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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
Amanita muscaria pushing up from the forest floor.
On the northern hemisphere forest floors, this is the season to discover and examine mushrooms and toadstools.
Mushrooms are edible fungal growths taking the form of domed cap on a stalk, while toadstools are similar but traditionally poisonous. This world of the forest floor is a dangerous place for casual and naive human visitors. Beware.
Amanita muscaria from underneath…now where is that dwarf?
With its bright red, white-spotted cap the fly agaric (Amanita muscaria) has delighted people since time immemorial. It is inedible (with a psychoactive asterisk, a risk) and yet considered one of the most attractive and most familiar species of fungi–a subject of many myths and fairy tales–valued also as a good luck charm.
Its white-spotted, red cap covers the head of a dwarf who carries out all sorts of mysterious activities in the forest.
Correct me if I am wrong but anyone who has silently walked through a rich, multi-layered forest knows that there are movements that strangely occur…movements on the edge or just beyond the capacity of our senses. Algernon Blackwood’s short stories examine those areas.
I’ll say no more. But I would appreciate the comments from readers who themselves have experienced, in the forest, that which cannot be explained.
Every year over the past four years, this local school has had these window boxes bursting with geranium lierre, ivy geranium. This village school was built 100 years ago and includes primary and middle school students.
These joyful flowers mark the school as the prideful focal point of the village center–signs of good health, beauty, good maintenance–everything the students and the parents would want out of a school.
Why don’t all schools look this joyful and welcoming?
LandArt2014 asks the artists to find their raw materials in the adjacent forest itself. Then the art goes through the transitional cycles of time and decomposition. Some of the 14 entries had already merged with the forest. Others were still visible. I liked the one above by a team from France.
Mini-meadow in the lawn–heart pounding variety–spring promise in early April.
Or, both and…
All my life I have seen cool weather grasses from Chicago to Detroit to Boston to the UK to Belgium; but I have never seen like I see in these photos– the Thun and Brienz lakes area of Switzerland.
Everyone’s house has a very small yard which usually includes a vegetable garden, fruit tree or two, flower garden and a flat trimmed lawn area.
In the spring the usually flat trimmed lawn area reveals this just opening array of wild flowers–kind of mini-meadow like.
People cut around these bouquets of wild flowers until the flowering is finished, then the lawns are fully cut.
Next year the wild flowers return. Both lawns and meadows, as I see it.
Anybody seen something similar?
Cool season grass, early April in northern hemisphere following a steadily mild winter.
