su libro
the genius of the place A range of books offers new insight gleaned from old ways, modern gardening tips, and intimate glimpses into Santa Fe’s literary and bohemian heydays.
By Charles C. Poling
This article first appeared in Spring II 07 Su Casa
Canyon Gardens: The Ancient Pueblo Landscapes of the American Southwest, edited by V. B. Price and Baker H. Morrow, University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque, 264 pages, hardback, $34.95
Two of New Mexico’s best writers, thinkers, and teachers about landscape—V. B. Price and Baker H. Morrow—have joined forces to assemble a far-reaching reader that focuses sharply on the lessons left behind like runes on the earth by the ancient inhabitants of the Southwest. Canyon Gardens gleans deep wisdom from the Ancestral Puebloan’s experience of adapting to this mostly desert place while pointing out our own culture’s failure to live in harmony with nature. More than a critique, though, this fine book offers both inspiration and guidance for mending our ways and diminishing our environmental impacts.
A fellow of the American Society of Landscape Architects, Morrow is widely known for his research and writings into Ancestral Puebloan landscapes, his leadership in establishing the University of New Mexico master’s degree program in landscape architecture, and his role in creating the state registration for landscape architects based upon the national standard. Price’s career spans a wide spectrum of writing and literary achievements, from co-founding the late, lamented Century magazine, to books of poetry, a novel, a regular column in the Albuquerque Tribune, books on Chaco Canyon—the list goes on. He also contributes to Su Casa (when we can get him!).
While the subtitle refers to “ancient” landscapes, Price loses no time in his prologue establishing a forward-leaning agenda: “In this anthology . . . we are more interested in the future than the past, emphasizing the relevance of ancient landscape design and horticultural practices for contemporary builders and architects, and their clients.” (That’s us, folks!)
Compiling essays from 10 other scholars of pre-Columbian settlement, architecture, landscape design, horticulture, and Hispanic settlement, Price and Morrow have organized these writings into two parts. Part One, “Landscape and Garden in the Land of the Ancestral Puebloans,” delves into the Native American (and in one piece, pre-Pueblo Revolt Hispanic) civilization and its uses of the landscape and interaction with the environment. Part Two, “The Influence of the Ancestral Puebloan Landscape in our Own Time,” includes seven pieces examining how we have sometimes learned, sometimes ignored the knowledge these people gained in their millennia-long struggle to survive here. In fact, Canyon Gardens continually if implicitly emphasizes our temporally shallow experience base in the Southwest compared to these earlier cultures.
The tenor of the book veers toward academic. Some of the contributions assume an audience already informed about Ancestral Puebloan (once called Anasazi) society and the tools, techniques, and terminology of archaeology. My casual, amateur interest and one college-level course (taught by the unforgettable archaeologist Linda Cordell) were enough to keep the text readable from my lay perspective. With an acknowledged debt to the seminal landscape architecture writer J. B. Jackson, Canyon Gardens adds to the body of literature calling for a reevaluation of American attitudes toward nature.
For an indication of the spread of subject matter, consider the movement from Morrow’s study of berry gardens near present-day Mountainair, New Mexico, to Carol B. Brandt’s examination of ancient seeds as a way to unlock the “text” of the landscape and Mary Beath’s apt use of Zuni maize as a lens for comparative culture study. Then consider architect Anthony Anella’s rumination on the ideological gulf separating Antoine Predock’s design for the famous La Luz condominiums on Albuquerque’s Westside and the River’s Edge subdivisions in Rio Rancho. Not content to merely criticize, Anella follows up with a strategy for doing something different: conservation land planning, using the sieve-mapping technique to sift out environmentally unfit sites for homes and retain the best places to build with a healthy landscape in mind.
In the context of the later chapters, like Anella’s, it becomes clear why the editors chose the earlier, more traditional archaeological essays: they create a context for thinking about our own impacts on the land. How might a future archaeologist interpret the physical remnants of our civilization? And what harsh judgments about our survivability might they reveal to the cold eye of future science? The fear is that we’ll look like Chaco Canyon: deserted, desolate, a victim of its own hubris, which led to “raw, uncontrolled growth” and its own eventual demise, as David E. Stuart points out in his essay, “The Chaco Ancestral Puebloans, Lessons Learned.”
Canyon Gardens represents the best kind of interdisciplinary inquiry, one that seeks to break down not only the barriers between parallel yet often unrelated professions (architecture and archaeology, for instance) but also the prejudices of thinking that stymie problem solving. What’s the problem? How to survive in a land (on a planet?) of limited resources—or more pointedly, developing sustainability as a cultural value to ensure our survival.
In his own chapter “Landscape and Survival,” Price synthesizes the insights presented by the contributors, seeking ways to incorporate ancient wisdom—“know your place,” in the deepest sense—with modern occupation of the desert Southwest. An overarching message in Canyon Gardens might best be captured by quoting pioneering conservationist (and onetime New Mexican) Aldo Leopold, who in the 1940s called for a “land ethic”—that is, a value system based on respect for nature, even oneness with it. That would be a shift from our present relationship toward land and nature, which brings us privileges but no obligations, as Anella suggests. Instead, he continues, land conservation can be successfully applied—and marketed—as a “profit-making principle of enlightened development”—certainly a step in the sustainable direction.
Price offers a design agenda within the larger architectural movement of New Urbanism. Drawing on the Ancestral Puebloan lessons, he suggests eight principles that should influence growth and development, including “sunlight,” “site protection” from the elements, “encircle” (use architecture to protect and nurture), “landscape as guide” (sieve mapping), “waste not water,” and “culture and landscape” (it’s that “genius of the place” thing).
“We have a model of sustainability right under our noses, our cultural neighbors who have survived here in one form or another for more than two thousand years,” Price writes.
How did they do it? Techniques and technologies aside, the native cultures succeeded, Canyon Gardens insists, because they considered humans as integral and inseparable from nature. In her essay “Conflicting Landscape Values,” Santa Clara Pueblo art historian and author Rina Swentzell writes, “Pueblo people believe that the primary and most important relationship for humans is with the land, the natural environment, and the cosmos, which in the Pueblo world are synonymous. Humans exist within the cosmos and are an integral part of the functioning of the earth community.”
Santa Fe Bohemia: The Art Colony, 1964–1980, by Eli Levin, Sunstone Press, Santa Fe, 307 pages, black-and-white photos and illustrations, hardback, $29.95 (paperback, $24.95).
For generations now, Santa Fe has capitalized on its reputation as an artists’ haven, far enough from the metropolitan art capitals to stimulate fresh creativity, exotic enough to provoke the imagination, and small enough to brew a social ferment of artists, wannabes, groupies, dealers, gallery owners, and acquisition-minded tourists. With all the press Santa Fe still earns as a mega-buck art market, it’s easy to forget that compelling art was once not only bought and sold but actually created here, by real people who lived in adobe dives, warehouse apartments, or even elegantly rustic estates—doing art.
Eli Levin remembers. And how! In this at times cranky, at times charming, at times scathing, at times downright loving memoir, Levin briskly recalls Santa Fe’s rebirth as an art colony from the mid-1960s to 1980. After its peak during the years of the Cinco Pintores earlier in the 20th century, Santa Fe had begun to unravel as an art colony, as tastes and styles shifted away from the finely crafted modernism and realism of the original painterly crowd. As Levin puts it, the older artists either gave up, moved away, or—probably worst of all—receded into the twilight.
Levin had the good sense and good timing to arrive when a new tide was lifting the Santa Fe art world again, and he would become a major player in this nueva bohemia. He reminisces charmingly about arriving in Santa Fe in June 1964. Puttering around Canyon Road (a dirt lane back then), he wandered into Claude’s bar, where he in one afternoon scored a job as a bartender and made a connection for a rental apartment. Work and digs arranged, Levin was ready for the bohemian life.
With considerable understatement, Levin writes, “Canyon Road at that time was an insular community.” From his stories, you’d think it was Peyton Place. You need a score card to keep up with who was zooming who. Organized into scattershot chapters on this artist and that, Santa Fe Bohemia leaps from one character to the next in a collage of impressions, opinions, and anecdotes—all highly entertaining, from the politics of art to surreal scenes of not-so-everyday life. Who knew artists got so wild and crazy?
And Levin doesn’t spare himself. At times he plays a central role in the proceedings, whether he’s bartending at Claude’s when a female painter flings her partner into the bandstand, to ruinous result, or organizing an auction at the Santa Fe Armory, with now-prominent gallery owner Linda Durham acting as auctioneer, assisted by painter Gene Newman.
That Levin was an actor in this bohemian scene gives his memoir an unimpeachable—if highly subjective—credibility. His verbal sketches (as well as his own artwork reproduced on these pages) offer insight into the once famous, the not yet famous, and the never famous peer group he hung out with. Many of them are now stars of the Santa Fe art world; perhaps more have either faded into obscurity or passed away. The dank breath of the Reaper haunts many of these pages, particularly the “where are they now?” postscript, which tells who made it big, who still paints anyhow, and who died.
Levin writes with particular grace and feeling about Louie Ewing, an older painter from the time of the Cinco Pintores, and Arthur Haddock, “one of the last of the old-timers,” both artists who seem to have imprinted in Levin an ethos of how to be a painter with integrity in Santa Fe. In these loving word portraits Levin best conveys the magical sense of community infusing the art world in its second golden age. And while he can be cuttingly funny in his treatments of big-name, big-ego artists, the book is best savored for its calmer moments, when Levin reveals the bonds, shared destinies, and finally diverging paths among a collection of independent artists who briefly cohered into a vibrant art colony.
Literary Pilgrims: The Santa Fe and Taos Writers’ Colonies, 1917–1950, by Lynn Cline, University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque, 184 pages, 31 halftones and two maps, paperback, $18.95..
Like Santa Fe Bohemia, Lynn Cline’s Literary Pilgrims delves into the lives and work of creative people colonizing northern New Mexico, particularly during the early- to mid-20th century. But where Levin’s book is almost gleefully subjective and impressionistic, Cline’s is meticulously researched, thoroughly annotated, formally structured, and crafted with a fine writerly flair. Cline even includes information for the reader to conduct literary walkabouts in Santa Fe and Taos, helping readers tour the former haunts of great writers and literary figures from the past like Mary Austin, Willa Cather, D. H. Lawrence, Mabel Dodge Luhan, Oliver La Farge, and so on.
Cline’s experience writing for newspapers and magazines—including the Santa Fean and the Santa Fe New Mexican—shows in her lucid prose, as she tells pointed anecdotes about these writers without ever becoming professorial and didactic on the one hand or callow and fawning on the other. While whole bookshelves of texts on New Mexico’s painters and artists can be found, the literary past has long been neglected, and this book aims to plug that gap.
Parts one and two of Literary Pilgrims are divided into a chapter each on the major writers associated with Santa Fe and Taos, respectively, through the start of World War II. Part three covers “significant others” like Paul Horgan, Fray Angélico Chávez, and Erna and Harvey Fergusson, whose reputations never soared quite as high as the primary subjects of this book. Cline even gives a brief nod to the more recent literary scene—let’s not forget Ed Abbey, and Cormac McCarthy has set books partially in the New Mexican landscape, writing with considerable authenticity of place.
The early writers like Mary Austin and Mabel Dodge Luhan brought along a strong Romantic sensibility for both the landscape and its inhabitants. Even in the 1920s, the modern world was exerting a dehumanizing influence on American life, and many of these writers found an antidote in the calming social rhythms, vast landscape, and personal freedoms available here. That’s a myth as old as the notion of “America” for those of European descent, the place as a rediscovered Eden where the new Adam (or Eve, as the case may be) is reborn.
For some of these writers, that opportunity resided in the landscape itself. Willa Cather saw the landscape as a catalyst for personal transformation—though she chose not to live here. Others sought renewal among the Native Americans. Mabel Dodge Luhan, who famously married Tony Lujan of Taos Pueblo (and changed their name to Luhan so her eastern friends could pronounce it) imagined a more elemental life here. For her, Taos was a mystical place, offering a new way of life in a new world, “strange and terrible and sweet.” (One can only imagine how the workaday locals felt, if they ever stumbled across these words in print.)
During a ceremony at Santo Domingo Pueblo, Luhan had an epiphany: “Ideas here might clothe themselves in form and flesh, and word symbols change into pictured, living realities.” The Indians, she thought, could “reveal the ‘power of life’ to white culture,” Cline writes, quoting Luhan. This is Rousseau’s Noble Savage all over again. If you don’t think the myth still grips American culture, browse a few Santa Fe galleries. In D. H. Lawrence’s scathing words, the Southwest had become “the great playground of the White American.”
Still, Luhan and many of the other Taos and Santa Fe writers banded together to lobby against the Bursum Bill, which would have stripped many of the Pueblo people of their land. Thanks partly to their efforts, the bill died in Congress.
It’s easy to tease these deceased émigrés to New Mexico. In the old photos, decked out in full cowboy regalia or posed horseback, a palpable earnestness nearly balances the pretense: who can’t relate to the dream of transplanting to an exotic location and adopting not only a new way of living, but a new way of being, a new identity? Yet the fact is, New Mexico has long inspired great writers to compose great writing. Mary Austin established a prose genre still in practice today: a feminist, Southwestern, poetic Thoreauvianism. Willa Cather, whose Death Comes for the Archbishop is an absolute must-read for anyone living in New Mexico, stands tall as one of America’s great novelists of the early 20th century. Oliver La Farge, who developed such a deep understanding of Native American culture that the federal government asked him to help the Hopi write a constitution, won the Pulitzer in 1930 for his Navajo love story Laughing Boy. It’s not too hard to connect the dots to Tony Hillerman’s hugely successful, culturally astute Joe Leaphorn/Jim Chee mysteries.
Novelist Frank Waters also wrote about Indians, persuasively and with sensitivity. Often called “America’s greatest unknown writer,” as Cline notes, Waters went beyond the Romantic pantheism of some regional writers who sought transcendence in the landscape, instead finding universal interconnectedness “within ourselves.”
These themes of spirituality, transcendence, and redemption in the native landscape and cultures run wide, strong, and long throughout New Mexico literature, among Anglo, Native American, and Hispanic authors alike, infusing the work with a particularly poignant savor.
Of course, the literary pilgrimage to New Mexico has never really ended, with luminaries like John Nichols moving here in the hippie era, home-grown authors like Leslie Marmon Silko and Rudolfo Anaya, transplants—but barely—like N. Scott Momaday and Hillerman, and more recent voices like Denise Chávez reaffirming New Mexico as a potent source of literary inspiration. Cline’s Literary Pilgrims is a fine introduction to the writers—and their work—who inhabited the Taos and Santa Fe literary colonies in their prewar heyday. If you enjoy such literature, as you read Literary Pilgrims you’ll find yourself jotting down an ever-lengthening list of books to buy.
Cutting Edge Gardening in the Intermountain West, by Marcia Tatroe,
photography by Charles Mann, Johnson Books, Boulder, Colorado, 224 pages, softcover, $29.95.
Cutting Edge Gardening in the Intermountain West is a comprehensive guide to the art and science of gardening in the hot and cold, mostly arid region stretching in sight of mountains roughly from northern New Mexico to Alberta, Canada. That’s quite varying terrain, but almost everywhere in it you’ll find, say, cactus and sagebrush growing nearby. After moving to Colorado in 1987, Tatroe “realized that this cloudless, dramatic, and dynamic landscape demanded a different sort of garden, one that reflects the unparalleled natural beauty that surrounds.” And while xeric means one thing in Denver and another in Albuquerque, “learning to garden with less water has become the catalyst for creating a new garden aesthetic.” (Rest assured that aesthetic doesn’t rely on acres of “Santa Fe brown” gravel strewn from sidewalk to stoop.)
As any photographer around here will tell you, nobody catches that aesthetic on film better than Charles Mann, who shot this book and whose photos regularly grace our In the Garden pages, as well as a variety of features (like this issue’s outdoor living feature). A gardener himself, Mann relates to plants with the intimacy of long, close familiarity, which imbues many of his horticultural pictures the quality of portraiture.
For her part, Tatroe writes from considerable experience as well. She moves easily from engaging first-person scene-setting to generalized principle to specific recommendation, all in just a few paragraphs. That makes this an easy book to dip or dive into. As the title suggests, Tatroe advocates for gardens that reflect the local landscape, a design approach slow to catch on in much of the region, where the English garden remains a Platonic ideal in the mind of many a water-hogging suburbanite. While xeric horticulture figures into Cutting Edge Gardening, there’s plenty of irrigating going on in these pages, presumably of the drip not random-spray variety.
Tatroe calls for regionalism in the garden, a “combination of clues that tells us that a particular garden or landscape belongs here.” One big clue is a diverse palette: in this region where “even the soils are polychromatic,” why stick to green, or even grass?
Beyond its philosophy, Cutting Edge Gardening offers scads of practical advice and information: plant lists, charts, tables, and an exhaustive index that helps you find a particular plant in the text or a photo. And yes, what photos! From tremendous landscape views to confidential tête-à-têtes with the most delicate blossoms, Mann’s pictures will bring you back to this book time and time again, rekindling your passion for gardening anew.