Painting
IN A PREVIOUS blog entry, “Clover the Hills and Far Away“, I discussed a style of literature, plays, poetry, and painting that was invented about five hundred years ago in Venice, Italy, known as ‘pastoral’. In this blog entry, Part Two of my exploration into the origins — and prejudices — of the modern landscaping trade, I discuss how the exotic images in these pastoral paintings became the basis for a new movement in terraforming, and an corresponding ideology that has come to eclipse all other belief systems about the relationship between spaces and species.
“LOOK INTO CLOVER LAWNS.” I like it that I’m not the only one raising eco-initiatives at Green Apple. Victor is Lead Hand out in the field, and I’m pushing pixels back at the office, so he handed me the brief: Why the hay are we putting down hardly anything except for green grass? It turns out that, despite their nomenclature, of the two species of grasses that we use with our clients — Kentucky Bluegrass and Sheep’s Fescue — neither of them are native to North America. So why do we keep using them time and time again, by default? For that matter, why are ninety-nine per cent of the people on this continent carpeting their properties with identical kinds of turf, without question? To find out the answer, I decided to do some serious research into the history of horticulture.
