Not all is what we think it is….

Rubus fruticosus in flower

Most of us tend to look upon bramble growth with irritation and dismiss the plant as common and painful, apart from when it bears fruit.

After my previous post I made a bit of an error of judgement and promised my Facebook friends that the next one would be on brambles.  It seemed a good idea at the time, but it has taken me a long time to get not very far with it….

Rubus fruticosus leaves

….because brambles are very common and not very photogenic when they aren’t in flower.  Also because the whole topic is enormous and complicated and incredible!

At the moment the season progresses and our shed is hidden from view by a thick tangle of fast-growing thorns.  Every year it is the same.  I gave up getting to the roots when I realised that the little bits I left were enough to grow later.  Spring brings out machete-like hacking.

Now you see it now you don't....

The Modernist notion of ‘Form Follows Function’ from the turn of the 19th century, but much vaunted in the 1950s and 1960s, was taken to extremes and allowed for a block concrete world where detail and creativity were considered extravagant ‘extras’.  I am a very big fan of simple design, and new creative thinking can take detail to a further level than the fundamental starkness popular in the times of fifty years ago.  Often we take the results utterly for granted, but on the occasions when we do take notice the effect can be deeply exhilarating.  Thinking ‘outside the box’ occurs across the world and using materials of different price and robustness.

Cleveden retracting bollard - photo taken by Joanne Lloyd

Since this blog is about bollards, I will start with a form of bollard that I have loved ever since first meeting one in Brighton just outside the Fire Station.  Walking down the street, suddenly this large and solid blob in the pavement started to disappear into the ground!  I stood rooted to the spot wondering what was going on, until I realised that standing there had a pretty low life-expectancy if I stayed put any longer.  I stepped back as the doors opened and the red engines roared out into the street and off in loud pursuit of the call-out.  Often times we will see bollards that collapse on a hinge.  These are low-tech and require little maintenance, but woe the tyre that gets near to them.  The electric retraction bollard is a piece of beauty and smooth operation.  The photograph was taken by my friend Joanne Lloyd of bollards at a Marina just outside Bristol.  This bollard automatically retracts when approached from one side but not the other.  The Fire Station bollard has to have been activated remotely, since no vehicle was in sight at the time it disappeared....

Drainage in patterned paving, Lisbon

Drains.  Without drains in our wet climate we would always be paddling or slipping on ice covered pools.  In dry climates the rains can come heavily and often the drains need to be larger to accommodate the high if less frequent level of runoff.  Drains in public open space come in all manner of shapes and sizes and there can be various techniques employed to manage how intrusive they can be.  I love the simplicity of form of the drain in a square in central Lisbon, where the texture of the small unit paving and the holes in the drain echo one another and the alignment of the drain is utterly true to the design of the paving.  Never easy to achieve, but very effective

Pedestrian crossing, Helsinki

when done well. In a similar vein pedestrian crossings don’t always have to be done in paint, they can also be incorporated within the design. Problems arise if roadworks take place underneath the spot, tarmac infill can cause a moth-eaten effect…..

Cycle path, Stockholm

We have a world that is dominated by signage and so much so that most of us have developed a disturbing knack of missing some completely because we have gone into overload.  Advertisers are now trying to hit us with varying levels of “You what!” advertising, a form I have always called frictional because it creates an effective that draws attention in spite of ourselves.  Landscape designers are now using new creative techniques to enclose the signage users want to know about in the detail of their schemes.  Two special forms are shown here, an embossed metal outline of a bicycle showing which is the cycle lane on a complex of paths from Stockholm, Sweden and a surprising little disabled sign

Disabled sign, Montecristi, Ecuador

from Montecristi in Ecuador made from blue marble sitting in concrete.  Simple and effective methods of realigning our response to the clutter of signs. 

Hanging basket, Tortola Botanic Gardens

My final comment relates to a special piece of low-tech design I saw in Tortola Botanic Gardens.  The ingenious use of common materials is a major feature in the Caribbean landscape and tyres crop up as planting pots for date palms, boundary fencing and also as this very attractive hanging basket.  The same day that we saw this we were treated to a steel band whose extra piece of percussion came from brake discs!

Function and design are inter-twined concepts, but this doesn’t actually imply any rules to be adhered to at all.  So long as they work, of course.

LIGHT CHEER

Traditional lights on the South Bank in London with smoky glass blocking light upwards without spoiling the effect of the light

Candle-light in a summer garden

February is often a hard month to cope with and it is a joy to behold March, for although Spring is welling up and young snowdrops and early daffodils can make their appearance and refresh the spirit, much of the change is in terms of ‘promise’.  Buds fill and the surface of twigs and the ground change into velvet softness after the harshness of winter days and nights.  Personally I have always found my patience starts to run dry in February, and even if there has been the chance to travel to exotic climes, the very dankness of the dark days and dampness can be dispiriting.  I have also noticed that other people have a less tolerant mind in February and can get quite ‘snappish’.

Looking on the ‘bright’ side now….

Lit paving in London

On dank and dark dingy days the presence of light can be electrifying to a darkened soul.  Many more landscape schemes have been incorporating light in small spaces as technology gets more playful.  Lighting doesn’t just have to be for Christmas, our local garden centre now maintains tree lights for 12 months of the year which is cheering in the summer and instructive in the winter on darker afternoons because you know where the gate is…

Landscape lighting can be very cheering.

There is also a point where landscape light can cause problems, particularly if the wrong kind of lighting is selected.  Modern lighting is thankfully very often designed to light the places where the light is desired and to avoid the places where a sense of darkness at night to aid restful sleep or encourage astronomy is key.  There is still a long way to go, but there has been a remarkable improvement in creative thought in the past few years.  Blocking or inhibiting light up to the sky unless where building frontages are to be lit can be achieved in simple ways.

Some lighting is for security purposes and aids restful sleep through reduction of worry.

Mural of the Northern Lights on Norwegian building

In the last few weeks Scotland has had the unusual chance to enjoy some of the Aurora borealis – the Northern Lights.  One year it was possible to see them in Sussex, when it looked like vast search lights in the sky.  In Scandinavia people go skiing in Spitzbergen which doesn’t really get light as we understand it in the winter, in the same way that it doesn’t get dark during the summer.  They ski lit by the Northern Lights, which must be an incredible experience.  One comment I heard about the Scottish experience was a bit of reverse poetry.  Apparently what this person was able to see and experience was lights chasing into the sky of a subtle form in mixtures of pink and orange – “a bit like looking across the lights of London, I suppose”…..  This was a view across the Highlands in a section where very few people live and any lights are usually twinkling headlights from cars.
 

Capturing sunset in New Mexico

Some lights have cheer added to THEM

Rabbiting Year

On the third of February this year we enter the new Chinese Year of the Rabbit (according to Wikipedia).  This is supposed to be a more diplomatic and less turbulent year than the previous one, the Chinese Year of the Tiger.  Speaking personally, that seems a jolly good idea!  While I keep an open mind on all manner of notions, the mantra of things looking up is one I intend to embrace.

Rabbits are also a great deal more relevant to landscape architecture than tigers, so there is a lot more to be said.  For a start there are a great deal more of them, something they continue to achieve with enthusiasm (although the European Rabbit is now a threatened species in its own natural habitat in Spain and Portugal – see Wikipedia and IUCN red list).  Secondly they occur in many different places and often in close proximity to rural people in their working lives or in gardens.

Rabbits are voracious eaters.  When we first moved into our current home we witnessed the decimation of a much-loved pot plant on its first night in its new location with horror.  The following weekend we went shopping for some plants for the garden and bought three rose bushes and a magnolia, thinking the roses would be too thorny and the magnolia too sour a taste for them.  Ha ha!  It turns out that young thorny shoots are a favourite and they loved the magnolia equally.  Thankfully although they all suffered, we were able to put fencing around them in time and now they flourish.  We went back to the garden centre, who gave us a list of plants rabbits won’t eat.  Ominously roses were on it.  We showed it to the neighbours who chuckled and said that they knew of examples of most of the plants on the list that had been decimated over the years.  Someone forgot to give the list to the rabbits!

Rabbit proofing

As the years have passed our rabbit population has declined alongside the growth of some very large domestic cats in the neighbourhood.  Some of these cats are now so large the bird population is safe, because those dainty treats aren’t a patch on the taste of real rabbit.  It feels a bit wrong to watch this change with a lack of pity, rabbits are one of the traditional cuddly furry animals alongside bears and guinea pigs.  A landscape training distances you from the rabbit for exactly the same reasons as we suffered in our garden.  A well-designed bit of open planting has to be installed with rabbit-proof fencing as part of the specification until the thorny species have hardened up and usually for five years at the minimum.  Rabbits like to strip the bark off trees and so rabbit guards are also a feature.  The youngsters are quite experimental which can be highly destructive.  In open landscapes the presence of rabbit or deer populations is shown by a ‘skirt’ line to tree canopies that are near to the ground.  Holly bushes can also have this skirting effect, which is surprising until you look at and feel the young leaves before they harden and realise that they could be eaten and digested fairly easily.

Several years ago I worked on a historic park in Sussex which had a string of terraced lawns progressing from the balcony outside the house into the ‘pleasure grounds’ and the outer parkland.  These lawns were not balustraded as with many Sussex properties, they relied on steep banks between the lawns for a softer effect.  As a result of the softer effect, at the time we were working there many rabbits had turned the whole string into an unmanaged warren!  The extra complication was that the owners LIKED the rabbits!  It was very hard to persuade them that they were losing their lawns and that there were other areas the rabbits could live that were less destructive and less threatening to their chances of getting grants for landscape restoration proposals….. there are plenty of places where their eating habits mean benefits to keeping unwanted vegetation down - so long as where they live is more robust.

So here’s hoping for a more amiable year with the right things happening in the right places!

Ivy – Helix in more than name

Hoar frost ivy in Sussex

When I decided to put something together on a Christmas plant I chose ivy largely because I was intrigued by what I might discover, only to discover that it has had little more than cursory mentions amid hinted at deeper stories.  Ivy as a Christmas decoration is often twinned with holly, but much folklore prefers it used for outdoor rather than indoor decorations because it has some awkward pagan overtones.  Ivy is also a symbol of Bacchus and its use in garlands and head decorations was popular because it was believed to ward off the ill effects of too much alcohol.  This is very appropriate for modern Christmas Days when many people across the country start the day with a Buck’s Fizz and continue drinking until the end of the Christmas meal.  In the early Christian church it was not so highly thought-of and it would be interesting to know what store the temperance movement might set by its continued use as a Christmas emblem.

Telegraph pole, Ireland

Ivy was named Hedera helix by Carl Linnaeus in his Species Plantarum of 1752.  Helix as a word dates back at least to the 1560s and almost certainly well before, referring to ‘spiral’ in both the Latin and the Greek.  In modern parlance, of course, we think of the helix of life, of the description of DNA and its double helix form.  A close look at the form of ivy as it climbs a tree shows a spiralling growth and multiple stems intertwining as they progress up the tree.  In a similar species, the strangler-fig in the rainforest, this action is far less benign than the picturesque image we have of the ivy.  In the rainforest trees are used as support for the young and semi-mature vine, until it reaches a weight and height that can be self-sustaining after which point the host tree is allowed to rot and die away.  The weight of the ivy can bring down a less robust tree, but strangulation is not in its primary vocabulary.

Ivy clad wall, Ireland

Ivy as a plant grows well almost anywhere in temperate climates.  It is pretty robust in dark, dank and northern aspects as well as being remarkably tolerant of low rainfall and pollution.  This has made it consistently popular as a plant in gardens and public spaces for centuries.  In  Europe in medieval times it was part of the palette of plants, including vines, used to drape over trellises and arbours, providing a manageable structure to the green areas of the time.  It is  used frequently to cover walls and fences.  At periods through history it has been used as a wall covering for houses, where it was considered to be beneficial in the retention of warmth because of the outer area of the plant having the leaves, inner areas having air pockets made by the path and the intertwining of the stems.  In the past 80-100 years this view has been challenged by the very realistic concern about how the plant travels as it grows and how intrusive to soft mortar this can be.  The old stems are robust and tree-like.  The young shoots are climbers and they are explorative, using sucking fronds to ‘stick’ to the surfaces they climb.  On an old brick wall with mortar in need of repointing, or with an old sandy mortar, this can lead to young shoots growing into small cavities, fattening as they grow and ultimately breaking up the wall.

Ivy growing on house walls

 

Earlier this autumn, I was in Inverness at the time of the Housing Expo.  It was fascinating to see one of the houses employing a mixed innovative and traditional approach.  Scotland, in particular eastern Scotland, can be profoundly affected by strong winds in the winter months.  This house uses a recycled rubber covering to protect the walls from the cooling impact of these winds and ivy is being grown up the side of the building to help with this protection.  It will be very interesting to hear how this and all of the truly innovative houses on this estate fare.  With the rubber coating it will be a while before there will be too many small cavities to be explored.

Aralia hispida in Newfoundland

Finally I am adding a photograph that we used as a Christmas card a few years ago.  It is called Bristly Sarsaparilla and grows on the Avalon Peninsula of Newfoundland.  As a plant it is a distant relative of the American Poison Ivy as well as being a family member of our ivy.  Its form is evocative of the berries and flowers of our own native ivy and several friends were kind enough to remark upon it.  Its latin name is Aralia hispida and Hedera helix is in the Araliaceae family.

Ball Bearings at Stonehenge

Stonehenge from the A303

Many years ago as a young Geography student at Exeter University I pleaded with my tutors to be allowed to do a dissertation on visitor behaviour at Stonehenge.  Unfortunately it was not to be, there was no-one who had the necessary knowledge to be able to act as my tutor so I went down a map route studying the archaeological mapping by the Ordnance Survey in Wiltshire instead.  My only real regrets are financial, my years in the map world have been wonderful and to have a 'great' as a tutor instead was inspiring.  Brian Harley is much missed.

Since then I have had the enormous privilege to have worked on Stonehenge as a landscape architect and graphic designer and enjoyed it immensely.  It is a wonderful site still in need of enormous TLC and sensible planning.

Granite balls in the modern landscape

It was with fascination that I read the Science Daily article on a young Exeter student's ideas about the movement of the stones from Wales and evidence that he has spotted as to how this could have been achieved.  Now a PhD student he has been working on decorated granite balls at Scottish Neolithic sites, especially in Aberdeenshire, since he was a second-year undergraduate.  He noticed that there were similar balls found near to Stonehenge.  With his colleagues at Exeter experiments have been undertaken using spheres and gouged logs that do cast interesting light on a possible technique for the long-distance transport of the Preseli stones used for some of the construction of Stonehenge.  Anyone who has spilt a bag of frozen peas on the kitchen floor will have a very good idea as to how such small objects can be capable of carrying MUCH heavier objects!  What is intriguing is the idea of how, in the absence of frozen peas, Neolithic man could have come up with such an innovative solution.  There is evidence that the Ancient Egyptians used logs for much of their transportation of large blocks of stone, but in a culture not as obviously sophisticated the idea of ball-bearings is fascinating.  The first UK patent for ball-bearings was not given until 1794!

Granite ball engraved as a memorial to Raoul Wallenberg in Stockholm
contrasts with the bicycle wheel

The ingenious nature of this design is that directional control would have been easier for the large blocks as the balls would have been guided on the grooved, seasoned wood and this would have been easier than the less flexible log-rolling used by the Egyptians and also than anything simple wheels could have achieved under such weights.  The journey from Preseli to Wiltshire is far from flat or straight and any techniques used would need to be able to accommodate uneven paths and many sloping landforms.  I hope very much that the next few years of work on this do prove that it is correct.  The engineering is simple and sublime!

Spheres are a symbol of universal potent power

Covering Rock

 
Not all recycling is messy or boring, as I realised with glee on a recent visit to Scotland and the two Highland Stoneware shops in Ullapool and Lochinver.  The wall coverings on the building exteriors are a joy to behold and use the broken pottery pieces in a creative and memorable way.  Highland Stoneware is beautiful and evokes the character of the highlands in many of its pieces.

The Lochinver boulders with their covering of pot fragments echo the lichen covered boulders higher up in the mountains.

The mural designs were by the remarkable Kaffe Fassett (with his assistant Brendon Mably) and are dated on the murals to 2000 for Ullapool and 2002 for Lochinver. In many places the ability of the broken pottery to use its third dimension is used for clever effect.  Several teapot spouts scatter the front of the building, for example.

Much of the pottery they used is recognisable in the complete works for sale inside the studio shops.  There are tremendous echoes with the ceramic mosaics designed by Antoni Gaudi in the Parc Guell in Barcelona.  The difference with the Highland Stoneware work is that it is in a location where the inspiration is immediately apparent.