Step Out

Unseasonably warm and then icy and cold. Nashville is not so different from Knoxville and many other parts of the southeast in that spring plants emerge during warm spells and are then blasted back. Pictured below are various plants and sites in winter dormancy. This time of year is for walking, seeing, locating, noting, and planning.

Dark colored bamboo!

Future pumpkin patch in the alley.

Sweetgum tree and telephone line pole.

Landward, ho!

Two medium-sized changes over at Land Scout central.
1.We're relocating to Nashville, TN.
2. I'm adjusting the name of the project and occasionally dropping the "urban" from the land scouts.

There are two reasons behind the second change.
a) The cadence of Land Scouts is nicer.
b) The shorter name allows for place-specific iterations like the Nashville Land Scouts, the Chicago Land Scouts, the Your-Neighborhood-Here Land Scouts while keeping the various groups under the larger heading of the Urban Land Scouts.

Look forward to more Land Scouting coming out of Middle Tennessee. Thanks to the many wonderful scouts and stewards in East Tennessee who've helped test out, refine, and embody the Land Scouts to date.

Happy 2013 to all!

Fritz Haeg Interview

 Image credit: Edible Estates Regional Prototype Garden #5, Austin, Texas. Commissioned by Arthouse. Image
    credit: Fritz Haeg

This is a nice interview from the American Society of Landscape Architects with Fritz Haeg, the artist behind Edible Estates: Attack on the Front Lawn. I love his frankness about the outcomes of urban gardening and his reasoning for working with single families. His projects "...operat[e] at the cellular level of one family, one individual. Because that's viral, it can spread, anyone can do it, and that's powerful." He goes on to talk about the less quantifiable benefits of small scale gardening (or urban farming) saying, "For me, it comes down to pleasure and I think that's the best point of entry into big cultural shifts like this."

Amen, to that brother. The Urban Land Scouts are, I hope, a pleasurable point of entry into a shift in awareness about our immediate land. Let's hold off on trying to use urban agriculture in the same way that we use large scale agriculture and focus on the aesthetic, cultural, and peripheral benefits from the material, scale, and pace of this work. 

A final shout out and source: I found this article on the facebook page for Urban Edge Studio. Thanks very much to Angelike Angelopoulos for directing me to their work!

Our History is Preserved in Every Seeds - Fiona McAnally

I'm pleased to say I know Fiona McAnally and sure her talk will be a good one. Hodges is the large ziggurat-like brick library on UT's campus. This fine flyer was drawn by Elias Attea.

This is How We Learn

Several years ago a friend gave me some native sunchokes (Helianthus tuberosus) from his yard and warned me, "They'll take over." I nodded but thought to myself, "I'll keep them in check. They won't take over in my yard." 

There is an adage in planting: right plant, right place. In the case of sunchokes (also known as Jerusalem Artichokes), the right place is a large sunny field or side of the road where you're not planning to grow other perennials. While I thought I kept the sunchokes somewhat in check by only letting a handful of plants grow each year, I was naive in thinking of the plant in terms of what was visible above ground. 

Tuber harvest

The plants have spread their tubers throughout the small bed in front of our house. I was excited to harvest some...until I realized how pervasive they were. These plants will outlast and outcompete my time and attention. And this is how we learn.

Relief

Seeds of Change will donate $1 to the American Red Cross for every packet of seeds purchased between now and November 15th.

We Go Out Walking

Photo by Karen Snider

This coming week is the last week that Genius Loci, my art show at Pellissippi, will be up. I'll be giving an artist talk on Monday, tomorrow!, from 3-5 pm at the Bagwell Center for Media & Art. I am grateful to the faculty at Pellissippi for inviting me into the space and for their help in promoting the events and happenings in the gallery.

I am looking forward to taking the show on the road and finding other spaces in the Southeast where I can install it and preach the good word of Land Scouting. Am especially looking forward to a final cataloging of the seed balls installation. Yes!

Earlier this week at Pellissippi I met with a group in the gallery to bind field books and go out walking around Pellissippi's campus.

Two observations about the combined bind-a-book and walk events: 1) People get really into making books. (To the point that we have to cut off our bookbinding in order to leave time for walking.) I believe bookbinding (like map drawing) can be a great way to engage so called non-artists or people who are not confident in making in an important creative process. Not only are we making something, but we're making an object that bears an expectation of further creative use. 2) Every time I go out on an Observation Walk with a group I learn something new-- often about familiar plants.