When you find that your soul, your heart, every wisp of inspiration
Every speck of the vast blue sky
And its shining star blossoms
The mountains, the whip-poor-will, and the bluebells
Are all tied together with one cord of rhythm, one cord of joy
One cord of unity, one cord of spirit
Then you shall know that all are but waves in the cosmic sea
CSF
We always were
Always

FOREWORD: EIGHT CONVERSATIONS

BY OBI KAUFMANN

I will gush. When asked by Louesa to write the foreword to this dangerous and monumentally beautiful book, I howled a perfectly contradictory mix of terror and delight. I’ve been bewitched by the magic that is Louesa and her art for years. I identified her long ago as the very best kind of revolutionary, and I signed up. As an intrepid peace punk, Louesa presents a world to her audience that heals as it wounds. In her writing, in her ikebana, and through her punk ethos, she reverses the polarity of so many expectations, and the effect is effortless, aesthetic alchemy in which the silent is transformed into the loud, the ugly is made to be beautiful, and the empty is found to be surprisingly full.

In the weeks that followed being asked to write this, I thrashed like a willow in a windstorm. Was my contribution to this important work going to be a high-minded philosophic essay or something akin to a fever-dream sketch with a possibly tenuous connection? To understand the voice I finally present, let’s begin by examining what had come before. In a published review of Louesa’s previous book, Foraged Flora, coauthored with Sarah Lonsdale in 2016, I wrote a passage that also applies to this book, as both works share common genetics:

This is not an art book like any other. This is not a coffee-table book like any other. There is a universe of beauty laid out here that amounts to something new and ancient, full of love and life (but also of death) that is comfortable to sit with and do nothing, and yet reminds me of everything. It is Zen, but it is rooted in the world of form and growth, reveling in both. It is fine with its contradictions. It thrives there, dynamic and at times angry. This is not a book about flower decoration; this is a book about love, and it can hurt, and it can make all things bare their truth. This is a book about witnessing reality and forcing oneself to be okay with what happens next.

Finally, then, I had to divorce myself from my appreciation of Louesa’s genius and engage with the work itself. What follows in eight paragraphs (written over eight days in the California winter of 2022) is a conversation with the spirit that is Punk Ikebana as a willful agent of its own volition. In this series of poetic meditations, I address punk ikebana as an abstract spirit, a character, a god of time, beauty, and death. The conversation is not direct. I am not writing fiction; I am exploring a metaphor. We move first through what it is to feel anything, as born by the appreciation of punk ikebana. From this particular kind of attention, I present my own practice in the mirror that punk ikebana holds up and what the meaning in beauty actually becomes.

01. ATTENTION

How many senses are there? We divide up the traditional five senses into categories of function . . . but I propose that there is a sixth one as well. We should call it attention, and it exists in the realm of the aesthetic. Together, the senses flow down from their mountain peaks as rivers pregnant with information on their way to join the other liquid senses inside the mind’s vast watershed. Receiving the poetry, can we let them converge—beautiful, tender, and open? Punk ikebana insists on it. Landscapes become bouquets, smells carry memories of old wounds now healed, and you begin to only be able to hear these words by moonlight. Punk ikebana holds mountain faces whispering of antlered trees that were one thing and now become something else. All things are permitted to be all things. Secrets are revealed, and in our sense-making, we are also making sense. We learn that the rivers do not flow over the earth, but the earth moves under the still water. The horizon is a circle of beings holding hands, and your death is their death, and both are illusion. At the great confluence there is one sense, and its name is attention.

02. GRACE

Punk ikebana is the coupling of attention with grace. Grace is turning to the sun to feed on the light. Punk ikebana is a contradiction; in it we are called to participate in a peaceful revolution in which every arrangement becomes a political act. The hours of practice that feed my life when I am most unaware of being at my most aware—painting, hiking, or reading—I am as close as I can be to this core power. I know things that I don’t know otherwise. I see that the current sprawling industry of modern human activity is not where the world presents its most stupendous glory, but that treasure of existence rests in the effortless functions of the natural world. Punk ikebana offers an antidote to the poisoned drumming of industrial fundamentalism’s rhetorical dogma and gives daylight and space to what matters most to me: peace, mental health, family and community stability, the value of skilled work, ecological connectivity and health, and economic and racial justice. Every day in the climate revolution, the anxious decisions like hot rain, keep me guessing at the fantasies that drive the illusory limitlessness of our Faustian economic system. I need punk ikebana because I can’t help but lay awake at night and fear the evil of wasted land and wasted obligation. While I attend to so many hollow duties that could implicate me as not living to my truest calling of serving only the earth, I hear the soil whispering that grace is not punitive. In the first rays of dawn, the old flower exists to attend to its own grace.

03. SILENCE

Punk ikebana has its own relationship to sound. There is silence of a kind. It’s a silence that only exists in a few places on this planet. You find it in the deep heat of the desert, where the air is made of a glass and the wind crawls over the sand. You can find it listening to the new winter mushrooms covered in snow on the edge of the frozen-over creek that wants to crack from any tiny pressure. You can find it in the springtime carpet of flowers turning the hills into an ocean of green, punctuated with distant shocks of purple and orange. Punk ikebana also allows the cries of the hawk to echo and break the reverie; it allows the dam to break, releasing the flood; it allows drums. Between the silence and clamor, might I be just still enough to participate and to receive the transmission of the greater envelope in this precious fold? In this space, I am challenged to see something today. I wish to be open enough to feel the value of the wealth hidden in the sensorial breeze—the breeze that does not blow.

04. TIME

Inside my mountain moment, in a small cabin at the center of the world’s morning light, I reset my diurnal clock to zero. The seconds tick by and hang in the air warmly between the freeze and the thaw of the coming winter day. Renewal is everywhere in a daily ritual that the birds know, revealing themselves to be kindred artists. Outside, trees write quiet calligraphy, and even the snow seems literate. I forget about punk ikebana. My boots growl and demand that I end this breakfast dream, but I hold on as long as I can because each tea-soaked breath holds a world of release. You and I will talk about Mars and last night’s movie, all the while waiting and hoping for the detonation of this intimate, silent bomb exploding into grace, presenting earth and heaven as the zero-sum game of love that they both certainly are.

05. CONSCIOUSNESS

Virginia Woolf said that “A sight, an emotion, creates this wave in the mind, long before it makes words to fit it . . .” And like the tide, the ebb and flow of our capacity to assemble and disassemble sense-knowledge defines the nature of our interaction with the universe. Punk ikebana is the aesthetic vessel capable of arresting the wave for as long as it takes synthesis to override analysis. Finding out more things will not get us to the ethical story of how we live in and with nature’s abundance. There is a subtle and yet complete illumination possible of what Wallace Stevens calls “the instinctive integrations which are the reasons for living” and that punk ikebana, like our own bones, remembers.

06. INTERCONNECTIVITY

In the age of climate breakdown, negotiating the deluge of media-based information while attending to my ability to mediate the existential anxiety that now seems a core facet of my mind’s software is the primary measure of my career, not only as an artist but as a citizen. I am as sure as I am about the beauty of the sunrise that my attention spent on the constant reporting of emergencies; the noise from whatever computer monitor is closest is at least as damaging as it is valuable. Meanwhile, punk ikebana knows what it is and what its limits are. The tree knows how to be beautiful. The self-feeding nature of punk ikebana’s nutrient truths builds inside of a feedback loop not unlike the workings of the global ecosystem—a system of energy that, when unbroken, feels virtually inexhaustible. The interconnectivity of the living world is so complex that it appears and often behaves as one single circuit.

07. BEAUTY

Saint Thomas Aquinas defined beauty as “that which pleases when seen.” Harmoniously composed and displayed botanical arrangements are universally known to please, but the practice of punk ikebana goes much further. It offers a broad and satisfying definition to the philosophical problem of beauty by deconstructing what it means to be alive and what it means to inevitably die in a universe that is everywhere full of immortal information. Punk ikebana is a disruptive, even revolutionary, element that disarms as though quiet contemplation were the only sane response to an insane world. Punk ikebana subverts global paradigms of commodification and the plastic and violent disposability of everything; it opens the body to a moment of plain truth in which the experience of beauty is immediate and nature reclaims its throne.

08. DEATH

Can death be beautiful? Can suffering? A mind flocked in some kind of aesthetic arrest sees those two questions as irrelevant, even ethically irrelevant to the appreciation of the thing at hand. The connection to a purely aesthetic sense, a realm in which the mind does not concern itself with time and ego (which are the material mechanisms of death and suffering), but rather finds eternity and the eternal now to be the very same thing. The divine capacity to even glean a moment, a breath of this vast metaphor must then be the same force of creation across this or any other universe. The eye that opened at the big bang is the same eye that will close upon the heat death of the universe in 1.7 × 10¹⁰⁶ years. And it is inside you, and it exists, and it does not exist.

INTRODUCTION

When I’m asked what punk ikebana means to me, my gut response is . . . I’m not completely sure yet. I do recall friends and colleagues casually referring to my work as “punk ikebana” as far back as 2008. They perhaps saw something new and iconoclastic in my work before I did.

If you ask most people who were or are part of the punk movement to define punk, any kind of punk, maybe even particularly “peace punk,” you’ll find the same sort of answers. The people involved in a movement, any movement really—can rarely define that movement. That effort is left to the critics, the journalists, and other cultural observers. For the rest of us? Let’s never say we have all the answers; let’s keep questioning, asking, probing, and being provocative in the spirit of “do no harm.” I’d call that peace punk.

Thinking about this definition, or lack thereof, has led me to look back at my lifelong relationship to the definitions, titles, labels, and categories where I may have been shelved over the years: waitress, bartender, art student, painter, florist, private chef, author, merchant, public speaker . . . naturalist, hippie, bohemian, preppy, “bourgeois eco” (a funny phrase I just heard recently). None of those have ever seemed a good fit, comfortable in and of themselves.

This train of thought led me led me to Virginia Woolf’s Orlando: A Biography, a story many of us may relate to if we’ve had the experience or feeling of defying definition, codification, or societal norms. I’ve been thinking about codification a great deal lately and the way it is playing out in my life nowadays. How I’m experiencing “punk” is something of a conversation with these concepts: I see you, codification; I see you, rules; I see you, hierarchy; I see the lineage of my practice; and there’s a certain amount of respect, honoring, and riffing on those rules. And alongside this recognition lives that innate impulse to break all those norms, hierarchies, and concrete cultural, human constructs. The “rules,” if you will.

Where this all comes together for me, right now, is that my work’s interface with California and the Pacific Rim lies in the mythos of a land where you can reinvent yourself far from your place of birth, even rewriting the past (for better or worse). And in this atmosphere, it seems silly to me that even in the floral realms, humans feel some need, obligation, habitual impulse to follow the “rules.”

THE HEART OF THE NOVICE

Students have studied ikebana, or kadō, “the way of the flowers,” for centuries. Specific principles and rules have evolved, and, as with all rules, they could be interpreted and/or followed more or less literally. I’m taken with the fact that ikebana is deeply reflective of its culture. Thus, these rules and guidelines could apply equally to floral design and to a life well lived.

“Rules and chance.
Like day and night,
rules and chance are two opposites
like light and darkness
. . .
Rules give us a feeling of security,
geometry helps us understand
structures
to build a world where
we can move around without fear.

Chance is unforeseen
and sometimes terrible
and sometimes happy.
. . .
Rules are born in the mind
rules based on logic
everything can be foreseen.
Rules can be used to plan.
Chance is the consequence
of environmental,
social, and geographic conditions
as they reach our senses.
The smell of eucalyptus,
the shape of a pebble,
the rhythm of waves on the sea.
A rule on its own is boring,
and chance on its own is terrifying.
. . .
The combination of rules and chance
is life, is art,
is imagination, is balance.”
—Bruno Munari, as quoted in Munari’s Books by Giorgio Maffei

The principles and rules for ikebana have developed over its long history with different practitioners and interpretations. Throughout this book, we’ll look at these precepts and guiding principles through any number of lenses, perspectives, and demonstrations. Here are my musings on some key precepts before we begin.

Ikebana must be freed from its fixed location within the home. And this freedom means that the Ikebana must be permitted to look for and find a new place for itself.

And this will have a deep bearing on the feeling of life which we of this day possess. In other words, it means that Ikebana must be a living thing of the present, not only reflecting past traditions but holding promises for the future.

—SŌFŪ TESHIGAHARA
Ikebana

I. SILENCE. In ikebana, this particularly refers to a quiet appreciation of nature, free of noise or idle talk. I agree that to hear more clearly, to see more deeply, we need to learn to quiet the easily distracted “monkey brain,” the self—although I do reject the idea of humans as somehow separate from “nature.” And sometimes it’s fun to gossip while working!

II. MINIMALISM. Here’s where my punk aesthetic comes in. I’m a bit of a rebel and a maximalist more often than not. I do strive for harmony and balance in my compositions always, but I also love the glam, the sexy, the louche, even. That said, the use of negative space is intrinsic to this practice and often a foreign aesthetic concept to Westerners. I lean into both vibes.

III. HARMONIOUS FORM AND LINE. When you gather and glean seasonal and local flora and compose naturally, you will find that harmony comes effortlessly. The longer, deeper, more studied, or more expansive your search becomes, the more treasures you find just outside your doors. Mother Earth contains all of the multitudes where they need to be; there’s no need to fly flora in from anywhere else.

IV. NAMES. One traditional precept of ikebana is to know the names of the flora you use, as naming is a form of respect. For me, this is complicated. I absolutely acknowledge the power of naming something, the inherent respect of saying, “I see you; I know your name and some of who you are.” However, naming is also charged and complex. Do we use the common casual names; do we learn Latin and botanical codification? Where is this species from (often a matter for some debate), and what is it called in its original homeland?

I often speak of flora in inconsistent terms, because that’s how I’ve come to know them. Sometimes the common name rolls more easily off the tongue. This is art and, in the way of art, often an inexact science. Sometimes it’s as simple as, say, preferring the word Nepenthes to describe any one of this genus of over 170 species. Which one should you use in your arrangement? With most choices I lean toward a less literal interpretation. I could prescribe you use only Nepenthes rafflesiana, the Malaysian pitcher plant, but why? Instead, I offer you thoughts on my flora friends under the names by which I have come to love them and encourage you to call them what makes sense to you, always with respect.

V. HUMANITY. In Shinto, everything is interconnected. No matter how we try to quiet the monkey brain, our narratives weave their way into our craft. At the same time, the less we see or feel the human hand in the work, the more sublime I find it. I do honor our ancestors, human and nonhuman, in keeping with Shinto practices (or beliefs).

VI. COMPOSED IN SITU. Start with where you live, where you find yourself now on this earth—in your garden, even if it’s a balcony herb garden. Find a relationship, communion even, with the myriad life forms swirling around our human lives. Start with what’s close at hand, and see how your vision of “place” swirls, expands outward. The further in you go, the larger these realms become.

Let’s take this devotion to place even further. When we bring our newfound or long-loved flora friends into our homes or otherwise carry these gifts inside, the dialogue with place continues. It evolves each time I arrange scented geraniums with the recently discovered wild peonies on our land; or datura and passionflower with an outlier of, say, cactus flower. Each time I compose, I am in dialogue with the room (or any other space): the color story; the textiles; the vessel; the totems; books; art; furniture, even. The arrangement does not exist in a vacuum; it lives, breathes, and communicates with the space as a whole. This is in keeping with the idea of animism: each object, stone, feather, and vessel has a life force. Energy is porous, interconnected, animated, and never static. When we begin to see, feel, and live this way, time and space expand.

VII. RESPECT ALL LIFE, DO NO HARM. In the search for answers, I return again to questions. Here is a list I’d like to proffer, some guiding principles to consider for your practice, posed as questions. The answers will be different for each person, each region, maybe even depending on the time of day. But pondering them helps me to arrive at an ethos, and I encourage you to do the same for yourself. In the pages of this book, I give some of my answers and inspirations. You will find your own.

How do we define local?
How do we define nearby?
How do we define seasonal, let alone micro-season or microclimate?
How do we define organic or biodynamic?
How do we define the all-too-often commodified, marketed, and bastardized sustainability? That’s a puzzle.
How do we define “zero waste”?
How do we define “grown not flown”? That’s an easy one.

Instead of answers, I offer this very simple mantra: if you only forage, glean, or source local and micro-seasonal flora, you’ll have a perfectly symbiotic and harmonious practice, one that is intrinsically whole and abundant, full of more yeses than nos. You will never fall into the design muck of “everything but the kitchen sink.” You will never find yourself struggling to create a coherent aesthetic using a peony from New Zealand, a tulip from Europe, summer flowers from California, and a spray of invasive Pampas grass. They are not meant to sing together. The beauty of companion plants goes deeper than their use in recipes or pest resistance. When we choose to compose in season, in place, the song is effortlessly harmonic.

I’m going to continue creating books with my growing village of creatives, and I’d love nothing more than for each new introduction to include lessons that I’ve learned from the critters that we have recently rescued, adopted, or been chosen by. That would be a dream: with every new book I get to adopt a new animal companion, or two, or three! In my first book, I wrote about my dog Scrap and her humble, local beginnings. While making this book we rescued two chihuahua brothers from a crazy scene north of Santa Barbara—also local.

These two bonded brothers have reinforced my belief that everything we need is right at hand, nearby, if we have open hearts and observant eyes. Enzo, confused and disoriented by the transition to a new home, escaped and spent five days and five nights traveling and surviving alone in a land full of dangers: mountain lions, coyotes, bobcats, raptors, rattlesnakes, and ranchers, to name a few. Diminutive ten-pound Enzo went on a hero’s journey and returned unscathed, resourceful, and wise. I wish he could share more details of those days and dark mountain nights, so we could learn from him. Despite the language barrier, he has taught us so much about this place; we had a journey together and apart, and together became more deeply rooted to our home.

I want you, the reader, to come to your own “gleanings,” answers, if you will, regarding what punk ikebana is after sitting with this book for a bit. I respect you too much to tell you before you read how you should interpret this body of work; I’m not a fan of that sort of condescension. More importantly, I hope this book inspires you to deepen your relationship to place.

Punk rejects human hierarchies, so I reject the mantle of “expert” or “sensei.” Adhering to “the heart of the novice” as a guiding principle requires it. We are all learning, and learning is most fruitful when we do it together. I would add that in our increasingly beleaguered world, my learning doesn’t solely come from other humans but from our nonhuman relatives and ancestors. Every time I engage in this medium of floral arranging—or let us say, punk ikebana—I hope to learn, not to teach or instruct. Teaching is only a byproduct of learning; they are one and the same, are they not?

SAN JUAN RIDGE SIERRA FOOTHILLS • SIERRA MIWOK LAND

Kit-kit-dizze
Western star flower
Western bleeding heart
Nasturtium Deerbrush
Dogwood
Vetch
Clematis
Rose hips
Honeysuckle
Douglas iris
Rootstock roses
Lady Banks’s climbing roses
Grass Valley and Nevada City heirloom and wild roses

For to snatch away from us even the darkness beneath trees that stand deep in the forest is the most heartless of crimes . . . I would call back at least for literature this world of shadows we are losing. In the mansion called literature I would have the eaves deep and the walls dark, I would push back into the shadows the things that come forward too clearly, I would strip away the useless decoration. I do not ask that this be done everywhere, but perhaps we may be allowed at least one mansion where we can turn off the electric lights and see what it is like without them.

— JUN’ICHIRŌ TANIZAKI In Praise of Shadows

I am increasingly interested in questioning how our relationship to seemingly common life necessities and luxuries changes when they are not so easily purchased. Or when they are purchased with intention and respect within our communities, our micro-ecosystems. Can we find a way to capture the world of shadows, or is this magic found only in other centuries or far-off lands?

Seeking insight and inspiration, our small crew made a pilgrimage in early May to Lenny Brackett’s hand-hewn masterpiece of a traditional Japanese farmhouse on San Juan Ridge, on the western slope of the Sierras above the Yuba River. We’d planned our working session around the moon cycle, as we often do—arriving on a day that would end with a balsamic moon, the last sliver of the waning crescent providing fainter illumination just hours before the complete darkness as the cycle begins anew.

Our culture too often ignores the new moon in favor of the full; our modern world seeks illumination everywhere, artificial light, more shiny bright objects to distract us, even lighting up our yards to mimic the stars.

At my home, though, we prefer the darkness and the real stars. Today, we are chasing the dark sky, an ultimate luxury in modern life—in the still, haunting, heavy, and comforting blankets of forest black as sumi ink, where humans are at a disadvantage . . . especially most modern humans.

I relish those dark nights when so many critters have the advantage over us, with senses that haven’t been dulled by “civilization.” Those nights where you can’t tell if your eyes are open or closed unless you sit with the disorientation a few moments, until it becomes comforting.

Through half-baked planning, dumb luck, intuition, or true grace, we could not have chosen a more symbolically or aesthetically aligned few days and nights to ensconce ourselves in Len’s home.

An antique ikebana tray placed next to the mud-plaster wall holds a celadon ceramic frog, a piece of charcoal, and a few drops of water . . . all the aubergine clematis nearby needs to steal the show. When we free and open our minds to previously unconsidered vessels that are wildly unconventional, suddenly the choices become expansive—endless, even.

You ask, “How long will floral creatures, these ‘arrangements’, last?” I answer every time, “I don’t care; beauty is not about duration.”

SHORT-LIVED MIRACLES

Let’s talk about the many treasures that can’t be purchased. So much of my work has been about those elusive finds, the flora that cannot be bought from a flower market, florist’s shop, or wedding designer. We had chosen to make this field trip, this retreat, this shoot, with that ethos as our driving force.

Everywhere we gazed, we saw beauty that would be impossible to purchase in civilization, despite our capitalistic culture gone mad with choice, too much choice.

The butterscotch iris on the side of the mountain road with a film of dust . . . like a weed but representing the rainbow goddess. The deer brush with honey-scented blooms at a fork in the road. The mountain dogwood, tall and healthy along the cedar home’s stone footpaths. The bleeding hearts growing steps from Japanese sliding screens, alongside their sweet companions: wild strawberries and kit-kit-dizze, western star flower and vetch. And finally, the most delicate, diminutive, true wild rose, all coming to life in the woods outside our door on this lucky day.

Not one of these short-lived miracles can be bought and shipped to far-off cities and towns, not ever, no matter how confident capitalism is that anything can become a commodity.

We brought these spring gifts to East Wind, Len Brackett’s hand-hewn, traditionally built Japanese home in the Sierra foothills, to install and document for four days or so. He built this place by hand over forty years ago, embodying the slow, time-honored wisdom that to do this kind of work is to live with something singular, alive and breathing, changing with you, the maker and the receiver. It is a relationship, evolving over time. At East Wind, the modern is interwoven with the traditional, this solar-powered California home built in traditional Japanese style, from local wood, fallen cedar that Len milled and planed himself.

The finished structure reflects this ethos, this blending of hyper-local materials and traditional Japanese spirit—its wood-fired bath, a family room where we gathered around inori, a sunken hearth, its walkways, known as engawa, bordering an open stone garden at the home’s center. No overhead lights, only floor lamps glowing in the nighttime.

The second day, we were becoming gleefully acclimated to inhabiting this unique and poetically inspiring home. The four of us—a mini village of visitors—decided to create an installation we named “Sexy Sake” in a simply appointed bedroom, inspired by its tatami mats, hand-crafted shoji screens, and open portal to the tokonoma, a traditional raised alcove dedicated to displaying important, meaningful, auspicious offerings such as ikebana, ceramics, and scrolls.

In this setting, we could create an installation, an offering, that would visually articulate the ethos, the vibe, the luxury of these quarters and the gemlike chatoyance, or “cat’s eye,” effect of Lenny’s hand-planed shoji. I was determined to create a sexy, deeply moody cinematic scene, inspired in part by my great admiration of the films of Bernardo Bertolucci. The shikki lacquer chests and our collection of heirloom sake and plates for zensaimori, a traditional selection of appetizers.

I am eternally a sucker for “common” blood-red rootstock roses . . . long, unruly canes, full of thorns and an abundance of irregular blooms . . . some baby buds, some in full glory, some fading, and some just plain dead! The more variety, the more thankful I am. California is littered with rootstock rose canes, some planted by the early Spanish and the European homesteaders a couple of centuries ago. We could get into who’s native and who’s not . . . but that would step on our sexy sake buzz.

It is a guilt-free pleasure cutting brambly rootstock roses, often by the roadside or in semi-abandoned neglected lots, untouched for years. Curtis and I have begun to see patterns and benefits from going to the same abandoned spots, the same rose bushes for years . . . the health of the rose, the number of new canes and blooms increase with our pruning.

For this little scene, I really wanted a more hyper-edited floral story: only bloody red rootstock roses of a variety of scale . . . broken up here and there with a few “outliers”—camellia, apricot, David Austin roses.

Again, the trusting nature of our creative collaboration with our photographer, Ian, is such that after I finished the floral arranging, and Curtis and I laid the small plates of delicacies, our sexy sake with otsumami on the tatami mats, we moved on to other areas of the house and property. I can’t recall now if we foraged, gleaned, did another install, drank tea, made dinner, or took a walk in the woods.

What I do remember now, a few months later, is what Ian did. After we all sat down at Len’s traditional irori hearth, drank some sake, and shared dinner, we spoke of what was next, what we wanted to create and capture. I was exhausted and retired to our bedroom to lie on silken tatami mats under an alpaca blanket brought to keep the mountain night chill away.

Ian, like a quiet country mouse, tiptoed around all night, or most of it, munching on seaweed rice crackers. He experimented with shooting our “sexy sake” scene in natural light, lamplight, artificial pink, and black lighting. How wonderful for me . . . that the scene could continue to unfold and develop while I slept soundly, half-listening to cicadas, bats, and tree frogs.

The jade teacups and shell teapot were both procured from our friend David Lee Hoffman, who lives in Lagunitas and is somewhat of a legend in the tea community. He lived in China for many years, and during his travels, he sourced some beautiful, rare tea accoutrements. We were lucky enough to be able to purchase some of the wares that he was willing to part with. The vintage jade teacups are exquisitely crafted, so delicate and thin that when light shines through them, they almost glow. The shell teapot was produced near Dinghu, a mountainous region in China that is known for its ancient, towering trees and colorful flowers. David unearthed a few of these from a chest in his storage, where they had been since the early 1990s.

One can choose to live in a place as a sort of visitor, or try to become an inhabitant. My family and I decided from early on to try to be here, in the mid-elevation forests of the Sierra Nevada as fully as we could. This brave attempt was backed by lack of resources and a lot of dumb bravado. We had our own extravagant notions of ecological morality. But necessity was the teacher that finally showed us how to live as part of the natural community.

— GARY SNYDER A Place in Space

LEN BRACKETT

Len Brackett has an abundance of experience, wisdom, and humor from many years of devoted practices, Japanese carpentry, Buddhism, and falconry. In addition to the education we all received from inhabiting his world for just four days, Lenny was a beacon of generosity and agreed to this short interview.

Indulge me in a metaphor . . . for eons, in most cultures, any ritual that occurs daily, whether at home or in places of work or worship, has become an opportunity for adornment. The wisdom that life can be ugly, hard, and dirty is also the wisdom that as creative beings, we can use our imagination, skill, and spirit to take the edge off, to elevate, to soften, to beautify.

At Lenny’s, when we wished to take a bath, it began with one of us making a woodstove fire, using wood culled from naturally fallen trees on the property. Next, you wash yourself from cedar boxes full of minimal water before entering the bath. As Lenny said with a mischievous eye, “It is so barbaric to sit in your own dirt or for others to sit in your dirt. This way, multiple humans can use the same bath . . . no wasting precious wood or water.”

This Japanese hot bath becomes sacred in the taking, which is what it used to be, what it should be, what I believe it will become again.

You relish this ritual; the work makes the reward that much more of a luxury. Conservation logically follows the more laborious system, ancient and superior.

Chop wood, carry water.

Here, we adorned our traditional Japanese bath with long, leggy, succulent nasturtiums.

Louesa: So much of the ethos of my work is firmly rooted in place and season, as is your life and work, can you speak to that?

Len: Place is important, at least taking care of where you live, not only meaning “don’t mess it up” but actively protecting it. Take care of where you live and the critters and people who live there too.

Louesa: What first took you to Japan after Reed?

Len: I have been interested in Japan since my high school days, and Zen in part because my brother-in-law is Richard Baker, Suzuki Rōshi’s disciple, so I was aware of Zen when I was fifteen. I didn’t have enough money to prove that I, a hippie, could take care of myself in Japan, and I needed to prove that. So I borrowed all the money my friends had, opened a bank account, and showed that to the consulate to get a visa . . . and then returned all the money to my friends once I had the visa.

Louesa: Why did you return to settle in California, specifically in the Sierra Foothills?

Len: I am originally from Minnesota—I had never been to the Sierras until we brought a building from Kyoto to my sister’s place; she owned land with Gary Snyder and Alan Ginsberg here on the ridge. That was my first time here, camped in Gary’s meadow with my new Japanese wife, who cooked for the crew of Japanese carpenters, plasterers, and copper-roof guys over a campfire.

Louesa: How did you and Gary Snyder cross paths and develop a friendship?

Len: I first met Gary when he came to Reed when I was a freshman. He did a reading from Mountains and Rivers Without End, and it blew my mind. He turned the West Coast into a mythic place for me. And it still feels that way to this day.

Louesa: Gary’s writing had the same effect on me, and I still experience California as a mythic land. I’m very interested in your perception of human time in relationship to your home and the surrounding land, your deep relationships with creatures that have a different relationship to time?

Len: Just that time is short. As Suzuki Rōshi told me: “Lenny, time is short, don’t waste time—pay attention, wake up!”

Louesa: What does the phrase “in praise of shadows” bring up for you?

Len: I think everything should be taken in context. By that I mean, what you don’t notice makes what you do notice noticeable. It’s the rather bland plaster of an English half-timber that makes you see the timbers, that makes the woodwork show. As my sister once said, too much beautiful stuff doesn’t give you energy . . . it saps it; you want to lie down and go to sleep. I’m good for about two or three hours in an art museum, then I am overwhelmed and want to sleep! It’s what’s not there that makes what is there so lovely. What makes Chartres Cathedral so wonderful or the Parthenon so amazing is the basic simplicity. Yeah, I know they both have decoration, sure, but it’s the structure that amazes, not the gargoyles. I’m particularly enthralled by the gargoyles.

IN KEEPING WITH THE MOMENT

What defines a vessel; why are we so narrow in our choices of vessels? So very unoriginal, so very unresourceful.

Does it go back to the culture of purchasing, not making, reusing, refashioning?

I reject boring vessels: pedestrian, vague, mass-produced containers. For me—and I give one of my mentors, Alice Waters, credit for this lesson—it does the wild delicate rose, the tender nasturtium, the elusive wood nymph bleeding heart, the kit-kit-dizze a grave disservice, an affront, a crime even, to place these creatures in a mass-produced vessel.

Every element of an arrangement, whether for a tablescape, a wedding ceremony, or an afternoon tea, should be in keeping with the moment, should honor and bring forth the beauty of each element and each ingredient.

I also strive when possible to make sure all of my elements are “of a piece.” It is ideal if everything used can come from the same site, the same collection, the same vessel vocabulary. For this shoot, we chose from my Japanese collection.

When creating tiny woodland offerings, arrangements, when you are engaging in punk ikebana why not just look around for a vessel? In the woods, even.

Who is to say that a moss-and-lichen adorned bit of Douglas fir isn’t the most fitting landing spot for a diminutive and perfect western star flower, sitting next to the flora of the day, kit-kit-dizze?

Who is to say a piece of scrap metal, patinaed just right, isn’t a romantic little wasen (Japanese-style boat) or bezaisen (Japanese merchant boat of the Edo period) for vetch and popcorn rose bits to sail away on?

Stones, stars, and sages.

WESTERN SIERRA FOOTHILLS • NISENAN OF THE YUBA RIVER AND MIWOK LANDS

Kit-kit-dizze
Alpine forget-me-not
Silverweed
Local roses
Chia
Wild strawberry
Wild iris
Western star flower
Redwood sorrel
Bleeding hearts
Gray-ball sage
Dogwood
Deerbrush

In our California homes, wherever we wake, the days, without fail, begin with tea.

How many rituals do we weave into our finite yet infinite lives daily, rituals that are utterly essential?

Rituals that provide comfort, continuity, peace, nourishment, solace . . . or company, respite, herstory, or the present moment? Simple, beautiful elegance or stripped-down necessity.

Connection to home, place (our own or places far away).

Connection to our companions and our long-gone ancestors.

Connection to water, flora, human craft, and hand.

Connection to the maker . . . tea maker, vessel maker, box maker, the hand that facilitated harvest, drying, curing, transport?

A deeper . . .

Connection to our self and to the stream of daily life and continuity.

I am a creative, fiercely independent, nonlinear being who has mostly resisted any daily schedule or legalistic, dogmatic rules for daily living. The one exception for the past twenty-odd years of living in California is

T E A .

Yes, tea, not floral arranging, or exercise, or reading, or prayer (tea is a prayer for Curtis and me). Daily offering and consecration, the delicious consumption of tea.

I cannot rise from my bed, no matter where I made it, without one or two pots of tea, usually jasmine pearls with a touch of local honey.

No exception. Ever. Even in a hotel room, Curtis and I bring our tea and simple accoutrements. And, as our collaborator and kindred soul Emily Erb, of Oakland-based tea company Leaves and Flowers, states in the informal interview later in this chapter, a mason jar does just fine in a pinch.

Drinking tea. We live
in dry old west
. . .
always new, same stuff
life after life,
. . .
rocks and streams,
a heartbeat, a breath, a gaze

makes place in the dizzy eddy.
Living this old clear way.

—GARY SNYDER
Mountains and Rivers Without End

A glorious early May morning with woven trays full of wildflowers.

KIT-KIT-DIZZE

This sweet, white wildflower is endemic to the Sierra foothills; its name, kit-kit-dizze, elicits a multitude of responses, some curious, some knowing. A tiny, aromatic, delicate-yet-hardy flower brimming with symbolism and purpose, it’s an essential presence on the woodland floor of the Sierras.

We made the journey from Ojai to these foothills, on a ridge just above the Yuba River, in the spring—which is to say, early May. Spring comes months later in this ecosystem than it does in Southern California.

The nature of my work is full of long-standing observations and educated guesses and/or hunches regarding what will be blooming, coming on strong, fading, and then dying in any given microclimate. Sometimes these historical observations reap predictable foraging and gleaning treasures. Sometimes I am rewarded with synchronistic, semimiraculous surprises, gifts from Mother Earth that had never occurred to me. Occasionally, as it goes for us humans, we strike out.

When our little road-weary crew pulled into Len Brackett’s country lane, ambled out of our cars, and began taking in a wonderous new environment, I was quickly struck by the hardy, fernlike, and highly aromatic groundcover with yellow-eyed, bright-white star flowers. Like an eager novice to this region, I blurted out to Len, “What is that gorgeous flower carpeting the ground?”

“Kit-kit-dizze!” was his reply, and my heart just about missed a beat. All was right in the world at that moment. Our timing couldn’t have been more fortuitous.

The first time I heard this marvelous word was most likely twenty years ago, when I was new to California and devouring Gary Snyder.

Tucked away in my Marshall, California, cottage above the Tomales Bay, I was undergoing a transformation. Place played the most powerful role in this spiritual and creative awakening, but Gary Snyder’s work also played a part, and that quirky term kit-kit-dizze held my imagination when I discovered that he had named his homestead after this truly native species.

So here we were, a group of friends and collaborators, gazing at the spring bloom in its full glory—abundant, healthy, “exotic” to our eyes . . . a photographer from England, a midwestern girl who never felt at home in Ohio, a fourteenth-generation Rhode Islander who has lived all over the globe, and a sweet tea master from Oakland via Alaska. Here we were being welcomed to the Sierra foothills by this meaningful—dare I say, sacred—being, kit-kit-dizze, right next door to Gary Snyder’s homestead. I can’t think of a better omen with which to begin our Shinto shoot.

I adore any creature that is part of the rose family, and yes, kit-kit-dizze is an unexpected relative. Also known as bear clover, tarweed, and mountain misery, these are just a few of the common names given to this fascinating plant endemic to the western slopes of the Sierra Nevada mountain range. The Miwok gave it the colorful name kit-kit-dizze and harvested it for medicine—and for its beauty, I’m sure.

We were incredibly lucky to arrive just in time for the ground to be carpeted with countless stars of a rare, diminutive bloom. The foliage was also enticing, fernlike, with a resinous, healing aroma. Its rhizomes spread at least five feet underground in the forest understory and can reach out over eighty feet from its center. It grows back very quickly and hardily after fire, and its massive root system can hold together a hillside, preventing erosion in heavy rains—greatly valued in these times of fire and landslide.

If one disciplined soul proffers to me with love a leaf, a flower, fruit, or water, I accept this offering of love from her.

—THE BHAGAVAD GITA

EMILY ERB

How does this relate to local and seasonal floral arts? To punk ikebana? To place?

The answer could be an entire book, not just a few paragraphs. Here is my interview with our collaborator Emily, which I hope will further illuminate that the thread is ever present, so obvious, so integral that I quickly lose any ability to make it concrete. Emily Erb is cofounder of the tea company Leaves and Flowers, based in Berkeley, which specializes in handcrafted botanical infusions.

Louesa: What brought you to tea? And please share a little bit about your path.

Emily: I worked for years in the coffee industry and was immersed in the local food scene in the Bay Area, but found that over time I didn’t feel my best with the overindulgent lifestyle these food cultures promote. I started thinking about what I was putting in my body, how what I consumed made me feel, and I became interested in plants as medicine . . . tea allowed for a direct relationship to the plants themselves, whether it was botanicals or caffeinated tea.

I grew to appreciate the ritual surrounding tea. I am fascinated with people’s everyday rituals and what individuals do daily to ground themselves. For me, the act of preparing a cup of tea allows me time to be fully present, even if it is just a minute while the tea is steeping. It is such an unfussy, simple act to reground.

Louesa: When we spoke about shooting at Len Brackett’s architecture firm, East Wind, how did you decide what to feature?

Emily: I knew it would feel as though I was stepping into someone’s home in Japan. I chose rustic yet delicate ceramics that would merge with the atmosphere of the house. I also selected glassware, which would display the leaves and flowers while brewing. . . . I selected teas from Japan, as well as some botanical blends that were mainly composed of flowers and herbs that are grown in California. In spirit, this selection aligned with the property: a traditional Japanese house built in Northern California.

Louesa: When making tea with friends or colleagues, what are you uncompromising about, and what are you relaxed about?

Emily: I am pretty uncompromising about the quality of the water used. In general, I think clean water is the most important thing to be concerned about in our diet. Water really affects the flavor of tea, so I always recommend using filtered water. I am relaxed about what to brew tea in. I have so often traveled where there are no tea-pots and end up brewing in a mason jar and using a small strainer that I always bring with me.

Louesa: What flowers are essential in your life, that you can’t imagine life without?

Emily: For scent, fresh jasmine, orange blossom, and gardenia. For drinking, rose.

Louesa: What does “punk ikebana” elicit for you? What about our collaboration resonates most powerfully? Or most quietly, poetically?

Emily: When I envision “punk ikebana” through your work, I see it as the merging of wildness and restraint. It harnesses the untamed energy that exists in nature, in the plants and flowers, and molds that power into these sculptural arrangements that you create. When collaborating, we seemed to harness this energy similarly, so the process of creating side by side seemed very seamless, very inspiring.

The magic of the dogwood blooming outside the sliding Japanese doors, and the delicately embroidered spring blooms on translucent silk and linen, paired with dainty porcelain in a sweet pastel palette . . . that’s what gives me joy. This is zero-waste, elegant, full of provenance and memories, and perfect for the moment right now: Northern California in early May.

TINY DELICACIES

Junko Schwesig has been a chef in San Francisco for over a decade. Raised in Japan, she moved to London to study fashion, moved into graphic design, and met her German husband. They eventually settled in San Francisco, where her love of cooking became a career. She has worked with Len’s son, restaurateur Sylvan Mishima Brackett, at his less formal mobile eatery Peko Peko, and later at Rintaro, an izakaya lauded for its marriage of Californian and Japanese cuisines.

Louesa: How did you and Sylvan begin working together?

Junko: I noticed a beautiful red Japanese lantern lettered with the Japanese for “Peko Peko,” a sign that led me to Sylvan’s pop-up in the Mission District of San Francisco. I got in touch with Sylvan after that and asked him if I could work with him.

Louesa: Tell us more about what you so lovingly made for us . . . and the craft involved?

Junko: When we first talked about the project, you mentioned “spring in Kyoto,” and I immediately thought about the traditional sweets people eat at picnics during cherry blossom time.

I made four dishes:

Sakura mochi, steamed mochi rice balls filled with sweet azuki beans and wrapped with salt-pickled cherry blossom leaves.

Sakura meringues dusted with cherry blossom petals. They are very sweet and very cute.

Daifuku, mochi balls with a sweet filling. I made them with sweet bean filling and added spring greens to the mochi as a seasonal element.

Gyūhi, a softer kind of mochi made with sweet rice. I wrapped each piece in bamboo leaf and steamed them.

Louesa: We also brought homemade fresh lightly salted bamboo shoots (prepared by our mutual friend Ryoji Kajikawa) to be served together. The shoots were grown by Penryn Orchard, right down the road from Lenny’s and harvested hyper-seasonally in May. This traditional and organic orchard specializes in rare and heirloom culinary specimens for America and is owned and operated by Jeff Rieger, Laurence Hauben, and Taylor, the French poodle.

WANDERLUST

One of the responses I have had to these past few years of “restricted living” has been an unprecedented wanderlust. I have been pining for Japan, Portugal, Iceland, Norway, Spanish islands, Corsica, Sardinia, Croatia . . . you get the picture.

When Len Brackett generously and enthusiastically invited us to his home for this project, I knew in my being that this would be as close to visiting rural Japan as this girl was going to get . . . for the foreseeable future.

Our intention was to channel and embody the soul, the peace, the ancient Shinto ethos and aesthetic of a quiet Japanese farmhouse or an afternoon tea full of antiques from the flea markets in Kyoto. We wanted to highlight Len’s lifetime of master craftsmanship and the delicate spring flora that are impossible to purchase!

We wanted to set and lay out a tea with the most poetic elements so that we could be transported away to a place where time and place were both familiar and deliciously disorienting.

Where am I exactly? Japan? California?

What time period am I in?

Where did these tiny, tiny forest-floor offerings come from?

OJAI • CHUMASH LAND

Wild clematis vine
Distant Drums roses
David Austin roses
Salmon datura
Popcorn roses
Hollyhock
Rootstock rose

Everything, animate or inanimate, changes naturally when it is transplanted to a new or different setting. When we were granted stewardship to this place on Sulphur Mountain, we inherited its existing structures. One was a toolshed fallen into disrepair, about 120 square feet and semi-infested with local rodents, full of toxic work materials, with a ratty linoleum floor. Due to our very limited budget and hippie commitment to repurposing, instead of tearing the tiny shed down, we began the mysterious and slightly off-putting task of restoring it. Under the linoleum, we found a primitive oiled-wood floor. The ceiling turned out to be a cool parquet, and after removing the tools and layers of trash, we unearthed a homemade plate rack. After choosing a few gallons of the best eco-friendly paint in shades of saturated but creamy pink, we had an adorable guest cottage. When our new neighbor came to visit, he shared some of the little cottage’s provenance. It was built in Malibu in the 1940s as a camp cabin, moved to Sulphur Mountain in the 1970s to become a kids’ playhouse, and then over the years, it became the tattered toolshed we encountered in 2019. In a funny, lowbrow way, it is an heirloom.

Timing is everything. As the cottage’s renewal progressed, my inheritance of antiques from family homes (dating to the 1850s) arrived from Ohio to a very different land and settled in Southern California.

As Curtis and I began curating our new home in Ojai, I was struck by how profoundly different these antiques that I had been looking at in northern Ohio my entire life looked to me now, how wonderfully transformed they were here in a new light.

The Currier & Ives prints that felt so stuffy hanging on the red-velvet-flocked wallpaper took on a new dimension in this setting. All of a sudden, they achieved high camp. The Persian mirror I used to stare at during holidays didn’t seem so “exotic” in a more sun-drenched setting. My mother’s (and momma’s momma’s) blue transferware was more dramatic, more saturated, and somehow silly-happy against the Rangwali pink wall.

Because my work always comes back to place. What I source, forage, glean, and arrange with is always in dialogue with place. The greater place of location, the architecture, the interior or exterior design elements, even the humans who inhabit that place, macro or micro.

Illusions are to the soul what atmosphere is to the earth.

—VIRGINIA WOOLF Orlando: A Biography

Hollyhocks, rootstock roses, and wild clematis cut from within feet of the cottage.

DISTORTED SCALE

I’m just going to say it . . . for all of the decades that I have been playing around with floral “installations.” I’ve been bored to tears with midscale design. Once I began bringing in giant fennel, magnolia, buckeye, road roses, and fruit blossoms to my retail shops, I instantly became known for huge, huge arrangements. Ceiling-scraping, precarious, almost dangerous towers of brambles and branches. But it wasn’t all enormous—I would also pick tiny delicate herbs, minuscule rosebuds, sprigs of wisteria, wild onions, and borage and create fairylike worlds under damp cloches.

I am consistent. Now I challenge myself to make midscale vignettes.

This pink room presented an opportunity to distort scale! Glorious . . . with towering rose canes and abundant datura? Or is it simply an illusion?

Speaking of antiques, my dad collected glass telephone pole insulators, and, true to form, as a child I would gaze at their glowing shades of ocean and feel lost in this cerulean world. It wasn’t conscious, but at some point around 2010, I started buying and using old ceramic insulators. The search for nontraditional “vessels” is a constant creative puzzle that is addictive for me.

In this country, ceramic insulators date back to the 1850s. Usually I find brown Bennington glaze. Rarer are deep greens, pale blues, creamy bone—I’ve even found some cobalt blue. The earth-brown hues are a dramatic, neutral grounding, and their form acts as a modern ikebana vase.

VENTURA COUNTY • CHUMASH LAND

Anise hyssop
Holy basil
Vervain
Clary sage
Lavender
Bergamot
Wild datura
Coreopsis
Passion vine
Blackberries
Lemon bee balm
Wisteria pods
Wild grape Mexican sunflowers
Bachelor buttons
Queen Anne’s lace
Asparagus, gone to seed
And always, roses and scented geranium

The wren is extremely close, very near to me right now. Feet from where I write in our window-lined indoor/outdoor porch/sunroom, which faces a deep, long valley below. She’s not a house wren; she is most likely a Bewick’s wren. She flits about in the great-grandmother olive tree who watches over us all—twenty feet from me now. We give thanks to the olive tree daily . . . more than once, I hope. I heard this sweet wren before I saw her, looking up from the words I was writing in longhand.

I recognized her because I know her. She was flitting through the olive branches making her metallic, wind-up, slightly shrill vocalizations.

Perhaps she was telling Enzo and Maurizio (the Chihuahuas) to stay away while she took a much-needed drink from the reclaimed ceramic trays that make our warren of bird and bee baths.

Very near, and now she has flown off.

We choose Ojai to shoot this chapter, and quite literally, we foraged, gleaned, and installed “right down the road.”

That is what my work is mostly about, after all . . . The work begins with observation and sourcing. Finding the most glorious materials can take many forms—foraging, gleaning, growing, and supporting local farmers.

You can go very far if you start very near. We generally start with the farthest, the supreme principle, the greatest ideal, and get lost in some hazy dream of imaginative thought.

But when you start very near, with the nearest, which is you, then the whole world is open, for you are the world.

—JIDDU KRISHNAMURTI

SWEET MOUNTAINTOP FARM

Rincon Mountain elicits childhood memories of Beach Boys songs and far away and casually sun-drenched California beaches and hillsides. As a twelve-year-old listening to records in suburban Ohio, the word Rincon evoked romantic, extremely exotic visions. Rincon Mountain in Carpinteria is only about thirty miles from our ridge here on Sulphur Mountain. They share an elevation of between 2,100 and 2,600 feet, with Mary to the west and our spot a little higher and southeast.

Each time we climb the one-and-a-half-lane, extremely windy yet open road, lined with avocado trees, it is a surreal and slightly disorienting ride. From the farm, one can easily survey much of the surrounding geography—from ocean views that look out over the Channel Islands and the entire Santa Barbara Channel, to mountain views that span from the Gaviota bluffs all the way to the Pine and Topatopa Mountains. The Pacific Ocean lies gently below, often cloaked in fog, and you feel as if you’ve entered another wild and slightly woolly realm of Ventura County. Grand sweeping views and a rugged community of devoted growers.

Mary Gonzalez was raised in this ecosystem of Ventura County and “Carp,” as the locals call Carpinteria. Her cheerful yet devoted stewardship is awe-inspiring. We welcome any chance to make the trip to Sweet Mountain-top Farm!

Despite being pregnant, Mary said, “Of course; come on over and forage and glean whatever you need.”

We are always greeted by the sheepdogs, Tulsi and Rosie, and maybe a few more in tow. Again, I am reminded of my childhood. This time, my childhood in Lexington, Kentucky, where every farm visit started with barking farm dogs charging the car and maybe allowing you to open your door.

Mary makes a gracious apology for the dogs’ cacophony. But she knows, I think, that nothing makes me happier than barking pack of happy country pups.

How do we define seasonal; how do we define local?

Mary grows so many glorious herbs and flowers! I hesitate to wax poetic, but the flora used in this chapter’s work forms a list that illuminates both seasonality in Ventura County and what thrives locally throughout August and September.

Late one balmy September night, I asked Mary which herbs she is gravitating toward in her two acres of abundance. Here is her list and her thoughts:

Lemon bee balm

healing properties: immune-boosting, respiratory and digestive support

Anise hyssop: cure-all flower also known as licorice mint: grows abundantly over North America (popular among local indigenous people)

healing properties: supports nervous system; aromatic digestive properties that can also boost moods; antiviral properties may assist in reducing fevers and coughs. It makes wonderful teas and cocktails too!

Wormwood: dusty ash green, a chaparral-toned perennial

healing properties: digestive bitter

When I asked Mary what makes her heart sing these days, she says, “Currently shifting into fall . . . native tarweed, which grows sporadically throughout our flower and herb fields—I love its airy texture and tiny yellow blooms. It keeps its shape when dried. And deep amaranth is a volunteer throughout our fields, also capturing our hearts!”

If we opened people up, we would find landscapes.
—AGNÈS VARDA

Speaking of plates, of relatives and ancestors both human and nonhuman . . . why not use the joyful mid-century enamel decorative plate your great-grandmother Lena made? Take that heirloom off of the plate rack; put a small, well-made Japanese “frog” on it; add a few tablespoons of water; and show off the fleur du jour.

SONIA ERNEUX AND CHRIS WILSON

I think that we can all agree that 7.7 miles is local. That is where we shot this chapter, 7.7 miles from our home on Sulphur Mountain—“down the hill,” as locals would say.

In semirural spots in most parts of the world, becoming community isn’t instant. It takes time, it takes patience, tolerance to differences, solidarity . . . it involves helping each other and lots of collaborating. And lots of laughter.

We cut these sacred wild datura at our place, hours before arranging at Chris and Sonia’s.

You can’t purchase magic. And it is not about durability . . . this dangerous beauty fades fast.

Sonia Erneux is the sole designer of her wonderfully named women’s collection, Love Tanjane.

Chris Wilson is an iconic local creative figure who has made Ojai his home with Sonia for over twenty years. He is an accomplished silkscreen artist and one-time journalist—so we decided to sit together on the sun porch for an informal interview. Here are some excerpts.

Chris: What was it about our place that really captured your imagination?

Louesa: The compound you’ve created is so magical—so indoor, outdoor, sun-drenched blurring the boundaries between indoor and outdoor. I love the sun-drenched etc. . . . the sun-drenched white, textiles, art and books.

I’m a maximalist, but I love environments that are very white and sun-drenched—minimalist—here, I feel transported to another land. You’ve been working on the property for twenty years; you’ve crafted it and transformed it from the ground up.

Sonia: My house is part of me, part of me that grew with me. I lived with it and never did everything all at once. It was organic. I told myself, I don’t want to buy furniture . . . I like the trash of people, finding treasures from alleys and dumpsters.

Chris: I was listening to Gordon White’s podcast, Rune Soup, and he was saying in a recent interview that the way you design and care for your place is similar to your skin and body being a dwelling place of your spirit . . . your house is a second skin.

Louesa: I think Instagram has, sadly, not only flattened out regionality but flattened out discovery.

Chris: Discovery. Yeah, there’s no sense of discovery anymore.

Louesa: We played with ikebana in your shoot, in that we use ikebana trays and frogs and used floral materials that usually would only be seen en masse—sprigs of blackberry with just three coreopsis. We were using so many of what I call “California farm girl” flowers, materials that they wouldn’t usually use in Japan. Traditionally in ikebana, you wouldn’t come with armloads of wildflowers—anise hyssop and bergamot, coreopsis, passion vine, blackberries, datura.

To me, capturing that light, sun-drenched, shadow geometry was such a huge part of the shoot—playing with different forms, the round vessels, and the very geometrical shadows and light through the bamboo slats are so beautiful.

It was really important that Sonia’s paintings and Chris’s silkscreens are featured. The painting that reminds me of Isabella Rossellini determined what that arrangement looked like . . . the vibe became kind of cinematic to us.

Sonia’s painting set me on a nostalgic riff, equal parts David Lynch, Rossellini, and bergamot from Carpinteria. Passionflower blooms were just deep and moody enough . . . everything used for this vignette was edible, fitting for a kitchen alcove.

Chris: What inspired you out in the barn? Talk about what that did for you.

Louesa: I loved using the sinks for the shoot. What’s better than a big metal art sink just to throw a ton of wildflowers in? Sometimes the best arrangement is just throwing beautiful ingredients en masse in a vessel or in the sink and letting them fall as they would in the field. It’s letting the materials speak—and you get out of the way.

Going for a really maximal setup, we used a splattered paint table, then put a busy flowered vintage cloth on it, and then the busy enamel plate that my great-grandmother made. Sometimes when you have a multitude of prints and patterns and colors it works, and sometimes it doesn’t . . . in some ways, maximalism is trickier than minimalism.

BEATRICE WOOD

“I was raised on fairy tales.” And as she put it, until the day she died, she believed that love was the most important thing in the universe.

It’s impossible to write about this hamlet beneath Topatopa Mountains, close to the sea, and on the edge of the vast wilderness of the Los Padres National Forest without honoring our Chumash and non-Chumash elders.

Beatrice Wood, Jiddu Krishnamurti, Annie Besant (the Theosophists), and even Aldous Huxley. There are many more of course, past, present, and future, all colliding in the now . . . Bee here now . . . but that is another chapter.

Beato, Beatrice Wood: could I have ever imagined a more fitting “auntie” . . . a more fitting muse, a more fitting doyenne . . . inspiring and informing my life as a spirited and pagan woman. An artist who choose to devote her life to her art, the art and creativity of others, and who knows in her bones . . . that all of living was art, was spirit, was light and shadow, was everlasting and ephemeral . . . but I digress. Perhaps it’s the local gin martini and my stroll to the oak bench and the sun “sinking like a ship,” to quote Dylan. And the pink moment on this very hot Ojai day.

When I did a deep dive into our lady of the Ojai Valley—Beato would have recoiled at being called a “lady”—I found a quote that speaks to me. Let’s let her speak for herself: “I wanted to go on stage, not because I was stagestruck, but to earn money so that I could get away from home. Because I was a good girl. Nothing is more revolting.”

I trust that resonates with any and all independent women creatives. Here is a cursory list of humans Beato was muse to, lover, friend, mentor:

Jiddu Krishnamurti

Henri-Robert-Marcel Duchamp (Beato is called the mother of Dada)

Henri-Pierre Roché

Aldous Huxley

Anaïs Nin

Mina Loy

Man Ray

Joseph Stella

Yoko Ono (and John, they spent time in Ojai)

James Cameron (Beato was the primary role model for Rose in Titanic)

Francois Truffaut (Beato was also the role model for Catherine in Jules and Jim—Roché, Duchamp, and Beato formed a love triangle)

Annie Besant (president of the Theosophical Society Adyar, 1907–1933, and founder of multiple local schools still operating)

Like me with my floral work, Beatrice said, “I never meant to become a potter . . . it happened very accidentally . . . I could sell pottery because when I ran away from home, I was without any money. And so I became a potter.”

At the age of ninety, Wood became a writer. Her best-known book is her autobiography, I Shock Myself (1985). When asked the secret to her longevity, she responded, “I owe it all to art books, chocolates, and young men.”

A shard of Beatrice Wood pottery found years ago near a neighbor’s dumpster. One man’s trash is another woman’s treasure.

Mama of Dada

I am writing about Beatrice Wood, again in my sunroom, facing south toward the Oxnard Plain, under the great-grandmother olive tree. As an offering to Beato, I have made a cocktail. She loved a good party, an olive tree elder, and most certainly a martini. Here is my “local” martini of this sunset:

Ventura Spirits Wilder Gin (hyper-local)

Bordiga extra dry Vermouth di Torino (not technically local but purchased from our outstanding local vino shop)

Yuzu citrus juice, the last of our hybrid yuzu fruit (the tree is in my sightline as I write this)

Santa Barbara olive, old-school with pimento

Shaken ferociously outside to surprise Curtis! Poured into tiny heirloom glasses . . . civilized. Garnished with a twist plus some pulp of a gleaned Meyer lemon (it’s practically a crime to purchase citrus in Ojai!).

OJAI VALLEY • CHUMASH LAND

Wisteria
Wild clematis
Passion fruit vine
Garlic scapes
Hollyhock
Elderberry
Passion vine
Datura
Matilija poppies
Torch cactus bloom
Scented geranium bloom
California poppy
Burned manzanita tree trunk
Burned coast live oak wood

Climate change does not recognize states, borders, or countries.

Here in California . . . what’s the saying? “As goes California, so goes the nation.” I have always thought that rings true, particularly here where the smoke hangs heavy on the vine.

These days, we find ourselves all too often speaking a postindustrial, post-truth, post-peace, post-pandemic phrase: “When we had our fire.” This phrase, tragically, can be employed by more and more people both personally and collectively, more and more communities—and I’d add, because I don’t believe in speciesism, that nonhuman communities also participate in this experience, in the narrative of “our fire.”

Around one year after we moved to Ojai, in December of 2017, the Thomas Fire (so named because it started near St. Thomas Aquinas College), was sparked a little over eight miles from where we live now. At the time, we were living in the pre-gentrification hamlet of Meiners Oaks. My grasshopper, Matthew Drewry Baker, was visiting, and we had taken a big hike in Matilija Canyon, a wilderness area that’s part of the vast Los Padres National Forest. Field biologists were doing salmon and trout studies in the barely flowing river, not realizing that in a few days those same lands and riverbeds would resemble a charred moonscape, no trout eggs or larval fish to count.

We were giddy and distracted by the joy of visiting with old friends. As Matthew was preparing to drive back north to the Bay Area, we stood on the deck facing east and cluelessly wondered, “Why is the evening sky so blood red?” It’s almost tragicomic now to recall our next guess: it being December, we thought, maybe it’s a nighttime football game at the nearby high school. It was not.

By 2:00 A.M., our neighbors banged on our door with the news that the fire, which had started near Santa Paula, had already traveled twenty miles to coastal Ventura, fueled by eighty-mile-per-hour winds and single-digit humidity. Burning an area the size of Central Park every few minutes, this inferno reached the coast in less than an hour. Standing on our little street, with howling winds, red skies, and confused but kind neighbors, our minds could not grasp the picture, the path, the speed, the ground covered, the voracity of this fire. By the time it was largely contained in January, the Thomas Fire was the largest recorded “wildfire” in California history. (I take issue with that description—was it truly wild, given humankind’s complicity?) The deadly mudslides in Montecito and Santa Barbara the following month were a direct result of this massive fire, which burned 440 square miles (nearly 282,000 acres).

The tales of that shared experience are many, and for years when friends gathered, inevitably the talk turned to how we all navigated, experienced, processed those months and the years after, in the poignant and powerful solidarity of tragedy. I will never forget the day we evacuated. Heading northwest on State Route 150, we pulled to the side of the road above Lake Casitas to look back on our beloved new homelands. As our small group piled out of our cars, perhaps seven to ten households with kids and dogs aplenty, all were silent at the sight of a growing smoke plume, a monster rising from the hills. Not one dog or child made a sound. The scene felt biblical, evoking Lot’s wife, who looked back for too long toward the home she was fleeing and consequently turned into a pillar of salt. Or perhaps even more apt are the words of Isaac Bashevis Singer’s short story “Henne Fire,” in which “No one wanted to pay for the sins of another. . . . [T]he fiery image had waved its arms and laughed madly.”

Do you believe that a charred oak tree can become Godzilla? I do, because it happened on the one-and-a-half-lane ridge road where we live. I also believe this because nearly every early culture believed that trees could become humans, bears, goats, emissaries to other worlds . . . and too many other entities to list. Most cosmologies also believed, as do I, that humans could turn into trees.

The small white flowers from the elderberry trees fallen down upon the backs of sheep and goats, and foxy growling, it being a funny midweek kind of day.

—VALI MYERS
Night Flower: The Life and Art of Vali Myers

PHANTOM SEEDS

What grows, thrives, and propagates in those in-between realms where elementals and mortals coexist? Or where traditionally they have been said to be aware of sharing lands?

Literature, mythology, and folklore are full of clues about every ecosystem or microclimate. Simply look or listen to the tales of your land, be it California, Ohio, Japan, Portugal, Mexico, the British Isles, or beyond. The stories will illuminate, and if you pay close attention to the ethnobotany, the flora, and the food consumed in these magical tales, you will deepen your connection to that spot on this earth.

All of my work is rooted in deep observation and the inevitable love of place, so it makes perfect sense that wild clematis would play a starring role. Wild clematis blankets our ridge above the Pacific, with its views of the Channel Islands. She also seems to thrive postfire and is an elegant companion to poison oak . . . or to toyon, charred oak trees, elderberry branches, anything she can throw her delicate fishhook barbs on. Once clematis takes hold, off she climbs, higher and higher, longer and longer, stronger and stronger. It’s a matter of survival.

Am I a bleeding heart? A resounding yes! It causes me pain to think of all of the humans on this planet who have only seen a domesticated, tame cousin of the wild clematis. Of course, some of the delicate, poetic essence of wild clematis remains in its hybridized kin. And yes, the greenhouse cousins often have larger, longer-lasting blooms in shades of eggplant, butter, raspberry, even butterfly blue—and yes, they grow more obediently in your garden when they began life in the hothouse. But, a resounding but . . .

Wild clematis is unruly, woody and woolly, autonomous, advancing with tiny, almost secretive blooms in early spring. Ethereal, like February after the Southern California rains. A harbinger of May, of spring in the Pacific Northwest, like forsythia is back East. It’s an obvious choice to love clematis in spring and summer, depending on where you reside.

Elementals and their friends don’t traverse the obvious paths. If we look toward the folklore of the British Isles, Clematis vitalba is one of the most magical plants growing in the chalky soil, known as traveler’s joy, shepherd’s delight, and the evocative and semantically interestingly bedwine. Author Adam Thorpe revived this name in Ulverton, his novel tracing three hundred years of unrecorded history and lore. The answer to this riddle is to say “betwined,” the old word for entwined like vines, over and over in the dialect of the shires—betwined, betwined, betwined—and you end up with bedwine!

In keeping with tales of fairy flora, wild clematis is a shape-shifter when gone to seed, a smoky fractal pattern of downy seeds, stationary or floating, resilient quivering globes of dust and dew . . . now you see them, now you don’t. Phantoms, even. No nursery clematis will give you such glimpses into other realms, near or far.

RUST

My enduring adoration of rust most definitely goes back to my early years in very post–mid-century industrial Ohio. Rust took on an aesthetic street cred, an enduring emo landscape element, as famously channeled by native son and avant-garde filmmaker Jim Jarmusch.

My erudite friend and colleague Martin Holden has been a geologist, an antiquarian book dealer, art curator, and merchant here in his homeland of California for almost half a century. In a perfect moment, he offered some perfectly nerdy musings on rust. Here, in words and paraphrases, are his insights offered freely since, as he told me, “Rust is free.”

The earth is dense with volume of goethite, a very important iron ore and a primary component in rust. But rust is also pyrite, chalcopyrite, siderite, magnetite—indeed, most minerals with a high iron content will alter rust over the long view of time.

We all recognize ochre as a pigment that plays a crucial role in most civilizations’ art, past and present. Cave drawings, sculpture, body adornment, pottery, jewelry, textiles . . . all of these mediums feature good ol’ rust.

Our elders, the Neanderthals, often covered their dead with rust ochre before burial, which always makes me think of Neil Young and whether it’s better to burn out than to fade away, and what is the color when black is burnt?

Rust is used as a fixative, a mortar in almost all dying techniques for natural textiles. There is indeed nothing new under the sun.

MATILIJA POPPIES

There seem to be many misconceptions and myths surrounding our town’s signature flower, the Matilija poppy. When I moved to Northern California, these towering stands of magical “fried egg” poppies seduced me instantly, and decades later, they still do—one of my enduring passions. When I lived in Stinson Beach, under the protection of Mount Tamalpais and next to a south-facing semi-sheltered shore of the cold, windy Pacific, these natives of a warmer southern clime always appeared out of place to me and utterly welcome on their own terms. They are tricky to get started in your garden, like most magical plants, but once they take hold, they will spread and spread and spread! Soon, gardeners will have huge, dense stands with those sunny-side-up faces, rimmed in the purest white, at a scale that is slightly disorienting. For this reason, perhaps, when I would ask permission to cut some, usually the human who cohabited with these creatures would encourage me to take as many as I could. “You’re helping me out!” they would exclaim, and then retreat indoors before the carnage or harvest began.

My gold 1983 biodiesel Mercedes wagon was a tank that we drove for nearly four hundred thousand miles—and, as my first husband recalled recently, seemingly the only one in the Bay Area without a smug bumper sticker preaching biodiesel to the choir.

That car was the best foraging and gleaning vehicle ever made. I could stack endless fennel fronds, bay laurel branches, and towering Matilija poppies in the seven-foot-long back of the car, and lash trees on top. Magnolias could be placed gently up front.

People often remarked, “But the poppies don’t last once they’re cut.”

Ah, my grasshopper, I say, you are so misguided. Not only will the already popped-out blooms last one to three days once cut, but they will “force,” the still pale green buds continuing to bloom indoors, sometimes for weeks. Patience and appreciation of such renegade flora are usually rewarded with glorious surprises.

Speaking of poppy magic, when we cut Matilija poppies near sunset, we need to exercise extreme caution and reverence. Bees of all sorts, but especially large bumblebees, are lulled to sleep by the poppies’ intoxicating pollen. We look once, twice, three times when cutting at dusk, so as not to disturb any bee tucked into her poppy bed for sweet dreams. And as always, we thank the bees.

HOLLYWOOD, LOS ANGELES • TONGVA LAND

Hibiscus
Plumeria
Morning glory
Sarracenia
Nepenthes
Sundews
Venus flytrap
Magnolia
Grapes from Darren’s garden
Passion fruit vine and fruit
Wild clematis, gone to seed
Date palm inflorescence

While Curtis and I were first living (occasionally) in LA, we would go to the Larchmont Village area for a break from the chaotic pace of downtown, Koreatown, Mid-City, and South Central, where we were living and working. We would get a matcha like so many Angelenos—and we were picky about our matcha! One fortunate day, we parked in front of a charming home with a front yard full of bonkers, mind-blowing hibiscus . . . a Willy Wonka visual trip!

It was a psychedelic vision of countless ombré shades of both hibiscus and plumeria; I had never seen or imagined anything resembling this riotous candy-colored explosion!

After parking in front of this home many times, I finally mustered the courage (with a great deal of encouragement from Curtis and a matcha high!) to just walk up to a stranger’s door and knock, something which is almost unheard of in La-La Land.

Darren, all dapper and cheerful, the most passionate hibiscus parent who loves his hibiscus babies, opened the door and was as welcoming as can be!

Variations of this experience have happened countless times in my twenty or so years of foraging and gleaning. So . . . why is it so terrifying to approach a home, a door, a fence, or a driveway and begin a conversation with a neighbor? Nearly every time, with very few exceptions, my knocking—followed by an explanation of my work and ethos—has been greeted with enthusiasm, delight, openness, and connection. After all, I am admiring a fellow garden lover’s vision and stewardship.

Darren’s hibiscus have become one of my most beloved and coveted elements, flora for any installation, celebration, editorial shoot, or floral delivery anywhere within sixty miles of LA during hibiscus season. They bring a luxe, glamorous, cinematic star quality to any spot they land . . . any place I position them. Plus, they don’t like to touch water after cutting. They are ephemeral . . . the bloom only remains open a day or two if you are lucky, which only makes them that much more priceless in my eyes and heart.

After visiting with Darren and putting together a box of vibrant blooms with some gleaned white grapes, we quickly ferry them to their new home (for a few days), Blackman Cruz, just a few miles away in Hollywood.

Reality, however utopian, is something from which people feel the need of taking pretty frequent holidays.

—ALDOUS HUXLEY
Brave New World

PASSIFLORA

Every artist has their repertoire. In every creative arena, I’ve witnessed most if not all artisans gravitating toward, preferring, even adoring specific materials that have become part of their lexicon, their tool kit. Jim Jarmusch returns again and again to cinematography saturated with industrial decay and long, moody shadows. Helen Frankenthaler was committed to velvety, saturated, blooming palettes in her printmaking. My great-grandmother Lena loved to make small plates of bright enameled glass and included mid-century Lurex in her weaving. She also had potted passionflowers, often blooming, in her Ohio kitchen windows.

While at Chez Panisse, it quickly became apparent to me which seasonal offerings were most beloved by Alice Waters. Meyer lemons, mulberries, tiny succulent lettuces and greens. Forgive me for speaking of them again, but I can’t help myself returning again and again and again to passionflower vines with fruit and blooms. We are always rooting, planting, and growing these vines from previous uses.

The genus Passiflora is made up of some 550 species, growing and thriving around the globe. Most species are found in the Americas, though some are also native to parts of Southeast Asia and Australia, Melanesia, Micronesia, and Polynesia. The species known as maypop is the state flower of Tennessee, my father’s peoples’ ancestral home.

The Christian mythology and symbolism of this plant could fill an entire book of its own . . . those medieval monks, under the influence of home-brewed vino and ales, writing on the tendrils, petals, sepals, filament, and chalice-shaped ovaries of the European members of the larger Passifloraceae family, as representing Jesus’s wounds, his crucifixion and resurrection, the apostles and Judas, the Holy Grail, the concepts of heaven and of purity. It was known in Spain as espinas de Cristo, or “thorn of Christ.” In a very different cosmology, some Hindu traditions call blue passionflowers “Krishna Kamal,” with equally elaborate structural symbolism.

Indigenous tribes also recognized the sacred nature of their local Passiflora and included it in their herbal medicine chest as teas for anxiety, insomnia, and delirium, as well as poultices to treat bruises and eye ailments.

I feel incredibly lucky to live somewhere that affords me the opportunity to play with these glorious creatures nearly all year, with just a bit of observant foraging, gleaning, and growing.

These vines were cut from a chain-link fence by a homeless camp and rewarded us with blooms and tiny apricot-colored fruit.

In keeping with our ethos, we only work with flora when they are grown—not flown. The carnivorous creatures (nepenthes, sarracenia, sundews, and more), seen in these scapes have been tended by Curtis and a local treasure, Nathan Witman.

Nathan’s Pan’s Garden Nursery is the culmination of his lifelong love of growing creatures and a specific interest in rare and unusual plant varieties. Their unique adaptation to low-nutrient conditions make them some of the strangest and most compelling members of the plant kingdom.

We have brought with us from Ojai, which is about an hour-and-a-half drive away, passion fruit vines with fruit and blooms, wild clematis vine with blooms gone to seed, and magnolias foraged along the way. We brought our carnivorous plantscapes and then foraged palm inflorescence and date palm clusters along the way, as well as the passion vines gone wild on an abandoned lot’s chain-link fence.

Some of these babies are what we call “orphans,” rescued from past events where they were destined for the compost, or worse, the evil trash.

ETRUSCAN GLASS

Historical evidence points to an Etruscan glass-crafting tradition dating to as long ago as 1200 to 800 bce, with even older examples dating to the Late Bronze Age, as early as 1500 bce, in Ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia. These pieces were made using a distinct technique mixing alkali glass and glassy Egyptian faience, a quartz-based glaze. Vessels were mostly core-formed, in which molten glass was trailed over a shaped clay core on the end of a metal rod. Core-formed vessels have been found in Northern Italy; it is now believed that they were imported from the southern Mediterranean regions.

Glass was present in many of the daily rituals of Roman life, and it seems clear that pre–Roman Empire, “Roman” or Etruscan glass vessels were used as tableware or as containers for luxury oils, perfumes, and medicines. By the first century bce, the Romans had developed techniques in glassblowing that changed much of the art and science of glasswork. Hellenistic and Eastern Mediterranean styles and artisans had major cross-pollinating influences on “Roman” glass as well.

Glass has been used for centuries across cultures for everything from jewelry to construction, from mirrors to luxury packaging and décor—such as tesserae, small tiles used to create elaborate floor and wall mosaics, as well as decorative scenes enhancing wooden and ivory furnishings. Windowpanes were essential to Roman bath culture, not as a transparent portal to view the outside world but a cloudy barrier that added privacy and security while also preventing drafts.

In a past life, I was a merchant. Who knows about whether that was true in past centuries, but from 2000 to 2010 (roughly and with a few relapses) I was what I like to call, in my old-school manner, a merchant. And as such, I took frequent buying trips to New York City—and always made sure to add a day or two to my travel itinerary for visiting museums. Why fly across the country and not create time for inspiration?

If the planets aligned auspiciously, a half-day trip to the Met would come to fruition.

The grand entrance’s floralscapes left lasting impressions on me, and I have tried to replicate this grandeur and scale several times for important installations, most notably my work for Creative Growth, Vivienne Westwood, and Kevin West and the land of Grand Central Market, DTLA. Each visit I found myself transfixed and mesmerized by the collections of ancient glass—Mesopotamian, Sumerian, Etruscan . . . any ancient glass seduces me.

So when we arrived at Blackman Cruz, with its constantly changing collection of inventory, and saw tiny Etruscan glass vessels, I knew they would steal the show.

BEVERLY HILLS • TONGVA LANDS

Scented geranium
Pink trumpet vine
Lynne’s heirloom roses
Dahlia and tree dahlia
Fuyu and Hachiya persimmons
Mint and basil blooms, gone to seed
Japanese anemone (white and dusty lavender)
Violet
Water lily
Pomelo
Hibiscus
Clematis
Hydrangea
Purple oxalis
California poppy
Banana blossom
Sweet alyssum
Chrysanthemums
Chocolate cosmos

The pervasive myth of Los Angeles is one of reinvention, of what is new, what is shiniest, youngest, fastest, most on trend, turning and churning out stories.

If you look long enough, closely enough, differently, you may be fortunate enough to catch some history, glimmers of glamorous times gone by . . . from another century, even.

Curtis and I stumbled into one such Beverly Hills portal a few years ago.

We had no idea that the Virginia Robinson Gardens sat upon the hill above the most iconic part of Beverly Hills. We were graciously invited to be part of their annual garden tour, and, as is so often the case, we said yes first—and asked questions after our initial site visit.

I, of course, was enamored initially with the stainless steel and early mid-century linoleum pantry and kitchen. Have you ever noticed how at every good fête, people end up in the kitchen?

Nothing is permanent in this wicked world, not even our troubles.

—CHARLIE CHAPLIN

DECADENT, IRREVERENT, PRETTY, AND PUNK

If Sofia Coppola can channel Marie Antoinette, and if Lance Accord’s cinematography for Marie Antoinette can create an enduring impression on me, why wouldn’t I create a tablescape riffing on that very young, indulgent, decadent, irreverent, and ill-fated punk queen?

I don’t understand people who scoff at period pieces, at antiques or antiquity. Beauty is beauty; craft is craft; the human inclination to elevate our shared daily rituals through embellishment, adornment, and artisanal excellence is as old as . . . well, so old that we don’t know how old. I will never deprive myself of beauty just because of some academic dogma or commitment to “modernity.” As I pen this, I am pausing and looking around the home I share with Curtis, and there is not one item in view that is “new.” I have never purchased a brand-spanking-new item for my home, except for appliances. I once read that some people are so triggered by antiques that they can experience a panic attack from, say, a Shaker table. Perhaps I am the opposite—new car smells make my skin crawl!

What a long digression, even for me. Back to the Virginia Robinson Gardens.

I find that when creating a concept for a table, it is wise and helpful to have a visual reference in mind. And I don’t mean “holiday,” or “spring fling,” or “resort.” Be more specific in your inspirations like, “the tableau from Babette’s Feast,” or the fairy table from the Chronicles of Narnia, or Willy Wonka, or Fellini . . . you get the idea.

Set and setting should inform your choices. So for this glass table, on the loggia at Virginia Robinson Gardens, my muse, the script, was Marie Antoinette by Sofia Coppola.

AN ANCIENT PAIRING

Trends are both fascinating and boring. As a creative, the most compelling artists somehow stay aligned with their idiosyncratic vision, unencumbered by the caprices of the trends swirling around them, no matter where they reside in their own cultural moment. A more nuanced description would be of an artist who can tune out trends in order to stay true yet predict and/or perceive prevailing trends and riff on them a little. I guess radio antennae is a woefully dated reference—oh well.

I’m a bit rebellious, a little contrarian, too much of a Leo tomboy, often embarrassed by “following” trends in any of the disciplines I’ve fallen into, whether culinary, fashion, textiles, design, painting, or floral work. Mindless trend-following makes me cringe!

So here I go again, contradicting myself, starting to fall in love with mums.

The easiest justification would be that they resemble saturated, colorful spiders. Or that they recall imperial Chinese palaces and festivals and are a crucial herbal remedy in Chinese medicine. Referencing ikebana should be enough reason to play with mums now.

Let us go with that, as, in fact, ikebana and mums are intrinsically linked—an ancient pairing.

According to ikebana lore, the Saga Go-ryū Ikebana School of the Buddhist temple Daikaku-ji is said to be one of the oldest sects in Kyoto. Myths abound, and there is a tale of the ninth-century Emperor Saga picking a handful of chrysanthemums growing on one of the two islands in the Osawa Pond, on the temple’s grounds. He then arranged these mums in the now-codified three-tier composition. These three tiers depict or represent heaven, earth, and humanity. This is a brief synopsis of the creation story of ikebana. Mums are the apple in the garden, the original flower.

Seasonality rules so much of Japanese culture for countless reasons, and chrysanthemums are hugely symbolic in autumn. Chrysanthemum festivals are lavish and opulent, with huge blankets or carpets of mums created around temples and palaces. It is fitting, then, that we used locally grown mums to break a few ikebana rules here, around this mini–Beverly Hills palace, Virginia Robinson Gardens.

MATRIARCHAL OHIO ROSE LOVE

Lynne Vinkovic of Rose Lane Farms has been tirelessly and conscientiously devoted to growing Los Angeles’s only truly local, seasonal heirloom roses for over twenty-five years. She is a true rose champion and honors the land she stewards by growing without pesticides or chemicals. I am fortunate and honored to know Lynne, to bear witness to her service, and to love her roses. Thank you, Lynne.

Louesa: Can you share your early memories of roses from your childhood?

Lynne: My first exposure to gardening and the love of flowers started in Ohio when I was a small child. Memorial Day weekend was huge for my grandma; her family would come as far away as Indiana and New York to get there and help her go to the nurseries and get all the annuals for the upcoming warm months. My uncle Joe always came in his van so that he could load it up. All of us spent the weekend getting everything planted so her garden would be flush with color and flowers all summer long.

Louesa: Did your mother, father, aunties, and grandmother all grow roses?

Lynne: All of their gardens had roses, climbers, and other varieties. After coming here and educating myself on growing roses, when I would travel home to Ohio to visit, I would always care for my mom’s roses.

Louesa: When did you realize that locally grown heirloom roses are a completely different creature than imported or domestic hot-house, greenhouse, big ag roses?

Lynne: In the early ’90s, I knew that I wanted to grow roses and change peoples’ minds as to how roses should look. I was growing roses in my own home garden and could not understand how imports and hothouse roses were the ones people wanted. I started Rose Lane Farms in 1995—there was no Instagram, and I would peddle my roses from store to store, with a van full of my harvests, hoping that designers would get it.

Louesa: What does any given day of your tireless devotion to your roses look like?

Lynne: I usually start my days at 4:00 A.M. during the growing season. From the end of March through November, I am on the farm before the sun is up. Everything I do is by hand—I have never had electricity on the farm. I start harvesting orders and getting them in the water, then I have designers pick up as early as possible. I always assess the plants to see which roses are doing well and which aren’t. I check for gophers and check the leaves for diseases such as mildew and black spot. I grow in zone 10, and I rarely have to deal with rust or black spot—I feel very lucky about this! But on the other end of that, I deal with super-dry, hot days that can be unforgiving.

Louesa: How many rosebushes are you tending?

Lynne: Two thousand plus. Roses will always be the queen of the garden.

Louesa: Have your most beloved roses changed over time?

Lynne: Tough question, but the answer is no. My favorite rose that I grow is Madame Paule Massad, bred by my favorite breeder, Dominque Massad.

Louesa: What pains you the most about the typical agribusiness rose?

Lynne: Mass production and not caring about the impact big agriculture has on our soil. You can’t just use and use and do whatever you need to make the most and not care and be mindful about our soil.

Louesa: Do you think people are beginning to wake up regarding growing roses with poisons, using too much water, the cost of transport, and of toxic sprays all along the supply chain?

Lynne: Oh yes, for sure they are! It is thrilling to me, and I realize how patient I have had to be for others to catch up with my mind and passion.

Louesa: I could not agree more, I feel the same way. Now, new topic . . . tell me about your feral cats!

Lynne: This pulls on my heartstrings, but yes, many feral cats are around and make the farm their home. I love them and wish I could do more for them. It is important for me to make sure they all are spayed or neutered. A group called Fixation is just down the street from me, and they work tirelessly to curtail overpopulation. I have one large alpha cat named St. Pin. He is known for his gopher-hunting skills.

Louesa: Do you share my love of thorns?

Lynne: Ha! I guess I do. There is something romantic about the gorgeously fragrant rose and then the prickles down the stem.

WINTER LIGHT CAPTURED

Every romantic is powerless before the allure of a greenhouse. Window upon window letting winter light in to capture steamy heat so as to nurture tender seeds, delicate growing creatures, or ailing orchids, dry herbs, leggy geraniums. The greenhouse is both a nursery and a hospital—one that’s pretty and smells great and where you always feel like a warm cat in a window box. I particularly adore greenhouses in a semi-ruinous state, with rotting wood, broken panes of streaky stained glass, the former nursery patients now old and rambling and taking back the always feeble architecture and building practices of man. Like the Green Knight, green always grows back stronger and remains where man has been.

It naturally follows that we chose to create tiny, delicate, fragile, ephemeral offerings to Virginia Robinson Gardens, in this practical and very much not decayed greenhouse on this estate, the very first Beverly Hills mansion. Mrs. Virginia Robinson had a collection of diminutive glass bottles, and I think she liked miniatures. I’d been itching to employ this antique stash that was casually placed on a shelf above the washer and dryer in a small room off the kitchen that was used for floral arranging. So many shades of aqua, celadon, lavender, and oyster-shell glass . . . some still dirty from a century ago.

These formerly functional and now decorative bottles were begging to be filled with clematis, violet, scented geraniums, anemone, single roses, blue cornflower, and sage, plucked mere feet from the greenhouse.

To understand how extraordinary this seemed to me you would need to have craved the particular light and silence of greenhouses as I did: all my life I had been trying to spend time in one greenhouse or another, and all my life the person in charge of one greenhouse or another had been trying to hustle me out.

—JOAN DIDION “Quiet Days in Malibu,”
The White Album

Question: How many glorious October persimmons are too many for Louesa?

Answer: Never too many.

Question: Why is the combination of persimmon and anemone so intrinsic to ikebana?

Discuss amongst yourselves.

HEALDSBURG • MIWOK AND OHLONE LAND

Queen Anne’s lace
Borage
Heirloom roses
Dahlia
Chestnut
Tree dahlia
Cosmos
Persimmon
Yarrow
Quince
Common medlar
Malabar spinach
Arkansas Black apples
Japanese anemone

Where does the sweet fermenting scent of late-harvest apples and pears dotted with drunk bees and turning to cider beneath their own trees take you?

Are you one of the lucky ones? One who has walked an orchard in the Libran months or possibly into Scorpio season and felt tipsy and transported to gentle fields from other times? For me, this takes me back to my very early days in small-town Ohio, before agribusiness swallowed all of the fields, when families often had a small orchard of heirloom apples, pears, cherry, quince . . . some blueberry bushes covered in bird netting, and maybe even a few big, seedy Concord grapevines.

The families of my youth didn’t plant, tend, and harvest these microfarms as we might, as a return to simpler times. They were simply doing what their grandparents did. These fruit trees and vines offered gardens beauty and a steady source of fruits from May to November. Neighbors shared and gleaned, without an app to guide them.

As my friend and colleague Kevin West says in his book Saving the Seasons “The seasons are astronomical facts, but they are also states of mind, perhaps even phases of being. Only the unobservant would claim that a place has no seasons, would fail to notice that nature and agriculture respond to the grand tilting of the planets in the cosmos—and that, even as busy urban people, we exist in an eternal natural world.”

Wet stone inspired us to transport this ikebana tray from a large tableau to its isolated stage. A modest platform for the star of this vignette, Malabar spinach. Succulent leaves and stems like veins full of healthy blood, seeds and stems and berries that communicate poison but are edible. I tried to avoid the cliché of grape vines, but who could resist this moody spray? Yarrow that looks charred and wet roses barely hanging on. An old-world blue shutter for a touch of formality.

These bees aren’t even mine. I just own the crisis.
Ownership was never more ludicrous.
Who can own a bee?
The sheriff will find out if the hives are stolen.

— STEVE SPRINKEL
It’s Too Late to Be in a Hurry

A SENSITIVE NATURE

A northern flicker is a burnt-persimmon-flecked cousin of the woodpecker, a handsomely garish cloaked flyer. A pair of these birds always seem to greet us—and occasionally follow me while I tromp around at my friends’ HomeFarm in Healdsburg. We were last there in early November and remarked that the flicker’s autumnal “camouflage” would seem impossible to imagine in June, but I’ve been there in June, and the pair are always there, their color unchanged.

It makes me sad to think that most people have never had the exhilaration of glimpsing a speedy, brilliant flicker. Like so many exquisite creatures, they are what our brutish culture calls “sensitive,” affected by our increasingly toxic environment. So many singular (aren’t they all singular?) species have this same diagnosis: sensitive to pesticides and poisons, vulnerable to habitat destruction and disrupted migrations, sensitive to the loss of dark sky and to increasingly artificial light, to air and sound pollution, to changing temperatures. Sensitive, I guess, to humans. I recently found a heartbreaking list of species in the Pacific Northwest and Northern California that are either near-threatened or actively endangered. This list includes the marbled murrelet, the little brown bat, olive-sided flycatchers, blue-grey taildropper slugs, phantom orchids (among many endangered orchids), Steller sea lions, California red-legged frogs, California least terns, salt marsh harvest mice, green sea turtles, giant garter snakes, Ridgway’s rails, Mission blue butterflies, tricolored blackbirds, southwestern willow flycatchers, and our always-on-the-edge California condors.

I am one of the fortunate ones. In my life in California, living in West Marin and now on a remote 2,600-foot-elevation ridge with unusual biodiversity, I have lived close to many of these threatened species. This cohabitating has only increased my love and my heartbreak. People wonder where my occasional anger stems from or ask why I am so committed, so uncompromising about not purchasing or eating food or using flora grown with pesticides or flown in from far-off lands. Please reference the list I just shared. Pesticides play a major role in how many creatures have come to be on that list.

I’ve always been a proud canary in the coal mine. Growing up, it took me a while to realize what an immense gift it was to get sick from pollutants that didn’t bother my family, schoolmates, or elders. I heard a lot of things along the lines of, “That smell doesn’t make me dizzy. That chlorine doesn’t give me asthma; that soup bouillon and MSG don’t make me feel odd with an unusual headache.” I’d hear . . . no, the spraying of pesticides on our suburban street while kids play . . . no, that doesn’t bother me.

Well, all of these toxins in my environment did bother me. In fact, they made me ill. When I moved to California, I was finally able to feel at home, to breathe fully, for what felt like for the first time in my life.

Do you see the naturalist thread?

Is this web woven in a manner that brings a fragile, fractal clarity?

I humbly believe that we have collectively made these realizations and observations a bit late. “Too little, too late” rings in my head too often.

All of the creatures, critters, flora, fauna, organisms who are or were “too sensitive”—they are trying to tell us something. They can’t communicate with us when they are extinct. Tragically.

But there are infinite nonhuman beings still around from whom we can learn a great deal if we pay deeper attention to them. To quote Guillermo del Toro, “Seeing is love,” and this has become an oft-repeated mantra of mine.

The flicker shows us when we are in a healthy environment, a thriving microsystem and ecosystem. They need clean air and water to survive; they live on an abundance of native insects, nuts, and berries that too are sensitive to pesticides. A glimpse of a flicker reassures me that this earth I’m walking on and this sky above me are doing all right, and I can breathe deeper.

THE GLEANERS

Sadly, foraging is a word that’s been commodified, “trendified,” bastardized, dumbed down, and thrown around to the point that we find “foraged” juice at the market, “foraged” grains, “foraged” bowls of acai . . . I could list endless examples of this word being misused to the point that I’m convinced most people don’t know what it really means.

Am I being a stickler for semantic accuracy in a time of loosey-goosey linguistics? Maybe . . . yet, in the spirit of being instructional and constructive, here are some definitions. Let’s start in the late thirteenth or early fourteenth century, with the old French word fourrage, which stems from fuerre, meaning “hay, straw, bed of straw, forage, fodder.” A more active, even militaristic, verb form can be translated as “roving in search of provisions.” I think of a conquering army pillaging, plundering, laying waste to villages and fields.

The most basic modern definition is, simply, “searching for wild food resources.” In other words, survival.

We forage not just for food but for medicinal, spiritual, and ritualistic plants, for building materials, adornment, trade goods, gifts, and more. Today, whole fields of study are dedicated to learning the most ancient survival tactics and sacred semi-lost knowledge. And somewhere in all of this lies the confusion between what is meant by foraging as compared to gleaning.

Returning to definitions, the origins of the word gleaning are unknown, but it probably has Celtic roots. By the sixth century, we have the Late Latin word glennare, and thence to Anglo-French glener, to Middle English glean, all meaning “to gather grain or other produce left by reapers” or, more broadly, to “pick over in search of” or “collect, gather, pick up.”

Most agrarian cultures had a system allowing the lower classes—serfs, villagers, the poor—to glean any food left on trees or on the ground after the upper classes had harvested the most valued crops. These practices, as well as more benevolent sharing cultures, served to minimize waste and provide nourishment for all in the community. Waste not, want not.

Circling back to my practice . . . when I tromp around West Marin cutting fennel or abundant bay laurel branches on the roadside or brambly rootstock roses that were planted on barbed-wire fences half a century ago . . . that’s foraging.

When my friends, local farmers, and neighbors invite me—or say yes to my request—to come to their land or home to cut or pick up an abundance of persimmon branches or fallen quince, gather all-too-abundant nasturtiums on a slope, prune a Lady Banks’s rose, or cut the last of the Queen Anne’s lace . . . that’s gleaning.

I’ll mention Agnès Varda twice in this book; she deserves it. Her famous documentary The Gleaners and I is a touchstone for me, a piece I return to again and again. She turns her lens on modern-day “gleaners,” humans often overlooked and hungry, even unhoused. They survive on the discarded leftovers of a rich and wasteful modern-day France, which can stand in for much of the Old and New World today.

These scrappy, resourceful individuals, living mostly outside of society, collect and create not just nourishment but visionary art with thrown-out materials. Gleaning is a rich metaphor. To quote Varda herself, on gleaning as a metaphor for documentary, “You pick what you find; you bend; you go around; you are curious; you try and find out where are things.”

KINDRED SPIRITS

Cindy Daniel and Doug Lipton are the owners of Home-Farm and stewards of its diverse bounty of vegetables, herbs, fruits, flowers, olives, nuts, grapes, chickens, and bees. Doug and Cindy were kind enough to host us and to answer my questions here.

Louesa: How did you two come to inhabit this land?

Cindy & Doug: In the early 1990s we fell in love with Healdsburg, a small town with deep agrarian roots. We moved here with our young children to become part of a growing community of sustainable farmers, winemakers, and food producers. Healdsburg itself is at the epicenter of a vital watershed, a region with allure and productivity that are based on the diversity and natural fecundity of its soils, hills, and woodlands. We settled in Dry Creek Valley, on sixteen acres of river-bottom land and began to envision our farm as a patchwork of small fields, orchards, wildlife corridors, and hedgerows.

Louesa: How was the land when you found it, and how have you been involved in its evolution?

Cindy & Doug: Although the farm was blessed with rich alluvial soil, it had been planted with grapes, so the first thing we did was to plant cover crops to enrich the soil. We also enhanced a natural swale to help move water through the property and began to establish a mixed orchard of heirloom fruit trees.

Louesa: At what point did you decide to cohabit more intentionally with the bees? What have you learned from living with them?

Cindy: I became interested in bees after attending a class on pollinator gardens, where I met a local “bee whisperer,” Michael Thiele, who become my dear friend, mentor, and something of a spiritual teacher. Michael offered a new paradigm of caring for bees, one that shifted from conventional production-oriented beekeeping to an approach that focused on the well-being of bees.

Michael’s approach toward bees, and by extension the one that I have learned, has always been deeply reverent and nonexploitive. Focusing on the bees’ health and life force, he refuses to use chemicals to treat them, sugar water to feed them, or smoke to calm them. He is so careful and deliberate that he rarely uses any protective clothing and handles bees barehanded.

Living with bees has taught me many things. Beyond fulfilling the critical role of pollinating our crops and providing us with honey, bees offer a glimpse into a world with its own social order, its own rhythm, and its own sense of interconnectedness. Over time I have learned to see the hive as one being—a super being, or “beeing,” as Michael would say. This notion suggests a different understanding in a time when contemporary beekeeping approaches the beehive as if it were a machine with interchangeable parts. In a larger way, it suggests we are all interconnected and interdependent, an especially meaningful lesson in these times.

Louesa: Can you speak to examples of climate change and pattern disruption that you’ve observed here?

Cindy & Doug: Over our twenty-five years on this land, we have experienced higher temperatures and have seen reduced bee activity, sun-damaged crops, and lower rates of pollination. Drought has stunted the growth of crops, resulting in a decline in the size and quality of produce.

Louesa: What changes have you have made to adapt?

Cindy & Doug: Too many to list here, but some key ones include replacing selected fruit trees with more heat-tolerant varieties, increasing mulching and composting, reducing tillage to reduce evaporation, and increasing cover-cropping to enhance soil biology. Changes made to attract more pollinators include planting new hedgerows and creating a drought-tolerant pollinator garden for bees. We recycle everything: all food scraps and vegetation are composted, and discarded tree branches and trunks are chipped to create mulch.

Louesa: How does your formal education inform or differ from your experiences at HomeFarm?

Cindy: When we met in college, Doug, who was pursuing a degree in biology to study soils and plants, turned me on to gardening and composting and the works of Wendell Berry. Together, we amassed quite a collection of books on food, agriculture, and ecology. Eventually, Doug received additional degrees in agronomy and soil chemistry, while I developed a deep interest in food and gardening. Together we dreamed of one day having a farm.

While we had gained a depth of knowledge from “book learning,” we certainly lacked much practical experience when we started HomeFarm. What we did have was a love of the land, determination, imagination, and a vision for our shared life. All these years later I would say that it takes all of that and more: commitment, attention, time, patience, and thoughtful stewardship. As Doug always says, farming is as much an art as a science, and one has to improvise, hone your senses, and stay present. To quote Wendell Berry’s The Unsettling of America, “There is an inescapable kinship between farming and art, for farming depends as much on character, devotion, imagination, and the sense of structure, as on knowledge. It is a practical art.”

I love you, rotten.
I love to suck you out from your skins,
So brown and soft and coming suave,
So morbid, as the Italians say.

— D. H. LAWRENCE “Medlars and Sorb-apples”

BRENTWOOD • TONGVA LAND

Datura
Hollyhock
Castor
Loquat Nepenthes
Sarracenia
Magnolia
Plumeria
Dahlia
Acacia
Cannabis
Nasturtiums
Oakleaf hydrangea
Salix willow roots
California buckwheat
Peruvian pepper-tree peppercorns
Matilija and California poppies
Persimmon blossom
Passionflower
Burnt pomelo
Eggplant bloom

When I was nineteen, I’d already consumed a steady diet of Monty Python during my suburban teens. And then Terry Gilliam’s Brazil came out in December of 1985. Some films do change the viewer’s lens (pardon the pun) and remain aesthetic and philosophical touchstones. For me, Brazil is one of those films.

On the topic of unconventionally postapocalyptic films, we recently watched Tank Girl. I’m not sure I’d ever seen the whole film, but people used to say I looked like Lori Petty, who stars in the film, along with Malcolm McDowell, who lives in Ojai. The plot centers on a drought-ridden planet . . . it seemed like it’d be a fun, retro watch. It’s not so funny these days.

I’ve been talking about Mad Max and Blade Runner and bandying about terms like dystopian, apocalyptic, and Brazil-esque for going on thirty years. You know what I’ve noticed? Sometimes in the past when I flung around these terms, these references, these dark phrases, I would be met with, “Isn’t that a bit extreme? A bit art-student sophomoric?”

In the past few years, I’ve stopped getting those responses—instead, there is a growing chorus of voices using those same expressions of doom. Can doom become camp in such times?

LA is an increasingly dystopian urban scape, full-tilt devoted to the capitalist machine of consumption. Don’t get me wrong, I love La-La Land—and what’s more “peace punk” than not purchasing flowers for our events and photo shoots? Than foraging at the Veterans Administration, or visiting your colleague’s urban rose “farm” on the wrong side of the 101, or being invited to glean from the gardens of the Westside elites? You know what tells me that these acts are punk, that they buck the dominant paradigm and question the system? People get so excited at the very idea.

It’s naughty.

It’s subversive.

It makes sense.

I disagree with everything
I used to say.

— VIVIENNE WESTWOOD interview,
The Guardian

Many poppies are known as “fire followers” because of their preference for propagating and multiplying after a fire. Their seeds pop open from the heat of the blaze, the charred soil aids germination, and sprouting is triggered by smoke. Often seeds that have laid dormant for years, including those of rare and endangered poppies, will receive the fire’s enticement to come out of dormancy. These glorious, happy fire poppies, Papaver californicum, also serve to reduce erosion, often on slopes where protective cover has been reduced or destroyed by fire. Science points to a history of severe but infrequent wildfires in California as well as most Mediterranean coastal chaparral ecosystems occurring every 30 to 150 years. Sadly these cycles are greatly accelerated now. Those years when ample rain follows fire, explosions of brilliant poppies often provide a stunning contrast to still-charred lands.

Ikebana has been known by the name of kadō. If interpreted literally, it would mean ‘the way of flowers.’ This, however, does not mean only the arrangement of flowers; in the conception of ‘the way,’ there is an element of the spiritual which might be termed something like Confucian training. . . . A greater freedom of spirits must be breathed into ikebana. Ikebana is a pure formative art using flowers as materials. And by being such it can become an art. . . . Attention, mindfulness, diligence, but humbleness, meekness, gentle touch of fear, above all listen to what the flowers have to say! . . . Begin with the heart of a novice, continue to possess the heart of a novice.

— SŌFŪ TESHIGAHARA Ikebana, 1958

KADŌ

We are breaking form slightly in this chapter—the interview is a conceptual dialogue between myself and the historic and cultural precepts of ikebana.

1. Shizuka (quiet, calm, flower), or silence. The observation of nature, absence of noise, idle talk, or gossip.

Louesa: This is innate to me—to listen to and deeply observe all that is of the “natural” world (although I reject the idea that we are separate from nature). In order to hear more clearly, to see more deeply, we need to learn to quiet the easily distracted “monkey brain,” the self. My hope is that getting to know other life forms will foster more tolerance.

2. Minimarizumu, or minimalism.

Louesa: I see this as inextricable from silence, as above. A comfortable and intelligent relationship with negative space is essential to this art—yet maybe here’s where my punk aesthetic comes in. I’m a bit of a rebel, and a maximalist more often than not. Glam, sexy, louche, even—still, I do strive for harmony, narrative, and through lines in my maximalism, not just a hot mess.

I also can lean into minimalism in my choice of vessel or flora—using only a single material such as earth-toned ceramics or glass or a single floral element, maybe magnolias or nasturtium.

3. Katachi To Sen: Form and line, implicitly harmonious and graceful.

Louesa: I’ve always identified more as a painter than as a floral artist. But then, isn’t all art made up of shape and line, composition, and color theory? The same artist will express their personality, their creative vision, in very similar ways regardless of medium. I have found that harmony comes effortlessly when you use only seasonal and local flora.

4. Sensei: In the West we mainly know this word in its meaning of “teacher” or “elder,” but it also carries the meaning of “form.” In ikebana, this can mean found rather than planned. You find what is already there, in yourself and in nature.

Louesa: I see Mother Nature and her infinite wisdom and countless creatures as the ultimate teachers, elders, sensei, containing all “form(s).” Gazing, seeing, being in communion leads to more thoughtful stewardship. No need to fly blooms, branches, trees in from other spots on Earth. The container of your “ingredients” is nearby, and it’s virtually endless. The deeper you go, the bigger it becomes, like a fairy house under the oak roots.

5. Jinrui: Humanity. Ikebana incorporates humanity as well as nature.

Louesa: In Shinto, it’s all interconnected. You can make ikebana into a reflection of your feelings or your past lives or someone else’s feelings. No matter how we try to quiet the ego self, our narratives weave their way into our craft. Calm the ego, look outside . . . sooner or later, your own unique human persona will reveal itself. I like to reframe this as communion with all beings, a dialogue with spirits that imbues my flora in this offering.

6. Bigaku: Aesthetics. Below, a number of relevant Japanese aesthetic principles or rules, with my thoughts and reactions.

Wabi-sabi (imperfection).

Louesa: My work is so often referred to as wabi-sabi that it’s almost a cliché—all of it is both perfect and imperfect in my eyes, all at once.

Miyabi (elegance), often translated as heartbreaker, eliminating anything that’s “vulgar.” Of course, such terms are all relative, culturally defined, and personal.

Louesa: Do what makes you happy in that moment, and always in relationship to your set and setting. But heartbreak has always felt seductively romantic to me and plays a huge role in my work.

Shibui (subtlety). Simple, subtle, or unobtrusive things are more beautiful when they speak for themselves.

Louesa: When I was at Chez Panisse, I came to understand the goal of infusing this extreme level of discipline, mastery of craft, and love into your work by getting out of the way and letting the ingredients speak for themselves. Overbearing is boring.

Iki (originality).

Louesa: In many ways, Japanese culture doesn’t celebrate uniqueness, and this is exactly the kind of contradiction that I find fascinating. Nobody has ever accused me of being unoriginal. But I do think a reverence for our ancestors’ teachings and lineage is a lost value in the West. You need to understand classical formality before you can be abstract. My work always feels a bit like abstract expressionism, but as a young artist I learned realism. Walk before running.

Jo-ha-kyū (slow, accelerate, end).

Louesa: This is about tempo and applies to other Japanese arts, such as the tea ceremony. Start slowly, accelerate, then end suddenly—like good sex! But yes, cadence is everything. I know I’m in a good zone when I hear my work, when the composition has a song. That is a sweet spot. Every being, every spirit possesses movement, as should every arrangement.

Yūgen (mysterious).

Louesa: Life is boring when all the facts are known; mystery is the nature of spirit, poetry, romance, and Mother Nature. I am allergic to obviousness and literalism, to pedantic or trendy art.

Geidō (discipline and ethics).

Louesa: With no discipline or ethics, your work is just noise and often painfully self-indulgent. For me, discipline leads to dropping some of your ego or self. The healing power of devotion and hard work is a wisdom in Japanese culture that I value and that has healed me.

Ensō (absolute enlightenment).

Louesa: This Zen concept is often represented as a circle, infinity, or nothingness. And thus, I have nothing more to say about it.

Kawaii (cute).

Louesa: This particular kind of cuteness has always has been part of Japanese culture . . . and Curtis’s favorite term of endearment for almost anything he likes is “cute”! There’s no precise translation possible from Japanese culture to ours, but “cuteness” is the closest. But I strive for high camp sometimes, and a sense of humor is essential to at least hold on to yourself as you create.

FLORAL FOAM

Have you ever had the experience of touching, tasting, or smelling something up close and just knowing it is wrong, toxic, unhealthy—a substance to be avoided at all cost?

Well, that is precisely the feeling I had the first time I touched and smelled floral foam. It was so obviously wrong, a crime against nature.

Despite my reputation sometimes, I do make an effort not to climb up onto a soapbox and make a speech. I trust that the nature of my work communicates more than any diatribe could—I’ve learned by now that the observations that seem painfully obvious to me are not always evident to others. One primary example of this is the floral foam so ubiquitous in modern-day floral work, a product of the notorious Union Carbide Corporation (now part of the Dow Chemical Company).

There is a movement underway these past few years—too late, in my humble opinion—to expose floral foam for the toxic nightmare crutch that I have always known it to be. I am going to brag here—I have never, not once, not ever, used floral foam in my work. Kind of like how I’ve never drunk diet soda, taken a cruise, gone big-game hunting, chartered a cigarette boat, or gotten married in Vegas.

There, I’ve said it.

When I speak to garden clubs, floral design communities, or my readers, I’m often asked what I use instead. My answer is one you might have guessed by now: nature.

After all, doesn’t nature provide the most useful structure for an arrangement? Isn’t she an all-encompassing system? The possibilities are endless and usually right under our noses and clippers. Let’s look at that in the context of one of my favorite flowers, the rose.

One of the worst things that’s happened in the recent history of floral design and nurseries is the unfortunate castrating and dumbing-down of roses. This subject, one I’m so passionate about, could easily fill an entire book.

Post–Industrial Revolution, the same people who brought us modern pesticides also decided that glorious heirloom and “wild” roses needed to be tamed. Genetic dicing and splicing resulted in roses that, to me, aren’t really even roses anymore. A good metaphor would be how, after generations of genetic tinkering and cross-breeding—voilà! You have a bichon frise. A fine lap dog, but clearly not a wolf.

These scentless, thornless, disease-vulnerable, pesticide-dependent monoculture roses—sadly, the roses most people know—are not roses by this measure.

So here’s the irony in relation to the topic, circling back to floral foam.

Humans, in their arrogant desire to “better” the rose, bred out the thorns that provide its natural defense against predators (news flash, we humans are predators). Imagine the person who adores roses but is challenged to make a creative arrangement without the thorns that, for me, act as Velcro. Instead, we have the big corporate agribusiness solution of using a toxic, man-made material to keep those thornless stems in place. And, adding injury to insult, these “improved” garden roses are more susceptible to mold, mildew, rot, and pests (or as I call them, beneficial insects), leading gardeners to use even more toxic chemicals. It’s a vicious cycle of poison, for both our beloved Mother Earth and for all of her inhabitants.

It just always makes sense to me to use what’s at hand, what’s provided by nature, for the bone structure of my installations and arrangements. I also scavenge interesting materials that can accomplish the same thing as floral foam or those horrid chicken-wire cages people put in vases to hold stems in place.

One of the most frequent compliments I hear is, “Your work has so much movement.” I’m always happy to hear that, but it’s not me. The movement in my work comes from honoring the movement, the lyricism, the sway, the reaching, the turning, the grace of the magnolia branch, the wisteria vine, the clematis tendrils, the nasturtiums all waterlogged . . . and on and on. If I forced these beings into a cage of chicken wire or a brick of toxic floral foam, I’d be murdering the movement, the poetry of the flora, and polluting the oceans, filling the landfills, and making myself sick.

I’d rather stick with the gifts and challenges that aren’t man-made.

For more on this topic, I urge you to check out sustainablefloristry.org.

We decided that aspic makes a flower frog and can replace floral foam.

FORAGING ON THE VA GROUNDS

The punk nature of my work, be it overt or more covert, exists in opposition to the tame, the gentrified, the fenced-in—like expressions of resistance, of counterculture art, have in any medium or epoch.

Foraging and gleaning, crawling around the outskirts and the in-between lands, the no-man’s-land, danger zones, unclaimed or abandoned lots, their chain-link fences neglected even long ago . . . these are fertile grounds for appreciating and using the flora that was long ago orphaned. These zones have an enemy, a growing threat, a buzzkill. My ragtag crew of abandoned lot crawlers have seen this threat growing year by year in California: gentrification.

All of my former stomping grounds have been overly sanitized. Real estate is more valuable every day, and it’s rare to see a lot stay “vacant” in Oakland, Berkeley, Marin, Sonoma, Napa, Richmond, San Francisco (forget about it), Ojai, Santa Cruz—even Benicia and Ventura are becoming overdeveloped. Instead of rootstock roses climbing a fence—or datura gone truly autonomous, passion vine taking charge—the owners of these spaces have chosen buildings and parking lots.

Nowhere is this more evident than Los Angeles. We now dread foraging and gleaning in LA proper. In fact, these days I often source materials from small urban organic growers. When I can’t forage or glean in an area, I am more than happy to support their labor and service. A winning pivot.

Around 2010, my colleague Kevin West asked me to create an entirely herbaceous installation for a conversation between Hans Ulrich Obrist, John Baldessari, and Frank Gehry about the Interview Project, some three-thousand-plus interviews with artists, activists, and everyday people. As fate would cruelly have it, I was broke, really broke, experiencing housing insecurity and hustling for every dollar. The night before my flight to LA, I worked a wedding where I not only created floral arrangements, but also stayed and ran front-of-house operations for Sylvan Mishima Brackett’s budding catering business, Peko Peko. I needed the money. My flight was delayed; I got into LAX around midnight after working twelve hours, made it to the remote car-rental lot, and crawled into my bed at the Sunset Tower (I may have been broke, but I stay in good hotels; it’s essential when working this hard). Hopped up on adrenaline, exhaustion, and the anxiety of delivering an installation for art-world giants, I slept for no more than three hours.

In the morning, I was losing faith in my reputation for pulling rabbits out of my hat no matter what. I met Kevin for tea and pastries on the Westside; luckily he’d had a hot date the night before and was also sleep-deprived. We were deliciously punchy, a state I believe can be bizarrely creative.

Kevin saved the day and the event, and in doing so, surprised me with a solution to my foraging anxiety. He was connected to someone who helped spearhead the Veterans’ Garden, a program at the local Veterans Administration hospital to create a community garden where patients could grow herbs, vegetables, and fruits. It was a proper garden, by which, among other things, I mean not too manicured but just overgrown enough—he knows what I gravitate toward!

I was ecstatic to see tall, tall oregano gone to seed, basil, thyme, lemon verbena, various sages, fennel, Persian mulberries, citrus, even giant, poisonous castor in untended corridors. We filled the rental car with herbs, and off we went toward the event with newfound confidence.

I think the evening was a success, but I was too tired to get dolled up and go. Sometimes, even if John Baldessari will be sitting in front of your vertical herbaceous scrim, the right thing to do is to stay in your expensive hotel room, have a hot bath, and order room service. The perfect evening.

This is a long tangent, but have faith; it circles back.

The way of the forager and the gleaner—for we were gleaning the garden’s excess harvest with permission—is to have maps and memories of good, fertile spots that you can return to season after season. Like any critter, we depend on circles and grids of trusted paths and surprises.

So this chapter’s shoot in Brentwood, as luck would have it, happened a stone’s throw from the VA building. Our nation is one vast crime of waste and forgotten peoples, and the VA exemplifies this. It’s a place full of heartbreaking pathos and discarded life, both human and nonhuman. In the way of bureaucratic laziness, such healthy, life-affirming garden programs have been all but eliminated. And yet, the green always grows back. Guided by a BFF who works at the VA, we explored the spots where these community gardens had been, finding treasures that almost no one sees or uses anymore.

My friend has a tender heart and a keen eye. She took us to jasmine climbing the chain-link fence; led me to huge, woolly late-autumn grape vines; showed me the giant loquat tree. She even gleaned some fruits to bring to her mother for a holiday meal honoring the forgotten.

Walking in the morning’s cool fog, we stopped under an old oak, all three of us quiet. An owl took flight just above us. A sweet omen for the day, not one to be feared. And moments later, I found hundreds of baby nasturtiums somehow taking root in harsh eucalyptus mulch—delicate, brilliant green, and poetic. Their nursery was so inhospitable that I could gently pull them out, roots and all. We quickly ferried them to our shoot. Because nothing is more “punk ikebana” than a baby nasturtium, roots and all, plucked from a neglected garden at the VA. We honor them, the no longer forgotten.

RYOJI

Almost every culture has had some variant of the concept of “crazy wisdom,” or a nonbinary understanding of amoral deities, gods, creators, and tricksters. Amoral doesn’t mean what Judeo-Christian theology says it means, situated in a world of good/evil binaries. Most of us are aware of the Native American tricksters Coyote and Raven. Most of us have some knowledge of Kali, the Hindu goddess who is the mother of all living things and also of destruction. We all know vampires can be cool and kind and sexy, as can the Norse god Loki. In the Shinto religions, the spirits know as kami often fulfill this role.

Ryoji Kawajima is a local character who has a lot to teach us about crazy wisdom; Curtis and I are stoked whenever he visits our funky compound, inevitably staying a few days and nights. His family’s lineage is from Hiroshima and Osaka. Just a hunch, but when your grandmother runs to the hills and survives the atomic bomb, shielded by other humans laying on top of her, you too might come into this world with a nuanced and innate understanding of cosmic mysteries and humanity’s fall from grace.

In true, traditional Japanese form, Ryoji always comes bearing omiyage, plentiful and perfectly thought-out gifts. Nothing haphazard about his extreme generosity, which seems to know no limits, in home offerings, collaborating, physical labor, or dare I say it, “spiritual” gleanings and gifts.

For example, he loves all of the shrines around our home, so he brought precious and rare seasonal incense made by living treasure Kinzaburo Kitamura, the last human in Japan who still makes it by hand in his workshop. Devoted, the maker burns the wood there, handles the sacred herbs, hand rolls, cuts, dries, and, of course, places everything in the most elegant old-school wooden boxes. I’m going to go out on a limb, but perhaps one of our favorite gifts ever! It follows that this next-level ancient method incense smells unlike anything ever purchased here, including from the esoteric incense shop in San Francisco’s Japantown.

Ryoji burned it freely, in his crazy-wisdom manner. It’s all an offering to the kami, and as such it should be given freely. At first I was sort of liberal with burning these rare sticks. Then, scarcity mentality crept in: what if that master passes on to other realms; what if he becomes too infirm to work; what if he stops shipping? Yikes, I better save some sticks.

Then Ryoji’s voice reminds me, “It’s all sacred and profane, it’s all flowing in and out, it’s all a gift . . . don’t hold this precious stick too hard; you may break it! New gifts and offering await all around us—honor the maker; burn and offer to your home shrines.”

Is this a tangent? No! I will not allow the tangent police to silence my riffs, no more than Ryoji would.

A great number of my collaborators on this book come from my Northern California community of almost twenty years or, now, our SoCal pod. Ryoji is firmly rooted in both tribes.

I always wanted to incorporate futuristic sci-fi, Tokyo-inspired, psychedelic, spooky, only-sort-of-edible aspics, jellies, and terrines for this book. Seems a must-have element for punk ikebana. We have been saving images of bright, weird, gelatinous scapes created in gelées for almost six years, but who’s counting?

These had to be vegetable- or ocean-based, none of the evil agribusiness animal products that most gelatin contains. I knew we had the obvious collaboration in our kami Ryoji, whom I know from my Bay Area culinary world.

So, over one of the winter holidays that we don’t celebrate, Curtis and I spent four days with our photographer, Ian, and both Ryoji and his friend David in our wacky Ojai compound. We ate together; we drank sake and heirloom California-grain whiskey; we cooked; and we laughed together while reading about, dreaming of, and teaching ourselves how to create the aspics for this chapter. Then we all reconvened in Brentwood for two surreal days and nights at a very dusty construction site next to the new Getty Museum to play with trays and trays of aspics and jellies and see if our idea was indeed crazy.

SULPHUR MOUNTAIN • CHUMASH LAND

Wild peonies
California poppy
Peach blossom
Cherry tomato
Nasturtium
Thistles
Datura
Hollyhock
Magnolia
Castor
Pepper tree corns
Cactus bloom
Heirloom roses
Elderberry
Lady Banks’s roses

If we are gathering, gleaning, and collecting the flora that we sacrifice to adorn our homes, if we are mindfully bringing the outside in, certain flora will emerge as familiar friends over time. As your practice becomes aligned with a specific place and season, comforting patterns begin to emerge, patterns and playlists that become even more apparent after a few years.

Some flower companions have become near-constant visitors in my home. When I lived in the Bay Area, jasmine tendrils, with their diminutive, almost cloyingly sweet blossoms, could be found in my homes and shops nearly seven months of the year. A rolling blooming of magnolias also became a signature of mine, changing with the seasons. I learned the microseason for countless varietals, enjoying sublime fuchsia-colored blossoms in November, delicate goat milk–hued blooms in December, and cup-and-saucer-sized Magnolia campbelli in February. Throughout spring and into summer, each month or two brought varietals in shades of pink and aubergine, star-petaled and bone-colored blossoms, and, in summer, the Magnolia grandiflora. Camellias become a constant during the heavy winter rains that saturate the earth on chilly mornings. In fact, by the time I left the Bay Area, I needed a break from camellias! Can you imagine?

My love affair with fennel along the roadsides and in abandoned fields has been going on some thirty years, to the point that I purposefully skipped weaving fennel into this book. A girl can only love so much fennel in her life (as I still do). Nasturtiums in Northern California can blanket yards, hillsides, and parking lots, even in San Francisco. Here in Southern California I wish and search for these fairy pads. And every rose ever born can thrive in the Bay Area, so it follows that I carry and live with roses everywhere, always. Some things don’t change.

Ojai has been our home now for almost seven years, with no seven-year itch in sight. The climate here is dramatically hotter, drier, more extreme—and seems to be getting more so every year.

This chapter—this whole book—offers some clues as to which floral companions share our lands, our paths, our roads, our town, and which are brought into the house to play, whether for a short visit or long stay.

How groovy is life here on our ridge and in our village that the first blooms I think of here are datura, particularly the local “jimsonweed,” in all of her glory, dangerous power, and surreal beauty? We ask the plant’s permission to cut, sacrifice, and adorn our space with it. Most was gathered right outside our door, on the thirteen acres we share, where it has been a native for eons. We have also foraged, with permission, gathering datura from the local hair salon, from no-longer-abandoned lots, next to the local AA and dog groomers, and the side of State Route 150. Datura seems to be everywhere here, so it’s a “usual” unusual player. I’m not sure yet, after almost seven years, how many months we are graced, blessed, anointed, even, with this queen. I’m thinking lately that the blooms are happening seven months out of twelve . . . not bad.

And hollyhocks! When I lived in Ohio and even in Northern California, I looked down on hollyhocks as too bright, happy, and garish, standing too tall and erect in a grandmother’s garden. But here in our glaring sun, growing alongside cactuses and poppies, they rock; they last and last. Tough characters, able to take the 110-degree heat and keep coming back for more. Holly-hocks, you now have my respect.

Elderberry plants used to be a reward for making the drive to West Marin, Sonoma, or Napa, but a rarity in urban Oakland. Ojai is just far enough south to have been northern Mexico not so long ago. Our hills are blanketed with elderberry shrubs, their showy, fragrant, ivory clusters of tiny blossoms perfect for cocktails. Later in the season they offer sexy, droopy clusters of deep, inky purple berries ready for arranging in your home or making into syrup.

I’ll spare the reader more examples. Suffice it to say, when you bring your floral neighbors into your home, your relationship with the land deepens, and the local flora become loyal, consistent friends, eternally teaching, healing, and beautifying our lives.

I always imagined that I would have a life very different than the one imagined for me, but I understood from a very early age that I would have to revolt in order to make that life.

—LEONOR FINI New York Art Beat

INTERIORS

This is the first home I have ever “owned,” or should I say, not rented; ownership is a slippery and slightly deceptive concept in this age of inflated home prices and deflated earning power for most humans in most places. As economist Robert Reich has said, we’re living with the greatest income disparity between rich and poor since feudal Europe. And that should be reason enough for the revolution that seems to be taking a long time to occur and for my growing ethos of “peace punk.”

I’ve had an epiphany, a realization in the past two years since we moved here as guests and, we hope, stewards of this small plot of land, where we can engage in rewilding. It has occurred to me that one of the most powerful ways to buck the dominant paradigm is by saying no to rampant consumerism in our homes. By living a life more fully aligned with our aesthetic, values, philosophies, and spirit in our homes every day. Does this seem painfully obvious?

As someone who grew up in suburban America, I don’t think it is painfully obvious. With globalization, almost every part of the modern world is marked by social-media culture, by big-box, flat-earth commerce. We have fewer and fewer small businesses, less regional variation, and more conformity. In most homes I visit, I witness an astonishing and sad lack of originality, the inhabitants seemingly unaware of the home as a unique extension of their personas.

Social media is a twenty-four-hour machine, all too often churning out images of how mainstream culture thinks your home should look and feel, whether it’s in California, the Midwest, Japan, Europe . . . and on and on. Regionality is becoming a thing of the past. Tragically, poverty and remoteness seem to be the only protectors of intact regional culture.

Why do so many people cede the power to express themselves to the demographic whims of big-box chains? Or worse, to the bad design and poor craftsmanship streaming out of factories around the globe? Why? Each individual may have their own answer to that question. I suspect laziness may play a role, along with the illusion that cheap goods make sense in the long run. The fear of being “different.” Some sociologists say the desire to “fit in” to your culture may be a stronger motivating factor than hunger or pain. Imagine that.

I wish with all my heart that this book will inspire even one reader to make their home, their nest, their refuge a more honest, more accurate, more soulful reflection of their being and spirit. I also wish for our beleaguered Mother Earth that this inspires the reader to take their time, allowing the home’s interiors to develop more slowly, more organically, with a gentle long view.

Fill your home with more antiques, whether from fancy shops, garage sales, sidewalks, or alleyways (I love a good alley find!). Embrace zero waste whenever possible. Don’t buy disposable furniture from shoddy factories or a decorative object with no meaning to you besides having seen it on Instagram.

Think about the past, present, and future meaning of anything you bring into your home, its value and durability. Ask yourself, will this end up in a landfill anytime soon?

Throw out societal conceptions of value and replace them with objects that mean something to you. This ocean rock, worn from eons of tumbling in the surf or being colonized by sea worms, makes a perfect incense holder; choose such a unique treasure over some tacky, mass-produced brass one.

This vintage kitchenware is charming and durable, rich with a lifetime of stories, burnt butter, and loving meals. This piece of art was made by my great-grandmother or my niece, or maybe a friend or visionary artist whom I want to support in their practice and career.

These bath linens are no longer made in Turkey as they once were; the looms don’t exist anymore. These glam towels belonged to my sophisticated grandmother, and I love their color, the handiwork, how they are still useful and beautiful after a half century of use. They remind me of her daily, as does this bathroom mirror, also from her home. All these things are better made than anything we could afford today. If you don’t have family heirlooms, purchase others’ heirlooms. These discarded orphans from other lives have a story, a craft. So many hands have made this and lived with this thing, so why buy new? Why?

This is your chance to say no to mass production. To be idiosyncratic and singular, to express yourself more fully, with no one to tell you what’s correct. You are at home, safe and sound. Become more fully you, living and breathing with your home.

VESSELS

If anything—and I mean anything—in our home can hold water, it’s fair game for use as a vessel. And if it doesn’t hold water, it simply becomes a dry vessel. With this attitude, this approach, this open-mindedness, the possibilities are almost endless.

My great pet peeve regarding vessels is those made of cheap, boring, standard, middle-of-the-road glass. You know exactly what I’m talking about. How could you do such a wrong, commit such an offense as to bring that sacred datura or magnolia into the house and plop it into a cheap, ugly glass vessel? For shame.

We honor those we love by selecting a container worthy of the life we’ve just taken right out of the ground. Look around your house, prowl antique shops, garage sales, sidewalk giveaways, and you will discover ingenious vessels to elevate, add humor and/or sentimentality, provenance, or intelligence to the floral compositions you create for your home. The really cool thing is that if your new find doesn’t work, doesn’t hold water, isn’t the right scale for your branches, that’s fine. You’re at home, where it’s easy to just choose another object to experiment with. Ikebana loves a good tray, teacup, or plate.

LIFE AND DEATH SIDE BY SIDE

Andrew Ondrejcak is a colleague, friend, and kindred spirit. His disciplines and mediums include, but are not limited to, film, fine art, set design, choreography, and all manner of performance art. We first met when he took a chance on me and asked me to help him articulate his vision in service of Andreas Kronthaler and Vivienne Westwood, as honorary creatives for an Art of Elysium event with five hundred guests. I’m honored to say more collaborations have followed, including a piece for Nowness. He and his mother recently stayed with us here at Raven’s Nest for four days and nights. Because I trust his intellect, powers of perception, insight, and, most of all, humor, I’ve asked him to interview me about this home and more.

Andrew: What time of day is the light best here? And how would you describe that light?

Louesa: We are endowed with a richness of windows. Curtis counted them when he washed them last, and there are ninety-two! So, a seemingly simple question it is not . . . plus I’ve always been terrible at “favorite” or “best.”

I was describing the winter solstice light, just before the sun sinks beneath the horizon light, to Obi Kaufmann the other day. He replied, (I’m paraphrasing, with his sense of humor), “Yes, the solstice light is so singular, so ‘sacred’; it’s almost like they should construct stone monoliths to observe this light.” It seemed golden and steely, verde and diffused, sharp and slanting all at the same time.

I’ve never been a dawn riser. Until being in this home. Here, as a pack, we naturally wake at dawn; sometimes we drink tea and watch the pink-dawn moment; sometimes we go back to sleep.

You don’t know yourself by talking to yourself or looking in the mirror. You know yourself by diving in and experiencing the self.

—DAVID LYNCH
interviewed by Hikari Takano

Dawn light seems worth rising for now. Also, I’m very partial to the golden seashell, lavender dove-gray light before sunset proper. The late, late afternoon’s slanting light.

I guess my answer would be that I’m stoked to spend the rest of my life (maybe—who knows?) observing the light here and its constant changing.

Andrew: When you cook, you use wild combinations of flavors and textures that are a surprise, both on the plate and on the tongue. What would you say is your philosophy of cooking? What gets you excited in the kitchen, and what bores you?

Louesa: As a child I was blessed with both parents absolutely loving to cook and including us kids in the kitchen from a young age.

Dad was a brilliant creative and a very wild spirit (especially for an attorney), verging on a mad scientist in the kitchen (and in life). It was also performance theater, slightly dangerous surrealist cooking. He was a bit erratic, though, and he would have wild successes or disgusting failures. So I unconsciously channeled his freedom, I think.

Mom was a Libra and more balanced and measured. She was an elegant, refined, intelligent yet intuitive home cook and taught me the most crucial ingredient, love. Corny, I know, but real. She understood the harmonious alchemy of good cooking.

Then I was in the restaurant world a lot of my adult life, culminating at Chez Panisse. I joke that if you don’t learn how to cook beautifully with seasonal California abundance during your tenure at Chez Panisse, you can’t learn to cook.

I guess I riff on that lifetime of great food, honoring my mentors a bit, having epic pristine ingredients close by, following the micro-seasons, and staying almost fully plant driven. Sometimes I feel like a farmwife, whipping up meals for hungry men and a few women.

I’m just an intuitive home cook, but with that being said, harmony, beauty, and nourishment are easier to achieve in both food and flora, with the most pristine earthy organically grown ingredients, sourced in microseasons and within twenty to sixty miles.

I think when I’m feeding guests one to three times a day, I am quicker, no time for obsessive deliberation or fussiness. That time constraint loosens it all up and helps to create more freeform, intuitive cooking.

Gorgeous, practically alive things plucked from our local, organic farmers’ fields, with their good, clean, biome-enhancing dirt, that excites me. Local fruit is a new love, its offerings changing monthly, even weekly: pineapple guava, persimmons, citrus galore, passion fruit, cherimoya, and our own pomegranates.

When our local fisherman says he has vermilion rockfish from the Channel Islands, that thrills me.

I guess I just love good, clean food!

What bores me? I don’t want to be snarky, and the list would be too long; in short, anything bland and packaged with additives or white sugar.

My mantra: learn the rules, culture, traditions, and basics, then freely break them to suit yourself and others.

Andrew: When my mom and I visited, you’d place stacks of books in our rooms. It was very special to see that you’d taken time and care to pick books that we’d like, in some direct way (like a book of pretty pictures) or in other, more poetic ways (like a history book that only tangentially relates). You’d never met my mother, but the stack of books in her little cottage was spot-on. What’s this process like for you? And how did you come to decide on one book over another?

Louesa: As my editor said the other day, it’s a fun challenge to try and get inside people’s heads, especially people you love or who are guests. I believe in the precept that you treat and greet guests as if the divine mother was visiting, because, in some senses, that’s what a guest represents.

Anyway . . . I sit and ponder what each guest is interested in or what may resonate with them. I visualize in my mind their “stack,” then I walk around the house and to all of the book collections, and I pick the books that speak to me when I’m thinking of that friend or relative—or, like your mom, a friend or relative once or twice removed. It’s a cool way to think about my library too, a reframing. I try and choose a mix of charming, beautiful, silly, or maybe deeper or even challenging—or, I hope, illuminating, mind- and spirit-expanding books.

It’s a game I play with myself, and I guess our guests, a psychic/ intuitive exercise, if you will. I like to be in communication with the humans who visit—before, during, and after the visit.

Andrew: There are objects and flowers and stuff around the whole house. It’s clear that you’re able to take something common from everyday life and, with miraculously little effort, turn it into a beautiful visual moment simply by the way it’s arranged. It feels like your whole home is motivated by your intuition. Can you talk about that process? Or, more specifically, are you constantly moving objects around? What’s your daily relationships to these objects?

Louesa: Wow, that’s a doozy of a question, and I’m concerned I will not be able to do those thoughts justice in a few paragraphs, oh, no, sentences of response. And “response” is the correct word, not answer—another mantra.

After living here for two years, we made a startling discovery. Through speaking with neighbors and hiking due south, we found patches upon patches of wild peonies! Something myself and most of my colleagues were unaware of . . . so now I can plan on harvesting with care and conservation in mind, the California peony (Paeonia californica). One of the only two wild peonies native to North America, its range extends south into Baja and north to the Central Coast. It may or not be a subspecies of Paeonia brownii, which grows in both the Sierra foothills and Klamath, thriving in coastal sage scrub and slopes. No transport from the southern hemisphere or Alaska needed.

It’s all a matter of perspective as to what is common, luxurious, rare, elevated, or base. And that feeling of “this is special to me now” . . . that’s a moving target, but, for me, it’s always rooted in place, narrative, and the nonhuman world.

It’s definitely more of a layered, old world . . . I call it the “rumpled aristocrat” vibe. Gleaning plays a huge role in our collections. Intuition is the guiding force, I hope. I think that when your intuition is engaged, any endeavor is more effortless.

Process is an apt word. We embraced the initial making of our nest—like staging, it’s exhilarating, the blank architectural canvas, but stagnation is death. It’s painful for us to witness or even hang out in homes, shops, or restaurants, even, where, after the initial “decoration,” nothing changed. We see the whole breathing, living home as one organism, one shrine, if you will. (Indoors and outdoors meld into one “space” most of the year.)

We make offerings and give thanks every morning to five to seven altars . . . that is moving energy, too. I go through fits and starts with moving, adding, removing, shuffling “stuff.” Photo shoots, parties, and guests will inspire this. Sometimes I just walk around and try and clear my head, to touch, move, reacquaint.

It’s all a daily relationship, I’d say.

Andrew: For those readers who aren’t as intuitive or confident as you in terms of decorating, what is some simple advice?

Louesa: Just do you; lean into what that means. Don’t buy new, shiny crap that’s trendy and often not well made. Find your own heirlooms, treasures, totems, books! No home should be without books. Don’t get bogged down in formulas or fussiness. What moves your spirit at home? What’s comforting to you; what gives you joy when your eye falls upon it? Don’t take your home or yourself too seriously; humor is needed. Also, don’t design in one key; don’t become cliché or one-note.

Andrew: In almost every room, there are visual moments (collections of objects or the way an object is placed in a room) in which life and death are side by side. In a way, your home is more than merely decorated or curated; it’s a repository of objects and images that meditate on a more complicated story. Is this fusion of life and death something you think about, or has this happened intuitively?

Louesa: You said it perfectly, my astute friend. I can’t top that. Life and death side by side and in collaboration with what’s remained of mine and Curtis’s “collections” for almost half a century. Plus, family heirlooms we gravitated toward or that chose us, going back to the 1700s on both ancestors’ sides. Life and death, always embracing and honoring life and death, louche and sexy—a vibe we want to share.

Andrew: What’s one good example in your house now of how two juxtaposing, seemingly antithetical, objects coexist side by side?

Louesa: I adore this question. All good art, to me, engages in unexpected juxtapositions and seeming contradictions. Looking around the main room in front of the wood stove, able to see the kitchen, the womb-like inclement-weather bedroom, part of the sunroom, part of the sun-drenched Kipling fair-weather sleeping room . . . I can see the old Shaker side table with rickety drawers; on top sit too many objects and totems. Here are a few such antithetical combos.

Flicker feathers we gathered in Stinson sitting in tiny antique vials with odd old labels; next to a metal turtle flower frog stuffed with jay, towhee, and tiny quail feathers; beside my mom’s large chinoiserie lamp with an osprey perched on a limb; broken sea urchin skeletons; next to a tiny scrap of copper; an enamel plate my great-grandmother made; with a shard of obsidian sitting on an enamel tray; and lots of incense and wood-stove dust.

Our art wall behind said wood stove, which already had the most rad patinaed smoke pipe in shades of pink, pale industrial metal tone (a big hit), spans four centuries. An old family Currier & Ives, “Noah’s Ark,” campy. Next to a positively brilliant tinted portrait of a minor French courtier, a dandy from the 1700s. Terri Bowden, a revered Creative Growth artist, did this piece, which reminds me of Orlando, gender-fluid, to say the least. Next to a lithograph that’s very theosophy-meadow, by a Maine artist I also collect, next to a folk art painted glass portrait of “Luisa.”

Andrew: For me, the visual you painted in my brain of the previous owner dying in the house and you arriving while all the old used hospital equipment was still in the sunroom—that’s such a specific way to begin living in a house. I think it might be fun to recount that story for your readers and explain how you dealt with the energy (and stuff) from the previous owners.

Louesa: Yes, it’s true. The hospital bed with a rolling cocktail cart sat in the southern-facing window-lined sunroom. The lady of the house would lie under our beloved great-grandmother olive tree. She adored watching the birds and gazing at the trees, this oak savanna leading toward the Pacific and a view of the Channel Islands. The most sublime spot we could imagine to begin any journey. How fortuitous that the sellers hadn’t staged anything! Not many buyers would be cool with the realness, but we were stoked and took the brutal, beautiful honesty as a fantastic omen.

Here is a winding-yet-connected path your question takes me down. We gravitated toward interior landscapes, homes where there’s a mix of glamour (used in the original sense of the word, of casting a spell) and “real.” You know, the real heavy stuff—the death part and everything in between, I guess. And I was just watering my birdbaths, thinking back on making this book, and becoming absorbed in the making and how lately our place has a lot more of the real and the death, more a human-dense realm, and less of the surreal . . . which is maybe real? I always want to make sure we achieve something close to that balance. When living in your home, when you really are making it your own, you go too far, perhaps, into one realm . . . real or unreal, as Ursula K. Le Guin speaks powerfully to, as does Leonora Carrington, the “realms of the unreal.” When you’re traversing back and forth between realms . . . not binary, I guess, but plural, as a human, it often becomes out of balance, off-kilter . . . and that’s fun to watch.

OJAI • CHUMASH LAND

Pixi blossoms
Decorative manzanita
Wild clematis
Wild currant blooms
Buddha’s hand
Key limes
Pomelo
Begonia
Chamomile
Barberry
Persimmons
Heirloom roses
Pomegranate
Lady Banks’s roses
Scented geranium
Sun-dried Queen Anne’s lace

A lifetime could be devoted to fully understanding California’s deliciously perplexing, fascinating, and all-too-brief winter. In this ecosystem, qualities of “winter” and “spring” exist side by side, or so it seems to us transplants from other climes. Seasons here are blended, accelerated, and never limited to the traditional four. Ojai usually feels like a desert microclimate, but on some glorious midwinter mornings, if we have been blessed with an ample rainy season, we can look out our kitchen window and see snow on the Topatopa Mountains. This year we were just that fortunate; in the two or three weeks leading up to December 21, over sixteen inches of rain fell in miraculous sheets from clouds that seemed to melt above us. The snowfall above three thousand feet was also generous and always welcome in this drought-prone landscape. We had been wondering, is all hope lost for rain this winter? And sadly, most of us could envision the tragic summer and fall that would follow if one more rainy season was instead a dry one.

Our despair was assuaged for the time being, as rain soaked deep into the soil, cleansing everything and satiating the land’s deep thirst. And after the winter rain? A week or two of winter sun and emerald green. A bright, happy early “spring” coming on the heels of the winter solstice brought sorrel, wild black currants, magnolias, and Lady Banks’s roses, as well as wild peonies, stone-fruit blooms, jasmine, poppies, lupine, and so many more just around the bend.

On the second day of January, we saw our first swallows return to start their family. A fat, worm-stuffed robin also made his first appearance in nearly a year at one of our low ceramic birdbaths. This morning, I spied a purple finch taking a bath, getting all dapper before seeking out a mate.

. . . the slow, the vast fall of the Cosmos backward through the Zodiac, the so-called precession of the equinoxes—that unimag inably stately grand tour which would take some twenty thousand years longer, until once again the spring equinox coincided with the first degree of Aries: where conventional astrology for convenience’s sake assumes it always to be . . . No: the only true pictures of time were the changeful heavens themselves, and their perfect reflection within the powerful consciousness . . .

— JOHN CROWLEY
Little, Big

THE WORLD MADE NEW

New Year’s is a complicated holiday for some of us. My relationship with time often feels somewhat nonlinear, and these days I actively seek a deeper alignment with the seasons and the astronomical rhythms.

Growing up as a “weirdo” in a very conventional American suburb, I never quite understood why we celebrated the New Year on January 1. I viewed the world though my own unique lens, as all children do, no matter how much “grown-ups” want to simplify the child’s mind and constrain their horizons.

Winter has always been extremely hard for me. I was born in August, and most of those clichés about Leonine devotion to and intense need for the sun ring true for me. Winter in Ohio can be punishing, dirty, gray, full of sleet, and most of all, long. I was one of those kids who was constantly sick from late October until April. Between May and September, I was the healthiest tomboy you’ve ever known, playing outside from after breakfast until the last smidge of summer light was gone.

Usually barefoot, often topless, I tore around the neighborhood, most often with the boys I wanted to punch or kiss (or both). But no winter sports for me, unless you count reading, sleeping, eating my mom’s nourishing food, and snuggling with my dog, indoors and warm. My lungs did not thrive in cold, dry air . . . cold, moist air . . . or forced-air heat. I will not bore you further with my childhood illnesses lest this become a tedious memoir.

Maurice Sendak spoke soulfully about his youth, much of it spent sick in bed imagining the beloved creatures we all know so fondly now—Where the Wild Things Are first played out in his imagination against his bedroom walls. Studies have shown that children who spend more time daydreaming indoors (whether due to sickness, climate, or cultural reasons) often develop a rich, more creative inner life that informs a lifelong creative practice. A garden needs fallow time. This is not a metaphor; it’s as close to a “fact” as I’m willing to write on the subject. It follows that I never felt the urge to celebrate on December 31, sick in bed or depressed as I so often was.

I hadn’t yet learned about other calendars, and yet, as a kid who came alive each May, I definitely wished, wondered, and dreamed of celebrating the “new year” on Easter, or May Day, the height of new life in Ohio, the resurrection of green and blooms. In the Midwest of the 1970s and ’80s, it wasn’t common knowledge that many cultures have, in fact, counted their years as beginning on the spring equinox or summer solstice. The ancient British druids, the Chumash people who lived where I write this today, and countless others have followed lunar, solar, or agrarian calendars. The celebration of Easter as a time of rebirth and new life makes so much sense if you have ever had a garden.

This morning, January 7, Curtis and I took our daily green tea (jasmine, then sencha—or gyokuro if we’re lucky enough to have any). We sat with Scrap, Enzo, and Maurizio next to our Middleton-pink gay-grandmother guest cottage, facing east to Meher Mount as the fog burned off below. The cold Pacific Ocean was visible to the west, creeping into view like a dragon, moving toward the tiger sun. We watched the bluebirds play in an avocado tree that had grown back green and strong four years after it nearly perished in the Thomas Fire. The swallows just returned yesterday, reminding me of how back East, forsythia is the earliest harbinger of spring.

I planted a buttery David Austin rosebush during our second year in California. When I phoned my mother, Maggie, to exclaim that we had abundance of these roses to adorn our winter holiday feasts, I might as well have been calling from Narnia. The magic of that image, of David Austin roses and scented geranium alongside local kumquats on a late-harvest table, was almost as foreign to this Ohio girl as it was to my mom. It was a kind of magic to find such horticultural wonders so close at hand in California, a bounty unfathomable in Ohio’s November or December.

I voice my gratitude, my intention, my trust that I’ll never take our microcosm of seasons for granted. A new year can begin on any day. It’s all set and setting, depending on where your sun rises and your moon sets.

That same night . . . at sunset on a gray day, we find ourselves in open countryside, standing silent and immobile . . .

— FEDERICO FELLINI
The Book of Dreams, Volume I, 1960–1968

ASTROLOGICAL SYNCHRONICITY

Year after year, I am struck anew in the leaner winter months by how deeply my practice is affected by the season, with fewer hours each day to forage, glean, gather, stage, and create. This effect is most dramatic for a month or so on each side of the winter solstice, as the limited daylight means working harder to create any celebration or event—in this case, a photo shoot for Oshōgatsu, the Japanese New Year.

Curtis and I live in a house that’s mostly windows, with ample vistas to the east, west, and south. It follows that we too follow the arc of the sun and moon most days and nights. We have the great fortune to live a life more closely in sync with lunar cycles than most modern humans can. When we travel (which is more infrequent these days), Curtis and I have realized that if we can’t see the arc of the moon from our hotel room or lodgings, it feels odd to us now, like we’re out of sync. We always try to find shelter that has a strong relationship with the outdoors, and particularly the sky.

Inevitably, when we return to this saddleback, our ridgetop home, we notice where the moon is in its cycle—first quarter, balsamic, laying on its back, or a few days from full—as it travels the north node across our home sky or returns along the south node. As we reorient ourselves, we remark how odd it is that such a daily relationship with the sun and the moon has become so rare in the modern world. For almost all of human history, this disconnect would be unfathomable, for reasons too numerous to even start listing here. More than a list, such an absurd exercise would take a lifetime of study and fill multiple volumes.

On the day before our New Year celebration, our Oshōgatsu osechi celebration, I was out foraging, gleaning, and running the countless errands required for a big photo shoot. The sun began slipping behind the mountains of our Ojai Valley, a winter solstice sun “sinking like a ship,” as Dylan said. It dwindled to a luminous canary-yellow glow behind Payne’s grey-toned clouds, moody and moist. It was about 4:45 P.M.

The light turned exquisite shades of cool, pale lemon, platinum streaked with slate. A greenish cast crept in with a sunset that held very little of our usual Ojai pink. Steely and chilly. I turned down a semideserted lane that runs along a nearby creek bed. Just recently flush with winter water, its banks were lined with scraggly willow, acacia, bamboo escaped from nearby landscaping, and spare, spooky walnut trees. Suddenly, a skyward explosion of corvids made my spirit soar. Hundreds of crows, maybe as many as a thousand of them, have been congregating here lately. A few ravens have joined this gang, adding to the winter cacophony, perhaps one of my most beloved orchestras. As usual, human activities being beneath their notice, the birds took zero interest in my doings, despite my reverence for them. I was not a threat.

I had recently noticed that the Lady Banks’s roses were just beginning to bloom early this year, thanks to all the glorious, miraculous rain. I knew of a spot nearby where a hedgerow of them can sometimes shoot up canes at least twenty feet tall, with tiny bud clusters and no thorns. The most drought-tolerant of all roses, they are able to survive in Ojai with no additional human irrigation given just a few years to establish themselves.

I pulled my car over by some huge county dumpsters just as the last of light of the year faded beneath the horizon to the underworld, where retrograde Venus lay sleeping. The birds grew less vocal, less raucous, tucking themselves in or flying to nearby roosts for the night.

I’d set out in search of my preferred bone-white roses. Instead, I found pale, buttery yellow buds on vast, grand canes. And in that moment, I had a change of heart. You see, I’m not usually a fan of yellow flowers. But on this cold, charcoal-gray night so close to the solstice, these pale tallow Lady Banks’s took on a new symbolism for me, their happy, bright offering a representation of the golden sun that had just abandoned us for the night. These blooms evoked the candles that cultures around the globe use to light their homes at this time of year, alongside memories of my childhood church illuminated by hundreds of tiny flames for midnight mass. And with that, I could no longer be snobby about the color yellow. These unexpected roses were the perfect offering for our celebration. I drove up the hill toward home in the inky dark, under the countless stars, with a car full of sunshine.

Persimmons again! How can I resist featuring them again and again while they are in season, with a million ways to eat their nutritious and delicious flesh and adorn our tables. Oh, and that’s not even including their sunset ombré leaves. Glorious!

YUKO SATO

Nama, also known as Yuko Sato, began studying pottery at art college in Tokyo. In 1996, she moved to San Francisco, where she has continued working with clay, both hand-building and on the wheel. About her art, she says, “I love to make simple, natural tableware, because its purpose is to let the food ‘shine’ and be the star. However, if some of my more playful designs with catfish or monkey drawings make people smile, that would also be a joy for me.”

OSECHI WITH SYLVAN

Sylvan Mishima Brackett and I have been colleagues and collaborators for some twenty years now. I first celebrated New Year’s Eve with his osechi years ago. I was house-sitting in Stinson Beach, laid up with bronchitis. I spent the evening watching Absolutely Fabulous, drinking a little champagne, and discovering osechi-ryōri. Japan’s traditional New Year’s dishes presented in a wooden jūbako, like a two-level bento, are a fine way to mark the dark night before a New Year’s Day. I was hooked. Ever since, I’ve made every effort to sit down to osechi each year in celebration of Oshōgatsu. Sylvan-san and I share a kindred spirit; speaking of our friendship and our simpatico working styles, he says, “I think we work from the same impulses: to find the most beautiful ‘wild’ things and present them simply.”

Louesa: I’d love to hear some of your childhood memories of osechi.

Sylvan: Although I grew up in a very rural part of Northern California, far from electricity, stores, or even paved roads, my parents had a small circle of Japanese friends in the area. When I was a small child, Oshōgatsu meant a day of gathering with these friends. We would crowd around the table—for this one day, Japanese was the primary language spoken. There was always ozōni (clear broth with toasted mochi) and tazukuri (candied baby anchovies), as well as tamagoyaki (rolled omelet), pickled daikon and carrot, and daikon simmered with chicken. I remember it was always very cold outside, and the wood stove was always roaring. With all the hot sake they consumed, my parents and their friends were extra jolly. I don’t think I ever considered all the work that went into making the meal back then. I barely registered that each guest would bring a traditional osechi dish, like sweet stewed azuki beans with mochi, tazukuri with walnuts, or smoked salmon. Now, knowing how difficult the ingredients were to source way out there in the mountains, and how much work it is to make this food, I’m grateful they kept this tiny part of Japan alive in woods of California.

Louesa: How long does it take to make such elaborately crafted and beautifully presented osechi?

Sylvan: We start in November. My father mills the wood for the jūbako from Port Orford cedar and sugar pine; our friend Kelib Thompson assembles them. We order the kuromame (black soybeans), special konbu seaweed, and tiny dried mackerel from Japan. We talk to our fish wholesaler about sourcing a huge number of spiny lobsters; to Jim Churchill, a citrus grower in Ojai, about holding yuzu on the tree until the last moment; and to our grower in Half Moon Bay about reserving a ton of tiny wasabi roots. The cooking begins a week before the celebration, with the soaking and cooking of the kuromame. The holiday week is intense: four days with six people working to cut the vegetables for the chikuzen-ni, roll and simmer the konbumaki, candy the baby mackerel, prepare kanten jelly from our courtyard tree’s perfectly ripened persimmons, et cetera. With the exception of the grilled duck, all of the elements need to be prepared the day before we pack the boxes. This year we finished at 11:30 P.M. after a fourteen-hour day. We started the next morning at 6:00 A.M., windows and doors open and heat turned off to make sure the ambient temperature stayed as low as possible. In down jackets and chefs’ aprons, we laid all the boxes out on the counters and filled them one element at a time. By 2:00 p.m. they were sealed and refrigerated, ready to be wrapped with washi paper and carefully tied with the mizuhiki, a ceremonial red-and-white paper string.

Louesa: What’s the order in which you eat your osechi? What keeps the longest for you?

Sylvan: The osechi is traditionally eaten on New Year’s Day. It’s spread on the table to be served with ozōni and any other hot foods you might like to include. New Year’s was traditionally the only time of year when women were given a break from cooking and household work, so everything on the menu is heavily seasoned with salt, vinegar, and sugar, designed to keep for several days.

Louesa: Which osechi do you find evokes the strongest feelings of seasonality and ritual for you? And how do your preparations reflect the intersection of traditional foods with your California location?

Sylvan: Part of the tradition is that the top layer of the jūbako will hold the more substantial dishes while the bottom layer has small bites and sides, each with an auspicious meaning for the new year. Here is a sample menu that I’ve presented in years past at Izakaya Rintaro, my San Francisco restaurant.

On the top layer of the box, the selection includes:

Spiny lobster (ise-ebi 伊勢海老)
Whole San Diego spiny lobster with Half Moon Bay wasabi

Grilled duck with mushrooms (kamoyaki to kinoko 鴨焼きと茸)
Charcoal-grilled Sonoma-based Liberty Duck breast with roasted maitake and shimeji mushrooms

Chikuzen-ni (筑前煮)
Simmered chicken thighs with donko shiitake, konnyaku ties, gobo, Nantes carrot, snow peas, and lotus root

Teriyaki amberjack (kanpachi no teriyaki, 間八の照り焼き)
Shiny grilled Baja kanpachi amberjack

To bring hope and wisdom in the new year, we eat datemaki (伊達巻), a traditional sweet, rolled omelet. For my dinner, I prepare it using ground Fort Bragg lingcod and mirin.

Two dishes are eaten to bring happiness. First, sake no konbu-maki (鮭の昆布巻き), which are simmered ma-konbu kelp rolls that I prepare with Quinault steelhead.

Also, hirame no kobujime (鮃の昆布締め), a konbu-cured San Francisco halibut sashimi.

Symbolizing luck, our namasu (膾) is a contemporary take on a traditional orange-and-white salad featuring pickled daikon and persimmon jelly. We pick the fruits from a tree outside the restaurant and make the jelly here.

To bring wealth, we eat ikura (イクラ), or cured roe. We season and cure sake and Quinault steelhead roe in-house and serve it in a yuzu-rind cup; prosperity is symbolized by tazukuri (田作り), tiny candied dried mackerel fingerlings with Wadaman sesame.

Good health is symbolized by kuromame (黒豆), giant, sweet black soybeans from Hokkaido.

And finally, we celebrate the new day with yaki-kamaboko (焼き 蒲鉾), fishcakes shaped to evoke the rising sun. I make mine with steamed and grilled Fort Bragg lingcod.

Louesa: If you made a smaller, more stripped-down set of boxes, which elements would you always include?

Sylvan: For me, the kuromame and tazukuri are the two quintessential osechi elements.

CAITLIN’S CAKES

At the age of twenty, Caitlin Freeman was so inspired by Wayne Thiebaud’s confectionary paintings that, standing in front of his Cakes in the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, she declared that “this is what I am going to do with my life.” She soon set about teaching herself to make cakes while working a nine-to-five grind. Soon, her passion for pastry became Miette Patisserie & Confiserie, which she co-owned from 2003 to 2008. She began by selling her beautifully crafted desserts, made with seasonal, organic ingredients, at the Bay Area’s most vibrant farmers’ markets. This in turn led to a shop in the Ferry Building, and the most perfect jewel box of a candy shop as well.

She left it all for love and coffee. Here is that story, as she tells it.

On October 29, 2008, I sold Miette and married James Freeman, the founder of Blue Bottle Coffee. I started making seasonal, organic desserts inspired exclusively by what would pair well with coffee. In 2009, the SFMOMA invited Blue Bottle to open a cafe in their new sculpture garden, outside the building where I first encountered Thiebaud.

I paid homage to my art hero in the café with by making Thiebaud-inspired cakes for sale. And then came my Ellsworth Kelly fudgesicles, a Mondrian cake, and the Richard Serra cookie plate that inspired him to send me a cease and desist letter.

After four deeply inspired, extremely personal, and wildly fun years of creative collaboration, the museum closed for lengthy renovations. Ready for a change, we bought property in my hometown of Ojai, and I set about finding out who I am today and what my creativity looks like in this quiet setting. I wander the orchards, watching the seasons pass with the fruit we grow; I pick flowers at their most beautiful; and I try to make beauty from the bounty in my backyard: hoshigaki from firm Hachiya persimmons hung up to dry, sweeter fuyu persimmons drying naturally, pomegranates with every meal in the fall, candied Buddha’s hand, lavender bath salts, healing tisanes, and Valencia oranges squeezed fresh each morning.

This is where Louesa found me, inspired me out of hibernation through her deeply inspired and inspiring vision of punk ikebana. We had long conversations about Japan and Ojai, our shared inspirations, the beauty of the land right now, and the preservation projects I’ve been working on. Within days, I was inspired to reach deep into the nooks where my pastry inspiration had been lying dormant to craft a bridge between the beauty that surrounds me here and the beautiful osechi being shuttled to Ojai from San Francisco. Inspiration came in conversations about kitchen heirlooms and Louesa’s grandmother’s angel food cake, a childhood kumquat tree, and the local honey that has helped to heal me. When I got into the kitchen, pastries just transpired from the ethereal magic of inspiration and collaboration, balancing the beauty of Japanese ingredients with a commitment to sourcing as locally as possible.

Here are some of the confections I created for this Oshōgatsu celebration.

Matcha chiffon cake with garden rose–infused Swiss meringue frosting

Black sesame–butter mochi and kumquat-butter mochi layer cake

Kumquat mochi cake

Honey nougat with black sesame, candied Buddha’s hand, chichibu whisky, and hoshigaki adorned with heirloom roses

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

There are countless paths, rivers, tributaries, eddies, and flights that led us to this abundantly collaborative project of making a book. I have approached these thank-yous with gratitude that is impossible to fully express and slight terror . . . my heart desires to thank each and every individual who has generously given to this endeavor, but I also realize that is not fully possible.

Beginning with thanking my mom, Maggie, always rings true. Mom continues to guide, inform, and protect; her gifts know no limitation of time, space, or mind. Of course, thanking Mom leads to honoring the lineage of women ancestors who reside in me, and in this book. Thank you to Curtis’ mother, Mary Wood, who turned 100 while we were making this book. Her unconditional love and support and her no nonsense wisdom is a constant guide for us. Momma’s momma, Lena, my great grandmother, whose artistry you see on many pages, my aunts and great-aunts, going back until the names and faces quietly recede or even disappear.

My father, Douglass, who taught me to look deeply, to see much more than the culture we reside in sees. He called on his Tennessee ancestors, remembering deep in his spirit the older ways, the ways before the Industrial Revolution and their separation from the great mother. He was coyote, madman, and genius, too tender and angry for this world, as so many visionaries are. When I lose heart I call upon his broken heart to guide and give courage.

Increasingly, we offer prayers of acknowledgment and gratitude to the nonhuman ancestors, living now and residing in the past and future . . . countless creatures who are offering grace, protection, and endless teachings. It is our intention to continue to be in communion with these nonhuman relatives more and more, gleaning the infinite wisdom they offer, despite human behavior.

Every garden needs fertile soil and a planting season. This book’s seeds started to germinate years ago and perhaps took hold sitting on a deck in Ojai and meeting a new friend, Janey Bergman, who introduced us to another new friend, who led us to Cameron Books. Kevin West, Jenny Wapner, and my rad agent, Amy Collins, all helped plant many seeds.

Amy Collins also embodied old-school tenacity, loyalty, professionalism, and brilliant humor in her devotion to bringing this manuscript to the correct house. She never gave up, despite some dark days for our communities indeed. Love wins, Amy. Oh! And we’ve never hung out in human form—vino, sake, and rescue critters, sister—let’s celebrate in Ojai.

I often feel like the luckiest girl in the world, and Cameron Books has made me feel even luckier. The dedication, intelligence, sensitivity, kindness, and collaborative spirit of our new Cameron Books community has been semi-revolutionary. Jan Hughes somehow intuited upon our first meeting, over a meal, sake, and lots of laughter in Ojai, the most perfectly idiosyncratic crew to help birth the manuscript. Mariah Bear, you are the logos magician and soul sister I’ve been imagining since my teens; I know now that I will be collaborating on books for as long as I can pen, and the hashtag #booksaremagic rings true. Krista Keplinger made sure the facts were correct with a sense of humor.

Alexandra Grant saw something compelling in our proposal and made the match with Chris Gruener, who offered us a leap of faith and an opportunity to make a book in a dark time for the planet. We hope the book sheds some earth love and stewardship of the plant kingdoms, and their allies: bees, butterflies, beetles, and pollinators far and wide. Calin Van Paris will assist in Punk Ikebana reaching as many eyes as possible.

We have two Ian/Iains to thank. Ian Hughes became a member of our “COVID-19 pod” of creative collaborators and never left. His tenacity, creative dedication, calm presence, precision with soul, and a deep, innate understanding of this work articulates exactly what we envisioned and is nothing short of a miracle. (He will cringe at this hyperbole!)

Iain Morris and Suzi Hutsell collaborated and enabled us to design and create the container, with the utmost enthusiasm, respect, and professionally seasoned craft. I need linear designers to bring abstraction and moodiness to the page in a resolved form. They were able to capture the visual cadence I heard, and that takes great insight and a nonformulaic approaches, which is rare these days.

We wish to thank all of the growers, farmers, makers . . . and that list is long indeed. Lauri Kranz and Dean Kuipers of Edible Gardens LA (kindred spirits upon our first meeting, a lifelong friendship baptized in their fiery Big Sur wedding), Mary Gonzales, BD Dautch, Steve Sprinkle and Olivia Chase, Cindy Daniel and Doug Lipton, Lynne Vinkovic of Rose Lane Farms, Darren Eminian and his Willy Wonka hibiscus, and Nathan Whitman and his hyper-local carnivorous plants. Carolyn Bennett is just down the road for emergency flora, and our home resident green thumb, Curtis Fletcher—our garden continues to evolve and grow.

Here’s to the bravery and extreme generosity of all the friends who opened up their homes, galleries, and gardens for us to run amok and create these in situ installations, often lasting for two, three, or four days and nights. I hope that when you dive into the book, you will deem your gift worthwhile. We place a great deal of pressure on ourselves to honor your environments.

Cindy Daniel and Doug Lipton are now two-time givers; I fear there is no way to adequately thank you or the abundantly fertile lands you lovingly and brilliantly steward.

Chris Wilson and Sonia Erneux, you drew us to this spot. Let’s stay in each other’s orbits, please. You allow me to forget where I am and laugh until I remember.

Adam Blackman and David Cruz, I still can’t believe you let us punks tromp around your ever-evolving and utterly glamorous gallery, and we didn’t break anything! Auspicious indeed.

Lenny Brackett, your realms could and should be an entire volume—perhaps one day. The four days inhabiting East Wind will always remain one of the most magical, sublime, poetic, and transformative times of our lives. Let’s share a bottle of sake soon. Sylvan-san, you helped save my life when I was sinking—not hyperbole—and you continue to inspire every aspect of my creative practices (from my old homeland, the Bay Area); bring Louis and the family down to bird-watch soon. Bring Yuko Sato, too; we live with Yuko’s charming and funny ceramics daily.

Emily Erb joined our house party in the Sierra foothills, ferrying her pristine tea, jade teacups, and perpetually calm, peaceful, and intentional manner. Emily, your delicate yet strong spirit infuses these pages. You can be the yin to my yang any day; I need that.

Junko Schwesig of Oyatsuya is a master of all manners of confections—true acts of culinary service and generosity that we happily devoured.

The grande dames of Virginia Robinson Gardens have consistently opened their historic doors for me and Curtis. We adore entering your old Beverly Hills dreamscape, which is rooted in historical preservation, and sharing a love of antique roses and romantic tablescapes. Your chapter is just a glimpse into those cinematic scenes.

Evan Cole understood me and this body of work from a six-foot card table draped with indigo textiles at one of the many trade markets years ago in a matter of minutes, one of his uncanny traits. He has been a devoted supporter and a more loyal friend than most have in any lifetime . . . his under-construction home made the perfect stage for the Blade Runner/Mad Max dystopian shoot I’d been conceptualizing for years. Again, nothing broken, and a wild ride was had by all.

Ross Anderson has also been part of our creative “COVID-19 pod” and was our first friend to christen our ridgetop home, drinking Beaujolais nouveau on a rainy winter night under our towering grandfather pine. His wit and intellect have been a lifeline these two years, and I hope for many more years to come of collaborating and chilling. He gifted us an “antique” ikebana tome, dogeared and elegant, which became one of the seminal references while making this book—thank you, Ross.

Martin Holden offered his knowledge of rust, and love of language in service of geeky patina adoration.

Andy Byers is also always game to play. He delivered his dragon pot in his deadhead van with no strings attached, and in fact, one dragon was slayed by the winds on New Year’s Day and became a broken New Year tiger offering; look for the sacrificed shards. Sorry, Andy!

Ryoji Kajikawa and David Ballen also joined the creative stew up at Raven’s Nest, always arriving with delicacies from the “big city” . . . California whiskey, ume, handmade incense, and expansive, joyful energy to experiment, learn, and create together. Instead of Thanksgiving, we spent days and nights as mad scientists, concocting aspic disasters with a few bizarre successes—an utter blast.

Caitlin Williams Freeman is a rare Ojai “native” and a new friend and colleague with unbounded enthusiasm and unconditional generosity. I loved the buzz of finding fellow perfectionist collaborators practically next door . . . plus, yum! I had been craving mochi cakes for months; yours took me to Tokyo.

For the past two years, Izakaya Full Moon (Yuya, Asaka, and their kids) have nourished us weekly, providing many gifts that are so often missing in this world: family-run, soulful, small restaurants; a small-town hub full of sake; devoted cooking; laughter; and joy.

This may seem like I’m teasing, but our beloved dog sitters also made this book possible. Scrap, Enzo, and Maurizio would like to thank Bart Gross and Susie Longwill for giving us peace of mind while we’re on the road and so much love to the pups.

Josh Roebuck, my first husband and lifelong soulmate (we can have many!). We came to California together; he is woven into our lives and always knows the Ohio Lou.

Matthew Drewry Baker walked into August dressed as a rabbit, eating a carrot—grasshopper, medium, wild and tender boy, now a sage and my teacher, interwoven, endless critter love and gratitude—we’ve pulled many rabbits out of too many hats together.

My girlfriends past and present who love flowers, romance, sexy textiles, well-laid tables, proper tea service, and walks in the oak hills, sage scrub, desert, and along the eastern edge of the Pacific. You lift me up, close and far.

Kellie Lawler, you make a rad partner in early-morning gleanings or late-night high jinks.

I’m humbled by all of my colleagues who contributed blurbs. Fatima Robinson, I can’t believe you want to hang out with little old me, but I’m stoked. Thank you for your example of elegance, grace, and power. Thank you, Meave and Rory McAuliffe, Yuri Nomura, Shane Connolly, Todd Selby, Jennifer Jewell, Laurie Kranz and Dean Kuipers, Kevin West, Ross Anderson, Alina Macias and Veronica Bellina.

All of my tomboy-loving guys! My favorite ratio is me to three or five guys; thank you for keeping me honest and not prissy!

Kevin West, colleague, collaborator, and fellow lover of place; Tennessee, California; sexy men; and all manner of preservation. Your loyalty and well-crafted words are priceless. Let’s make a book together soon!

Andrew Ondrejcak, bring your mom up to Raven’s Nest soon, and let’s keep collaborating.

Matt and Bart’s Books, one reason we moved to Ojai, still giving us hope for humanity.

My work is about place—and the environs with which I engage, learn from, and honor. This is intrinsically linked to those who have shaped humans and nonhumans alike for millennia. As such, it is necessary to recognize, name, and learn from the traditional indigenous peoples and nations who have acted and continue to act as stewards of the land in the face of genocide and forced removal under the regime of settler colonialism. It is of the utmost importance to learn this history and honor the continuing determination and grace of indigenous peoples from the lands in which we create and reside.

I met Obi Kaufmann again after many moons of my not inhabiting the Bay Area ecosystem he resides with Ali in. It was a glorious summer solstice. We sauntered down to our neighborhood hang, Farmer and the Cook, as usual. Immediately we “bumped” into Obi, Ali, and their rescue pup, Gordy. I’m not ashamed to say I cried tears of mad respect upon meeting such a seminal, inspirational human for me. I went out on a limb and asked Obi to write the foreword to Punk Ikebana. Our “interview” for this foreword took place exactly at sunset, winter solstice this time, and, of course, we spoke of the light at Stonehenge. My words can’t do justice to his words; they slay me. Eternal gratitude.

My love, Curtis Searle Fletcher, is one with me and one with this creation, all ways, always.

I most certainly cannot turn the tide of madness, greed, cruelty, and exploitation we all bear witness to on a global stage. Assaults on the nonhuman and human relatives who play no role in the toxic detachment from Mother Earth, from source. However, this windy, bright February morning, I noticed the first lilac bloom—diminutive-yet-powerful lilac—from the bush that Curtis has spent two years nurturing and bringing back to life—he excels at that; it’s one of his countless gifts. As the day unfolded with a barrage of grim global reports, I had an epiphany.

This new bloom, brought into the house after being thanked and placed in a tiny, tiny incense tray adorned with double carp, then on a soil-pigmented, hand-thrown plate . . . first lilac bloom, you bring joy and hope, and for the luxury of this simple act, I am infinitely thankful.

STOCKIST & RESOURCES

IN PRAISE OF SHADOWS

Location Len Brackett—East Wind (Higashi Kaze) Inc.; eastwindinc.com; Instagram (IG): east.wind.inc

Ceramics Yuko Sato—nama-ya.com; IG: namayayuko

TINY AND SWEET

Tea Leaves and Flowers—leavesandflowers.com; IG: leavesandflowers

Bamboo shoots Penryn Orchard Specialties—penrynorchardspecialties.com; IG: penrynorchardspecialities

Confections Junko Schwesig—IG: oyatsuya.kitchen

SISTERS COTTAGE

Paint Farrow & Ball—farrow-ball.com; IG: farrowandball

Perpetual muse Mathew Drewry Baker—IG: mathew.drewry.baker

SUN-DRENCHED GEOMETRY

Herbs and flora Sweet Mountain Top Farm—sweetmountaintop.com; IG: sweetmountaintop

Herbs and flora Edible Gardens Los Angeles—ediblegardensla.com; IG: ediblegardensla

Wardrobe Sam Roberts—samrobertsla.com; IG: samrobertsla

Wardrobe and paintings Love Tanjane—lovetanjane.com; IG: lovetanjane

Screen printing, herbs, and flora Chris T. Wilson—christwilson.com

FIRE AND REGENERATION

Ceramics Tierra del Sol Gallery—tierradelsolgallery.org; IG: tierradelsolgallery

Glass forms Jocelyn Lawrence—IG: songofabsolution

BLACKMAN CRUZ

Location Blackman Cruz—blackmancruz.com; IG: blackmancruz

Carnivorous plants Pans Garden Nursery—pansgardenojai.com; IG: pans_garden_nursery

Hibiscus Darren Eminian—colorlicioushg.com; IG: colorlicioushibiscus

VIRGINIA ROBINSON GARDENS

Location The Virginia Robinson Gardens—robinsongardens.org; IG: robinsongardens

Roses Rose Lane Farm—roselanefarms.org; IG: roselanefarms

Mums Alena Steen and Danny Shimoda—nightheronfarm.org; IG: nightheronfarm

BEE HERE NOW

Location, flora, and heirloom fruit Cindy Daniel—IG: cindydaniel_homefarm

Poet Steve Sprinkle—farmer-and-the-cook.com; IG: farmerandthecookojai

CRAZY WISDOM

Aspic creations Ryoji Kajikawa—IG: ryoji.kajikawa

RAVEN’S NEST

Research Barts Books—bartsbooksojai.com; IG: bartsbooksojai

Tools and equipment Hida Tool—hidatool.co; IG: hidatool

Guest interviewer Andrew Ondrejcak—andrewondrejcak.com; IG: andrewisamerican

Furnishings and flora Our own collections

SOLSTICE OSECHI

Osechi Rintaro—izakayarintaro.com; IG: mr_rintaro

Ceramics Yuko Sato—nama-ya.com; IG: namayayuko

Ceramic pots Andy Byers—IG: allelujahhallelujah

Cakes and confections Caitlin Freeman—modernartdesserts.com

Chamomile and ergot Earthtrine Farm—venturacountyfarmday.com/earthtrine/

Sake Den Sake—densakebrewery.com; IG: densakebrewery

Images
CAMERON + COMPANY
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Petaluma, CA 94952
www.cameronbooks.com

Publisher Chris Gruener
Creative Director Iain R. Morris
Art Director and Designer Suzi Hutsell
Managing Editor Jan Hughes
Editorial Assistant Krista Keplinger
Copy Editor Mariah Bear
Proofreader Christopher Cerasi

Text copyright © 2022 by Louesa Roebuck
Foreword copyright © 2022 by Obi Kaufmann

Gary Snyder, excerpt from “Cross-Legg’d (for Carole)” from Mountains and Rivers Without End.
Copyright © 1997 by Gary Snyder. Reprinted with the permission of The Permissions Company LLC, on behalf of Counterpoint Press, counterpointpress.com.

Photography copyright © 2022 Louesa Roebuck and Ian Hughes, unless otherwise indicated below.

Author photograph (this page) © 2022 Sean Jerd

Published in 2022 by CAMERON + COMPANY, a division of ABRAMS. All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, mechanical, electronic, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission from the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available.
ISBN: 978-1-951836-64-1
eISBN: 978-1-647008-02-4