It is that time of year.
It’s here. There is no doubt.
What’s this?
It’s the autumn.
We don’t have those North American attention grabbing sugar maples or even their cousins around here.
What is a nature prescription? Why do you need it? Political or health albatross around your neck? A walk out past the edge of town?…just like Dancing in the Moonlight. Take a break.
How can I get free of this stinking political and health fear-stuffed albatross?
Suppose this page is about you…and suppose you are wound up tighter than a drum by the tension of world wide and local politics and health. This page is your wayfinder.
THE PURPOSE OF THE BLOG AND ALL MY WRITING is to assist you the visitor to begin taking steps along a path toward discovering the regenerative existential cures to be freely found in plants, gardens and the landscape.
THE FIRST STEP is what could be called ‘nature prescriptions’–calibrated doses of time outside. Take a walk. But does the walk heal? What actually happens? What is on the path that takes you on a journey? Where do landscape journeys take you?
And why even take that path and that journey?
A walk, a journey just for the landscape?–heh, I know what you are thinking–we all know what landscape is, right? Same old, same old, right?
flahertylandscape contends it is more–consider this:
The landscape can be a private cocoon to rest the restless.
On the walk you may weave dreams full of surprise and delight yielding true moments of repose.
It can be a journey to unwind, to regenerate, to reconnect with inner peace, to nest away from the daily hustle and bustle.
I am embedded in a landscape that has moved from spring into the definites of summer. The basics and the speed of spring growth have finished. For some, the hazy sameness of summer signals the onset of boredom.
Nope, not for me.
Clouds change like the seasons, too slowly to easily see.
And that is how the flahertylandscape blog is changing–slowly.
I set up this web site to talk about the landscape. Since 2013, most of the posts encourage the reader to interact with the landscape, its gardens and plants.
This blog also includes a section on landscape architecture, my profession.
And I have also included a section entitled landscape stories.
I wanted to write landscape stories spurred by my own career in landscape architecture to give to students some insights into what they might find in their careers.
Goes back to my university education where I found the most interesting and valuable courses to be a series of 2 week summer courses taught by private sector landscape architects. Why? Real world projects had a resonance that was absent from typical class room assignments.
Situations in post graduation offices taught lessons never addressed at university.
So I wanted to provide that resonance and reality for students still in university. You might ask, why don’t you teach? My response? Teach?!! Different animal–designing and getting a project built–that’s what I can share…and then there is the small item of my stroke four years ago. Isolated now. Don’t do crowds well. Don’t multi-task. Don’t do tit for tat speed–so I write.
Now I am getting to my seasons change title.
I will be gradually modifying this blog as I get closer to the ARC of my debut novel, Tangier Gardens, the first in the series, The Landscape Architect–fictional autobiographical stories that track the strange twists and turns in the life of a landscape architect who is committed to professional career practice. ARC? Advance Review Copy–working on this now.
Over the next six months, I will track the ARC, the pre-publication and the launch. All will happen and be accommodated on this blog.
But I also have a presence on YouTube which features the many years I lived and worked in the Arabian Peninsula. It has been years since I dug into the Empty Quarter–that place in SW Asia around which a lot of my professional career as a landscape architect revolved. You wonder about that landscape? Here is a taste. Follow the links embedded in each photo.
I am a naive midwestern American kind of guy–born and raised in the suburbs of Detroit, Chicago, Cleveland–not really urban, not really rural. Farming has always been a mystery to this outsider.
Everything I encounter in this agricultural mountain landscape…naively captivates me.
Around my own home the first haycuts are already underway–there is the fragrance of a freshly cut lawn–we all have that familiar smell but the smell of freshly cut pasture hay? We had a couple good rains in May–all pastures were rich with grasses and wild flowers–the wild flowers went to seed first then the grasses–and as the grasses were going to seed in the first days of June we had a spell of sunny warm weather.
All the farmers down here at the valley bottom were out cutting their pastures. Fragrance at daytime and night time. They let the cut hay dry in the open fields for a couple days before binding it for later use as feed.
What does that have to do with ‘Up the valley’?
Well, everything in my topographical homeland was flat. Topography and its impact on life in the mountain landscape intrigues me. So, I took a walk up the valley–up the Lutschine River valley to a village named Gundlischwand (+/- 660 meters above sea level). That means uphill 100 meters–doesn’t sound like much does it? Couldn’t be further–amazing walk–here’s what happened. The valley changed. The topography changed. The plants changed.
I was going back in time.
In the mountains spring comes first at the low valley elevations. Then by the time spring comes to the higher elevations it is normally not days but weeks later.
So when I walked up the valley I was walking back in time. Climatically speaking.
The price of admission?
A stuffy nose, a couple sneezes and a runny nose–all in sequence.
It took me 1/2 hour to walk the next 100 meters.
But that will be a journey for another day.
Part of what keeps me going into the landscape every day is how the people in the local towns and in their agriculture integrate at the smallest scale into the larger landscape. Wilderswil is an excellent example.
From my place I took two busses and in 10 minutes I was in Wilderswil Dorf–the center of the village.
The Bears Hotel in the center of Wilderswil–this is downtown in the village. 2,700 people live in Wilderswil which is part of the Interlaken agglomeration(24,000 pop.).
After 5 more minutes walk I was at the edge of the village on a pedestrian path known in the local dialect as a wanderweg–a way for wandering through the landscape–journeys to the unknown.
Wandering along a wanderweg.
After 15 minutes in thick mixed forest, a view of the larger landscape opened before me.
The small scale agriculture sits at the base of steep forested mountains.
The valley floor is pasture for smaller agricultural holdings. The forest begins where the slope becomes too steep for pasture.
The small scale agriculture comes right to the edge of town.
This is the kind of diversity that comes from hard work and returns healthy people.
The town people use every imaginable way to bring practical plants, gardens and small scale agriculture right to their doorstep.
These are typical throughout the village–the owners encourage nature right up to their front door.
This last black and white photo, taken in 1952, shows Wilderswil at the mouth of the Saxeten Valley and river. This valley, while never gaining the reputation of the Lauterbrunnen and Grindelwald Valleys, has undeniable drama and magnificent landscape setting. These are the Berner Oberland.
By Werner Friedli – This image is from the collection of the ETH-Bibliothek and has been published on Wikimedia Commons as part of a cooperation with Wikimedia CH. Corrections and additional information are welcome., CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=59858775
I’ve been scruffing through the local edge of town landscape, taking a soft pleasure in the unrolling of spring when…
…a couple trees seemed to be everywhere. Everywhere. Every farm barn, every hay barn, every pasture…so I grabbed a couple photos.
About two weeks ago the light sweetness of the apple blossom filled the air around each tree. Undeniably magnetic.
Like the walnut trees, these apple trees are everywhere.
The bronziness of walnut tree spring foliage carries the promise. This is a region where dark walnut wood has been used traditionally for carvings like Brienz boxes and bears. But for me, it is about bakery treats.
So, it wasn’t long before I was thinking about what can be found in the bakeries every fall and winter–after the walnuts and apples ripen. Add cinnamon, sugar, pastry with just the correct amount of baking.
Fresh, warm walnut and apple bakery, the only thing that tops springtime apple blossom fragrance.
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.
Ain’t no stopping it now.
The plants, the grasses, the trees–they all know.
And the April showers have already brought the early May flowers.
They all show.
Spring! It has arrived!
Some days it is hard to get up from the computer.
Other days it is hard to take my eyes off my mobile.
Well, today it is time to take a walk for walk’s sake.
Uphill? I’ll give it a try. But how far?
Do it!
