The Soft Dimension

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

An expansive view on the twenty third floor of Park Shore Towers licking the edges of Lake Washington, imagine it! The sun is gleaming off the lake and casting sun back onto books, floor to ceiling.  Memorabilia under glass winks as I move from room to room in the light. While I water plants in containers on the patio my eyes flit over titles, mostly history. I almost feel like the building, it’s view, the books, and every detail is a part of a geologists dreams… It’s been years since I’ve actually been here, yet the books belonging to my clients the Denny’s, I see clearly, the fact that they were the first European family to settle this place called Seattle, has somehow made those moments indelible.

This family is of course like any other. Children, grandparents, and parents smile from photos in modern frames. What sets them apart is that they are the first family to homestead what later became downtown Seattle. When I imagine these huge windows with expansive views it’s knowing I’m looking out over 150 year of history, that planted itself with this small seed. The businesses, roads, and economies that have transformed this place in the blink of a eye.

If this brief expanse of history were a book it should be like some kind of DK tour guide of Rome or Paris, all the changes to land and economy etched in hand, small paintings as inserts and some photos… And instead of just achitecture the pages would be spliced with the notes on peoples lives from generation to generation, the Gates, the Nordstroms, as well as the first people, the tribes of the Suquamish, the Duwamish and others. And incredibly many of these details exist. The journals of T.T. Waterman have all sorts of information about how the Suquamish tended and created the landscape we call home.

I’ve recreated a number of his maps that were difficult to read, ferreting out details while stooping and squinting over stories of where rushes were gathered for weaving matts, where trails were walked, salmon and perch were fished, clams and duck were hunted. The delicious contrast of the imagined mingling with the reality of lamp light, all revealing a fondness I’ve always had for the diaramas of ships, engines, markets, and other systems. But it’s also something more, it’s as though I get to crawl into the skin of a place as it once was and play around with the ideas today, a mental exercise I find as delicious as if I was designing a soundsuit for Nick Cave.

Of course it’s not just uncovering these mysteries that is so yummy is it? Its also the moments between reading, the pauses where I sense echos between what was and what is. Somehow this exercise and play reminds me that reading the landscape is a skill not entirely forgotten.

 

 

Case in point. If I were to ask you where the most level and grounded place in the city is that also connects two great bodies of water would you think of the area around King Street Station? This is also the site of the main village Djidjilal tc, where Chief Seattle was born. It had two main trails leading from it down to the water and peoples crafts. How about if I were to ask you to go where the creative force is felt most strongly in the city, where would you go? Freemont? Would it surprise you that Bt da ‘kt was also where the shamans went to preform their most important ceremonies? Function follows form… The form inspires different generations and different economies in similar ways.

When I hike threw Seward park and hear the various bird songs and then notice the thrush song starts to predominate and I look up to see old groves of Madrona in decline and newer cedar and fir shading them, that I am looking at original prairie ecology, that the first people once maintained with regular burnings to keep the forest open. Belltown was one such prairie (Baba’kwob), and was where Denny and his family thought the ideal location to homestead was. We imagined these places as wild but I’m sure Denny would have agreed he chose the spot because it was well maintained. In fact many people wonder at the decline of the Madrona in our area and it is probably suffering from some of the same stress as the Oaks in California where groves were carefully maintained by tribes going so far as possibly fertilizing the trees with ground up oyster shells.

If we look again at the map on the north side of Lake Union is another maintained prairie that was used as a regular summer camp by the tribes. This camp is an easy distance from Greenlake where they caught salmon and perch in nets at DutL c. In a way the landscape was a maintained park with a delicate chain of roads and camps that connected all the activities of the seasons together. Any designer worth their salt understands how smart this is. Olmstead the father of landscape architecture here in the United States created the Emerald Necklace in Boston and replicated that same system here after much of Seattle had already been regraded or logged. The idea shared between both designs being that the dweller travels through green corridors to get to a new location, and that each location has its own and uses and personality. Cemetaries, forts, and look out points… are not placed accidentally, all these places have qualities that recommend them.

For instance it’s not difficult to imagine how sacred Sti’t tci  (Foster Island) was as a place of reflection. Knowing the history though helps me to also appreciate how that part of Seattle connects the water and the sky together, and would certainly have helped prepare families to send their loved ones to the next world. This sense of the function of places, their identity, and integrity, in fact is very evident in the first people’s words used to describe locations. As you know when you grow up somewhere, you never refer to 52nd and Hudson, you call it the old house, or where I grew up. The story of a place is not as easily experienced in how we name things today.  For example near the Sound there is a huge rock that looks like a giant magicians cape was thrown onto it, the story goes that a bride ran away from a unhappy man and he thew his cape onto her turning her into stone. This story is actually in the name of the place… “Blanket Rock” and three trees in the distance represented her family who were leaving in a boat. The fact that a few of these names are being restored by the tribes is an entry point for us to understand what it feels like to belong to a place and to care for it, even the rocks.

As I think about Earth Day being immanent and how at odds our economies are with sustaining future generations it feels like restoring a name like Ti’Swaq “sky wiper” or “touches the sky”, is both a small change and a huge monument to spirit. Mount Rainer is actually named after a British Captain who later fought to suppress the American Revolution. The irony that this name has lasted so long is not lost on me. But who are we to question the wealthy or the name given a mountain?

 

 

In 2005 Lynne Manzo at the University of Washington wrote a piece on the multiple meanings of place and their psychic affect on our every day lives. The study interviewed 40 participants in New York. From a phenomenologists view she asked what places were important to these people. She found both negative and positive associations with places that described a dialectical process of growth and development as each person came to terms with what these places felt like and realized why they were there. Quoting Cooper Marcus she points out we will even “unconsciously place ourselves in conflictual environments that enable us to work out unresolved emotional connections”. Manzo helped me think about places as not just isolated locations but as a vocabulary in our lives, and our relationships to places as a reflection of our journey in the world. Home may not be where you sleep, it may in fact be a place you are going to… And people who have been oppressed will often have very different associations with places connected with oppression.

When I think about the work that Fredrick Law Olmstead did first in his travels through the south writing on the situation of slaves there, this idea of oppression connected with plantations becomes very clear, or why one person would find a farm a nurturing environment and another would find it tinged with negative associations, or even deep feelings of oppression. Olmstead wrote dispatches home to the New York Times as he traveled the South, and was involved in creating and running the Red Cross during the civil war. A man of incredible nobleness of mind and foresight he also started Putnam Magazine (now The Atlantic), designed Central Park, and eventually created the idea for the park system we enjoy in Seattle and cities all over the country today. To think all this is a happy accident is foolish, but understandable, since Olmsteads greatest work, that described his vision, was never published.

His whole life was in pursuance of what it was to be American, wanting to understand what were the qualities of these people that traveled so far for freedom. He was working on a colossal book that would have compiled all his findings. But more important than that perhaps is what he left behind for us. Olmstead created a framework for a sense of place in which we could discover ourselves and express ourselves as Americans. If you think about the Atlantic or a place like Zucotti park you might think of an article or an incident but mistakenly forget that someone designed it for us for a specific purpose. I lived in South Central for a while and have fond memories of Leimert Park and the poetry there. After the Watts riots in 1965 Leimert, a park designed by Olmstead, became a center for poetry, writing, celebrating, and healing. Members of the Watts Writers Workshop went on to influence things in popular culture like hip hop and rap to StarTrek. Olmstead would certainly be surprised by the cultural changes that had taken place by 1970 but I also think he would have been delighted to get to witness the far reaching affects of his work, since he was deeply concerned with slavery and its implications for the American psyche.

 

 

Like Olmstead the jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt was concerned with there being a space for political acts and speech as an expression of freedom. Arendt did not know the plantations of the South like Olmstead, but she had escaped Nazism in Germany. After arriving in New York she went on to join the New School and to form a wing of philosophy called Critical Social Thought. Arendt thought theory was meant to be grounded in real issues, to help a person find themselves in the world. The fact that we had confused the happiness of consumption with the happiness that comes with freedom of expression concerned her greatly. Arendt had escaped fascism in Germany, she wanted to make sure her new home in America didn’t fall prey to the brainwashing possible with new forms of media and power. (Please check out The Century of the Self by Adam Curtis if you’d like more on this.)

And yet all forms of media are a double edged sword. The internet has the potential to create forums for discussion when parks or parts of our government are closed to us. I wrote a thesis about the potential for organizing and finding moral common ground on the internet years ago. Perhaps I will dig up some of those older pieces but what inspired me originally to write was Thomas Kuhn’s book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, in which he lays out how science goes through developmental episodes where one world view is replaced by another. He suggests this happens out of the necessity of changed circumstances, and in 1998 when I was doing my research in Berkeley and Silicon Valley I thought those changes circumstances were be the internet. Fastforward past Y2K and we see that community has been altered by the internet with situations like the Arab Spring trying to be controlled by every government that has power it doesn’t want returned to its people.

I started writing this because I was thinking about how we name things like, Blanket Rock, or Sti’ti ci, or Mount Rainer, and how also we can respond to changes in technology and environment that require new evaluations of old paradigms. I’ve never been a real proponent of political revolutions, they are very messy, but I do think that like Thomas Kuhn suggested ideas can change radically and over night when people realize what they want. I also like that Lynne Manzo suggests a lot of life can be  worked out in our every day relations to place and our understanding of what is home. That dialectical process of looking at what is frightening or difficult and finding new places to occupy that are comfortable are a part of our journey. The world doesn’t want to be changed dramatically but if we change just a few key things that can sometimes make all the difference.

As a part of celebrating differences I’ve pulled together some dates that make me think about Seattle’s journey, and some of the amazing and painful things that have happened to us here. There are a lot of important dates I am leaving out but I would encourage you to try writing something like this for the place you live in… It’s like taking stock of what you’ve got in the larder for cooking. I even encourage you to throw in some details about your family. I have a number of stories about what happened to my great grandparents when they first arrived and the challenges they faced creating a new home here. These stories have informed me deeply through my life and seeing them as a part of a bigger American experience is a reminder of what an incredible experiment American democracy really is.

I’ll share one quick story which was of my grandfather and his cousins circumnavigating the globe in the 1920′s. (They arrived back in New York just after the stock market crash having cut their travels somewhat short because their money had lost its value and the world economy had fallen apart.) Besides totally falling in love with their descriptions of Istambul, (the center of trade between the east and west) I was perhaps most moved by their arrival in New York harbor at the end of their travels. In his journal my great uncle wrote that in New York they saw everyone they had come across in their journey around the world. Yet here they were living in one place together… I like to imagine how at home he felt with these cultures that probably seemed so foreign once, and this monumental change in perspective happened, as Manzo suggested was possible, on a journey away from home.

 

 

9,000 BC earliest evidence of Native Americans in WA after the Bering Straight bridge receeds

8,000 BC earliest evidence of visits to in Puget Sound

2,000 BC Salish speaking people establish settlement in the Sound

1592 CE Juan de Fuca explores the Puget Sound for Spain

1775 first European contact with Natives in coastal WA with Juan Fransisco Bodega…

1775-92 smallpox and other European diseases wreck havock on Native populations

1778 Captain Cook, Vancouver, and Gray all map various parts of the Northwest coast for Great Britain

1787 United States Constitution is created.

1805 Lewis and Clark cross the country to catalog the natural resources of a new country on commission by Thomas Jefferson

1811 British continue fur trade in the area, the market is so successful with China it leads to the near extinction of the sea otter

1830 European potatoes and peas introduced and adopted by many Native people, are boycotted by Salish for unfair trade prices

1845 First European settlement of Puget Sound at Tumwater

1848-49 Snoqualmi attack on Tumwater…

1850 Salish dog on brink of extinction (last identified Salish wool dog dies after the turn of the century in 1940)

1850 The Donation Land Law Act was passed by congress from which homesteading and farming would transform the western landscape in one generation…

1851 Settlement of Elliot Bay by brothers Arthur and David Denny near Belltown

 

 

1852 Henry Yesler arrives and begins construction on the first steam powered mill on land sold to him by Doc Maynard

1853 Congress creates the Territory of Washington. Meanwhile plantations as an economic model and the morality of slavery is coming to a head. Fredrick Law Olmstead travels the South sending dispatches to the New York Times reflecting on slavery for northern readers (Eventually publishing Journey in the Seaboard Slave States and starting Putnam’s Magazine with friends)

1854 Governor of Washington Territory Isaac Stevens concludes the Medicine Creek treaties moving the many local Salish speaking tribes from their home land to one of three reservations…

1853-54 Last great smallpox epidemic struck the Puget Sound killing 50% of the remaining Coastal Salish. Yet remaining Makah keep their traditional lands

1855 Recurrent Native attacks on European settlements are called the Puget Sound Wars

1858 Olmstead and Vaux’s design for Central Park are chosen from 33 entries

1859 Treaties negotiated by Stevens are ratified by Congress. Just two years later Congress declares war with the South.

1875 Congress extends the homestead laws to Indians willing to abandon their tribal affiliation

1883 The Montlake cut joins Lake Washington and Elliot bay for shipping also lowering the lake by 20 feet and exposing new city land that is used for Olmsteads Seattle park system design.

 

 

1887 First transcontinental railroad completed to Puget Sound. European – Native demographics shift dramatically while Salish find it hard to gain employment

1889 Washington State admitted to the Union just when Seattle burns to the ground and is then rebuilt in brick, helping create jobs in the post war economy.

1897 Discovery of Gold in Alaska promotes a boom again in the economy, REI and Eddie Bauer get their start outfitting explorers

1900 Tribal children are removed from their families, sent to boarding schools by the BIA, and forbidden to speak their mother tongue. This program continues until the 1960′s

1903 John Charles Olmstead visits Seattle to begin the design of our park system

1908-11 Seattle begins one of the largest earth moving projects in the world with the Denny regrade

1909 Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition opens

1910 Seattle large ship building business turns toward planes when Heath ship building becomes the first Boeing factory.

1915 America enters World War I…

1931-41 One of the largest Hoovervilles grows just west of Qwest field

1941 Salish population is down to 6,500.

1942-45 Japanese American Internment during WWII…

1945 World War Two ends 70,000 jobs are lost overnight at Boeing.

1950 Nordstrom’s helps build the first suburban mall in North America in Northgate over a cranberry bog near Thorton creek

1962 Space Needle is constructed for the Worlds Fair

1965 America enters Vietnam War…

1971 First Starbucks opens

 

 

1970 Tribes join together to occupy Fort Lawton at Discovery Park eventually opening Daybreak Star Cultural Center

1970 Boeing is hugely affected by the post war oil crisis. Seattle falls into the worst depression economy of any city in the nation to date.

1974 Indian fishing rights of 1855 treaties upheld by Judge Boldt

1975 Bill Gates starts Microsoft

1980 Social Justice Fund Northwest develops the first grass roots environmental philanthropy NGO

1990 Listing of the Northern Spotted owl as endangered creates a window of opportunity for rethinking the ecological values of old growth forests.

1990-1 Persian Gulf War

2000 Amazon.com goes from 107 dollars a share to 7, Internet boom and bust

2001 Duwamish people briefly won recognition as a tribe with rights under the Clinton administration, then loose them under the Bush administration

2003-11 Iraq War

2004 Thorton creek having been piped underground for 54 years is daylighted by community members and Mayor Greg Nickels

2006 Sub Pop Records becomes the first Green-e certified record label

2008 Washington Mutual bank closure and receivership is the largest bank failure in American financial history, the market crash is still affecting global economies in 2012.

2012 New Squamish Cultural Center scheduled for completion in August

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Happy Easter! Take a minute today to celebrate Spring by dropping by the Volunteer Park Conservatory. For the last fourteen days we had artists show pieces of ceramic art that were especially envisioned for our Edwardian style glass house and its collection of plants… It’s the last day!

 

 

All the works were made by local artists.

 

 

 

All are for sale.

 

 

One has been purchased by neighbors of ours to stay in the Conservatory’s collection… See if it’s the one you would have bought!

 

 

Have a rich and celebratory Sunday…

 

 

Imagine waking up in a town called Gardiner. Just because… After too many sleepless nights sometimes a change is all you need.

 

 

That moment came for me when I decided to go for a drive over the mountains to Eastern Washington. Then I just kept going… I found myself in Missoula, Montana first, shopping for a change of clothes at Goodwill and calling home to rearrange my scheduled appointments before the weekend. Once I was east of the mountains it seemed obvious… only a few more hours on the road would bring me to the worlds greatest wilderness reserve.

 

 

Yellowstone… Our countries oldest and largest National Park… also appropriately the reserve for the earths largest active volcano.

 

 

It is a fascinating surface of boiling pots, other worldly geologic formations, sage brush, pine trees, and herds of animals protected from ever expanding development just beyond its defined boundaries. Here mated pairs of trumpeter swans over winter in geothermal waters. Herds of bison feed on grass under the dry snow, huge dark figures, batting their long lashes while silently shoveling. Nothing could be more enthralling to the eyes of a dazzled urbanite. The mere notion that this all exists at the same time that you could be caught in traffic is somehow too much to hold, the mind overflows. Maybe because you rarely see a Bison wrapped in plastic at the local Safeway. But here they belong so completely to the landscape that it becomes a kind of question mark as to where they’ve been, where you’ve been. Lost somewhere in translation…

And at this point you haven’t even seen Wolves. Naturally cautious, these furtive creatures first show their presence when you enter the far reaches of Lamar valley, where there many admirers, biologists and photographers, also patiently wait. Drifts of people collect by rode sides, hoping to capture a moment with these animals, large telescopic lenses projecting us as close as possible into the panting heaving social pack, a projection into what is truly wild. Eager we are to see something that we can’t quite see in ourselves. I am of course looking for this too. Opening books, reading signs, talking to guides. Thinking deep down that there might be something hidden here that I can uncover with the searching light of my own mind. Yet what I’ve seen on TV parades as familiarity. “One tree and you’ve seen them all” has to crumple under the weight of this new experience. This is new, entirely new. What is this…

 

 

Here the forces of nature are not disguised, and yet a delicate balance is maintained, pushing and bending life into its many forms like toothpaste from a tube. These forms of life are sometimes so bizarre that you’re lonely animal spirit howls in adulation after seeing only mirror reflections of you, and you again on the street and every where around you.  A few details to delight: Aspen trees have evolved a little trick of holding chlorophyll in their bark to capture energy through the long winters without leaves. Elkhorn push through the deep snow to chew on these naked bodies leaving dark scars up and down their otherwise white flanks, getting the beasts through an otherwise unbearable winter. The area is also thick with lodge pole pine, actually predominates the forests of this area, forming the ecological backbone of the region with their straight strong trunks. Everywhere you step there is an ancient scroll unfurling of complicated connections between plants and animals. As it unfurls you walk deeper into a mystery forgotten in the concrete paradise. Here there are all sorts of echoes that touch anew and stir the skin.

 

 

Each part of the wilderness builds on the other keeping every piece in rigorous check like an elaborate game of chess… No carcass ends up in a trash bag here, it’s a feast that feeds souls, celebrated in the licking and the panting of a new litter of wolf pups. On my way east across the park to Silvergate I come across a herd of female bison and their offspring. Here they are right on the road, not silent like a group of boulders resting at the base of a valley.  Here a small one trots right along next to my truck eying me continually. I wonder at the purpuseful calf. It is eerie to be the focus of attention… Ahead two massive Bison flank either side of my vehicle making me nervous to pass them. As I draw closer I realize my miss translation. One of them is lame and effortfully walking, balancing her massive load on three delicate legs instead of four. The somber mood of the female herd, their caves, and their snowbound world recede in my rear view mirror. My vehicle a surreal but nice remove, shapes my empathy into a fine sliver of guilt quivering right near my heart. I sit weightily in my seat as I drive. Everything seems it should be looked more deeply into.

 

 

And then an hour later I arrive in Silvergate… A  cozy group of cottages fanning out along the road run by some of the itinerant biologists, artists, and photographers, that have come to call Yellowstone home. My first words with the in keeper are about the conditions of the road, and what I saw… Soon enough I am housed, fed, and ensconced in conversation about wolves and their history in the park. So much is known about the Isle Royal wolves of Michigan (the one place where wolves had not been hunted to extinction) yet here at Yellowstone the story is of the fascinating reintroduction of these pack centered predators. Feared for so long… it was a triumph of modern science to place the beating heart of the wild wolf back inside America.

 

 

It was in fact a political battle of Frankenstein proportions, that twisted and turned enough to surprise even the most hopeful with a happy ending, while also somehow leading the mind to wonder if it wasn’t somehow meant to be. Daring and amorous, ferocious and devoted are a few words to describe these animals. These heroes with shy dispositions keep to where there wild game is, rarely trespassing on property that doesn’t harbor the kind of prey they have evolved with. The rutting season has just ended, and the alpha female will give birth to her litter in three months. Spring will mean caring for and raising this single litter of pups as a whole pack, since it is not just the genetic material of the alpha male that she brings into the world.

I stay up late listening to music and glancing through books. In the morning I leave with a stack piled high, that will make their way back on my next visit. Somehow, I’ve been invited to return to meet the new litter of pups in the Spring… And with this excitement I’ve also got a time line that is building in the back of my mind that includes visiting wildflowers near Waterville just beyond the Cascade mountains. I envision myself following the thaw of snow back to this place, that bridges the boundaries of Montana and Wyoming, this Yellowstone place.

 

 

As I follow the road home to Seattle I think of geysers like old faithful, waterfalls, rivers and other rhythms of flow and force, how they break us down from the outside with their aweful power. The awe cleaves you open like a giant fissure. You look down inside and you are amazed to see what you find. It is like walking uninvited into the gardens of a persian king. Here, snow and storm swirling around my car, my heart beating, Spring is a distant intrepid destination. A vision of revision. And a place called Yellowstone.

 

 

 

 

The story of the land itself is often left out of many histories of regions, and this is often done in the interest of “expedience”. Yet such a simple exclusion reveals a world of judgments and deeply held values and beliefs. In general we don’t value the land on which we are so dependent and therefore don’t spend time to explain its history. It is exactly this minority status that makes its untold story important because it gives us direct access to the shadow side of our culture.

Lets take a moment and explore the shadow side of American culture through traversing the local terrain of the Puget sound, beginning at its point of greatest transition in 1850 with the passing of the Donation Land Law Act and ending around 1900. This brief glimpse will look upon the Native cultures and their relation to the land and then the newly settling European perspective. Through doing this we’ll compare the two cultures constellations of beliefs and how that relates to their concepts of time. I hope to emphasize that what we give time to and how we use time, is intimately linked to what we believe about and how we perceive time. And by exploring this we can begin to see how it shapes the world around us.

What first captured my imagination for this idea were two pieces of information I was led to by the graduate student Cal Thrush on my first visit to the Pacific Northwest room at the University of Washington in 2000. These were two maps both drawn in the mid eighteen hundreds revealing different stories, one was the native descriptions of place interpreted by the anthropologist and UW professor T.T. Waterman, and the other was a survey by Edwin Richardson for the territory of Washington, of the area containing Seattle and including the Dawamish River, Lake Washington, Elliot Bay and other know places. What struck me about these two maps were the differences of perception that were conveyed through these dissimilar maps of analogous places. These maps bridged the gap between metaphor and material, symbolic and real that I was trying to connect. Here was an example of how language and technology obviously influenced material reality.

This is local history yet it is understood around the world where ever you go, since technology and it’s paradigms have moved to change each community over the entire globe. If you travel around the lip of the Pacific Rim and find yourself in Japan the people and ecology of that place have experienced similar challenges to technological development. While avoiding the out right genocide that we were able to impose on tribes here. Dealing with the consequences of these paradigms is the struggle of contemporary life. Inside the modern complex of beliefs we are forced deep down to idealize primitive life while desiring escapes of all kinds from the reality we live in. The lack of connection with what is real, the touch of the land, the feeling that comes with spending enough time with close friends, these are the values that escape us and that we are looking to find paths back to once again. The question is how do you design an environment that recognizes these problems? Let’s let’s look at the history.

 

Before 1850:

 

The first people to colonize the Puget Sound region came over the Bering Strait, from China, during the occurrence of the last ice age. By 1850 these people had been securely settled on the land in and around Puget Sounds for at least two thousand years. This approximately nine thousand year process, over which the Native Americans became accustomed to the geography, flora, and fauna of the region, was a rhythmic one dictated by the processes of the natural world. When the sun came up and when the sun went down, when the moon waxed and waned and the tide followed its course up and down the beaches, when the salmon returned to spawn up the rivers, when the ferns popped up their appealing fiddle heads, and the huckleberries ripened, these were the primary rhythms that the natives moved to. To say however that they didn’t shape the land through their own interests with their own technology and mythology would be simplistic at best.

The Native people, had by the time the first Europeans arrived, a complex and evolving system with the land. Although they had main lodges and villages they also had summer camps, although they primarily ate salmon, they also traded for venison with the forest people and whale oil with the Makah; although they had slaves within a generation they could become free, although they gambled to win wealth, they also threw potlatches to rid themselves of all their possessions, and all these apparently contradictory aspects of these people worked together as a whole to reveal a culture highly attuned to its surroundings and working as a dynamic whole. Later these Native systems of balance would be regarded as blatantly contradictory, irrational, and uncivilized.

Native Americans also practiced forest maintenance and select plant cultivation. For instance, The tribes of Whidbey Island set occasional prairie fires to keep the open spaces clear, to replenish the earth, and to encourage the growth of particular plants like bracken fern, which they enjoyed as sustenance, and which responded well to the recently scorched soil. This one practice had many uses because it also increased the biodiversity of the island ecology, making their land ethic contingent and even synonymous with biodiversity. Other practices also followed this ethic of careful attention to the cultivation of the land.

As with the Braken fern, when Puget Sound Natives saw a useful plant flourishing in a particular area, they would ascertain the reasons via careful observation and then encourage further growth using this acquired knowledge and selective practice. Nettles were another easy example, made into a tea tinctures for colds and the leaves and stems rolled and dried to make string, it was always in use by the people of a village. By chance, the human refuse that added to the richness of the soil surrounding the villages attracted these plants, and eventually, with human encouragement, there “crops” were within easy reach. There were a plethora of such examples in which the first peoples self interested stewardship of the land was a way of life and an ethic. As Harlan Hagau pointed out in Eden Ravished,

“The land to Indians was more than merely a means of livelihood for the current generation. It belonged not only to them, the living, but to all generations of their people, those who came before and those who would come after. They could not separate themselves from the land… however, As they became dependant on white man’s goods, the land and its fruits began to assume for them an economic value that might be bartered for the convenience produced by white man’s technology. This is not to say that the Indian attitude toward the land changed. Rather it illustrates that some Indians adopted the white man’s view.” (Harlan,65)

With the creation of the Donation Land Law Act of 1850 and then the Muckel-te oh Treaty of 1959 former native relations to the land became obsolete. Not only, as Harlan suggested did some Natives choose to acquire new European objects, but in most cases there was no alternative for their survival with the loss of their land, relocation, and the subsequent intensive indoctrination that occurred on reservations. There was a clear European agenda to eradicate this connection with the land and it’s ethic because it did not coincide with their concept of development, production, civilization, and modern identity. To put this constellation of values together in one word we could simply say that their two different concepts of time had collided.

 

After 1850:

There had been many explorations, contacts, and even some settlements of the Puget region before this point. But because of the low population of Europeans, a very different set of social dynamics prevailed between the two groups. In general, the first set of Europeans were much more dependant on their hosts, and although this simplifies the actual history of difference between Europeans and Natives, many fur traders did marry native women and adapt to their village life.

In 1850, however, this all changed with the direct importation of European visions of settlement. The Donation Land Law Act qualified every man to settle Western land, and within four year of cultivation, own it. The agenda was clear’ the vision of cultivation was a European one. America no longer only wanted furs from this hinterland but it wanted to intensify its profits by establishing colonies that would log and feed the nation. The eradication of the native land ethic was in progress. In the eyes of Eastern bureaucrats and Protestants, native peoples did not practice cultivation, they did not live a civilized life and the Europeans were going to bring them this, through making the land more productive and increasing the population density.

Of course, the land was already richly abundant and this fact was clearly what attracted settlement. There were numerous records of astonished journals, pages gaping wide at the beauty and fertility of the land, and yet in an odd set of contradictions, Europeans sought to improve perfection. Arthur Denny, Doc Maynard, and Henry Yesler were among the first to settle Seattle. Each man was quite different from the other yet they were all possessed by a vision to make Seattle a “great” (productive) metropolitan city that mirrored something they knew from home.

Those who settled the Puget Sound region, despite the abundance surrounding them, found it quite difficult to grow the crops they had brought along. Enormous work went into cultivating these non native species, especially in weeding out the native ones, which farmers often did not realize were wholly edible. Because of the difficulty of this work and the slow deterioration of the land through the use of the plow, farmers desperately tired different crops, finally settling on fruits and dairy farms for most of Western Washington. This required a dependence on other parts of the country to supply the goods that they could not grow, unable because of their stubborn habits and unconscious religious idealism to change their lifestyle to fit the land. As on botanist described, “ The arrival of the white farmer spurred the most cataclysmic series of events in the natural history of the area since the Ice Age” (White, 36).

In many ways the European land ethic that arrived in 1850 to settle Puget Sound couldn’t have been more different than that of the Native Americans, and this was because of complex historical reasons of course, Biblical language encouraged settlers to view nature as something wild that needed taming, so that settlers approached the natural world as something to wrestle into submission as opposed to something with its own intelligence which could be learned about, honored, and lived in harmony with. This created an enormous rift between Native and European cultures because each had its own reference and perspective on “civilized behavior”. For Europeans the Western landscape was as incomprehensible as the Natives were. They did not speak the language of the landscape or of its people. They were also in the unique position, because of the power and advancement of European technology, not to have to learn it.

 

Land Ethics and Concepts of Time:

 

A powerful way to discuss the differences between European and Native land ethics is by comparing their concepts of time. In The Anthropology of Time, Alfred Gell introduces us to two theories of time. These two theories we learn are not only conflicting ideas scientists use today but are also two models that belong to different cultures; such as the indigenous Natives and the colonial Europeans. I believe exploring the differences in these two concepts of time will be helpful to our exploring the intimate geography and history of the Puget Sound region.

In his book Gell describes a debate between physicists concerning the conflicting theories of time he calls models A and B. What I propose is that theory A is a distinctly modern European model of time while theory B is one familiar to most indigenous people. Gill begins by describing how in theory A time has the tenses of past, present, and future, while in theory B time consists of before and after. Within the first model time is abstract, transcendent, and homogenous, while within the second model time is concrete, process linked, and immanent. Model A focuses on the future, change, and the process of becoming, it is dynamic yet thin, while model B resides in four dimensional space, a stable field, where change is contingent on the qualities manifested by a thing. Model B is causality and connection while Model A is separation and judgment.

For instance culture A produces a calendar and clock to describe the structure of time while culture B follows genealogy and seasons. For culture A time appears dynamic because with in this thin world of reason or judgment there is always a point to over come, some tensed belief that must be revised or updated with the passage of time, and this requires effort. This effort creates work and the sense that time is dynamic when in fact it is we that are dynamically restructuring the world. While in model B, nature continues on rhythmically, everything has a time and a place. For those living with model A, however, there is never enough time or space in the moment because identity is cut off from its connection to the spacious natural world. We can also see that two such different models, and the feelings that describe them, create very different relationships to work, and therefore explain the opposing economies and identities of indigenous and modern cultures of both today and yesterday.

One way to explain some of the differences in these two concepts of time would be to look at how technology changes the structures of society. For pre literate cultures, all knowledge was passed on through a story telling circle, and the speaker was dependent on the audience for recognition of truth. In literate cultures truth was determined by who recorded it and was less dependant on an agreeing audience. This might explain why with pre agriculture and literate societies time was perceived within the before and after schema that believed in causality and connection between events such as they experience in their dependence on nature and the other people of their tribe. While post agricultural societies that needed to record information about over production for purposes of trade, focused on differentiation between individuals and events, change, personal will, and objects of desire, and because of this fixation always wanted to increase their dominance over nature.

Experientially the feeling of both schemas or worldviews is quite different. In schema B man is grounded in the natural world, in seasons, “in congealed time more or less coextensive with space” (Gell, 155). In schema A man is caught in a “wafer-thin screen of unique events in a continuously changing and moving present” (Gell, 155). Looking beyond the Northwest to Japan in 1978 the scientist and farmer Fukuoka explained how civilization values increased production to the detriment of the land because with development its concept of time and space also changed. He explained that “ In farming there is little that cannot be eliminated. Prepared fertilizer, herbicide, insecticide, and machinery – all are unnecessary. But if a condition is created in which they become necessary, then the power of science is required” (Fukuok, 168). Here we begin to see that the demand for metropolitan life and increased production and population is at odds with sustaining a biodiverse environment.

Fukoyama agreed that perhaps one of the fundamental problems in the issue of agriculture were concepts of productivity and time. Within his garden overlooking Matusyama Bay on the island of Shikoku he explained,

“Long ago in this village, in the days when the farmers were turning the fields by hand, one man began to use a cow. He was very proud of the ease and speed with which he could finish the laborious job of plowing. Twenty years ago when the first mechanical cultivator made its appearance, the villagers all got together and debated seriously which machine was faster, and without looking beyond considerations of time and convenience, the farmers abandoned their draft animals. The inducement was simply to finish the job more quickly than the farmer in the next field. The farmer does not realize that he has merely become a factor in modern agriculture’s equation of increasing speed and efficiency. He lets the farm equipment salesman do all the figuring for him… Now questions of time and space are left entirely to the consideration of scientists… In nature, the world of relativity does not exist. The idea of relative phenomena is a structure given to experience by the human intellect. Other animals live in a world of undivided reality. To the extent that one lives in the relative world of the intellect one looses sight of time that is beyond time and space that is beyond space” (Fukuoka, 170-1).

Fukoyama sensed when he left studying plant disease and returned to his family’s land to farm that there were larger issues at stake than what new herbicide to apply to weak and dwindling crops. Trusting his own ability to observe the natural world and follow his intuition while working in his garden led him to the understanding what more people are realizing today; modern agricultural practices don’t work in the long run. He also explains that in order to follow a more sustainable path individuals will need to question many of the ideals our current relationship to time encompasses; development, productivity, and the absolute authority of specialists.

 

Modern Challenges

We’ve done a brief tour of  the Pacific Northwest and looked at how Native and European ethics of agriculture were related to their concepts of time. These concepts of time were affected primarily by technologies that changed social structures, religious practices, and personal identities. It is conceivable that toiling in the fields justifies images of heaven and hell that developed in the Bible and led to the fundamental desire to escape the body that became the hallmark of the Judeo-Christian tradition. In fact the destruction of the world and the resurrection of Christ is the long awaited event in that document. For natives, however, the the spirit was not separate from the world but instead infused in everything, and if the land were to die within this context man would die with it too.

Although the Bible was the primary article of European culture there were other important implements for the transformation of the West. In the Way We Ate: Pacific Northwest Foodways, Jaqueline Williams introduced us to the significance of food habits and memories. These were in fact the habits and memories that would colonize the western landscape. Although Williams focuses on the creative ingenuity of women settlers and attempts at food substitution her essay based on letters and diaries reveals, like the maps, the ideals that would not simply be projected but would be literally planted in the land. And where the land was not fit for such dreams, it would be reshaped in almost every conceivable way through logging, farming, regarding, new systems of exchange, irrigation, and damming to become the landscape of productivity they envisioned, in a strangely new and distinctly American form.

Yet to what extent was the land productive before? Was it less productive in its diversity than in our developed monocultures? We might say yes, but was this productivity sustainable and life giving, not only in the material sense but also in the psychological and environmental sense? As we see the very ground beneath our feet collapsing, with many native animals, plants, and habitats, for which we depend, on the brink of extinction. It is my belief that these miss placed dreams, dreams of material domination and spiritual escape are jeopardizing a rich reality that arises from accepting some limits. What that looks like in practice is an interesting question, but limits help establish connections and a sense of value that is tangible and can be passed from generation to generation. Pouring over these maps, photo archives, and stories that other wise remain hidden from view in the landscape has certainly touched a chord in me, that I’d like to visit again and again through my work. In fact I realize ten years after first starting this research that it’s my dream to make this ancient connection to place a new and distinctly modern reality.

When I started my landscape design company seven years ago, I wanted to explore where my clients came from and build gardens that created meaningful connections with place. Yet early on I learned an unexpected principle of good design. Go to the place you are interested in, respond to the environment, walk through it, feel it. Write notes and draw up a plan that is purely intuitive, then put that drawing away. Later take the measured space and try conceptualizing it in a new way using angles and planes that don’t already exist, yet serve a purpose for an idea you have for the space. You can do several of these maps, but choose one schema you like most and combine parts of it with the intuitive plan. Find ways of melding the two worlds. In the end you will have a garden that functions well on multiple levels.

Seattle coincidentally has a history that parallels this story. It had two designers Arthur Denny and Doc Marnard that argued over a grid for the cities flow of activity versus a topographically oriented design. Parts of the two designs were combined to the chagrin of both parties, and we can see how that influenced the shape of the city today. No other city has undergone such dramatic earth works as Seattle. If you look at photos from the 1850′s by 1900 it is almost impossible to recognize the same places because of projects like the Denny regrade and the filling in of parts of the Seattle waterfront. This all happened to make the landscape fit Arthur Denny’s grid. While Doc Maynard’s design follows the shapes of the water front and structures that are already there. As a city we are in a unique position to understand how those combinations worked as a whole to create the spirit of the city we know today.

In particular we get to look at the points of interest that arise when these two designs meet. Belltown is often hard to get to in the mind and on the road because it is a kind of wrinkle in the grid as you squeeze the map up around lake union. And yet this magic trick in space has also created a unique enclave for artists and businesses. It’s quite possible that if we understood these issues of translation between worlds we might have an even more enjoyable experience of the places themselves, getting to know them in new ways and harnessing their strengths. The place to start would probably be to revisit the intention of the city and then to begin building signage that clearly describes how to best experience it.

Seattle is lucky enough to be a world class city, with gorgeous scenery all around it, and a fascinating history. With businesses that draw talent from all over the world it is a mix of local and foreign that needs self expression in the landscape. Where do you go to feel at home, is there a restaurant, a neighborhood, a park or Conservatory that feels like a mirror for something you understand? I know a number of people who have moved to Seattle who visit the Volunteer Park Conservatory because when they step in those doors they feel a connection with a place that they know and love that at any other place in the city they can’t access. This is what makes a city fantastic, these kinds of doorways into worlds that we all need to visit. The primary challenge of the 21st century is probably about how we make urban life more livable and resolve environmental issues that can no longer be ignored. Concepts of wealth are likely to be turned on their head as the natural world and indigenous cultures twinkle before extinction, like the last brilliant lights of our own soul.

When we look at what is happening in Belo Monte, Brazil it is clear that we are still deeply wrestling with all these questions. What would it look like to require less energy so that we could visit these wild indigenous places some time in the future? I would certainly remember to conserve my light at home for the promise of another chapter in my favorite story.

 

Looking to jazz up your winter garden? With very few flowers in bloom its a chance to notice other elements. I cherish waking in the morning to this scene outside my window.

 

 

Sometimes all you need to do is play with the shift in perspective that comes with the sun lower to the horizon. And because the early morning is full of shadows the honey colored morning light plays off the darkness.

 

 

This is my favorite moment of the day. When the sun glides in underneath the giant courtyard tree and casts it’s long fingers between the slots of the fence and onto the forcythia there. If only I could compose some music to go with how this display of morning light makes me feel. The wind chimes work in a pinch, to make you feel the wild weather that comes with the season.

 

 

This last week I caught a ride to Bainbridge on the ferry. When the sun is shining there is no better place to be. The sky and the water collude in a brilliant display of eye dazzling sun shine. There you are in the center of light from above and below being carried away from the city, its mire of requests and responsibilities to something entirely new and refreshing. Breezes tousle people’s hair on deck as the city pulls away, as if to signal a reordering of your inner life.

 

 

 

When I arrived at the destination of my longing, Bloedel Reserve, it was afternoon. Dolphin Road in February… The sun was slanted at such an angle underneath the trees, no wind, no leaves. The place was utterly quite, warm, and delicious… a spirit of benevolence that belongs with a well tended forest.

 

 

 

At the ponds I was pulled through to infinity.

Reflection upon reflection upon reflection followed…

 

 

And then suddenly I chanced upon some gardeners. We chit chatted about what they had been up to the past year. Building a nursery, and growing all the plants for it… A plant sale that drew over 3,000 visitors. Detail for the bigger picture.

 

 

The director Ed Moydell was up to something, always.

In fact I learned he was just up at the house so I dropped in for a little conversation. The living room full of golden mirrors… A beautiful flower arrangement placed near us. A few words about the Volunteer Park Conservatory that I needed advise on how to support. On my way out, all these lovely surroundings so carefully placed around us, of course a Charlie Chaplain esque moment ensued. I nearly opened the door into my own face (if only I had a hat to toggle or mustache to wiggle). Of course Ed only said the most beguiling thing at the moment as he ascended the stairs.

The whole Reserve was filled with sky ponds that day, gently lit, yet quietly penetrating.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

About a year ago I started making these small sculptures out of tooth picks, super glue, dark red gesso, and gold leaf. I’ve always been a believer in quality materials. With the right materials, things always seem to turn out… well.

 

Even if you don’t know what that looks like to begin with… I didn’t have a grand design I just thought that the sculpture would somehow come to life if these pieces came together, and maybe if I tried it with something small then I’d know if I could build something bigger.

 

 

Details… The box of toothpicks and container of super glue came from my favorite little store Harwick’s (a family owned tools and hardware store that’s been around for more than 75 years) and the gold leaf from Daniel Smith. A few of these supplies had been bumping around in a drawers for a while, as well as in my head, while others I had to go hunting for like… gold.

 

 

As I built the triangles they started needing each other to go anywhere. So I wove and layerd the angles and points together. In my mind they were spreading or reaching, bridging and arcing.  Eventually they expressed a certain completeness, they had a certain character and the follies, or so sculptures are called in landscapes, made their way to my container garden indoors.

 

 

There they seemed to find their home, of all places, on top of plants… Rather than referring to jewel encrusted crowns these are singing in silent sylvan tongues about harmonies and resonances, about how things are built or mended.

Have any favorite memories of school?

Haha! Sometimes it’s hard to get back into the frame of mind of being a young student… I loved the walks my middle school teacher Bill would take us on in parks to identify plants around Seattle. In art I had the freedom to draw what I wanted and gravitated towards the quite and observant world of botanical illustration. Yet the time outside of school often felt the most electric, because I did what I really wanted! Drama classes and choir camps… I think at an early age we know where our talents and sympathies lie. But often schools give such a broad over view of subjects and in such an abstract context that it can’t help but loose the spark of self initiation and personal relevance. Maybe partly because of this I’ve always thought it would be great fun to develop programs outside of school for students that love the same subjects. The kids have all chosen to be there, and you have freedom to be wildly interdisciplinary, while encouraging critical thinking skills. This year at the Volunteer Park Conservatory I’ve created a back door for kids to see into the inner workings of our greenhouses and learn more about where all our plants come from and why botany and environmental science are so important and fascinating.

We had two sessions for our day camp that we called “Around the World in Four Days” one at the beginning and another at the end of summer. Many students enrolled with friends, and some parents asked to be involved too. It was a community effort. I involved botany students from the University of Washington, gardeners from the Conservatory, and various specialists from the Friends of the Conservatory. It was a good group. We explored our way through the plant kingdom by visiting the collections, doing scavenger hunts, and building terrariums for deserts and rainforests. Kids could learn what belonged to a particular region, could curate the piece themselves labeling all the plants, and learned to care for them and took their terrariums home at the end of the four days.

Almost everyone came in having particular plants they gravitated towards, yet there was a much bigger picture those plants were a part of. We started class by looking at the regions the plants came from. We looked at how the wind, weather, and topography all work together to create the unique environments that plants grow out of and respond to as we pondered words like evolution…

Most of our students had been to the Conservatory before but many had never seen or touched a globe that didn’t divide down national boundaries. The globe I painted described regions where plants and animal communities share a common environment. This opened up a whole host of questions… Why are some spots warmer than others? What is weather? How does it move around the earth? We experimented making clouds in glass jars as well as saw how dew drops and rain forms with a little help from water and ice cubes inside metal cups. We even talked about how we make the climates in the various greenhouses at the Conservatory to reproduce the conditions nearer the equator the best we can. Throughout all this students each kept a detailed journal that they decorated and wrote their notes in.

We didn’t just talk about evolution as a concept we looked at how it happened over generations of plants living in a climate and successfully reproducing. We looked at orchids as an example of an incredibly diverse species of plants that has made a life most often in the canopy of trees, just where certain insects and birds can pollinate them. These orchids form bonds with their pollinator not only through offering it nectar but also mimicking how they look or creating the perfect landing pad for them.

Kids got to look at some of the many orchids in our collection, draw and label their parts,

and even pollinate their own flowers toothpicks in hand!

Then the orchids that they learned to pollinate went in their journals with a number of other pressed plant parts. It was cool to see students first botanical drawings next to the real plants. Their journals were full of drawings and keep sakes to remember all they learned.

After exploring the many things that shaped a plant above ground we also looked below at roots and soil. With collections of dirt from all over the state students saw how combining sand, clay, and humus in varying amounts formed very different soils for each region, and thus very different communities of plants. Some were hard and repelled water, while others were like big sponges. Everyone got to guess which soil belonged to which location.

Then we set up the microscopes and looked a little deeper…

even on the smallest level we could see life in the soil. Bacteria that formed beneficial relationships with plants actually helped roots absorb nutrients from the soil. Of course if there was more plant debris in the soil then there was likely to be more microorganisms, and more beneficial relationships. Maybe this next year we can test that theory, and find out if these cultures can be introduced to poorer soils for bioremediation projects. Or perhaps even better have some friends from EarthCorp teach us about how places like Gas Works Park have been cleaned up through introducing a network of the right microorganisms.

We wrapped camp up by looking again at these many relationships on a large scale. Students drew the plants and animals they’d learned about and placed them where they would normally live on a giant mural. And every student got to tell their own story about how that being was special and an important part of the woven tapestry of life. Parents arrived for the presentation and for pictures. And after the students had packed up all their drawings, terrariums, and other goodies we got to hear from parents and guardians how much the kids were talking about class every day over dinner. When you’re growing corn from a kernel, measuring it’s growth, studying it’s structure, making tortillas from ground corn fried in a skillet with melted cheese on top, you’re gonna have a lot to say, right? After such a successful class and such great students I’m happy to see summer around the corner and kids already signing up to explore the Conservatory and some of our worlds many treasures.

 

 

Starting the year I keep wanting to extend the celebration… So happy New Year! It’s only the first few weeks and I’ve been spending this time giving away the things that aren’t essential, and figuring out what is so that I can amplify it. In that spirit a little garden renovation 101!

 

 

About three years ago I built this garden for some clients in Kirkland. Marty and Sue wanted to be a part of some of the building too! So Marty and I moved about 20 yards of topsoil and mulch over the course of a week to cover their lawn and begin to build the architecture of the landscape. It was a monumental amounts of dirt! Yet Marty perservered, you could even say remained cheerful as we moved load after load off the driveway. I’m not sure who got the better workout, but after we established that he could handle the heavy lifting, the landscape had the winter to settle into place and compost the lawn, making for rich planting material later.

 

 

In the spring we looked at the plans again and started a new and different part of the work. Planting what we’d talked about through the fall and winter. Some changes had to be made based on availability in the nurseries, but the main challenge was to keep within the budget we’d discussed while purchasing enough mature trees and shrubs to soften the large rockeries and fencing that contained the garden. Sue wanted color and cut flowers while Marty wanted wildlife and water features. And just as important as being in the garden in the summer was looking out on it during the the other seasons. I wanted that kitchen nook view to be as inviting year round as picking up a good book, full of the drama of life. Even the stones were placed so that they could fill with water and serve as bird baths in just the right spot.

 

 

This fall I made it back to the garden to visit and chat about what had grown after the installation about two years before. It was great to see what had been successful, and informative to see what needed some changes. One plant was imposing on the walk way while another was breaking up the rythm of the grasses. It took about four hours to pick up and move plants to new locations. But you really can’t do this work unless you’ve given the garden a chance to grow and mature on its own. The sun, rain, soil all work together to create a unique microclimate in each garden, and this affects the plants in turn. Probably what I love most about gardening is this part of the work, it’s a conversation between what you thought and what came to fruition. And then making the careful adjustments that serve the purpose of discovering again that feeling that you were looking for when you first made your design.

 

 

This process can be a little humbling, but more often than not it’s totally delightful to see what has happened while you were away. What was just a dream to begin with has taken on life. Humming birds visit and build nests, children pick blueberries, lavender is gathered and enjoyed, parties are held for friends and everyone gets to hang out in the garden and find their favorite spots.

 

 

For me, after stepping away from the work,  hearing about how much my clients and their guests have enjoyed the space together, is the biggest reward.

 

 

This next year I’m looking forward to diving into another year of design…

 

 

As I reflect on what I want most in life, my mind flickers over these gardens and the moments that I’ve helped to create. I just want to thank all my clients for being a part of making something beautiful and meaningful together!