RichardsI enjoy gardening the most when it aligns with my broader philosophy of life, so I thought readers might like to see that philosophy and see how I apply it to gardening. These principles are in random order, just as they are applied in life. Sometimes my focus is on having fun, other times I'm focused on planning, still other times I just want to kick back and chat to my friends and neighbours.
Introduction / Pareto principle / Balance / Fun / Working for happiness / Family / Purpose / Order / Planning / Flexibility / Variety / Strategic Resilience / Motivation / Sustainability / Invest to save / Kaizen / Kindness / Giving back / Experimentation / Learning
revisiting architectural blogging
An Article by Alan JacobsI have appropriated from Brian Eno and others the distinction between architecture and gardening, and have described my blog as a kind of garden. But lately I’ve been revisiting the architecture/gardening distinction and I have come to think that there is something architectural about writing a blog, or can be – but not in the sense of a typical architectural project, which is designed in advanced and built to specifications. Rather, writing a blog over a period of years is something like building the Watts Towers.
Simon Rodi didn’t have a plan, didn’t even have a purpose: he just started building. His work was sustained and extended by bricolage, the acquisition and deployment of found objects – and not just any objects, but objects that the world had discarded as useless, as filth. You put something in here, then something else, you discover, fits there … over time you get something big and with a discernible shape. Not the regular shape envisioned in architectural drawings, but nevertheless something that can be pleasing or at least interesting to look at – an organic and irregular shape. A geometry of irregular forms.
drawing.garden
A Website by Ben MorenGardening, but with emojis and less time.
Phantom Regret by Jim
A Poem by Jim Carrey & The WeekndAnd if your broken heart's heavy when you step on the scale
You'll be lighter than air when they pull back the veil
Consider the flowers, they don't try to look right
They just open their petals and turn to the lightWorking with Brian Eno on design principles for streets
- Think like a gardener, not an architect: design beginnings, not endings
- Unfinished = fertile
- Artists are to cities what worms are to soil.
- A city’s waste should be on public display.
- Make places that are easy for people to change and adapt (wood and plaster, as opposed to steel and concrete.)
- Places which accommodate the very young and the very old are loved by everybody else too.
- Low rent = high life
- Make places for people to look at each other, to show off to each other.
- Shared public space is the crucible of community.
- A really smart city is the one that harnesses the intelligence and creativity of its inhabitants.
A Brief History of the Digital Garden
An Article by Maggie AppletonDigital gardening is the Domestic Cozy version of the personal blog. It's less performative than a blog, but more intentional and thoughtful than our Twitter feed. It wants to build personal knowledge over time, rather than engage in banter and quippy conversations.
Enjoying the garden together
A Quote by Brian EnoAnd essentially the idea there is that one is making a kind of music in the way that one might make a garden. One is carefully constructing seeds, or finding seeds, carefully planting them and then letting them have their life.
What this means, really, is a rethinking of one’s own position as a creator. You stop thinking of yourself as me, the controller, you the audience, and you start thinking of all of us as the audience, all of us as people enjoying the garden together. Gardener included.
Maggie Appleton's Digital Garden
A Website by Maggie AppletonAn open collection of notes, resources, sketches, and explorations I'm currently cultivating. Some notes are Seedlings, some are budding, and some are fully grown Evergreen.
Design Thinking
Ducks and decorated sheds
A duck is a building whose confirmation is a complete symbol or icon. A decorated shed is a building to which symbols, often commonplace signs, have been attached.
Clinging to ideas
Another aspect of design thinking that was evident in the foregoing case studies is the tenacity with which designers will cling to major design ideas and themes in the face of what at times might seem insurmountable odds. Often the concept the designer has in mind can only come to fruition if a large number of apparently countervailing conditions can be surmounted.
Even when severe problems are encountered, a considerable effort is made to make the initial idea work, rather than to stand back and adopt a fresh point of departure.
A concept of style
It is a concept based not on the classification of various physical features of architecture and urban design but on the problem-solving process itself. We have seen that the final outcome of a design process is strongly determined by at least three aspects of that process:
- the subject matter of the organizing principles which are adopted,
- the manner in which these principles are interpreted and reinterpreted in the context of the problem at hand, and
- the sequent of applying such organizing principles.
Consistency in style among the output of designers can thus be understood as a habitual way of doing things, of solving problems.
Form and figure
Form applies to “a configuration with natural meaning or none at all,” whereas figure applies to “a configuration whose meaning is given by culture."
Design skirmishes
it is apparent that the unfolding of the design process assumed a distinctly episodic structure, which we might characterize as a series of related skirmishes with various aspects of the problem at hand.
As the scope of the problem became more determined and finite for the designer, the episodic character of the process seems to have become less pronounced. During this period a systematic working out of issues and conditions took hold within the framework that had been established. This phenomenon is not at all surprising when we consider the fundamental difference between moments of problem solving when matters are poorly defined and those with clarity and sufficiency of structure.
Within the episodic structure of the process, the problem, as perceived by the designer, tends to fluctuate from being rather nebulous to being more specific and well-defined. Furthermore, moments of "blinding" followed by periods of backtracking take place, where blinding refers to conditions in which obvious connections between various considerations of importance go unrecognized by a designer.
Such plans were deemed efficient
The terrain of cities was subdivided along the lines of distinct and discrete patterns of use, with very little opportunity for mixing (separation and concentration of functions). After all, the home environment should be just that…while places of work should be aggregated and serviced with their appropriate supporting functions.
Such plans were deemed efficient.
Constrained by the medium
The inevitable reciprocation that occurs between the act of drawing and the thinking associated with it. The hand moves, the mind becomes engaged, and vice versa. We might ask: How much does the medium of expression actually constrain a design process?
A medium has a way of constraining our choices, and this influence may not involve conscious choice at all. The planner, in the end, sees and understands only those things for which they can provide expression.
Autonomous constraints
Autonomous or independent constraints do not derive from the problem as given and understood…there was nothing in the problem statement, or brief, that required any reference be made to it. This constraint, introduced by the designers, usefully transcended the givens of the problem situation.
Unless the entire problem at hand can be solved using strictly problem-oriented constraints, we have to step outside the known problem context in order to continue problem solving activity.
The strange familiar and the familiar strange
The problem solver, when confronted with a new and yet unsolved problem, overlays the structure of the unsolved problem with an apparently similar problem with which he or she is experienced.
Making the strange familiar and the familiar strange are also principally based on the use of analogy.