October 2015

I  returned a week ago from a garden writer’s conference in Pasadena, where I won not only the one Silver Award of Merit I was expecting, but two, and on top of that the Gold Award for magazine writing from the Garden Writers Association. These awards were given for two parts of the six part series I did on color for Pacific Horticulture over the last two years. I always come away from these conferences with so much: new friends, new ideas, better ideas, and well, this time a few awards.

Before I left for California my friends and colleagues were already pestering me about my next color piece. I guess no one wanted me to be done. My friend John Wott jokingly suggested I should write about “drab”.

So “drab” was stuck in my head, like a song virus, during this whole trip.

I had not been to Southern California in over twelve years. After landing at LAX and taking the shuttle east to Pasadena, I was surprised how green everything was. All we’d been hearing about up north in Seattle was the Southern California drought and water shortages. I was expecting anything but this verdant place.

Still for all the green it was hard to get “drab” out of my mind.

So I looked up the word “drab” in the Oxford English Dictionary, to assuage this vexing mantra. The OED traces it’s history back to the early sixteenth century when it was used to designate a dirty woman, a slut or a harlot. Also at about this same time it designated a type of hemp or woolen cloth—possibly what the harlots wore? It wasn’t until the late eighteenth century and the early nineteenth century that it was used to designate a color, a light or yellowish brown to be exact. Later in the that century, which seemed to get more and more colorful, it began to mean dull, or “ wanting in brightness or colour” as the OED would have it. I would say that this is definition we are working with still today.

Wallace Stegner, “The Dean of Western Writers”, was a staunch environmentalist. He said to appreciate nature in the arid West, “ You have to get over the color green; you have to quit associating beauty with gardens and lawns.”

Certainly southern California could use his advice. But even we gardeners here in the Evergreen State need to face that fact. This summer we experienced an exceptional drought. And we’re expecting worse next year. Certainly a drought aesthetic is needed.

I might say I would be hard pressed to give up my green, that’s why I moved to this state where it “always rains”— doesn’t it?

So during my trip  south I began seeking out the drab. First as a simple exercise and then as a way of training my color-hungry eyes to feel comfortable with the drab world.

Here are some images and thoughts from my travels:

Drabness can easily be equated with deadness. Certainly the drab outer covering of trees, the bark, is composed of dead cells, but they function as a protective layer for the more tender inner living tissue. Even the old withered leaves of the aloe in the first picture (I wanted to peel them all off) probably keep that plant cool and retain moisture. It was nearly  100 degrees when we visited the Los Angeles County Arboretum a few weeks ago. In this arid landscape and other around the drab world  “unsightly” dead tissue has a function.

When a dead leaf lands on concrete we can really see how colorful it is. No it is not red or blue; yet , it is  a brown as rich as red or blue.

One of the best acts of ” gardening”  I saw during a quick visit to  the USC Pacific Asia Museum. This installation by Chinese artist Liu Jianhua is stunningly simple, drab, even. But within the context of the galleries created such a sense of quiet contemplation, melancholy even, it stopped me. Held me captive.

So powerful is the drab world.

Jianhua crafted thousands of leaves from porcelain and then glazed them with this lovely shade of  dead-leaf-brown.

The lack of color has always had a profound effect on the mind. Often debilitating, if one thinks of a prisoner in his cell. I remember how the long snow covered winters of Wisconsin wore on one after a time.

But the Japanese have long used the absence of color to clear and open the mind. Nowhere is it more obvious than in the Japanese ceremonial tea house.

This one at the Huntington Gardens was built in Kyoto in the 1960s. It was returned to Japan for renovations in 2010, recently reconstructed within a new garden setting,  on a hilltop with dramatic views. I spent part of a very hot afternoon, temperatures topped out at 102, under a red umbrella with ex-Seattlite Robert Hori, the garden’s curator. Maybe because we sat so still and talked about beauty and stones,  gardens and art, looking constantly at this tea house I barely felt the heat after a while.

In the Chinese Garden at the Huntington, these large natural “sculptures” or gongshi, the scholars rocks, are appreciated for thinness,openness, perforations and wrinkles.

But obviously not color.

The lack of color (they actually are a very drab color of beige-brown) always makes the textural attributes of an object more pronounced.

In one of the beautiful estate gardens we visited in San Marino the owners left this old lathe house stand, as a folly I suppose. It stood in such strong contrast to most of the buildings in this upscale neighborhood, it really captured my attention. It’s drab and sorrowful demeanor (it was full of weeds and old pots) created an atmosphere nearly as contemplative and peaceful as a Japanese teahouse.

Once you get over the blocky monumentality of the Getty Center, you will notice in the details of the stone, as perforated and wrinkled as a Chinese scholar’s stone, a rather unintentional earthiness to the place. I spent a lot of time looking at these sort of details after my eyes tired from darting across the colorful centuries of art in the galleries.

I avoided the ill-advised gardens this visit, for the simplicity of the drab stones.

The rains and cool temperatures have brought the green back in abundance to us in the Pacific Northwest. Yet, I think I agree with Stegner. We in the West need to get over are addiction to green, our fear of the drab.

I will write a few more posts on the drab world before the end of the year, after all :

Brown is the new green.