The Garden Variety project is
a series of three art element markers commissioned by the
Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority for the Hostetter,
Penetencia Creek and Alum Rock Park and Ride Facilities
for the Capitol Light Rail Project.
With its mild climate
and fertile soil, California is an ideal growing environment
for almost every type of plant family. In a typical California
garden, it is common to see many plant species of diverse
origins coexisting and flourishing side by side. Such is
my observation of the gardens along Capitol Avenue and by
extension the communities of Hostetter, Penetencia Creek
and Alum Rock. Conspicuous cultural diversity and variety
is thriving in these neighborhoods.
When we look at a garden, do we see
nature or culture? Author J.B. Jackson would answer, “Landscape
is history made visible.” This is especially evident
in the existing ghost orchards which are a remnant of the
not-too-distant past. The landscape has always been shaped
and molded by the regional needs and desires of its temporary
occupants. The vernacular gardens within these diverse communities
are the source of inspiration for Garden Variety.
We are all victims, whether
we know it or not, of a way of thinking that sets the
city apart from any other kind of environment. At the
root of this confusion is one single error: the error
which proclaims that nature is something outside of
us, something green which we can perhaps enjoy as a
spectacle or examine for future exploitation, but which
is only distantly related to us. Nature, thus defined,
belongs in the country and is all but totally excluded
from the city; hence the oft-repeated outcry that urban
man is alienated from it. Nature is actually omnipresent
in the city: in the city’s climate, topography
and vegetation, and we are in fact surrounded by an
impalpable or invisible landscape of spaces and color
and sound and movement and temperature, in the city
no less than in the country.
J.B. Jackson
