Edward Flaherty's Blog: flahertylandscape, page 39

On Ecology–Kenneth Grahame

Between 14-18 July 2015, on each day, I will be making a post in celebration of International Authors’ Day, featuring review of works by Kenneth Grahame, J.L. Borges and Algernon Blackwood, authors whose works have been formative inspirations for me.

These posts will be made as part of a Blog Hop as can be seen and visited through the links at the bottom of each post.

Today is 15July2015.

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On Ecology–Kenneth Grahame

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Kenneth Grahame, 1859-1932, access to his works at Gutenberg.

Especially in Kenneth Grahame’s Wind in the Willows, E.H. Shepard’s illustrations imparted the author’s deep feelings for the forest landscape and its inhabitants.

While many think of Wind in the Willows (1908) as Toad of Toad Hall–it really is an intimate picture of the landscape around which Kenneth Grahame grew up and always loved.

I think of him as the first Ecologist. Most of us, when we think of ecology, think first of the Odum brothers in the 1950s. But for me, it was the observational powers of Kenneth Grahame–how the flora and fauna intimately interacted on diurnal and seasonal bases in his own local patch.

The following two minute sound clip documents Kenneth Grahame’s heartfelt understanding of the landscape.

I respect, I highly value his powers of observation. Unfortunately his efforts have been blacklisted, by some cultural revisionists, as anthropomorphic, but…that bit of censoring is only as transient in time as a slight breeze on a hot, still, summer day.

Kenneth Grahame’s work will return–be it Wind in the Willows, 1908 or Pagan Papers, 1893 when he was already asking ‘Are we irrevocably cut off from the natural world, or might there still be a way back to it?’

He knew of the power in the landscape.

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This Blog Hop is hosted by Debdatta, please visit. 

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Plants: how do they inspire you?

Please answer that question because on the last day of this International Authors’ Day Blog Hop, I will randomly select a winner to receive The 23 Club, Beta 6, a free giveaway for your reading enjoyment.

Landscape Story–what is it?

Between 14-18 July 2015, on each day, I will be making a post in celebration of International Authors’ Day, featuring review of works by Kenneth Grahame, J.L. Borges and Algernon Blackwood, authors whose works have been formative inspirations for me.

These posts will be made as part of a Blog Hop as can be seen and visited through the links at the bottom of each post.

 

 

Today is 14July2015.

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Landscape Story–what is it?

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These landscape stories are classic quests–journeys. Maybe a landscape story should start with some context, some definition.

On the earth, humans see the surface and what they see is landscape. The difference between landscape and garden is that a garden is cultivated by humans, is protected by humans and is relatively safe from threats of death to humans. Whereas in the larger landscape, the threat of death, by other life forms including humans, known or unknown, may be just ‘around the corner’, or even ‘in your face’.

Myself, I always have looked at it like this from a larger historical perspective: in the beginning humans moved in the landscape–hunting and gathering, I think is the currently popular way to describe their activities. When humans found the dangers in the landscape, when they found the threat of death in the landscape too great, they built shelters–the realm of architects today, shelters.

Then humans put fences around their shelters, cultivated plants and called those outdoor areas, gardens. Gardens are places dominated by plants, places where humans offer some personal service to plants. Gardens are places relatively safe from the danger of death. In the garden, there is protection. In the garden, the intense human energy for self defense can be suspended, enabling finer instincts of humans to be accessed.

Gardens and landscapes both are essentially the environment of plants. And plants  are the domain where the most dynamic interactions remain to be discovered by humans. Landscape stories explore dynamic interactions between humans and plants in gardens and landscapes.

A landscape story moves beyond furniture and setting. The plants, gardens and landscapes begin to have lives of their own…kind of like real life…and beyond. In the works of literature, arts and music, plants, gardens and landscapes have forever been the source of seemingly unlimited human inspirations. Of particularly rich inspirations for me have been works by Kenneth Grahame, by Algernon Blackwood, by J.L. Borges. Inspirations of sensual thresholds, of emotion, of intellect, of design, of beauty, of spirit, of existential uncertainty, of connecting essence, of source, of…

In The 23 Club, Erik Chalmers, a landscape architect, follows his obsession to build beautiful and captivating gardens in strange places…this time to the Empty Quarter in the Arabian Peninsula. On his way, he stops over in Bahrain and, in a kismet moment, bumps into an old friend, Jean-Claude Thibaut.

Jean-Claude Thibaut, an ethnobotanist, was born in the Belgian Congo and had built his career around exploring ‘borderline’ human cultures, Bedu, Gypsies, Berbers and their interactions with plants and landscapes. Erik finds out that Jean-Claude had recently been to the Empty Quarter to advise an Emirati on his masters thesis–a study of how people from the Liwa Oasis traditionally used plants in their extremely arid sand desert environment.

In the following 4 minute sound clip, Jean-Claude explains some of the unmappable experiences he had during his nine months driving everyday from Abu Dhabi to the Liwa Oasis, in the heart of the Empty Quarter–the very location of Erik’s new Liwa Qsar project, a five star resort destination series of courtyard gardens.

Then there is another facet to these landscape stories. They are fiction, but they use geography, history and botany to give the stories some ‘real life’ anchors, as in the following three minute clip where Erik Chalmers and Jean-Claude discuss the Spice Route over a plate of biryani at a truck stop in the middle of the ‘almost’ Empty Quarter.

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This Blog Hop is hosted by Debdatta, please visit. 

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…where is it…

Plants: how do they inspire you?

Please answer that question because on the last day of this International Authors’ Day Blog Hop, I will randomly select a winner to receive The 23 Club, Beta 6, a free giveaway for your reading enjoyment.

International Authors’ Day

Between 14-18 July 2015, on each day, I will be making a post in celebration of International Authors’ Day, featuring reviews of works by Kenneth Grahame, J.L. Borges and Algernon Blackwood, authors whose works have been formative inspirations for me.

These posts will be made as part of a Blog Hop as can be seen and visited through the links at the bottom of each post.

Also at the bottom of each post please find the giveaway question:

Plants: how do they inspire you?

Please answer that question in the comments section. On the last day of this International Authors’ Day Blog Hop, I will randomly select a winner to receive The 23 Club, Beta 6, a free giveaway for your reading enjoyment

Landscape Story–what is it?

14July 2015

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On Ecology–Kenneth Grahame

15July2015

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Landscape Mysteries–Algernon Blackwood

16July2015

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Existential Garden Visits–JL Borges

17July2015

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The 23 Club, Beta 6 Giveaway

18July2015

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This Blog Hop is hosted by Debdatta, please visit. 

In The 23 Club, Erik Chalmers, a landscape architect, follows his obsession to build beautiful and captivating gardens–this time to The Empty Quarter.

Humans Need Not Apply

And then, what?

Easy, humans will have more time in the landscape, in gardens, with plants, exploring, asking… Older, forgotten knowledge, accessible via plants, will be re-learned.

And what have we forgotten? Perhaps you will share with me?

PS And maybe we will have enough time to have measured discussion on…say… the difference between a republic and democracy, or…how to balance individual freedom with personal, local and national security? ;-) But what does that have to do with plants?

Bauhaus

Is the sun finally setting on Walter Gropius’ Bauhaus?

Walter Gropius brought together various engineers, architects and artists to do under one roof, what they had always done in separate buildings in the past. The effort to do multi-disciplinary work with all the resources in the same room…an earth shattering concept?

In June 2015, I went to the old Weimar Republic, and visited the Bauhaus in Dessau where various international academics and practitioners, in conference, discussed the gathering of all the multi-disciplinary data inside a computer to do on a screen what they had previously done on paper–planning and designing buildings in the landscape.

Seems like the Bauhaus principles are alive and well–contrary to the sunset photo above.

Sleeping two nights in these original Bauhaus buildings gave me cause, 80 years after their creation, to mull over–form and function of my shelter in the landscape.

And the result…?

Myself–in my own personal living space, after the functions are well sorted–I prefer the intimate, expertly crafted details from William Morris, Arts and Crafts, Art Nouveau and more recently from Christopher Alexander in his Timeless Way of Building and The Pattern Language.

Bauhaus modernism from the 1930s? A bit like the five star version of a Solzhenitsyn gulag.

Update Beta 04 The 23 Club

Having benefitted from the welcome assistance of beta readers from Goodreads over the past six months, I have upgraded this landscape story into a strong Beta 04.

With that confidence, I am currently seeking a literary agent to move to the next stage.

…the promise of sexual pleasure?

Can the promise of sexual pleasure be far from any story, from any image?

The Last of the Abencerrajes

Aben-Hamet, the last of the Abencerages. Transl by François-René de Chateaubriand

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


I read A. S. Kline's 2011 translation, found at: http://www.poetryintranslation.com/PI....

This story of chivalry from the time shortly after the Spanish Christian reconquest of Granada and the Alhambra presents all the chivalry and love that is at the heart of Cervantes' Don Quixote.

The story can be read just as easily changing the Christian and Muslim characters around.

The theme of love and restraint has the Andalusian strength described by Lorca as innate in the Southern Spanish human character and as transmitted in the music originally brought with the Arabs from Damascus and their entourage from Persia and the Indian sub-continent.

I am left with historical and cultural questions. So who are the Spanish? Who were the Spanish before Tarek invaded in the eight century? And how African are the Moors? And how Moorish are the Spanish Christians today?





View all my reviews

Updated Loglines: Interesting or Boring?

As I continue to develop three landscape stories concurrently, I have revised their loglines:

The 23 Club: Amidst a team of unpredictable rogues and mercenary colleagues, a landscape architect has taken a challenge to build a set of luxurious gardens in the unforgiving sand dune landscape of the Empty Quarter.

Crystal Vision: An expatriate American, a mid-career landscape architect, for six years building and living in a new town in Saudi Arabia embarks on his own pilgrimage which takes him through the peculiar gardens and landscapes of Thailand and Switzerland, tracking a singular clue left by his recently deceased close friend and office colleague.

Yellow Dreams: To finish his last university class, a self directed design study, an American landscape architecture student goes to Morocco for six months where he is twisted by the deafening roar of the North African landscape complexities, endangering the completion of his study--his graduation.

Interesting or boring?

Landscape Pushing

The landscape pushes us out, we chase views, vistas. And the landscape pushes in on us, we reflect, ask questions.

It pushes across boundaries: physical, emotional, intellectual and spiritual. The landscape is there for all. We need only to open ourselves to it and explore.



Interlaken, Switzerland, in the Hohematte, looking East.

Inspirational mountains…settled by humans longer than the written record…

Nevertheless the human landmark for more than eight hundred years in this inspirational landscape is a tribute to God, the supreme power, the supreme authority. People turn to God because the landscape asks unusual questions of us.

In the above image, this landscape and the human shelters built there still, today in 2013, remind all of the human existential questions that stir in the landscape.