CJ had visited Morocco once before. A long time ago . He was with his Mom. And he was only six. They spent three months on the beaches of Essaouira; but they never visited Tangier.
Now 20 years later he was on his way to Tangier. He thought he knew Morocco.
Want more? Visit my Tangier Gardens Amazon author page.
Who is CJ?
He is the protagonist in the series, The Landscape Architect.
The Landscape Architect is the title of a series of fictional autobiographies. These are CJ’s autobiographies. In this series, CJ reveals the twists and turns in the development of his career as a professional landscape architect via his interactions with cultures, landscapes, gardens and plants of the world—where the unexpected and downright strange become daily facts of life.
Tangier Gardens is the debut novel in that series.
When you dig into Tangier Gardens, you will find a contemporary coming of age action novel about CJ (Christopher Janus), who like us is facing a broad range of distressing challenges.
CJ needs a break. He has been busting his hump full time six years at university with one more class till graduation.
He wanted just a few moments of repose before getting on with his career.
Didn’t happen. We all sadly know that story. But how did CJ deal with it? Tangier Gardens is that story.
CJ, studying landscape architecture, is into pedestrian towns and warm sandy beaches. For his last class, a term abroad design study, he’s on his way to Tangier, a town with sandy beaches on the Med and a historical pedestrian district, the medina.
However, crossing the Strait of Gibraltar and landing in Tangier immediately upsets his planned easy observe-and-check-the-box design study. He is thrown off balance and he has to start all over from scratch–no more easy study.
With Andalusian legacies, languorous gardens, Moroccan markets and ancient medinas, Tangier Gardens brings Mediterranean life to the armchair traveler.
If you are:
-A nature lover, into urban gardening or a landscape architecture aficionado;
-Curious about all things green–the environment, plants, gardens, landscape;
-Intrigued about the North African multi-cultural, mystical history of people and plants, then
–Tangier Gardens IS A MUST.
Nigh onto 10 years ago I had just finished 25 years building gardens and landscapes in the Arabian Sands. The Sands were my life.
But be sure about this…the Sands are more than sand.
To reflect the huge unknowns of the Sands, my blog banner became part of the enigma of the Sands. Exotic for a Midwestern American, you bet. But exotic is a 25cent tourism marketing adjective. The Sands are not.
Ten years have passed. I live in another exotic landscape, this time a mountain landscape. Ten years of explorations in this new landscape have enthralled me, so I am updating the blog banner.
Exotic? Borders on magic realism, neo-romanticism and eco-gothic. They are all alive and well in exotic landscapes. as are rarely predictable and always inspiring plants and gardens. Just take a walk, open your eyes and ears. Listen, feel, see, discover.
Old banner–the sands–always an enigma–sun but no soil or water.
New banner–the plentitude of soil and water.
Have you ever been where black forests white, only to feel winter pushing at the edge, unleashing colored dreams?
These are the forests of fairytales. Forests, where blacks and whites dissolve…into the always gray, always shady dreams…or do they?
Color or gray, dreams invariably have misty, shapeshifting edges where certainty and uncertainty jostle. And the fairytales? Were they once dreams, or…?
I have talked about, that is, written about portals…portals and plants.
What do I mean when I say portals? It is more about what words can not describe. What?
Perhaps you remember some TV shows, Twilight Zone, One Step Beyond…but this is about real life. That’s right, real life.
For centuries, dare I say, millennia, people, humans have spoken about, written and explored the indescribable relationships between plants and humans. Portals is my effort to continue that chain of communication.
This last week I had a birthday. I received from my dearest friend two books of illustrations by the Swiss, Ernst Kreidolf. Both images in this post are his work. He spent his lifetime addressing the communication relationship between people and plants.
Ernst used gnomes and elves to describe these indescribable relationships.
Let me share some of Ernst Kreidolf’s life story.
He was born over one hundred years ago in Switzerland. He was a classic artist, a pioneer of children’s illustration and picture books…and gnomes in the popular imagination! His magical illustrations have a timeless quality. To this day, his art is still very popular in Switzerland.
Ernst Kreidolf und die Pflanzen
Kreidolf’s famous books first appeared in 1901 Die schlafenden Bäume (The Sleeping Trees), in 1902 Die Wiesenzwerge (The Meadow Dwarves), and in 1903 Schwaetzchen fuer Kinder (Chit Chat for Children). In 1904 Kreidolf was involved in Richard Dehmel’s Buntscheck, ein Sammelbuch für Kinder (Patchwork, a Scrap-book for Children). In 1905 the book Alte Kinderreime (Old Nursery Rhymes) appeared followed by in 1908 Sommervoegel (Butterflies). The latter was highly acclaimed by Hermann Hesse. In 1911 Der Gartentraum (The Garden Dream) was published.
In 1920 Blumen Ritornelle (Flower Chorus), in 1922 Alpenblumenmaerchen (Alpine Flower Fairy-tales), in 1924 Ein Wintermaerchen (A Winter’s Fairy-tale), in 1926 Lenzgesind (Servants of the Spring), in 1928 Das Hundefest (The Dogs’ Party), in 1929 Bei den Gnomen und Elfen (With the Gnomes and Elves), in 1931 Grashupfer (The Grasshopper), in 1932 Aus versunk´nen Gärten (From the Sunken Gardens) and in 1935 Die Himmelreich-Wiese (The Kingdom of Heaven Meadow).
His illustrations carry us off to the world of fairytales and dreams, where plants play a leading role.
One cannot but wonder at his ability in both identifying the key characteristics of plants and giving humans a unique interaction with them.
His legacy endures as a tender ode to Mother Nature’s glory. The best illustrated web site with Kreidolf biography–a fantastic display of his water-color work.
And portals? His work was all about portals.
There is no Arabia Felix without the Rub al Khali.
Rub al Khali–the Empty Quarter…a massive natural and cultural enigma…
I can not escape its sand. I can not escape.
Clouds, almost like lingerie on a quiet, sunny winter day–the level of mystery–what is really there that I can’t see? I want to see more.
Lord Byron saw it in storm and had quite a different take, documented in his poem, ‘Manfred‘.
The view south toward the Jungfrau massif from the Interlaken region. Real estate agents might call this the million dollar view.
…something completely different…speaks for itself…
From a newspaper,
‘A livestock owner, who staked out his pen in a bid to apprehend the thief responsible for his regularly ‘disappearing’ milk, stumbled upon a couple in a compromising position instead.
Unable to pinpoint the reason his goat’s milk vanished everyday, the owner deduced it could be the handiwork of a thief. Crouched in a corner inside the pen, the owner made sure he could clearly watch the entrance and pounce on the thief when needed.
An hour later, a GMC Suburban vehicle stopped near the entrance. Stepping out of the vehicle, an Asian driver and a woman entered the pen and hastened into a room located on the far side.
Waiting awhile, the owner tiptoed towards the room expecting to catch the couple pilfering his goat’s milk. He found no thief and as he barged into the room he froze in his tracks.
Right in front of him, the couple were engaged in a sex session. Shocked to see an uninvited stranger they jumped up in surprise and tried to flee.
Refusing to budge without an explanation, the owner demanded they produce their identity cards that revealed their respective nationalities. The amorous couple further disclosed that they used his pen as a regular rendezvous for their animated meetings and also helped themselves to the available goat milk.
When the owner insisted on producing them at a police station, the woman burst into tears pleading to be forgiven. The Asian too followed suit. Not wanting to blow the issue into scandalous proportions, the owner let the couple off the hook.
*end of story*
My comment–happened in Kuwait twenty some odd years ago, when reporters just told a good story without trying to take a political position or without trying to change the world. I found the story fun to read and without heartburn. Can’t remember the last news story I’ve read this year that came without heartburn. 🙂
I did some landscape stuff while in Kuwait.
Not far from Basra, and with a whole lot of Iranian, Iraqi and Palestinian influence.
And then time passed.
…or, poppy?
…demanded I take this photo! 600pixels wide does not do justice to what my eyes and ears met that day.
What are landrace clouds? I made it up. Combination of words to describe the reality of cloud appearance in my neighborhood.
My neighborhood. According to the Swiss National Meteorological office, my Swiss neighborhood is the Northern Alps, the north facing slopes of the northernmost range of Alps in Switzerland. Using more common tourist and environmentally friendly vocabulary, my neighborhood is in the Jungfrau Region of the Berner Oberland around Interlaken. I live in the north-facing drainage basin of the famous Eiger, Monch and Jungfrau mountain triumvirate.
Now all that aside, over my years of walking this neighborhood, I have noticed that barely observable, minimal fluctuations in temperature, humidity, pressure and wind create quite dramatic formation and dissolution of very low level clouds. Please do not confuse them with fog. For a patient viewer, a dance reveals itself. And where there is dance, there is music. Not in astronomical time, but in real time. See it. Feel it. Hear it.
Unmistakeable to a person on foot.
So for me, landrace clouds are very specific, locally generated occurrences. That is my starting point. That is real. Then the fiction begins. I call it fiction because of the reality that what we call ‘fixed’ or ‘settled’ science is not really fixed or settled or permanent. I like working and writing on the edge of the fixed because every edge is fuzzy and invites exploration, as do these landrace cloud phenomena.
I ask myself, what really happens at the point where a cloud begins its formation in touch with the earth? My response is a bit alchemical, a bit old school. I theorise that point as the interaction of earth, air, water…kind of special already, no? But what about ether? What happens at the moment of generation and the final moment of dissolution?
So, I go hunting in my neighborhood for generation points of landrace clouds. Following are eleven images from recent forays.
1. Here is a generic shot of clouds in my neighborhood. Note the lake(water), the mountains(earth) and the sky(air). Note the cloud varieties. Anybody sense the presence of ethereal?
2. Here is a closer view showing certain cloud interactions with the earth.
3. In this partially zoomed view, note the implied dynamics of the landrace cloud edges.
4. In this zoomed view it is clear to see the scale of the landscape and the recently generated landrace cloud.
5. And now the landrace cloud hunt begins–first person–on the ground–in your face.
6. I learned the landrace cloud dynamics first hand. They always move. Their edges always change. The harder I looked, the further away they were.
7. On another day, I learned that if I just stood still long enough, the landrace clouds came to me. But on this day no such luck.
8. Without the opportunity to be at the point of cloud generation, I had so satisfy the walk by appreciating such details as here.
9. Spring wild flowers in Alp pastures never cease to amaze.
10. But as I was looking for the landrace cloud points of generation, I saw this hut at the edge of the forest.
11. And at the peak of the roof, protecting this hut, was…
All of the above represent a ‘typical’ walk in my neighborhood. And that is why fiction is just too close to fact.
