Words with a Garden History: Favela

Cnidoscolus quercifolius Note the spines...[source]

Until this recent article in the Financial Times  I didn't know that the notorious 'favela' of Brazil is also a plant...

"Favelas take their name from a hardy plant which thrives in the arid northeast of the country (which happens to be where most of the slum dwellers hail from ).  Not only do vicious thorns protect the favela against predators but, if ingested, its leaves can kill you with a poison that mimics the effects of cyanide."

Favela is Cnidoscolus quercifolius, a member of the notoriously phytotoxic Euphorbia family.   Its usage as a synonym for 'slum' grew out of a shanty town established by decamped (and unpaid) soldiers who settled on the hills outside of Rio in temporary protest at the end of the 19th century.  But the government never paid and they never left.  They named their site Favela Hill after the plants on the hill where they had celebrated their victory over the rebels of Canudos.  (see rioonwatch).

What is your favorite word with an unexpected or forgotten garden meaning?  Mine is vignette, which means something short enough to be written on a vine leaf.  

Cnidoscolus quercifolius [source]

Arborglyphs

image via yorkstories

"Nay, I will try these verses, which lately I carved on the green bark of a beech-tree..."

Mopsus  (Virgil, c. 50 B.C.)

I've always just called them tree carvings but technically they're arborglyphs, or sylvaglyphs, "culturally-modified trees" or just tree graffiti.  But by whatever name they're personal histories--carved into the bark of a tree.   Smooth barked varieties--beech, birch, aspen--are generally preferred and these unique documents--manuscripts in their own right for is not paper itself made from trees?--have begun to capture the attention of scholars. 

Professor Joxe Mallea-Olaetxe, a specialist in Basque History at the University of Nevada, Reno, documented over 20,000 arborglyphs in the mountains of the western United States, carved by Basque sheepherders who left their own Pyrenees Mountains behind to supply mutton to isolated mining camps.  They summered their flocks in the lush meadows of the high Sierra above Lake Tahoe, and left a record of their solitary sojourns including names, dates and images of what they were thinking about:  towns back home, bears and buffalo, but often naked women; some carvings are not for the easily offended.

Arborglyphs by Etienne Maizcorene

Some like Etienne Maizcorena left a naively artistic, stylistically recognizable body of work.  Etienne even created his own forest gallery:  

"Aware of the merit of his art, Maizcorena chose a site for his "gallery" near a kanpo handia in Humboldt County, where all his arborglyphs "hang" some eight or nine feet above the ground. Obviously, he did not want anyone touching, overcarving, or disturbing them ... Maizcorena either stood on his horse, or he used a ladder.
— Joxe Mallea-Olaetxe in Speaking Through the Aspens, p.147

There is historical as well as artistic merit in the arborglyphs.  Angie KenCairn, a heritage specialist for the U.S. Forest Service, studies aspen art in the Routt National Forest of Colorado, gleaning information about historic construction projects and stock drives, especially since the herders' usually dated their work.  "Much of the oldest art has actually been discovered on standing dead or fallen trees, and the forest service is striving to document these carvings before they disappear. “They’re a cultural resource,” Angie emphasizes. “Defacing them in any way is a federal offense. Anyway, people should be respectful of those who came before them and respect their legacy.”

Sego Canyon arborglyph [source]

Arborglyphs are inherently ephemeral; most of those currently being recorded date no earlier than the 1920s, when shepherding in the west peaked.   Earlier "cultural modifications" to the treescape have been felled or lost to the vagaries of fire and drought that afflict any forest, even one with artistic interventions.

In a time when contrived urban interventions like sticking legos on a building are a Very Big Deal, I'm moved by the unaffected authenticity of these rural interventions.

Sources and additional reading:

The best source of information on the Basque sheepherder arborglyphs is a multimedia site by the University of Nevada, Reno Library.  The Maizcorena images are from this site. 
Dr. Joxe Mallea-Olaetxe published a book "Speaking Through Aspens: Basque Tree Carvings in California and Nevada", in 2000.  He notes that arborglyphs contain the most comprehensive record of sheepherders compiled anywhere in the American west. yet "Until recently, federal archaeologists and historians made almost no attempt to record the arborglyphs, despite the ephemeral nature of aspens.  Their failure was the result of a number of factors, not excluding prejudice against minorities and their cultures and the wholesale dismissal of the arborglyphs as pornography or simple doodling.  The inevitable results was that a great portion of this massive data bank was lost."
The quotes from Angie KenCain are from an article about Colorado arborglyphs: "Aspen Diaries" by Kelly Bastone, published in Steamboat magazine. 
A PhD student at my alma mater, the University of Bristol, did her thesis on a comparative study of arborglyphs left by WWII soldiers on the peaceful Salisbury plain with those left on the front lines in France. A story about her work in the alumni newsletter inspired this post.  

Into the Wild

"Beautiful nature" in the 18th century:  Pope's Garden at Twickenham, c.1730, by William Kent.  From the British Museum

“Follow Nature. Gardening is an imitation of “Beautiful Nature” and not works of Art.”

In 1751 the Reverend Joseph Spence, who is not nearly so well-known to garden history as his friend Alexander Pope, penned a list of sixteen “general rules” for the design of landscapes. The first repeats Pope’s all too famous “consult the genius of the place” aphorism, but the other rules are actually more interesting, and I particularly like his recommendation for imitating “Beautiful Nature”, because that’s really what all gardeners, and all gardens, seek to do in their own way.

But by modern lights few of us would call Spence's ideal--Pope’s garden at Twickenham (above)--so very natural.

In a way that's what enables garden history: the fact that the sort of Nature we perceive as being beautiful, and therefore want to create in our gardens, is constantly changing.

"Beautiful Nature" in the 21st Century 

Like notions of what “Beautiful Human” means—the ancient Greeks admired a unibrow and seventeenth century Parisians prized a double chin (and both are more ‘natural’ than our current expectations of a plucked forehead and a timely jawlift)—“Beautiful Nature” also shifts in the cultural winds, towards what society views as important, as precious.

Thus the paeans to philosophy in the eighteenth century garden, and the paens to ecology in ours.  The more we view the wild as precious, the more we seek to create it.  Reverend Spence might not recognize the forms, but he would surely be in comity with the means, because the 21st century garden above still follows his rules:

4.  Assist or correct the general character of the ground
5.  Conceal any disagreeable object
6.  Open a view to whatever is agreeable (n.b. Spence would definitely have taken out that middle tree)
8.  Conceal the bounds of your garden everywhere
10.  Contrive the outer parts to unite well with the country around them

Is a carefully constructed rock bridge more 'natural', more wild, than a shell-encrusted grotto?  No, yet I don't think that's a bad thing.  Defining a garden style as particularly ‘natural’ has frequently been a way to scorn previous styles by attaching to them the scurrilous ‘unnatural'.  Horrors!  But all designed landscapes are places of artifice.  Even if (especially if?) they're made of weeds.

The award-winning 2009 'Crack Garden' by CMG Architecture featuring aesthetically pleasing weeds.
 Only in our time would this be considered beautiful.

Make no doubt about it, these weeds are carefully pruned and controlled...and quite unnatural.  How we achieve our imitation of wild and beautiful nature is always a subject of debate.  William Robinson’s 1870 The Wild Garden (available in its entirety on google books)  is currently having a resurgence of popularity, but it’s appropriate to question his enthusiastic championing for introducing hardy exotics into native plant areas. Frederick Law Olmsted, that great 'constructor of nature' followed Robinson's ideas, but botanist Charles Sprague Sargent disagreed so fiercely that he demanded that 'his' side of the Boston riverway project be planted only with natives in direct challenge to FLO's side, which mixed in exotics.  And I get snippy about the faddish ‘prairie garden’ of European descent, because it doesn't look like real prairie to this native; just like an English perennial bed in a grassy dress.

"Beautiful Nature" c. 1870:  the frontispiece of William Robinson's The Wild Garden

I love 'wild gardens', and my own landscape is wild-ish more by default than by pure intent.  But I also want to continue to see other forms of created nature.  On this debate, we must let the Reverend Spence have the final word.  His own landscape had a kitchen garden, and a fruit orchard, and a grassy meadow 'dashed with trees' and sandy paths for walking and flowering evergreens and a long view of the hills.  "Variety" he said, summed it up.  "Study variety in all things."
 
[Sources:  Reverend Spence's list can be found in Ann Leighton's American Gardens in the Eighteenth Century" or in The Genius of the Place:  the English Landscape Garden 1620-1820 edited by John Dixon Hunt and Peter Willis.  The lattter also contains the description of Spence's garden.  Both should be in any serious garden historian's library.   The best discussion of the concept of the wild garden in the 20th Century is Nature and Ideology: Natural Garden Design in the Twentieth Century, Volume 18 in the Dumbarton Oaks series, edited by  Joachim Wolschke-Bulmahn.  It's an excellent scholarly overview, though expensive, and I found the reference to the dispute between Olmsted and Sprague there.   The best wild gardener, for my money, was Jens Jensen, about whom we'll talk more in the future.   And in the interest of full disclosure, this post has been prompted by a conversation with House Beautiful magazine. Which is good, because it has gotten me posting again.]