28/12/2011 - 13:12:21
Posted By: Paula Panich
Amazing things can come your way if you allow yourself to wander, especially through footnotes. Real footnotes, in books. Which is how I was introduced to the celebrated German critic, Walter Benjamin, and his essay, “The Storyteller.” I was in the Round Reading Room at the British Library in Bloomsbury, reading about fairy tales. I [...]
26/05/2011 - 11:33:51
Posted By: Paula Panich
The textures of Tuscany in the warm low light of autumn were too rich to ignore.
18/05/2011 - 14:14:21
Posted By: Paula Panich
I’m teaching a class in the UCLA Extension Landscape Architecture Program called Making Space: Four Voices, Four Writers, Four Landscapes. We’ve become interested in the anthropology of space, that is, how language, culture, and experience shape our perception of space. (In the article below, by the way, there is a reference to “Edge” — that [...]
24/04/2011 - 13:16:00
Posted By: Paula Panich
The day of the Resurrection or the resurrection or just any Sunday, depending. But I thought to comment on my previous post, “Eating Icons,” first published in a longer form in the oldest extant magazine in the country. I love history, so I like that about The North American Review. My true mentor in essay-writing [...]
05/04/2011 - 21:54:03
Posted By: Paula Panich
The Central Garden at the Getty Center in Los Angeles is not just a collection of plants but a complex sculpture by contemporary artist Robert Irwin. Set like a jewel within the Getty Center’s imposing promontory overlooking Los Angeles, Irwin’s work is a critical element in Getty’s collection of contemporary art. This year is the [...]
Posted By: Paula Panich
The San Jacinto Mountains, above Palm Springs, California, shoot up 10,804 feet from the desert without, as one writer has it, the geologic fanfare of foothills. I’d come in January to one of its mountain towns, Idyllwild, to try to recover some shred of a self fractured from a September move. I left a beloved [...]
Posted By: Paula Panich
Edith Wharton moved into The Mount, her house in Lenox, Mass., in 1902; she put the now-famous house and garden up for sale only nine years later. Yet she wrote in 1934, just three years before her death: “The Mount was my first real home . . . and its blessed influence still lives in [...]
23/03/2011 - 23:19:05
Posted By: Paula Panich
Arizona If winter in the Northeast is, horticulturally speaking, the time of Persephone, we were thinking about where to go for a respite from the cold and a chance to learn more about plants. Botanic gardens and museums near and far are a good start. Now that Southwest Airlines is flying to the Southwest from [...]
Posted By: Paula Panich
Dan Hinkley in China (and Massachusetts) In photographs, Dan Hinkley, co-owner of Heronswood Nursery on the Kitsap Peninsula in Washington Sate, looks a bit the mountain man. It might be the angle, but he seems the renowned plant explorer in suspenders one might conjure up, readily leaping over tigers to grab that rarest of epimediums. [...]
Posted By: Paula Panich
Tohono Chul is a 48-acre botanical garden in northwest Tucson, Arizona. The name, in the language of the Tohono O’dham tribe of southern Arizona, means “desert corner.” The Santa Catalina mountains loom in the near distance; the garden is an oasis in a busy, growing city. In a corner of this corner of the Sonoran [...]
