News Flash:
Biomimicry at its best! Inspired by plant processes, scientists are working toward creating home scale power generating systems.
Learning How Plants Split Water to Utilize Solar Energy Inspires Scientists in the Generation of Power
|
|||
I design for long-term viability by creating beautiful places that feed, nurture, invite, and give back: to us, to the soil, the water, the air, and the wild. My work is the vehicle through which I em-power and support individuals, groups, neighbors and comm-unities that are inter-ested in creating resilience and self-sufficiency. Click here to read about my services
|
Yesterday in Phoenix, Arizona, the late-afternoon temperature was 105 degrees with a humidity reading of 5 percent! One hundred and seventy miles to the south and 2,889 feet higher in elevation, our temperature hovered in the low 90’s with humidity in the low teens; thirteen percent to be precise.
This summer’s monsoonal rains became the “nonsoon,” as the long-awaited relief from heat and drought never arrived. I know no person who remembers such a dry summer, though I heard that Cassina’s grandmother, aged 92, remembers a summer such as this.
I was home from school the day the electricity first surged through the network of thick grey wires that wove throughout our house. In this old, old house made of stone and earth, it was impossible to channel a niche for the wires; instead, they lay on the surface, ending in domed brown switches the size and shape of a tea cake.
 Cat, My Daughter, Visits the Old House, Vacant For Forty Years
 Container Doors Have Since Been Painted to Blend in With the Broader Landscape
This 8X8X20 steel shipping container is only visible from the north side of the hill, which faces the house site.  Just Tucked into the Notched Hill, the Container Awaits its Earth Covering When approaching from the road, the container is invisible–you see only the grassy hills, one of which is crowned with a small ventilation chimney, eventually to be crowned with an ornamental weather vane.  Roof Vent, Eventually a Weather Vane Stand
The shipping container has been buried in the hillside to create a hidden… Read More My good fortune to have been born into a world of self-sufficiency (though it was post World War Two) continues to influence my life both personally and professionally. We lived a non-modern life: no flush toilet, no car; no electricity for the first 6 or 7 years, and no road to the farm unless one walked or rode a horse or tractor. Learning began at home with mother and father. Starting at age four I walked (a mile or two) with my sisters to the proverbial two-room schoolhouse with its productive gardens (for school lunches) and its composting toilets. We had our biannual visits to town to see the dentist- an enormous undertaking for my mother. If we were lacking anything we were unaware of it. To this day my sisters and I speak of our lives on the farm at Felin as idyllic. This story of The Harvest….. Read More
It is that time of day when the last bright pinpoint of the setting sun suddenly pops below the mountain’s wide black edge. l track its movement, following this pattern over months, noting which ridge or dip marks this days’ exit. Read More Living an Artful Life is an unrestricted, creative place, wherein creativity is not defined. As a life-long artist and lover of Naure’s extraordinary design, my desire to express resents confinement and always nudges at those boundaries of restraint.
I work with land to create functional, wild spaces, that hold tension between my sense of order and Nature’s innately complex and beautiful systems- the source of my deepest inspiration. It is a relationship that evolves as the land becomes the canvas, in the same way that the blank page is a canvas for externalizing an inner voice.
The canvas captures the essence of a moment in time, whereas the landscape is a constantly-evolving, living entity that carries its own life, where nothing is fixed.
Reflecting on the stationary moments of individual acts of creativity, a series can express shifts and changes over time. I see this in these collage images that I have created. Click on the image below to view full album.
It was the grasshopper invasion of 1999 that sent me hurrying up the road to Sonoita where I had located a family who had an excess of ducks: Indian Runners. Physically appealing with their tan and white patches and distinctive upright posture, I was instantly interested. What fully captivated me was their obvious delight in eating grasshoppers that came into their pastured enclosure. Then there was the clinching piece of information the slipped from John’s lips: “They lay up to three hundred eggs a year.” Done! How much?
Growing up on an old-style farm where ducks were an integral part of that world, you may be led to believe that I knew something about them; though if you know ducks at all, they are more independent than cats. And that is how you want to keep it. A duck that becomes a pet can be bossy- especially if it is a drake. The life of hen ducks is decidedly of the lower pecking order and I know of one woman who did not tolerate that kind of authoritarian bullying. He, the boss-drake, following a close friendship, ended up in her freezer! Read More
The idea for the garden began in 1998 when I returned to the community of Patagonia, Arizona. For more than ten years I had been learning about our industrial agricultural system: its dependence on fossil fuels for fertilizers, pesticides, transport, packaging and more.
 Vacant Land in the Heart of Town,Hard-Packed Earth Full of Broken Glass & Remnants of Road Asphalt Some years earlier, following two personal health crises, I had begun to make the connections between diet and health. A natural evolution followed as I learned more about industrial agriculture and its negative effects on the environment as well as its embedded issues of social justice.
This was more than my body being affected: this was the planet’s body. Our food systems were putting at risk our basic life support system, and what we were eating was not contributing positively to our health either.
An essay by Peter Bahouth (former president of GreenPeace), entitled The Attack of The Killer Tomato, has been the seminal agricultural story for me. Listening to him present this tale at the Bioneers conference in 1993 I realized that I could make a difference through my food choices and that others could too.
In addition there is the fragility of supply: 75% of the winter produce for all of the United States comes to us through the port of entry at Nogales, Arizona. If this port of entry were to close for any reason, say a global pandemic, then there would be serious shortages within the food supply. Read More This morning’s air is fresh at 79 degrees and breezes stir the branches, indicating stronger than normal air movement. Where I write I am protected by a four foot arc-of-a- wall that is about thirty feet long. The wall is akin to an arm draped over shoulders by a sturdy friend, encircling and shielding the embraced one. It invokes feelings of comfort and privacy with an invitation to be outside in this maturing orchard, to be part of the garden rather than outside of it.  Plastered & Painted the Straw Bale Wall Sits on a Good Foundation to Keep its 'Feet' Dry  Rosa Altissimo Trained on Cement Reinforcement Mesh Follows the Arc of the Recycled Satellite Dish
The rich blue and pale purple of the wall echoes the color of the distant mountains, underscoring the wild beauty beyond this garden: this is the clair voyer, the clear view of classic European gardens where the personal is clearly and deliberately connected to the broader landscape.
This is the tessera, the mosaic piece within the whole: the tesserae.
This is the pattern upon which I envision the resilient world of our future, the self-sufficient communities embedded in their big, open spaces. Each garden a productive blend of native plants, food for ourselves, teas, medicinal and culinary herbs as well as plants that feed the soil: the legumes. Space determines the extent of self-sufficiency. Read More |
||
|
Copyright © 2010 Tessera ∞ Tesserae - All Rights Reserved |
|||