Sister Arts: Gardens, Poems, Art, Community

"Not Afraid of Ikea:" Jason and Mike's Home and Garden

It's especially fun to write about the home Jason Craft and Mike Craigue share on East Side Drive, because Jason is the whole reason I started this blog.  Jason and I met when he was a grad student in the English department in the 1990s.  He left academia and stayed in Austin, and we've kept in touch over the years.  About six months ago, I contacted Jason and asked him for some professional help.  He's been a blogger and website designer and other things I can't even name over the years (he's now a software developer) and he was the one person I could think of who could help me figure out:  with three books coming out in one year (which you, dear reader, can find here, here and, in January 2012, here), do I need my own website?  No, Jason said.  What you need is a blog, and you need to post to it EVERY TWO DAYS for SIX MONTHS.  So here we are.  Such is the power of Jason.

When Jason and Mike moved into the house in 1997, the area was, shall we say, affordable.  "Have you seen The Last Days of the San Jose?"  they asked me.  I haven't, but remember South Congress in the 1990s--no business going on after 5 p.m. except drugs and prostitution.  They said their house was "a shack" when they moved in; now it's a polished gem set in an inviting, well-used front and back garden.

Inside, the 1700-square-foot house is colorful and inviting.  Almost everything Jason and Mike showed me they credited to a friend or family member.  The beautiful curved glass-brick entry piece was suggested by their friend Mark, whom they call "Markitecht," apparently because he is an architect.  His name came up a lot.

Markitecht is also responsible for the beautiful built-ins

that make the relatively small space so functional.  Jason admits to getting "nervous" when things get messy and says that built-in storage areas calm him down.  The couple credit their friends Jonathan and Billie Jo with the color scheme, a different value of the same teal/turquoise color on every wall:

Here Jason shows me another important influence, Mike's cousin Hazel Kight-Witham, a California artist and writer who has given them several of her prints. 

Jason's mother Donna also loves to buy them art.  The pieces they display range pleasingly from treasured family heirlooms like this needlework motto made by Jason's grandmother Dot, which Jason remembers from visits to her Kentucky home as a little boy,

to the whimsical

and even downright creepy,

a combination I find irresistibly queer.

In the yard, these two big guys are trying to grow some food, mainly tomatoes.

Like all of us, they have to fight the birds and squirrels for them.  They've hung red Christmas balls on the tomato plants and planted a bed of catnip to attract the neighborhood's feral cats into the yard,

but they admit the tomatoes they get to eat are mostly green.  Winter vegetables include lettuce and greens in one of two seasonal beds. 

They enjoy cooking outdoors on one of those cool ceramic eggs,

a gift from Jason's dad and the source of Mike's much-beloved slow-cooked brisket.

There's a nice outdoor dining area on the back porch and they also cook for friends at their "New York-style" Ikea pull-out dining table, which they keep pushed up next to the kitchen island so guests and hosts can visit while the food is being prepared.  The Ikea bar stools they bought "for, like, twelve dollars" years ago as a stop-gap have not been bettered over the years, and indeed, they look great in the beautiful cook's kitchen.  And that, my friends, is why Jason and Mike are not afraid of Ikea.

 

 

Drawing in the Landscape: Rachael Shannon's Lesbian Land

Last summer, I gave a gallery talk at Women and Their Work called "A Brief History of Queer Space," in conjunction with Leah DeVun's exhibition about the Lesbian Land movement of the 1970s and 1980s, "Our Hands on Each Other."  At the time, Leah and I argued in a friendly way about whether or not the practice of lesbians creating communes was dying.  Leah told me that the women in the wilderness and backwoods communities she had visited were concerned about their legacy; either they did not have children, or their children were not interested in going "back to the land."  My point was that while those particular groups of people might be struggling, the concept of lesbian land lived on, both on a large scale, such as the fabled Michigan Womyn's Music Festival, and in smaller-scale experiments in living like Rachael Shannon's small East Side lot, which she refers to as her "land."  I finally got a chance to visit Rachael's land this week, just as she gets ready to leave it to spend two years in Baltimore getting an M.F.A. in Community Arts at the Maryland Institute College of Art.

This mirror leans against the fence near Rachael's outdoor shower.  First at Darcee Douglass's iconic lesbian compound on East Riverside and later as an attender and worker (or "festie") at Michigan, Rachael grew to love showering outdoors and built her own version on East 16th St.

She showers here every morning and says she has never been bothered by or bothered her nieghbors (with whom she is very close)--although she does avoid showering on Friday mornings when the rather high-sitting trash truck rolls by her fence.  (Well, one time she did have a problem with a neighbor, or maybe just a passer-by, who stole the first crop of green pears from her front-yard pear tree.

Her painted response earned her the local nickname The Pear Lady.)

In general, though, Rachael doesn't like hard-and-fast boundaries like fences.  She says she was first attracted to this neighborhood when she bought the house--then "a shack"--in 2002

in part because the unfenced yards flowing from one household to the next reminded her of the small Texas town of Wharton, where her dad grew up.  Rachael's parents and grandparents are all designers, makers, builders, not professionally but as a way of life.  Rachael recently visited her 91-year-old grandfather on the land he visits every day to watch the sunrise and sunset.  He knows the birds, animals and plants on the property and keeps track of them all.  This kind of "piddling and tweaking" is also how Rachael describes her ongoing projects around her land--including planting this sago given to her by her grandfather:

Surrounding Rachael's small, always-in-renovation cottage is a series of other buildings.  Her studio is in the house, and that's where her roommate also lives; Rachel herself sleeps in a trailer,

decorated with flats from this year's Gay by GayGay festival in Austin.  There's also a silo,

currently used for storage but which Rachael ultimately envisions as studio and living space as well.  And here's the bike shed she just built with her dad:

Rachael's love for adding these outbuildings reminds me of a series by iconic lesbian-feminist photographer Tee Corinne that commemmorated the storage tanks and yurts of her Oregon back-to-the-land community.  I wrote a little bit about those photographs in the conclusion to my book.

Rachael's design sense is organic, sensual, curved.  She says there was not much she could do about the squareness of the house--"you just had to work with the box"--but her plantings and outdoor architecture have a rolling, sinuous quality, like Hogarth's "line of beauty".

Rachael calls her design practice "drawing in the landscape,"

and says she is seeking a homey, inviting, yet crafted and intentional feel.  Her garden is a wonderful place to visit.  Rachael will be leaving it in other hands for the next couple of years but she says she's like "a kite on a string"--she'll keep coming back to her Austin land and with the help of her community, it will continue to evolve and provide a home for many.

 

 

Editing the Garden

Growing herbs in the window box outside the kitchen window was a lovely idea, and while they lasted it was great to slide open the window and snip whatever you needed for your recipe.  But that spot gets full sun through the afternoon and ended up being way too hot for such tender plants.  They got burned to a crisp, so I dug them up and relocated them to the front bed where we have a few straggling herbs from last year.

Who knows, they might make it.

I made the requisite Memorial Day trip to Home Depot and bought some moss roses, which look lovely in hanging baskets and are supposed to tolerate full sun.  We'll see if they can stand up to the heat reflected from the window.

I guess heat is not the only thing the window reflects.  I swear, I have been photographed (or as in this case, photographed myself) more often in that red T-shirt I got at SteinMart in Midland than in any other garment I own.

Meanwhile, the potted herbs were doing splendidly so I planted chives and virtually invisible cilantro (it had spent too long unplanted) in a new container.

Looking forward to sprinkling these on grilled fish and vegetables.

In front-bed news, the Starry Eyes flowers we planted in our newly-ameliorated soil just withered up, so Madge put some balloon flowers there:

Hope they last; they are gorgeous.

Did you all see the wonderful article by historian David Blight in today's NYT?  Turns out Memorial Day was first celebrated in 1865 in Charleston, S.C. by thousands of African-Americans who buried the Union dead left behind when whites fled the city.  Very much worth remembering.

How Ruby Saved the Neighborhood and Other Stories from Vic and Neville's Garden

Neville Hoad and Victor McWherter assured me that their garden was "where Queer Gardens meets Grey Gardens."  The large corner lot on Lullwood Road in the Wilshire Woods neighborhood does seem to have two different personalities.  The front yard is an impressive display of lawn that would have made a 1950s dad proud:

In the large, shady back yard, the aesthetic is lush, overgrown, and sensual, with a riot of plants, colors, textures, animals and uses.  "Nature in Central Texas is messy," Neville said.

As you can see, Neville (left) and Vic (right) are among the gardens most attractive features.  And that's Ruby, their Jack Russell/basset hound cross, who along with her sister Harley keeps the yard nicely pocked with holes.  But more about Ruby in a moment.

Neville grew up in Johannesburg, South Africa.  He describes himself as a "vernacular gardener" who "started off trying to plant all the things my colonial grandmothers planted:  camellias, azaleas, roses." He remembers a "huge bouganvillea outside my bedroom window" and says, "the thing that I really miss is a jacaranda tree."

And really, who wouldn't?

When I asked him about the trend toward native plants gardens, he said, "I respect its practicality but I don't like its ideology.  I think gardens should be cosmopolitan, and native gardens are a bit xenophobic."  But along with the English garden flowers he loves, Neville has also planted and come to enjoy colorful natives like Turk's cap, butterfly weed, salvia in many colors, and flowering trees including crepe myrtle and a small but thriving Texas mountain laurel:

Other personal touches in the garden include Geraldine the Giraffe,

a lovely pair of flamingos,

and what Neville calls "the ashtray of shame:"

One reason Neville loves the garden, he says, is because "I smoke."  He doesn't smoke in the house, though, which means a lot of time enjoying one of their two outdoor seating areas.  Does Victor smoke?  "Not officially, and you can put that on the blog." 

But I promised a Ruby story, and here it is.  When the new Mueller development was being planned just across Airport Boulevard from Wilshire Woods, the planners decided that there was not enough room to put the new water pipes down Airport.  They proposed to run them down Ardenwood instead, right past Ruby's house, which Ruby and her neighbors did not appreciate.  One neighbor, an ecologist, did some research and discovered that Wilshire Woods was the last extant strand of post oak savannah in Austin.  Post oak savannah is the only habitat of the endangered Texas red garter snake.

If the neighbors could find a specimen of a red garter snake to prove that it was still living in the area, the plans for digging up Ardenwood would have to be scrapped.  One day Neville was in the yard and saw Ruby looking like she was wearing "a Fu Manchu moustache."  He looked more closely and saw that she was carrying in her mouth a tiny snake with a red stripe.  He took a picture, sent it to the proper authorities, and the pipes now go down Airport.  And that, my friends, is How Ruby Saved the Neighborhood.

 

Hell Alley and other Mueller gardening challenges

Last weekend I had the pleasure of taking a walk around my neighborhood courtesy of the 2011 Mueller Garden Walking Tour.  Gardeners are working miracles in spaces that range from tiny New Urbanist strips of land to generous common areas.  Here are a few highlights.

My down-the-street neighbors at 2049 Antone have done a community service by planting their street-facing fence with beautiful coral vines. 

Because they have a corner, lot, they have more space inside the yard than many:  a long, narrow area that they have transformed into an inviting living space with several landing areas,
flowerbeds and an herb garden,

and, complementing the professional design, some nice DIY touches:

Next door at 2045 Antone, the much smaller yard features built planters that create an attractive circular form for the yard space:

These neighbors made the most of their small yard by planting a thriving vegetable bed on the back alley:

At 4109 Camacho, neighbor Janelle is a master gardener and leader of the Mueller Landscaping Committee.  It shows!  In addition to spectacular front yard views,

Janelle's husband introduced us to "Hell Alley," the strip of land on the side of their property where summer temperatures get above 100 degrees for many days at a time, and the sunshine never stops baking the plants.  The gardeners helpfully posted a list of plants that were working for this challenging setting, including full-sun favorites like salvia gregii:

A very special feature of this garden is the Peggy Martin climbing rose:

This spectacular bloomer attracts bees and has thrived in my neighbors' garden.  This rose is also notable because it was one of the few plants to survive the flood of a Mississippi plantation during Hurricane Katrina; the plantation owner began propogating it and sells cuttings to raise money for hurricane relief. 

One of my favorite gardens was one of the smallest, neighbor Kim's "art project" as she calls her alley experiments at 4116 Camacho. 

Kim had some real challenges to overcome aside from square footage, such as the unsightly air conditioning units blocking her space, which she masked with beautiful morning glories.

Kim has some great collectible plants like this unusual cactus:

But my favorite original touch had to be the shoe holder Kim converted into a vertical bed for herbs:

Although she admits to having been an art major, Kim is modest about her gardening knowledge, saying she learned everything she knows from her neighbor Andy.  Needless to say, I was curious to see Andy's garden, which is at 4109 Camacho, a corner lot facing into the courtyard of the garden homes between Camacho and Scales. 

That's Andy standing with his arms clasped behind his back on the porch.  What you see above is the part of Andy's yard that faces the garden courtyard, so Andy says that against his lawn-hating instincts, he does need to leave some of the original landscaping in place for the benefit of his neighbors who share the common space.  In his side yard, though, he goes wild, and he enjoyed showing us his wide variety of plants:

From DIY artisan to master gardener, Mueller neighbors are keeping Austin weird by keeping it green.  Kudos to the Landscape Committee for organizing this wonderful tour, and to all the gardeners for providing us with such beauty, pleasure and inspiration.

 

China's War on Flowers

My friend Deb Paredez alerted me to an article in the New York Times this week describing the Chinese authorities' crackdown on flowering jasmine. 

After Tunisians dubbed their anti-government uprising earlier this year the Jasmine Revolution, calls went out on Chinese social media that those who wanted to protest government censorship of the Internet and other abuses should stroll silently through the city streets, carrying a jasmine flower.  In response, the government forbade the sale of jasmine.  Of course, many vendors are too busy working to have gotten the memo about what was wrong with their staple commodity, and were confused when the bottom suddenly fell out of the market for China's most iconic flower. 

Rumors abound:  jasmine is said to be contaminated by radiation from Japan, or to contain a poison that is making people sick.  Even those that have heard that jasmine is now seen as a symbol of revolution find the idea silly.  After all, a song about the beauty of the jasmine flower, "Mo Li Hua" (sung here by no other than President Hu Jintao!) is practically China's national anthem, having been sung during the Olympics whenever a Chinese athlete won a medal.  And the China International Jasmine Cultural Festival--cancelled this year--celebrates the ubiquity of the flower in Chinese art, medicine, food, and everyday life.  At a recent festival, one of the biggest stars was singer Song Zuyong, "Beautiful Jasmine Flower."

In fact, jasmine seems like a good symbol of the impossibility of ever completely repressing the human spirit.  Despite offical bans on buying or selling the flower, the Times reports that with prices so low, many Chinese still could not resist buying jasmine.  You can't keep a good plant down.

Mother's Day Garden Tour

Mother's Day is kind of a big deal in our family, since we have not one, not two, but three mothers on site.  Madge's niece and her children came up from Houston to join us for the weekend so we decided to do something special and got tickets for the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center Garden Tour.  Since it was promoted as as Mother's Day event, we thought it was on Sunday.  Turned out to be Saturday, when we had the kids' school festival, closing night of Madge's play, and a wedding to go to, so in the end Barbara, Madge and I only got to visit two gardens.  But they were varied in scale and both inspiring.

First we went to 1008 W. Monroe, a nicely-renovated, modest-sized home in Travis Heights.  The landscapers are Kim Beal and Becca Cealy of Rain Lily Design and Landscaping.  They were both on hand to answer questions.  Kim told me that the previous owners had installed a wooden deck that stuck out halfway across the sloping yard, creating a wet, unusable space under and beyond the structure.  Rain Lily removed all that (as well as a lot of scruffy St. Augustine grass) and installed good drainage, rainwater irrigation barrels, and rock and pebble pathways and steps to allow access to the whole yard. 

The front yard was transformed from a depressing swath of St. Augustine to a native plant garden with interesting textural and color variety.  The buffalo grass was especially lush and gorgeous the day we visited, a wonderful canvas for the palette of purples and soft grey limestone.

The site is quite uneven so the designers used a variety of materials to make walkable pathways

and landing places.

Personal touches like this sculpture by a friend of the owners make the garden homey and unique.

Next we drove to 2604 Stratford Drive, a sumptuous West Lake Hills mansion on 7/10 of an acre overlooking the city.  Glee Ingram Growing Designs had transformed this steep, rocky hillside into a welcoming, beautiful, usable space.  It was spectacular, if still not completely accessible to all--you have to be in good shape to scramble up and down the well-laid out paths, some so steep they are more like ladders.  But there are lovely surprises around every corner, like this water garden at the front door:

Painted exterior walls, like these in the outdoor kitchen

and sculptural elements such as metal fencing, staircases, and a rainwater collection system

by Chris Levack, the artist who also made the spider and plant sculptures at the Mueller prairie greenbelt, punctuated the beautiful natural plantings. Like the Travis Heights property, this one is entirely irrigated by rainwater collection.  I overheard a visitor say every garden on the tour shared this feature.  She asked, "Do you think they're trying to tell us something?"

The descending pools (including a hot tub) and waterfalls were very inviting, like swimming in a combination of the Trevi Fountain and Barton Springs:

Open spaces like this alternate with shady woodland paths that invite exploration.

Seeing these beautiful examples of landscape art was a great start to Mother's Day weekend at the House of Many Moms.

Mueller Prairie Wildflowers

The poet Eileen Myles once told us in a workshop that every poem is a list.  I don't know if every list is a poem, but this list of wildflowers seen in the Mueller prairie greenbelt must come close.  Thanks to neighbors Janelle Dozier and Mary Parker, who compiled this on a one-hour walk.  They note that our prairie greenbelt gets half an inch of irrigation every 30 days during the current drought, so there are more flowers to be seen here than in roadside ditches.  An archive of flowers.

purple prairie clover:

side oats or Grama grass:

Illinois bundleflower:

Englemann's daisy:

Gaillardia or Indian blanket:

bluebonnets:

gumweed:

Maximilian sunflower (multiple flowers per stem):

common sunflower (one flower per stem):

purple prairie verbena:

sow thistle:

Texas thistle:

beggar's tick:

mealy blue sage:

silver-leaf nightshade:

bluets (also known as Quaker ladies!):

horsemint (both this and lemon mint are family mondarda):

lemon mint:

Partridge pea:

scarlet pea:

Texas bindweed:

larkspur (not native--probably from seeds blown from a nearby flowerbed):

primroses:

Shallow Pot Succulents

According to Typepad Help, my recent travails with sideways pictures have to do with a painful interaction between the iPhone and Typepad.  I have saved these photos in a smaller format in the hopes that they will consent to appear right side up.

Madge bought three small succulents for the pot on our backyard table.

Wow, it's sideways.  Okay, we'll have to try another fix.  In the meantime, these are:  Aloe vera

whose sap is of course great for cuts, burns, and other medical uses;

Gymnocalycium mihanovichii "Hibotan" (I kid you not):

and Devils' Tongue Barrel Cactus:

Madge was attracted to the barrel cactus by its beautiful bloom.  Guess what!  When she got it home, it turned out that Home Depot and GLUED ON an ARTIFICIAL FLOWER to sell the plant!  It doesn't bloom until October or November.  Madge performed surgery and here's our unadorned plant, waiting to bloom at the proper time (and probably sideways):

Backyard Herbs and Flowers

We have not yet managed to achieve a full-on vegetable bed on our tiny Mueller yardage, so our stop-gap is that echt-urban garden, the pot. 

Umm, not sure why you have to tip your head to the left to see this, but do so please.  This is our very healthy crop of rosemary, basil and mint.  Last year I learned that with basil and mint it's very important to harvest from the bottom of the stem to encourage new growth.  That has been great for the health of these plants. 

Madge and Barbara picked up marjoram, Greek oregano and thyme one day when Madge was making a Mediterranean feast for the teacher lunch at school

In the background you can see the kitchen windowsill, where Max keeps his prized Venus flytrap.  The other pot (right) is a catnip we are going to plant out front for Ruby and Toby.

If this picture looks a little posed

it's because Milo actually does not usually help water the begonias and impatiens in this pot.  He sure decorates a photograph though.  And here is Blue, as usual inserting his beloved ball into the picture.

Okay, time to google Typepad and find out how to turn these pictures around!