fields

It's been called living sculpture, a giant stylized artichoke, the cousin to the aloe, new world native, and a vital component to both tequila and didgeridoos: The agave.

It thrives on neglect, needs no fertilizer, very little water, and can tolerate a variety of soils as long they're well drained. The perfect addition to the California garden.

Agave makes an excellent candidate for potting as it produces  sparse roots and tolerates crowding. It's also a good companion to the pool as it produces litter sparingly.

The agave's natural structure makes it an excellent sculptural accompaniment to soft grasses, wispy wildflowers, tufty salvias, and other fine-leafed gatherings. It not only provides the masculine element, it makes the feminine appear even more so.

It also makes for a striking emotional impact, its visual severity along with its spines and dagger-like projections can add drama to a any garden or country road.

Agaves are available in many color, sizes, and varieties including spineless.

Below, the sentries of the Sunnyland Gardens in Rancho Mirage, CA:

Beneath the pergola one agave stands like both king and jester at the terminus of this visual corridor: The general-in-arms and a floppy and spiky armed clown. If great gardens are like kaleidoscopic mixtures of beautiful contrasts then the agave, as one designer said, "is a great design opportunity."

Grasses are sensual. You can smell them and hear them and watch them move. Meadows are sexy, just like lovers they never stop changing, never ceasing to surprise.

John Greenlee

That sensuousness can be seen in the way grass moves in the breeze. How it blooms robust with color in the spring and goes dormant brown in the winter: As Greenlee might say, they're the essence of sex and death.

Grass is dynamic. It gives texture and balance, it can be sharp or fluffly. It's an ensemble player, a backgrounder, accompanist, or virtuoso soloist if need be. Its culturally polyglot: It's Asia, Africa, the Mediterranean, and the American heartland. It's tropical, jungle, desert, lush, dry, sparse, and dense.

Below, the work of Washington D.C. based James Van Sweden:

Layers:

Meadows:

In contemporary gardens, it is the quintessential modern material.

More James Van Sweden:

It works in the meadow; it works in a pot:

Piet Oudolf's Trenthan Gardens:

The image of the transparent eyeball* has become a staple of nature mysticism: in the midst of wild Nature, the self becomes one with being... differentiation, alienation and struggle cease.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Below, hillocks in a field in Kyrgyzstan:

Hillock is a British term referring to small hills or knolls. This, along with hummock, are terms used more commonly to refer to bumpy terrain, such as the above which shows the effect of grazing animals on moist soil. These mounds can also form out of sediment collecting around decaying plants through water from rain, snow, tides wind, etc, as often seen in wetalands.

Soil covered ancient shell mounds in Palo Alto, California:

These, from Iceland:

Hillocks and hummocks have served as inspiration in design as well. Emerson's idea of the transparent eyeball was about absorbing nature, becoming its vessel and disappearing into its grandeur. Before nature we are nothing but spiritual antennas for the divine. Picking up that broadcast has taught us something about aesthetics too.

Maya Lin's Storm King Wavefield in Mountainville New York was built over a former gravel pit which covers 240,000 sq ft and peaks at 15 ft in height.

Her work is also reminiscent of grazing lines left by cattle:

Life Mounds by architectural theorist, writer, and landscape architect Charles Jencks. This work is one of the commissioned pieces featured in the sculpture garden Jupiter Artland.

Lin's Wave Field at the University of Michigan, 1995:

A Danish landscape architect known best for his urban spaces, Stig L. Andersson admits an influence of Japanese culture. He calls it an integration of substance, space, and changeability. He goes bumpy as well.

Tufts:

The Jardim Das Ondas by Joao Gomes da Silva, Lisbon Portugal:

The legendary gardens at Marqueyssac:

*Yes, the transparent eyeball concept was inspired from a recent episode of Mad Men.

Whatever we think is the way to a more spiritually fulfilling life—no matter our tradition, culture, or inclination—most likely it will never be found behind a glowing screen.

In guru-speak, the outdoors is where humans first met God (in whatever that means). Our ancestors were taught in the outdoors and every culture has its tales of pilgrims and heroes meeting spiritual fulfillment there. Often, it was the deeper into the wild, the deeper the experience.

Even on the micro-world of our own own gardens, it can be a space where "we can restore our emotional and spiritual balance and nourish our senses and souls, away from the noise of everyday life." The garden is a facilitator.

Early gardens paid worship to gods and the dead. Gardens in Egypt were often found near tombs of the elite. It may've been the Romans who first secularized gardens and treated them as an extension of indoor space. It could be said that gardens engage all five of the human senses in a way few experiences do.

More than anything else a garden is a portal, a passage into another world, one of your own thoughts and your own making; it is whatever you want it to be and your what you want to be.

William Longgood

Green is the fresh emblem of well-founded hopes. In blue, the spirit can wander but in green it can rest.

Mary Webb

Some of the ideas in this post were found in The Spiritual Garden: Creating Sacred Space Outdoors by Peg Streep and John Glover.

For plants, humans could be just another invasive species.

Michael Pollan argues that when it comes to choosing what goes in your garden the choice may be less yours and more the plants', Darwinianly speaking. It could be that unsuspecting humans are being duped by the corn, grass, and flowers no less than the have butterfly or the bumble bee.

We're outmatched: Humans don't even have as many genes as rice. At the very least, plants are smarter than we think. Sure, we humans have consciousness, we make tools and form societies, but plants have a powerful and ancient biochemistry that may have us outgunned.

The color, shape, texture, perfumes: Humans can no more resist this than the hummingbird can.

And so, the meadow: It may the best compromise between flora and two-legged fauna.

Making the case for a post-turf California is nothing new, but the chorus has been steadily swelling. (A few of the more vocal members we've featured here are John Greenlee, James Hitchmough, and Piet Oudolf.)

Among them are the authors of the newly published Reimagining the California Lawn (where some of these images were taken). The authors add yet another resource for suggestions on lawn alternatives both practical and edible. Another advocate, designer, educator, and anti-lawn and edible landscape activist Fritz Haeg, reminds us that there were no lawns in Eden either.

Despite a lawn's prodigious use of water (the average lawn gulps about 88 gallons a day) and demands of time and resources for care and maintenance, lawns are practically useless. According to a 2007 UCLA study, the use of our yards, back or front, as a locus for recreation is a fantasy. Both children and their parents are staying inside more. Lawns are a poor investment and, especially in Southern California, no longer sustainable.

From a design aspect, it's even possible to view lawns as a kind of yoke. When landscapes are liberated, a new variety of new possibilities appear: The meadow, the jungle, the desert, the productive garden, etc.

If you're an American, born anytime after 1940, of middle-class indoctrination, you most likely lived a portion of your early life in some version of the tract house.

Vernacular suburban landscaping, as I remember it, mostly didn't do layers. You had lawns, trees, and something in between on the borders. The in between acting as a moat-like barrier between the house, street, and neighbors.

The photo above is from photographer Julia Baum. See her photo essay of maturing suburban homes here.

Layers give depth, illusions of space, and levels of interest that the suburban yards of my youth were crying out for.  A challenge beyond the reach of a mere lawn and oleander border.

Layers give space a visual hierarchy, not just of height and planar discontinuity, but also guide the eye to new discoveries.

As the elevation rises, plantings help break through the linearity and offer many surprises..

The layering can be horizontal and vertical, linear and non-linear.

Brazilian landscape architect and multi-hyphenate artist, etc., Robert Burle Marx was the master of layering. Above, he also uses layers in a horizontal graphic way. Above and below, an experiment with the patterning with stones and gravel and juxtaposing different grasses.

Marx goes all flat in tile and stone on Rio de Janeiro's Avenida Atlantica.

Japanese architect Tadao Ando and the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth: Only the squares of the structures, water, and concrete walkways are needed to complete the vision. Any other details would be superfluous.

American architect John Lautner described himself as "part psychiatrist and part metaphysician." "Fluent containers" is how one writer described his work.

This house is the famous Elrod residence in Palm Springs. A house that "folds" into its surroundings: The house as meadow and vice versa.

Clearly, the Elrods would've been the best of neighbors.