Philip’s Garden Blog

Wayne Thiebaud, Street and Shadow, 1982-83, 1996 http://www.crockerartmuseum.org, Oil on linen
35 3/4 in. x 23 3/4 in. Crocker Art Museum, gift of the artist’s family

“Vertiginous.”
This is the way Wayne Thiebaud (the painter, not artist, he insists) describes the landscape of San Francisco. Various dictionaries define this word as having an aspect of great depth, drawing the eye to look downwards. A giddy precipice. Inducing a feeling of vertigo, dizziness or of whirling.  Alfred Hitchcock must have had the same thought in mind when he set his 1958 psychological thriller, Vertigo, in San Francisco. Against the backdrop of a gleaming cityscape James Stewart and Kim Novak play cat and mouse as they plunge their cars over the city’s precipitous streets.

There are other cities with hills and expansive views such as Lisbon and Hong Kong, but it is the imposition of a relentless grid of streets with a willful disregard for the terrain that gives San Francisco its unique quality. No discussion of gardens in San Francisco is complete without considering the city’s topography and layout. Behind the many densely packed wood-framed structures lie hidden small “pocket” gardens. Some are placed well below the dwelling, while others perch precariously above, accessed by winding wooden stairs.

Wayne Thiebaud, 24th Street Intersection, 1977. Oil on canvas, 35 5/8 x 48 in, Private collection, copyright Wayne Thiebaud

Wayne Thiebaud once lived down the street from me in the Potrero Hill neighborhood of San Francisco. I never did get up the nerve to borrow a cup of sugar (or a tube of Alarizon crimson) from him, but it was a source of neighborly pride that he was there, just the same.  Thiebaud’s paintings of mass produced pies and cakes vaulted him into the “pop art” scene of the 1950’s. With paint as thickly applied as the fillings and frostings he depicted, Thiebaud’s work revealed an optimistic regard for his subjects, and did not share the deprecating satirization seen in later pop art.  In 1973 Wayne Thiebaud moved to Potrero Hill, at the time a working class enclave of Russian and Eastern European immigrants. Located on the bay below downtown, this neighborhood of  low rents, sunny fog-free weather and spectacular views from its grid of plunging streets attracted writers such as Alan Ginsberg (who wrote Howl here), Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and the artist Robert Bechtle.

Potrero Hill where Thiebaud Lived is placed directly below the cityscape of downtown.

Inspired by the setting, Thiebaud produced paintings of fantastic cityscapes, with cliffs for streets punctuated by improbable gardens. All were executed using strong, saturated pigments reflecting the brilliant technicolor light of the city.

  
 Wayne Thiebaud, Down Eighteenth Street, 1980 Oil and charcoal on canvas http://hirshhorn.si.edu/

Thiebaud presents not a literal representation of San Francisco, but the idea of the city. Wayne Thiebaud describes the process of painting this series: I’ve always painted out of doors, with a french easel, some in the city, but not very much. So I started from the San Francisco intersection, and I remember one time painting on the street, and a nice man came along, an older fellow, and he stayed longer than most people would, and he watched, and finally he couldn’t resist, and he said, “I’ll be God-dammed. You are painting the intersection.” He couldn’t believe it. so I knew from the beginning I was in trouble.

After painting directly on the street, and making 20 or 30 pictures that way, I felt none of them were very successful. The reason for not feeling that they were delivering on what I had hoped for had to do with some sort of dramatic feeling in this particular San Francisco landscape, and the on-site works weren’t reflecting this. And during this time, I had a chance to talk to the critic Brian O’Doherty, and he was relating to me how Edward Hopper worked on his city pictures. He made lots of different sketches, watercolors, drawings, and then he put them together, like a stage set. So I thought I would try that and see if it might help. I went back to the studio, and began to make a lot of drawings with graphite or charcoal on paper, which I could move around a lot, kind of playing around with them. These drawings seemed to offer more of the visual feeling that was closer to the idea of San Francisco. So, when I returned to painting again, the city itself looked more like the composite drawings I had been making. An that dialogue between what was actually there and what was made up became the basis of the entire series
Wayne Thiebaud: Cityscapes
Exhibition catalog with an interview with the artist by Richard Wollheim. 52 pages with color reproductions. Published by Campbell-Thiebaud Gallery, San Francisco, 1993
http://crownpointpress.stores.yahoo.net/waythiebcit.html

Wayne Thiebaud Apartment Hill, 1980 http://www.nelson-atkins.org/ 

It is the San Francisco neighborhoods whose names end in “Hill” (Potrero Hill, Telegraph Hill, Russian Hill, and Nob Hill) where Thiebaud’s cityscape paintings come to life. In a walk I took recently up and down these hills, the glancing light of the late afternoon sun placed some streets in deep shadow, while the apartment towers on the summits were illuminated like signal beacons.



Tourists crowd six deep before the crooked Lombard street as they will do before the Mona Lisa. I want to ask “Haven’t you seen a winding street before?” Looking closer, however, at these families from India and France, those polite Dutch kids with their blond dreadlocks, I see that everyone is smiling, laughing and appear quite giddy. This is the city as amusement park.  The camera in my hand is nothing unusual on these streets. Indeed, because of it, I fit into the scene.



 As I continue my walk to Nob hill I come to suppose that in a Thiebaud cityscape we are all a brand of tourist, where what is real is so improbable that only the fantastic comes close to reality. San Francisco as depicted by Wayne Thiebaud blurs the concepts of truth and the idea, where the city itself becomes a kind of polychrome dreamscape.

Planted smack dab in the middle of San Francisco’s Civic Center Plaza is a demonstration garden of edible and ornamental plants that has the potential to not only create a radical shift in our food production, but a re-imagining of the garden itself.

“Utopian ideas with real world applications” is the way that artist and designer Amy Franceschini describes her work. While travelling in Ghent in the the east Flanders province of Belgium, Franceschini  discovered that this city underwrote private vegetable gardens as being considered critical for local food supply and the health of the environment.

Amy Franceschini believed that our “centralized” agricultural system led to food production far from urban centers. Not only was this wasteful in fuel, but in turn led to higher prices at the supermarket. Growing produce locally in under-utilized backyards and public lands in urban environments meant that organic practices in food production could be insured. Food and fuel independence in uncertain times is also a national security issue. Inspired, Franceschini turned her sights to that most innovative of American cities, San Francisco.  Joining with Blair Randall of The Garden for the Environment, San Francisco’s non-profit demonstration garden, a pilot project funded by the city of San francisco named Victory Gardens 2008+ was created. This program calls for:

A more active role for cities in shaping agricultural and food policy. This program offers tools, training, & materials for urban dwellers to participate in a city-wide transformation of underutilized backyards, public lands, school yards, and marginal urban sites— turning them into productive growing spaces.  The SF Victory Garden program builds on the successful Victory Garden programs of WWI and WWII but redefines “Victory” in the pressing context of urban sustainability.  “Victory” is growing food at home for increased local food security and reducing the food miles associated with the average American meal.

The city hall gardens inhabit the same site used as a victory garden during WWII. In the 1943 image above, the victory gardens here were utilized more as a demonstration garden, but it inspired an enthusiastic populace to plant victory gardens in Golden Gate Park and throughout the region.Victory gardens throughout the US in the 1940’s accounted for 41% of the national food production!

The City Hall gardens today are sponsored by Slow Food Nation, Seeds of Change who specialize in 100% certified organic, openpollinated seeds, and The Studio for Urban Projects which focuses on art, architecture, ecology, and the public realm to generate projects that re-imagine the urban landscape.

I spoke with Blair Randall,  Victory Gardens 08+ Program Director, about the structure of the planting areas. He explained that, “The raised beds of rich composted topsoil was necessary as the existing soil under the Civic Center Plaza was sandy and low in fertility like many parts of San Francisco. The circular paths between the beds aided in harvesting.”  Drip irrigation, shown with black tubes in the image above, is an integral part of their approach. Water-wise drip irrigation is necessary in an environment which experiences drought and water scarcity. The traditional kind of jet spray irrigation is inefficient and also contributes to powdery mildew in this climate of dry days and foggy nights.

Randall continues, “This also becomes a matter of good public policy for cities with municipal gardens who wish to set a standard of water conservation.”

Bold effects are achieved with contrasting plantings of chartreuse and bronze colored leaves. It is exciting to consider that this new approach to vegetable and edible landscapes has not only environmental benefits, but also innovative aesthetic possibilities.

While strolling through this garden, I could not help but notice a profusion of flowering plants both in their own beds, as well as incorporated within the beds of edible plants. These flowering plants are used to attract pollinators. Featured here are California native plants such as the pink flowering Clarkia amoena, and two species of Baby Blue Eyes, Nemophila menziesii, and Nemophila maculata “baby five spot”

In many home gardens, households struggle between those who have an interest in edible plants, and those for whom it is not a garden without flowers. Traditionally, except for a tidy row of marigolds, flowers were banished from the vegetable patch. Adventurous gardeners may have included the artichoke in the flowering perennial border, but generally an apartheid of species prevailed. In the wholistic approach of  Victory Gardens 08+, both flowering  and edible plants are integral for a healthy ecosystem.

The focus of Victory Gardens 08+ is of course on edible plants, fruits and vegetables. What is striking to me personally is that when plants such as the squash shown above is elevated as a garden feature, considerations of  the plants usefulness as a food source also takes on new meanings. What may have been taken for granted in a plant which provided food in the past, now in this context can be appreciated for its aesthetic, emotional and spiritual qualities.

 The gardens featured here attracted an incredibly large and diverse crowd of people who wanted to experience this place with their families and connect with others. In my last visit to this garden I sat on the straw bales which define the perimeter and had a great time chatting with the people next to me. Watching the huge crowds of people enjoying this garden I saw young people taking in the scene, an Asian grandfather excitedly pointing out plants to his family, gardeners in straw hats, mothers and fathers. It came to me that even though people could certainly visit a community garden to see edible plants, it was the very fact that this garden was placed in our most public of places, the Civic Center Plaza, that created a setting where everyone felt they could participate. Blair Russell  remarked “This garden in this particular setting creates a civic engagement; people of all backgrounds come together here and discuss what kind of city they want to live in.”

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