Dog-gone BLOGGER!

How many blogs could a dogged blogger blog,
if a dog-gone blogger didn't get clogged?

As 2011 closes out and 2012 begins, this is the question I am asking myself.  I've committed myself to blogging on three sites besides my own.  My loyalties are to all four.  Some might argue that my personal site should take precedence over my work-related blogs.

I don't see it that way.  I instigated the other three blogs; thinking we were missing the boat(or the blog) at work.  I hate leaving any stone unturned.  We were not giving ourselves, our employees and volunteers a chance to have their say.  I am supposed to pick up the slack, when there is no one else to shovel another load of words into cyberspace.

Over the last two years, I have become more facile at writing blogs.  I used to write them in MSWord, panic over punctuation, agonize about an opening sentence = DRIVE MYSELF NUTS.

But, no more.  I've graduated.  I write directly into blogger, compose in my head, and surprisingly I'm more content.  This is a pretty good way to kick off 2012, even with three other blogs looming in the future.

LIVE IN 2012:
ricepaddyrandalls
learninggardenrandalls
gardensrandalls

All the best

Happy
Holidays
Looking forward to writing
more blogs in 2012.
Thanks for reading.

The DOT Above the EYE

 Hats:  An Anthology by Stephen Jones:  Newel post as you go upstairs to the exhibition.

The Hatmaker's Muse
Moderated by Phyllis Magidson
Bard Graduate CenterThursday, December 15, 2011

Lola Ehrlich
Albertus Swanpoel
Patricia Underwood

Waiting around for a lecture or panel discussion to begin is usually pretty boring.  Last night was different.  Almost everyone who came to the Bard Graduate Center was wearing a hat.  Not just any hat, but a hat to remember.  

It turns out that although hats have gone out of fashion (at least in this country) there is a rarefied group of people that still make hats and wear them.  They filled the room at Bard last night. 

What is the difference between a milliner and a hatter?
A milliner makes one-of-a-kind hats and a hatter makes hats that can be reproduced.

I don't look good in hats and therefore, I never wear them.  I've always thought it was the shape of my face that was antithetical to wearing a hat.  Last night changed my mind on this point. 

Lola Ehrlich:  A hat is a fierce and dangerous accessory.  When a woman puts on a hat, her personality is transformed.  Like the perfect perfume or perfect mate; a hat is a seductive accessory.  Choose your hat in proportion to your hips. 

Patricia Underwood:  It's the frame:  The theater:  It's mysterious.  When the hairdresser became more important, the hat became less important.  In order to sell a hat, you need a salesperson. Stores don't want to devote a salesperson to selling hats.  How many pairs of sunglasses can be placed in the same space as one hat?

Albertus Swanepoel:  My client is not hip or cool.  They want something modern and wearable.  I believe the best hat looks like it's been worn.  It's part of you.  A hat can enhance your attitude.

The stars were aligned at this event:  A moderator with good questions,  3 panelists with plenty to say, and an audience with the ultimate fashion accessory, a great hat.

The last question of the evening:  How do you feel about the baseball cap?
Lola Ehrlich:  It's unfortunate we are not in the baseball cap business.  We would all be rich.

All of the above photos by Peter Mauss.  All photos are copyrighted. 
Please contact Phyllis Odessey for permission to use any of the above photographs.
Everyone in the photos was sitting in the audience at Bard Graduate Center.

True GRID

Broadway Boogie Woogie by Mondrian
The Greatest GRID:
Master Plan of Manhattan
1811-2011

Unfinished GRID:

Design Speculations
for Manhattan

Museum of the City of New York
December 6, 2011 - April 15, 2012

I am not a map person.  There is nothing I like less than walking around a city with my nose in a map.  The grid must have been invented for people like me.  It makes navigating your way around New York so easy. 

The Architecture League and The Museum of the City of New York have organized two great shows.  The Greatest Grid is a celebration of the grid; full of maps when maps were works of art; historical photos of the city and a brilliant exhibition installation.  Upstairs, is another show, Unfinished Grid, which showcases the 8 winning proposals from Call for Ideas that deal with the future of the grid.

On Saturday, December 10, Ken Smith, Amale Andraos and Mark Robbins and Gregory Wessner discussed Call for Ideas and the questions raised by the competition.


Wessner opened with What makes the Manhattan grid so special?
Andraos:  The grid allows each lot to become expressive on its own.

Smith:  The great moments in the city are the non-grid spaces: like the Flat Iron Building.  Broadway breaks the grid.  It's a cow path.  This is what makes the grid livable. 

The grid seems inevitable today.  How else could NYC be organized?  How would you get from east to west, north to south so easily?  It's unimaginable.  As the panel pointed out the grid is an egalitarian ideology.

 What do 8 entries add to a grid that works so perfectly?

For me there were two interesting ideas.  NYCity2 (Fotis Sagonas, Ioannis Oikonomou) think digital technologies can be harnessed to "help New Yorkers play a more engaged and vital role in shaping the future of the city?...  Residents upload their wishes and desires for their block, neighborhood or the city as a whole to an online platform."  This new grid is shaped by the city's inhabitants.  Do we trust our neighbors to create a livable city?

Tabula Fluxus (Group Han Associates) begins with the obvious:  the city is becoming ever more crowded.  A new horizontal grid above the existing verticality is the answer.  How do you get up there...you use the voids in the grid.

 For me, the grid is my true north..my compass..my om. Good luck to anyone who messes with it.

The DARKEST DAMPEST Place on earth!

LADY LONDONDERRY'S
Enduring Legacy at

Mount Stewart

The Royal Oak Foundation
Michael Buffin
Gardens and Park  Adviser at The National Trust
for Southeast England and Northern Ireland
December 6, 2011

Who would you seek advice from
if you wanted to create 90 acres of gardens?
Lady Londonderry consulted no one.

Mike Buffin opened with "I am going to tell you a story." For me that is the perfect way to begin any lecture.  I am always ready for a good tale. 

Lady Londonderry (Edith Vane-Tempest-Stewart, Marchioness of Londonderry)  was "very rich, extremely talented and had no formal training as a garden designer."  Yet, her gardens at Mount Stewart are a world heritage site and considered one of the great gardens in the British Isles.

Lady Londonderry collected plants like some people collect stamps. Some might have considered her an amateur, but she was an expert plantsman.   Buffin was lucky enough to have access to her meticulous garden journals containing voluminous documentation of her obsessive compulsive purchases, including 170,000 rare purple tulips. The Marchioness was a hoarder of rare and tender plants from all over the world.

Although she grew up in the 4th wealthiest family in the UK, she was often mistaken for one of the gardeners.  Listening to Mike Buffin, I wanted to know how this socialite became so enamored of gardening.  Trying to get at the underneath of things must be part of the motivation for those who write biographies. I was grasping for clues.  Was it that Lady Londonderry's  husband was cajoled into marrying her by the Prince of Wales.  Or the fact that the climate at Mount Stewart suited every tropical plant under the sun, but the SUN hardly ever shines in that part of Northern Ireland.  Gardening is known to lift the spirit, maybe it did for Marchioness.     

It was the fashion to change bedding out schemes in Lady Londonderry's era.  In the case of the gardens at Mount Stewart, there might have been a different reason for this constant reconfiguring and planting of gardens. According to Buffin, rose bushes grew to be the size of trees.  The extremely mild climate combined with very high rainfall, caused everything to grew so quickly that plants just got too big too fast.  That is a problem, I wouldn't mind having.   

I don't know why the Marchioness just kept going, creating one garden after another, buying more and more plants, moving this tree from here to there.  It might be the same reason all gardeners do it.  We can't help ourselves.  There is always another garden to make.

GARDENS AT
MOUNT STEWART

Italian Garden
Sunk Garden
Maiori Garden
Dodo Terrace
Spanish Garden
Shamrock Garden
Rhododendron Wood
Lady's Walk
Jubilee Avenue
Memorial Glade
Sea Plantation on the shore Strangford Lough
Ti Nan Org (burial ground)


Mount Stewart
Portaferry Road
Newtonards
BT22 2AD
Ireland

http://beta.nationaltrust.org.uk/mount-stewart/