Above are "Around the Home and Office" images. Been indoors a lot. A good time for some domestic ethnography. The Aldi (commodity) flowers just keep going and going.
Of note: I use the word "commodity" in a critical theory sense that refers to produced objects. However in recent reading I have seen "commodity" used to express "comfort."

I have been isolating very well. I think I have to follow good honest safety practices if I am to honestly continue to meet and consult others (at safe distances). I have an extended  quarantine space that includes two people. In the field, we are each working with our own separate tools, wear latex gloves all day, maintain distance, and disinfect the controls in the trucks.

We applied and were granted "essential business" status after listing out a series of practices that were seasonally specific such as rejuvenation pruning and transplanting. Our application also listed out specific weeds and invasives such as Lesser Celandine and Buckthorn as species that will colonize and naturalize if not controlled. A few hours after we received out status to continue work, The Department of Ag and Markets declared all horticulture and landscape care work as essential so we are operating at full speed right now.  

Clockwise starting at top left: Hellebore just emerging. Work at the Buffalo Niagara Medical Campus. Clean Hellebore leaf. What I believe to be Japanese Beetle grubs.

I have been more committed than ever before to collecting some branches to force. With early flowering woody plant species, you can cut a branch, bring it indoors, put it water, and in a short time the buds will start to open. This week I collected branches of VanHouteii Spiraea, Magnolia, Quince, Forsythia, Crabapple, and Amelanchier. 

Well, honestly, its not much of a project. I just made a post last week about how I had bought some flowers at Aldi for $3.99 (x2), and that I generally think their flowers are awful (but at $3.99, what do you want?). But. Part of designing is figuring out how to use the materials available and at $3.99 I want to find a way to use them. Right now I would call them a bit of color amongst a number of other plants and branches I have around. Maybe they work in well in a situation where they aren't the main focus.
Point - I trimmed the bottom inch of stems off a few days ago and changed the water. I want to see how long they last. I'm on pace to get two or three weeks out of them.
Further...oftentime...I have so many friends that are Aldi shoppers and buy themselves flowers there as a little self-care item. Perfect. That is what they are for. But. If I could recommend, cut the stems down a third to a half the length they come in, and put them in a stubbier vessel. Flowers with long stems just thrown in a vase at home, uncultured, often aren't finding their full potential. Explore "arranging," its an art.

Indoor plants. I try. I think I have enough basic skills to keep my plants alive. I have some kind of wooly scale thing I have been mechanically managing on a plant for some time. Watering - well, I think less is better than too much but it limits a plants growth. Different kinds of containers, humidity, light - all things and details that have led me to only grow Peace Lillies and English Ivy in hanging containers (not really).
Of interest, something I have noticed or am suspicious of, is the character of my relation to the plants I imagine growing. I have had a lot of failures but I try and am engaged. I have a relationship with my plants. I talk to them (not really). There is an empathy. I'm listening. I'm trying to grow them, allow them to be healthy, thrive. When a plant doesn't do well, I feel I have failed. Most importantly, I imagine having the plant forever.
I suspect this is different from many. It seems now one is able to buy a $200 plant at Home Depot for $9. It is brought into the home as decor, maybe watered, and then after a few months, probably not more than 24, the plant is thrown in the garbage, disposable. They don't even get planted, they just stay in their black plastic container and placed in an ornamental pot, deployed as furniture.
This is all fine. Only, it is just a way of saying, "this is a different practice."

I vary rarely finish a book. I don't really read from beginning to end. Books are things I think with and when I am sorting through something I explore books to help. So, if I list out the week's books, it doesn't mean I sat down and read them, it just means they are being carried around in my bag and I am actively using them as a tool.

Home: A Story Story of an Idea. Rybczynski, Witold. Pocket Books, New York, 1997.
This is morning reading. A nice history of the relationship of architecture, design, and home objects to ideas and senses of intimacy, privacy, and comfort.
The Vocation Lectures. Weber, Max. Hackett Publishing, Indianapolis, 2004.
Not morning reading. I saw these lectures referred to in another essay and I thought I might find some nuggets in here to help think about another study on "anti-intellectualism."
Landscape Journal: Design, Planning, and Management of the Land. University of Wisconsin Press. Volume 37 Number 2 2018.
For all of time I have been searching for scholarly/University journals that engage in what I see my work as - there must be "a literature" somewhere. 

The first branches I've brought in this winter are from a Quince I planted in the back garden three seasons ago for just this purpose. To me, Quince are the most Cherished and sentimental to the woody florals for forcing. It only took three days before life activity became apparent as the buds started to swell but it was probably two and a half to three weeks before they bloomed. The blooms have given me a solid week of peak performance but are in decline now and will soon be sent to the compost pile. I will try to find some VanHouteii Spiraea nearby to take a few branches from and maybe a Forsythia (boring) or Crabapple.

Following a similar path as the branch forcing, I have also expanded slowly into bring in non-flowering woody branches so that I can spend some time with them. I say "spend time with them" as I need to practice my winter branch identification. Winter branch identification is part of the core identity of a hort geek. Twenty years ago I was a star with it but as I just learned at a recent conference, my skills have declined. I am not really worried about it; "In The Field" I feel quite confident I will identity pretty much any ornamental plant you put 100 feet in front of me - I think I identify mostly by form, texture, and structure at this point (how I engage them in the field as a designer) and not so much by scale patterns, leaf scars, and bud location. But. My street cred must be maintained.

Weber, Max. The Protestant Ethic and the "Spirit" of Capitalism. Penguin, NYC, 2002
Spirn, Anne Whiston. The Language of Landscape. Yale, New Haven, 1998
Gay, Roxanne. Bad Feminist. Corsair, 2014

Roxanne has become the voice I spend my early morning with as I drink my coffee. I have written about this in my other blog project, but her work has very much influenced my own voice as a writer.
Sprin, I am just beginning this book. I take it to be part of the canon in landscape Architecture. It is worthwhile in small bits and pieces, I don't like to sit down with it for long durations - Just, I think I want to read a voice that feels more like Roxanne Gay's at this point. Spirn's work I take to be much like my own in that it is informed by Critical and Literary Theory. Spirn is writing about the "poetics of landscape."
The Weber is an old classic. I grabbed it along with a more contemporary essay that questions the traditional translation of "The Iron Cage" of capitalist rationalization - argues a better rendering is "The Steel Casing." The metaphor of the human encased in a steel casing, one that is the animating force of the body's meat...sometimes one just needs to go and review texts to help their imagination.

I am always fascinated by the concept of Aldi as a garden and floral supplier. I imagine in another month they will be rolling out the seasonal supply of bare root Roses and #2 container Japanese Maples. It is so curious to me that I always find myself wanting to experiment.
Their flowers tend to be the worst. However, very inexpensive, which always makes for a soft spot in my heart and so I want to "find a way" we can work together. For months, warm colors have been everything to me, so these yellow and gold collections of mums caught me.
I don't want to write an entire critique of commodity flowers here, but...the Primary Yellow is fascinating. And...the branches are so perfectly straight that when you put them in a vessel, they're just, straight. It is striking to me as I know plants from the garden and from "nature" and these very orderly units are so confusing to everything I know.
But they were $3.99 and they'll probably NEVER DIE.
I'll keep working.

There isn't enough winter, at least in our business. I took a break for 5 weeks and did a fellowship in Toronto. I was back in the office, with Alyssa, January 21st. I spend a week reordering my living space, tearing down and reassembling the office and studio, and sorted through all our 20 year deep archives to clear out everything everywhere that wasn't needed. I needed to get lighter. The 2019 books and insurances were self audited and the sent out to the accountants and all the "2019s" were archived. I review, revise, meet, and present plans and budgets for 2020 with our major maintenance accounts and supporters, and then start visiting and writing our 2020 care plans for our residential clients. I have been putting a collaborative construction project together with friends at Olsen Design involving a fence, driveway, and garden. I have a list of five or six projects that last year agreed to make 2020 projects to still get up on the drafting table and now I have had two new clients call me this week to help them get design and build projects going. Its easy, in a sense, its just all this space you anticipate in the winter to allow you to get things done - well, March starts tomorrow; space over.

From Raxworthy's text, I imaging two poles on a spectrum of practices that make gardens. On the one end we have "architectural practice." This work is through the imagination, thinking forward the growth and aging of materials, prediction, and making representations and drawings The other end of the spectrum is 'gardening practice." At the furthest end, gardening is improvisational. The gardener interacts with growth and materials in real time and takes action directly to form the space of a garden. The gardener is the garden's agent in a way an architect can't be. Architectural practice works through simulations.

This model or thinking apparatus, what Raxworthy refers to as "logical support" will come into play in future writings. It is a beginning.

I say, "From Raxworthy's text" as I don't think he presents "a spectrum of practice." I believe he presents "how architects do it" verses "how gardeners do it." Oppositions the text seems to want to resolve together as a dialectic, resolve into one practice. Architects need to become more like gardeners and gardeners need to become more like architects, he says late in the book. This is a slightly different thinking apparatus or method. My approach is inverted. I see "Those who practice making gardens." Then we ask how they go about getting there. Everyone makes gardens. There is no heirarchy.

It makes us consider garden making practices, eliminates problems with top down thinking, and a sense that one identity position or another may be advocated for - well, it keeps the identity position as "those who make gardens." Without sharing an identity one might think practices of one or the other would be being appropriated.

But.
I talk about "thinking apparatus"
Because on the one hand
Raxworthy gives me a way to think about "conflicts"
in the worlds that I make gardens in.
Certain kinds of gardens.
However.
Raxworthy, I believe, is imagining a different kind of "garden"
"Gardens" that in part
cities are modeled around.
"Landscape as infrastructure" may be a key phrase.
In this sense "process" stops being a word we use to talk about how we go about making gardens.
"Process" looks to ways that the science of landscape design has come to objectify "nature" and "ecologies" as "processes."
I think Raxworthy is looking at a landscape architecture
That may be moving away from living space
A design where we know, are attached to, enjoy, touch, collect, and curate space with plants
Living space humans as animals and plants share
Towards an architecture and design that only reproduces computer simulations of "natural and ecological processes."

Such simulations separate us
Because the landscape no longer moves in human time
But at the speed of computer processing.
This may seem apocalyptic.
We can contextualize it as that.
It is one way of many ways to think about it.

But the garden, the home, the city, and other bodies
are what we relate to, and
The relationship between us is our measure
Our unit that calibrates us to how we know the world.

The form of a garden at any given moment is provisional, because the garden is always growing.
The gardener as observer is always linked to the analysis of a garden
because s/he is also maturing while the garden is growing,
and s/he and the garden are both at particular, ephemeral stages. (138)
​

​







​

In the springtime, I find it easy to have images flowing into social media. We are in contact with a lot of sites during a time when everything in the garden is emerging and their is day to day changes and transformations in the landscape. But then...we get to, what I call, "Construction Season." We go through production phases during the year; spring maintenance till Memorial Day weekend, then smaller installs and constructions for a month or two, then by mid-July we start "Construction Season" where we build two or three larger landscape projects (It happens this way because of the time it takes to plan out larger projects). By the end of September we finish up a few smaller works as we start the fall maintenance season up until final leaf removals in early December.

But the images during construction season are slow. There is less change to document. In the real, most images in the Buff Hort project are of the changing seasons, the landscapes movement through human time, and the rhythm that we can move from place to place around the city. But when it comes time to document our changing of the landscape itself, well - those are slow photos.

I last posted the five images I submitted for critique in the workshop, but those where chosen from an original body of 220 clicks that attempted to compose about 50 images. I moved the images into my laptop, "favorited" anything I saw as having potential, and then selected the five I liked best from the reduced group. These are the B-sides.

Also, I haven't imagined these images as "Intagram and Phone Images." I recognize this is how most view content now, but...well...I don't see "The Buff Hort Journal" as content - it is a filing and archive system to share and save my work. (See C.W Mills essay "On Intellectual Craftsmanship," 1959) A phone screen is probably to small for these images and little of the composition would be understandable.

​

I spent the weekend northeast of Philadelphia at a garden called "Chanticleer" in Wayne, Pennsylvania. I hope to post some reflections soon. It was "opening" - meaning, it allowed for a vulnerable, producing space to open up as I worked. Outside of Instagram I don't really have an identity as a photographer, so I was very unsure of my space there. It took a little while, but I was able to break myself free from the pressures of a group and be alone to work with my camera: And, really, my tripod, reflector, and lens kit, which doesn't ever really happen because all my images are captured on the move and I never have time to carry or deploy a tripod - nor do I ever have good light; I only have a tripod to get some camera stability doing low light shots of flowers in my office and studio in the winter time.

I will share images as they become ready as I'm still going through them . Here I will offer the five images I submitted in the workshop for critique. 

Pollinator plants, well, really, that's just kinda (almost) everything that has flowers and is still a fully functional reproductive biological organism that can reproduce itself (with the help of bees).
We might speak of "pollinators" as opposed to those other plants that have had the life bred out them - I'm thinking of Dahlias, Peonies, Lilly, etc. These species have become more products of human culturing.

Certainly we all like "pollinator plants" - but to be named as such, we need to narrate the idea of them as a group that stands opposed to the bad commercially bred and hybridized plants. But then if we tell the story of the Dahlias and Peonies as "traditional," and representing the history of gardening, well, they can become our friends again.

Of late I have been looking through a book that shows gardens from around the world just has everything all mixed up together