Author Archives: eflaherty

Where is the Water

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When I look at these Berner Oberland landscapes–filled with fresh water, snow, ice, I am amazed by their inherent wealth and health. I am awed by their physical presence.

For decades I lived around that Empty Quarter arid sand desert of my most recent posts; but I needed refreshment, I needed recharge, so I regularly retreated to these water rich mountains.

These two geographies, one lifeless and the other full of life, put me in contact with the extreme ends of the water continuum of life.

Landscape astounds me.

Landscape journeys enthrall me.

Chase the Water

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In the 1980s, on the Red Sea coast side of the Hejaz mountains in Saudi Arabia, I worked for four years and never saw rain.

The 1980s Kingdom of Saudi Arabia Western Region shepherds, the goatherds had, as Bedouins always had, steered their flocks toward the parts of the landscape that had cloud bursts or rainstorms most recently. In the 1980s they used Toyota trucks as their primary mode of transportation.

It was always about chasing the water. Water was unpredictable and transient. Transient forbs and grasses were located differently every year, every season. Life depended on successful reading the landscape.

But this wasn’t the Empty Quarter.

The Empty Quarter was empty, why? Because no one could read the landscape, no one could read the water. No life. Empty.

Hejaz, Tihama

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Not every desert in the Arabian Peninsula is sand.

The house, the human shelter in this photo sits where the Hejaz mountains fold down onto the flat Tihama coastal plain. The house’s position in the landscape tells the story of: water–there is life; and no water–no life.

In the mid 1980s I lived on the Red Sea coast of Saudi Arabia,  in the Western Region. The area is known historically as the Hejaz after the mountains running north from Jeddah, parallel to the Red Sea coast. This is the region of Mecca and Medina. And the Hejaz mountains divide the Tihama, the coastal plain influenced by the Red Sea from the inland deserts, Nafud, and Nejd.

The first time I heard the phrase in the above image caption, ‘no water–no life’ was in Morocco in the early 1970s. I was sitting with a group of people including a young Moroccan man, from Meknes, whose family originally had been farmers in Taza. He said, “Without water there is no life and no cleanliness.”

Between Nejd and Nafud

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In the Nejd and Nafud deserts, it was these sand dune beauties that called…that seemed to be the emissaries of the Empty Quarter, the Rub Al Khali, the world’s largest contiguous sand desert, located in the southern Arabian Peninsula, to the south east of the Asir Mountains and north of Yemen and Oman.

In the 1980s, while living and working in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, I travelled the triangle from Jeddah to Riyadh to Medina, touching the edges of the Nejd and Nafud deserts, and then via the Red Sea coast back to Jeddah.  There were always somewhere in the landscape…sand dunes–not always continuous but amongst rocky plains and stony mountains, sand dunes tucked here and there.

Somehow these sand dune emissaries had moved north on their own from the Empty Quarter, and I must say–they began as magnetic attractions for my eyes.

But also their landscape stories, their landscape reputations became magnetic attractions through the ears as heard by St. John Philby, Bertram Thomas, Richard Francis Burton, Wilfred Thesiger, Gertrude Bell and T.E. Lawrence–all authors, all travelers, all mesmerized into their own Arabian Peninsula sand dune desert explorations.

Discoverable Portals

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Discover a portal, cross the threshold…unpredictable, unimaginable, indescribable, transcendent…all possible…

I am working through a transition from planning, designing, building and maintaining gardens, landscapes and plants to writing about them.

The above graphic shows how I link past experiences with my stories. I describe it in a little more detail here.

In the next months, I plan to select landscape, garden and plant images from my past decades of work in North Africa and the Middle East to demonstrate what it is that inspires me to write.

Garden Design, Horticulture and Fog

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Monochromatic: the transition from fall into winter has brought fog to the mountainsides and lakesides. Only the foreground can be seen.

Fog in the literature of garden design and horticulture–I have always sought clarity in textbooks and popular writing from the fields of garden design and horticulture.

But unfortunately in both fields the more I read the more finely subdivided became the material of those fields–finer and finer until I became lost in a fog.

You may just write me off as another searching for the holy grail but…I have found lessons to be learned from the larger landscape that can inform those who try their hand at horticulture and garden design.

Fog is a monochromatic filter and winter is a gray scale reality.  Both lessen the detail and the variety our eyes have to interpret.

So in my garden design, I need only water, healthy soil, light, minerals, deciduous plants and evergreens.

Or is that just the folly of a desktop gardener?

Gray Scale: lessens the detail that our eyes have to interpret.

 

 

Introspective garden pilgrimage

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W. Curt Mulligan, a Los Angeles Landscape Architect, executor and close professional friend of George Moleson, recently met the author at the above pictured Eau Zone pool deck restaurant in Dubai. Credit to Kerzner International Developer, EDSA Consultant and Desert Landscape Contractor.

Over the past year via some excellent beta reader reviews from Goodreads, I have updated my original Beta of Crystal Vision to Beta 02.

Crystal Vision is a landscape story–a landscape story like my first, The 23 Club.

The 23 Club featured Erik Chalmers and occurred primarily in the Arabian Peninsula sand desert known as the Empty Quarter.

Crystal Vision is a pilgrimage, beginning near Medina in the Western Region of Saudi Arabia, that ultimately takes George Moleson and his design journals into the landscape heart of the Bernese Alps–Grindelwald, Switzerland.

George Moleson is a professional landscape architect from Los Angeles who had taken a job six years ago planning, designing, building, managing a new town on the Red Sea in Saudi Arabia.

When his best friend on the job commits suicide, George is shocked and is left with only one clue.  His options become clear when his own job is terminated and he has nowhere to go.  He begins a pilgrimage to the cities and hinterlands of Thailand and Switzerland in a hunt to find the fiancé of his recently deceased friend.

Along the way, George has doors of perception opened in Thailand’s Golden Triangle where he meets Vrndadevi, a permaculture specialist who talks to him about spiritual settling.  Then she points him to the Swiss landscape where yodeling and the Bernese Alps encourage George into deeper personal and professional introspection.

These peculiar landscape events gradually refocus his original search to close the loop on his friend’s suicide onto his own professional and personal life uncertainties–a search to answer questions that we all face.

On the surface, this story is about design, plants, gardens and it takes place in exotic locations–a natural for me.  But then it turns into something deeper.

Normally designers’ notes and their journals do not interest me–they are the  overelaborated microscopic views of narcissists–the stuff of ethereal ephemera–but this one is different.

George’s design journals are like a well structured and well detailed beautiful garden, a series of garden rooms that had unfortunately been neglected, had become overgrown.

Look closely at them, pull out a few weeds, cut back overgrown others–the careful cleaning reveals beautiful plants with the spark of life, with kernels of good health.  Inspirational portals of excellence await discovery, enjoyment, exploration.

Here is a link to all ten Crystal Vision episodes’ summaries, including the entire Preface.