DryStoneGarden

Thursday while I was down on the peninsula, I passed near a house where I did a small stone project last fall, so I stopped by to check out the planting that the client did afterwards. Pretty nice, and fun to see someone else’s plant choices. There wasn’t a drawing or anything when I did the project, just a request for an 8″ high wall to give a back drop to a low planting of color, and I didn’t know exactly what would go in afterwards. You can’t see so much of the stonework at the moment, but it will reappear as the plants finish their bloom cycles.

The yard had nice trees and shrubs before, but it’s a lot more interesting now. This photo from when I finished the project was in my 2010 wrap-up post.

Green Fire: Aldo Leopold and a Land Ethic for Our Time from Jeannine Richards on Vimeo.

‘A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.’ Aldo Leopold

Last week in Berkeley, there was a showing of Green Fire, a documentary about Aldo Leopold that is making the rounds. The trailer embedded above is a bit slow, but the full length film is engrossing and well worth a viewing. A Sand County Almanac made a big impression on me years ago, but there’s more to Leopold’s story than just that, and the film conveys that same sense of a Leopold as a great conservation thinker. It can’t be overstated how far ahead of his time he was.

Among other highlights, the film has footage of the shack and farm — now a national historic landmark — where he wrote A Sand County Almanac. I remember reading the book, reading about his efforts to rehabilitate the land, and wondering how his conservation efforts there endured after his death. Quite well, apparently, no doubt in part because his children were conservationists too. The photo above is from Wikimedia, this blog has a few more photos of the shack and land, and there’s a slideshow of black and whites at the Aldo Leopold Foundation website for contrast. But you get the best sense of the place by watching the film. The KQED climate blog, reviewing the film, says it will probably be shown on PBS in about a year.