Contemporary Authors

• Growing Wildflowers Avon (New York, NY), 1995
• Paths and Walkways: Simple Projects, Contemporary Designs Chronicle (San Francisco, CA), 1998
• Water Gardens: Simple Projects, Contemporary Designs Chronicle (San Francisco, CA), 1998
• Landscaping with Stone Sunset (Menlo Park, CA), 2000
• Small-tree Gardens: Simple Projects, Contemporary Designs Chronicle (San Francisco, CA), 2000
• Small Patios: Simple Projects, Contemporary Designs Chronicle (San Francisco, CA), 2001
• Sunset Landscaping Small Spaces Sunset (Menlo Park, CA), 2001
• Roses Sunset (Menlo Park, CA), 2003
• Theme Gardens Sunset (Menlo Park, CA), 2004
• The Edible Garden Sunset (Menlo Park, CA), 2005
• Hillside Landscaping Sunset (Menlo Park, CA), 2007
• Peril as Architectural Enrichment ( poetry) Kelsey Street Press 2011

1. The edible garden https://lccn.loc.gov/2004109878 White, Hazel. The edible garden / by Hazel White, Janet H. Sanchez and the editors of Sunset Books. 1st ed. Menlo Park, Calif. : Sunset Pub. Corp., c2005. 192 p. : col. ill. ; 28 cm. SB453 .W4267 2005 ISBN: 97803760317090376031700 (pbk.) 2. Growing wildflowers https://lccn.loc.gov/94096452 White, Hazel. Growing wildflowers / writer, Hazel White ; photographer, Saxon Holt. New York : Avon Books, 1995. 79 p. : col. ill. ; 26 cm. SB439 .W48 1995 ISBN: 0380774291 (pbk.) : 3. Hillside landscaping https://lccn.loc.gov/2006932480 White, Hazel. Hillside landscaping / by Hazel White and the editors of Sunset Books. 2nd ed. Menlo Park, Calif. : Sunset Books, c2007. 160 p. : ill. (chiefly col.) ; 27 cm. SB458.95 .L25 2007 ISBN: 9780376037787 (pbk.)0376037784 (pbk.) 4. Landscaping with stone https://lccn.loc.gov/99066032 White, Hazel. Landscaping with stone / by Hazel White and the editors of Sunset Books. 1st ed. Menlo Park, Calif. : Sunset Books, c2000. 128 p. : col. ill. ; 28 cm. SB475.5 .W42 2000 ISBN: 0376034769 5. Paths and walkways : simple projects, contemporary designs https://lccn.loc.gov/97006980 White, Hazel. Paths and walkways : simple projects, contemporary designs / Hazel White ; photography by Matthew Plut. San Francisco : Chronicle Books, c1998. 118 p. : col. ill. ; 23 cm. TH4970 .W45 1998 ISBN: 0811814297 ) 6. Roses https://lccn.loc.gov/2002112761 White, Hazel. Roses / by Hazel White and the editors of Sunset Books. 7th ed. Menlo Park, Calif. : Sunset Books, c2003. 127 p. : col. ill. ; 28 cm. SB411 .E24 2003 ISBN: 97803760365990376036591 7. Small patios : simple projects, contemporary designs https://lccn.loc.gov/00024126 White, Hazel. Small patios : simple projects, contemporary designs / Hazel White ; photography by Saxon Holt. San Francisco : Chronicle Books, c2001. 120 p. : col. ill. ; 23 cm. TH4970 .W46 2001 ISBN: 0811825426 (pbk.) 8. Small-tree gardens : simple projects, contemporary designs https://lccn.loc.gov/99017658 White, Hazel. Small-tree gardens : simple projects, contemporary designs / Hazel White ; photography by Matthew Plut. San Francisco : Chronicle Books, c2000. 118 p. : col. ill. ; 23 cm. SB435 .W418 2000 ISBN: 0811821234 (pbk.) 9. Sunset landscaping small spaces https://lccn.loc.gov/00109152 White, Hazel. Sunset landscaping small spaces / by Hazel White and the editors of Sunset Books. 2nd ed. Menlo Park, CA : Sunset Books, c2001. 112 p. : col. ill. ; 28 cm. SB472 .W575 2001 ISBN: 0376034777 10. Theme gardens https://lccn.loc.gov/2003109781 White, Hazel. Theme gardens / by Hazel White, Janet H. Sanchez, and the editors of Sunset Books. Menlo Park, Calif. : Sunset Pub., c2004. 128 p. : col. ill. ; 28 cm. SB457.5 .W49 2004 ISBN: 0376033037 11. Water gardens : simple projects, contemporary designs https://lccn.loc.gov/97006981 White, Hazel. Water gardens : simple projects, contemporary designs / Hazel White ; photography by Matthew Plut. San Francisco : Chronicle Books, c1998. 118 p. : col. ill. ; 23 cm. SB423 .W48 1998 ISBN: 0811814068 (pb)

• Vigilance Is No Orchard - 2018 Nightboat , https://smile.amazon.com/Vigilance-No-Orchard-Hazel-White/dp/1937658821/ref=sr_1_1_twi_pap_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1538277046&sr=8-1&keywords=Vigilance+Is+No+Orchard

• Entropy Magazine - https://entropymag.org/conversation-between-hazel-white-and-jamie-townsend/

  Hazel White is the author of Vigilance Is No Orchard, published in May 2018 by Nightboat Books, and also of Peril as Architectural Enrichment, from Kelsey Street Press. Her public work includes presentations at SFMOMA, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, and Headlands Center for the Arts, where she was an affiliate artist for several years. She’s a recipient with poet Denise Newman of a Creative Work Fund grant, and her poetry has appeared in New American Writing, Denver Quarterly, Elderly, and Fence. She grew up on farms in England, and once wrote gardening books.
  Download PDF

• World Literature Today - https://www.worldliteraturetoday.org/author/hazel-white

  Hazel White’s new poetry manuscript, Vigilance Is No Orchard, is a finalist for the 2015 National Poetry Series. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in VERSE, Denver Quarterly, Fence, and New American Writing. She and Denise Newman received a Creative Work Fund grant for a poetry installation next year at the UC Berkeley Botanical Garden.

• Sculpting My Life - http://www.sculptingmylife.com/blog/2018/1/1/hazel-white-back-to-the-garden

  January 1, 2018
  Back to the Garden - Part 1: "Aesthetic Shock"
  Creative Careers
  This is the first in a four-part series of posts based on an interview I conducted with the poet Hazel White, about the twenty-year process of writing her book Vigilance Is No Orchard, forthcoming from Nightboat Books. It’s a story of intense commitment to carrying out a creative vision no matter how challenging the process.

  AESTHETIC SHOCK
  I started out as a freelance writer, writing primarily about landscape architecture and gardening. I have loved poetry since childhood, but I always had this thought running through my head: “Poetry is the hardest thing in the world; I’m going nowhere near it.”

  One day twenty years ago, I turned a page in a magazine and saw a photograph of an amazing garden. It was an aesthetic shock. I felt physically jolted. I knew instantaneously that I would do whatever was required to stand in that garden.

  I had long believed that our most essential experience of place or space is about shelter and view. Now I think the maker of the garden, landscape architect Isabelle Greene, had triggered my almost paranormal experience through an exquisite manipulation of those two elements. The garden sits in a tight canyon; a series of freeform terraces step down the hill.

  I thought that if I could just stand in that garden, I would understand it.

  The Valentine Garden, designed by landscape architect Isabelle Greene
  The Valentine Garden, designed by landscape architect Isabelle Greene

  Within 24 hours I’d called Isabelle Greene at her Santa Barbara office. Too shy to say, “I’ve had an aesthetic shock,” I presented myself as a garden writer and explained that I was writing books for Chronicle Books on garden design and used that as an excuse to ask if I could come see her work.

  She asked why I was writing gardening books. I said I wanted to teach ordinary gardeners what professional landscape architects know about space. I’d taken a lot of landscape architecture classes at UC Berkeley Extension and had read a lot about the philosophy of space. She said she didn’t think this was something that could be taught. And she wasn’t compelled enough by my story to meet me or let me see the famous garden she had made for Carol Valentine, in Montecito.

  Years later, when I told her the truth, she said, My god, if you’d just said so, I would have gotten you into that garden immediately. So I had shot myself in the foot by not being honest.

  ACCESS TO THE GARDEN
  Each year for the next four years, while I was writing other books in the Chronicle garden design series, I called her assistant and asked if I could come down and see some gardens and maybe meet with Isabelle. I was always told, “She’s busy, but you’re welcome to come see some of her work.”

  In Year Four, I called the assistant as usual. This time I suggested that if Isabelle had a favorite restaurant, I’d be happy to take her to dinner. That approach broke through! I went down there and we met for dinner. Within five minutes we were talking about line and form and whose work we loved. It was immediately obvious that we were both crazy about landscape.

  Hazel White
  Hazel White

  She explained to me that the inspiration for the Valentine garden—her most famous creation—came from aerial views of the California landscape. She was particularly interested in the straight lines of fields and how they get interrupted by a creek or a river or foothills. She was interested in that meeting of a strong, human-made line against a natural line. The garden photograph I’d seen had the most extraordinary resonance with aerial photos of landscapes. But in the view in the photograph, you’re actually only looking down thirty feet. Isabelle had manipulated the scale such that the viewer sees terraces that are large in themselves, but are a miniaturization of the much larger landscape you’d see from a plane.

  She finally arranged for me to see the garden.

  All those years, I had been confident that once I was standing there I would know the particular power of that garden. I thought back then that I could pretty much understand and write about any landscape architecture using a set of concepts I’d become familiar with. I had been quite successful doing so, getting my work published in the London Telegraph Sunday magazine and so on.

  Standing in the garden, I felt a strange alertness, a fizziness in my nervous system—yet I couldn’t figure out what was producing the effect. It would be a long time before I was capable of writing anything sufficient about this garden.

  January 15, 2018
  Back to the Garden - Part 2: "A Pretty Big Failure"
  This is the second in a four-part series of posts based on an interview I conducted with the poet Hazel White, about the twenty-year process of writing her book Vigilance Is No Orchard, forthcoming from Nightboat Books. Scroll down for Part 1.

  A PRETTY BIG FAILURE
  Isabelle had a show at the UC Santa Barbara Art Museum. I wrote a catalog essay for it. A publisher of some note came to the show, became wildly interested in her work, and wanted to publish a series of books on her. Later, I had a verbal contract with the publisher to write one of the books, but due to an economic downturn in publishing, the project fell through.

  Hazel with Isabelle Greene
  Hazel with Isabelle Greene

  Exhibit catalog for Isabelle's show at the UC Santa Barbara Art Museum
  Exhibit catalog for Isabelle's show at the UC Santa Barbara Art Museum

  At another point, my partner agreed I could take a year off from earning income to write a book about Isabelle. At the end of the year, with nothing much written and feeling miserable, I got brave and contacted the top agent for landscape books in New York—office on 5th Avenue, the works. She was interested but thought Isabelle wasn’t sufficiently well known to warrant an entire book just about her. The agent wanted me to write a book about Isabelle and another landscape architect. I turned her down; it didn’t feel possible to compromise. I’m sure she was very surprised.

  Then I decided that in order to write the book I needed to attend a Master of Fine Arts writing program. I got into the MFA program at California College of the Arts. At the end of the first semester, a professor told me that she didn’t think I could write the book about Isabelle’s garden for probably five years. I went home and cried.

  By the second semester, my writing had broken down completely. I could no longer write a linear sentence. Friends were telling me I should drop the book idea. It was looking like a pretty big failure. I suppose the breakdown in sentences was related to my emotional state. Something had to break.

  At that point I took a course called “Hybrid Forms” taught by the poet Kathleen Fraser. Being a good girl and following her directions, I produced these short condensed pieces in response to her exercise prompts. She called them poems. I was terrified—I didn’t want them to be called poems. I couldn’t face my inability to write sentences anymore. I made a valiant attempt to get the hell out of this huge discomfort and transfer to the Visual and Critical Studies program, but wasn’t able to.

  I had grown up in a working-class family. I’d argued my way to college based on the expectation that I’d make money. So writing poetry felt like a crisis. Yet I could no longer write anything else.

  Hazel as a child (Hazel's on the right)
  Hazel as a child (Hazel's on the right)

  Hazel as a teen, on a farm in the southwest of England, where she grew up
  Hazel as a teen, on a farm in the southwest of England, where she grew up

  A couple years after receiving my MFA, I wrote my first poetry book, Peril as Architectural Enrichment, in the space of about four months. It was published by Kelsey Street Press in 2011. It dealt with landscape architecture—but wasn’t about Isabelle and her garden. I felt guilty. I had accrued 70 hours of interviews with Isabelle yet I had been unable to produce anything out of all that material.

  February 3, 2018
  Back to the Garden - Part 3: "You're a Good Egg—Happy Easter"
  Creative Careers
  This is the third in a four-part series of posts based on an interview I conducted with the poet Hazel White, about the twenty-year process of writing her book Vigilance Is No Orchard, forthcoming from Nightboat Books. Scroll down for Parts 1 and 2.

  PUT THE RELATIONSHIP ON THE PAGE
  In 2005, at California College of the Arts, the main feedback on my attempts to write about Isabelle and the garden was that my text lacked any sense of our relationship. I showed ten pages to the poet Leslie Scalapino. She hated it and spent an hour telling me in detail what was wrong with it. I agreed.

  I joined a writing group and everyone said, We think you should put your relationship with Isabelle on the page.

  Years later, when I had 60 pages written, I worked with the poet Rusty Morrison privately for a few sessions. She had a lot of critique. The title had the word shelter in it, but she wasn’t buying that the book was really about shelter. She thought that that word, that concept, was a safe placeholder. She said something about how the image of the garden “owned me and disowned me.” She encouraged me to take more risks with the whole manuscript.

  I had thought it was almost done, so I was a bit shocked. And scared about taking those risks. I went to England. After a few months I gathered up the courage to read through all of Rusty’s written comments. Her observations felt completely right. But what she was suggesting—writing about what wasn’t sheltering me, of being lost over and over again in that image—seemed impossible. I realized that right from the beginning I’d clung to the topic of shelter because it was something I felt confident about and comfortable with. Rusty said, Take it out.

  I needed to let everything go and write the messiness, make myself more lost!

  IMG_4420.JPG
  I produced another version. I put everything I had into it. I met with Rusty again and this time she seemed to think I’d succeeded, or done well enough.

  So I sent it out to poetry competitions. It was a finalist for both the Fence Books Ottoline Prize, chosen by Brenda Hillman, and the National Poetry Series. It seemed only a matter of time, I prayed, before it would be picked up by a publisher. I hoped I was done.

  YOU’RE A GOOD EGG—HAPPY EASTER
  Feeling more confident than I had in years, I sent the manuscript to Nightboat Books. The publisher, Stephen Motika, read it and said, I’m interested in your relationship with Isabelle and I don’t see it on the page.

  I honestly didn’t think I could do anything more about it. I came to a grinding halt.

  One day several months into my despair, I felt a different kind of energy—a little cocky, a little devil-may-care. I walked to the filing cabinet and took out a file overflowing with correspondence from Isabelle to me. Birthday cards, holiday cards, notes I had saved. With a kind of weird, wild boldness I thought, I’ll give them this relationship. Flipping through the file I started writing things like, “You’re a Good Egg—Happy Easter.”

  IMG_4421.JPG
  I should mention that during these years I’d become a close friend of Isabelle’s, in spite of the fact that I’d failed to publish a book about her and the garden I was so obsessed with. She’d gotten married—in that same garden. I’d attended the wedding, even helped her dress for the ceremony. In my maniacal writing fit, I included details about how I helped her that day with her corset and shoes. I produced about eight pages of quotes and inserted them into the manuscript.

  I sent it off to Stephen. I was just waiting for him to reject it.

  February 18, 2018
  Back to the Garden - Part 4: Mountain Lion Footprints on the Deck
  Creative Careers
  This is the last in a four-part series of posts based on an interview I conducted with the poet Hazel White, about the twenty-year process of writing her book Vigilance Is No Orchard, forthcoming from Nightboat Books. Scroll down for Parts 1–3.

  EIGHTEEN YEARS OF DEFEAT IS A STRANGE SPACE
  [When we left off with Hazel's story in Part 3 below, she had revised her manuscript yet again and sent it—yet again—to Stephen Motika at Nightboat.] He wrote back after some time. He didn’t like the changes. But he didn’t out-and-out reject the work.

  Six months went by. One day I pulled out the manuscript again. I cut a third of the quotes and embedded the remainder more carefully in the manuscript. I sent it back to Stephen and wrote something like, “I’m not certain that I’ve fixed anything. If you could let me know your decision by Sunday I’d appreciate it. If the answer is no, I completely understand.” I almost wanted a rejection. There were many times during the whole process when I wondered if I were mentally ill. Eighteen years of defeat is a strange space.

  Stephen wrote back and said he loved the rewrite. He had a lot of praise for it. But he also didn’t come right out and say he’d publish it.

  I went to Brooklyn in the fall of 2016 and met him for breakfast. I was grateful that he had spent so much time on my manuscript and I was also nervous he might still be thinking it wasn’t done yet. I said hesitantly, Stephen, is it yes or no? He said, Yes. He said, Sorry, in my feedback I’ve been harsh on you. I said, That’s true. We laughed. He knows a lot about landscape architecture and admires Isabelle’s work, so he cared about this book. I’m of course very grateful now.

  Untitled.png
  MOUNTAIN LION FOOTPRINTS ON THE DECK
  I’ve thought a lot about why this project took twenty years. I’ve come to understand that as an English person, I wasn’t writing about a Southern California landscape from the perspective of someone raised here. I had to take up habitation in a foreign aesthetic. It’s very hard to have lost one’s original place. It’s even harder to write about that. Yet I felt I might never encounter a more mysterious or necessary subject. So what choice did I have? I had to address that desperate resettling.

  I also think I was jealous of Isabelle’s power as an exquisitely intuitive maker. I wanted to write as powerfully as she created gardens. The project became finish-able when I realized I would always fail to fully get the experience on the page; that instead, I needed to allow the failure to enter the work, become part of it.

  A third challenge to completing the work was my guilt that I was making an experimental poetry book, not the gloriously successful coffee table book Isabelle and I had originally envisioned.

  But about six years ago I realized Isabelle wasn’t holding a grudge. Around that time she arranged for me to stay in the guest house at the garden she had created for Lillian Lovelace. The Lovelace garden features a pool with boulders in it, set under oaks, with a teahouse at its edge. It’s that placement of the human-made lines and the wild lines I described earlier, that reduces me to a noodle. I stayed in the teahouse for three days and nights. I swam in the ocean and in mountain creeks. I slept with the door open and in the mornings there were mountain-lion footprints on the deck. I wrote several poems.

  Blog #10 - Photo Hazel White Part 4 - Lovelace teahouse and pool.png
  Isabelle always knew I was more of a writer than I knew. She told me early on to stop calling myself a garden writer. She said I was an artist and a real thinker. By the time the book was finished, she had come to see me as being more true to myself as an artist than perhaps she’d been to her artist self during that time. So in the end, she’s glad it ended up how it did.

  And so am I.

Vigilance is No Orchard
Publishers Weekly.
265.21 (May 21, 2018): p45. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2018 PWxyz, LLC http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Vigilance is No Orchard
Hazel White. Nightboat, $16.95 trade paper (92p) ISBN 978-1-937658-82-3
White (Peril as an Architectural Enrichment) unites her passions in this finely conceived collection that fixates on one remarkable garden in Santa Barbara, Calif. The work evolved over many years, from White's first, visceral encounter with the Valentine Garden through her long friendship with the garden's designer, legendary landscape architect Isabelle Greene. "I want to live in the green," White puns. "And this wants out of me onto the page." The book formally and substantively records White's apprenticeship in Greene's principles of composition, "reaching beyond a lesson to a dappled place where light plays." Just as plants of Southern California's harsh terrain "demonstrate the filigree of survival," so do White's lines form a "zigzag path/ of abandonment." These elements both invite the reader to view from a distance and "draw a visitor forward" into contact, shelter, even trespass. White's most ambitious passages merge poetry with the physical and phenomenological properties of this single, intentional acre: "now alive in the mind of the other, building to achieve her for her." And yet, suffusing the book's memorialization of the garden is the fact of its passing: "The vision was not mine to keep. It slows and fails." Exquisitely alert to the realities of natural environments, White's book is among the most interesting of the new nature writing. (June)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Vigilance is No Orchard." Publishers Weekly, 21 May 2018, p. 45. Book Review Index Plus,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A541012579/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=e1a9e7ae. Accessed 29 Sept. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A541012579
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Paths and Walkways
Ann Leyhe
Horticulture, The Art of American Gardening.
95.8 (September-October 1998): p66+. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 1998 F+W Media, Inc.
http://www.fwmedia.com/
Full Text:
Although not specifically geared to small gardens, Water Gardens and Paths and Walkways, by Hazel White, with photography by Matthew Plut (Chronicle Books; $16.95 each; 118 pages), will be a great help to anyone who is dealing with these elements in garden design, small plot or large. White started out with the work of professional designers who shared their creative visions of paths and water features. Each "project" is given one large photograph and descriptive text for replicating the design. In addition, a column of text is set aside for the particulars of the project (for example, expense, difficulty, location), as well as a list of tools, ingredients, and maintenance needed to complete the job.
What raises these books above many other volumes in the how-to category, however, is White's voice. These books are worth reading even if you never intend to buy the level you would need to build a path, or the pond liner for that bit of reflecting pool. On creating water effects in a garden, she writes, "A garden that engages the imagination is fun to make and enchanting to experience. It draws you in as a participant in its spirit. It evokes feelings of play, gives the everyday literal mind a much needed rest." Encouragement abounds for those doubtful of achieving the effects they desire. From Paths and Walkways: "Another Saturday it's up early, in favorite old clothes and the gloves and the boots, for a day outdoors away from the phone. The work starts out warm and energetic, clearing and digging and hauling the materials into place. . . . Building a path is fun. Take it slowly; enjoy getting everything lined up right, before you start."
Now I am eyeing my small garden . . . there must be a place I could put a tiny water feature, perhaps with a new path to get me there.
Ann Leyhe is a contributing editor of this magazine. She writes and gardens in Berkeley, California.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Leyhe, Ann. "Paths and Walkways." Horticulture, The Art of American Gardening, Sept.-Oct.
1998, p. 66+. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A21147896 /GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=fd48dc94. Accessed 29 Sept. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A21147896
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Water Gardens
Ann Leyhe
Horticulture, The Art of American Gardening.
95.8 (September-October 1998): p66+. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 1998 F+W Media, Inc.
http://www.fwmedia.com/
Full Text:
Although not specifically geared to small gardens, Water Gardens and Paths and Walkways, by Hazel White, with photography by Matthew Plut (Chronicle Books; $16.95 each; 118 pages), will be a great help to anyone who is dealing with these elements in garden design, small plot or large. White started out with the work of professional designers who shared their creative visions of paths and water features. Each "project" is given one large photograph and descriptive text for replicating the design. In addition, a column of text is set aside for the particulars of the project (for example, expense, difficulty, location), as well as a list of tools, ingredients, and maintenance needed to complete the job.
What raises these books above many other volumes in the how-to category, however, is White's voice. These books are worth reading even if you never intend to buy the level you would need to build a path, or the pond liner for that bit of reflecting pool. On creating water effects in a garden, she writes, "A garden that engages the imagination is fun to make and enchanting to experience. It draws you in as a participant in its spirit. It evokes feelings of play, gives the everyday literal mind a much needed rest." Encouragement abounds for those doubtful of achieving the effects they desire. From Paths and Walkways: "Another Saturday it's up early, in favorite old clothes and the gloves and the boots, for a day outdoors away from the phone. The work starts out warm and energetic, clearing and digging and hauling the materials into place. . . . Building a path is fun. Take it slowly; enjoy getting everything lined up right, before you start."
Now I am eyeing my small garden . . . there must be a place I could put a tiny water feature, perhaps with a new path to get me there.
Ann Leyhe is a contributing editor of this magazine. She writes and gardens in Berkeley, California.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Leyhe, Ann. "Water Gardens." Horticulture, The Art of American Gardening, Sept.-Oct. 1998, p.
66+. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A21147895 /GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=d458fa27. Accessed 29 Sept. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A21147895
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paths and Walkways
Publishers Weekly.
245.8 (Feb. 23, 1998): p73. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 1998 PWxyz, LLC http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Hazel White. Chronicle, $16.95 paper (120p) ISBN 0-8118-1429-7
In this launch of Chronicle's Garden Design series, horticulture writer White suggests' that paths give a garden structure, much as a skeleton shapes a body. She notes that paths, by facilitating movement from place to another, have a narrative quiality. Such concepts as scale, symmetry (or asymmetry), curving and/or straight lines, materials (dirt, wood, stone, brick, etc.) and edging also contribute to a path's ultimate effect. These concepts and those specifically concerned with building different kinds of paths are lucidly and briefly addressed in the first two chapters. The rest of the book is devoted to detailed "recipes" for constructing 24 specific paths. Photographs of each path are accompanied by a list of the equipment and supplies (including plantings) required to build it and to satisfy its maintenance needs. Grouped according to material (e.g., Brick; Grass and Wood), the projects are also classified according to case or difficulty and relative expense. Such elements as grade and climate are left to the reader to consider, as are the many variations that will certainly be required of any given project by specific sites. The projects, such as Fieldstones and Irises, embellished with boulders, marguerites, euphorbias and lamb's ears, or Herb Parterre, using gravel, crushed rock, metal edging and dwarf myrtles, will surely spark further ideas in the interested gardener, while White's matter-of-fact approach to their construction will help reluctant or intimidated gardeners get started along paths of their own. (Mar.)
FYI: White's Water Gardens, another title in the series, is also being published in March.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"paths and Walkways." Publishers Weekly, 23 Feb. 1998, p. 73. Book Review Index Plus,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A20334761/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=741ae7ce. Accessed 29 Sept. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A20334761
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More from Sunset; Sunset books: growing pleasures
Sunset.
214.4 (Apr. 2005): p18. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2005 Sunset Publishing Corp.
Full Text:
If there's anything better than a beautiful yard, it's a beautiful yard you can eat. The Edible Garden, newly released by Sunset Books, is a multifaceted guide to coaxing flavorful, fresh foods from your patch of ground. All the basics are here: choosing a design, prepping, planting, growing, handling pests, working the soil, mixing flowers and produce, and an A-Z crop encyclopedia. Along the way, the writers share secrets to intangible joys: what makes a path inviting, how to balance colors and forms, the power of restraint, and knowing when it's time to go bold. As one caption puts it, "Gardening teaches us quickly and well--about weather, seasons, time, and the earth--because it engages our senses."
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
INFO: The Edible Garden (Sunset Books, 2005; $20), by Hazel White, Janet H. Sanchez, and the editors of Sunset Books. Check out www.sunsetbooks.com for details or to order a copy.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"More from Sunset; Sunset books: growing pleasures." Sunset, Apr. 2005, p. 18. Book Review
Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A131043346/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=9834d375. Accessed 29 Sept. 2018.
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Small-Tree Gardens: Simple Projects, Contemporary Design
Publishers Weekly.
247.6 (Feb. 7, 2000): p82. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2000 PWxyz, LLC http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Horticulture writer Hazel White believes that a tree alone possesses inherent beauty, but when planted with forethought, all that surrounds it will be enhanced as well. In Small-Tree Gardens: Simple Projects, Contemporary Design, she sets down 25 projects, accompanied by photographs, that illustrate how a simple gravel river with Strawberry Guava lends a peaceful air, a vibrant redbud gives breath to an old shed, the elegant shadow of a thoughtfully placed magnolia or Italian cypress creates striking patterns on a wall. Her expert directions will suit even a novice gardener. (Chronicle, $18.95 paper 118 p ISBN 0-8118-2123-4; Mar.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Small-Tree Gardens: Simple Projects, Contemporary Design." Publishers Weekly, 7 Feb. 2000,
p. 82. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A59474829 /GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=f178ea67. Accessed 29 Sept. 2018.
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"Vigilance is No Orchard." Publishers Weekly, 21 May 2018, p. 45. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A541012579/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=e1a9e7ae. Accessed 29 Sept. 2018. Leyhe, Ann. "Paths and Walkways." Horticulture, The Art of American Gardening, Sept.-Oct. 1998, p. 66+. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A21147896/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=fd48dc94. Accessed 29 Sept. 2018. Leyhe, Ann. "Water Gardens." Horticulture, The Art of American Gardening, Sept.-Oct. 1998, p. 66+. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A21147895/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=d458fa27. Accessed 29 Sept. 2018. "paths and Walkways." Publishers Weekly, 23 Feb. 1998, p. 73. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A20334761/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=741ae7ce. Accessed 29 Sept. 2018. "More from Sunset; Sunset books: growing pleasures." Sunset, Apr. 2005, p. 18. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A131043346/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=9834d375. Accessed 29 Sept. 2018. "Small-Tree Gardens: Simple Projects, Contemporary Design." Publishers Weekly, 7 Feb. 2000, p. 82. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A59474829/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=f178ea67. Accessed 29 Sept. 2018.

• Entropy Magazine
  https://entropymag.org/conversation-between-hazel-white-and-jamie-townsend/
  Word count: 4780

  Conversation Between Hazel White and Jamie Townsend
  written by Guest Contributor September 4, 2018

  JT: Hi Hazel. I’m very excited that we get the chance to correspond about your brilliant new book Vigilance is No Orchard, just out from Nightboat. As perhaps an intro or frame to this discussion, I’m wondering if you could talk a little bit about how the focus of this collection, writing about landscape architect Isabelle Greene’s iconic Valentine Garden design, as well as the actual garden itself, emerged. What was your initial draw toward Isabelle’s project? How did it compel or perplex you enough to undertake this book- length engagement?

  HW: Hi Jamie, thanks for your question. I saw an image of the garden in a magazine. Something was at stake there. It was a physical experience—later I would research the Stendhal syndrome, how people are made ill by an experience of art. The image, or something promised there, shot through me like electricity and suddenly I knew for certain that I would do anything to stand in the garden. The effect was strong for weeks, and then it faded, but it never went away. I was a professional writer, of books and magazine articles on gardening, especially design. I called Isabelle. When eventually I
  did stand in Carol Valentine’s garden, I had the same fizzy alertness, but I couldn’t explain what was occurring there. So writing was my way to try to make sense of it. I didn’t know it when I turned the page in the magazine, but that was my first glimpse of one of the most internationally famous gardens of the late 20th century, and the maker of it, Isabelle Greene, is an artist as well as a landscape architect.

  JT: It makes me think that we are trained to perceive in a particular way, which is then assumed to be sort of 101 when you enter any field. The physically disorienting experience of being stripped of a frame of reference or context that you had to seeing the Valentine Garden for the first time draws out all sorts of larger questions that perhaps weren’t raised in your writing previously; maybe more epistemological than practical questions? For example: what are the needs of a particular body in space and how do those needs prefigure an external world? Or, how are we surprised by what we need beyond the practical? You write in the book: “To know where you are as a fact”. When this certainty or mastery, in a sense, fell away how did writing change for you?

  HW: Yes, it was just that—an experience of being stripped of a frame of reference. What was there in that garden was exquisite beauty in combination with no focal points. Without focal points, there was no insistence on how one should see. That presented as a sort of psychic decentering, and spectacularly, as an invitation to engage freely in space. Greene describes her work as leaving clues around to get people into the game. I was her perfect visitor!

  Your idea of “the needs of a particular body in space”—yes, Greene plays with that. Our primary need is for safety, shelter. And this was a garden bound by tall white walls on three sides, in a tight canyon. When shelter is sufficiently provided, as it was there in that site and in the abundance of breath-taking beauty, the body wants to step out of shelter
  into the world, to feel the joy of safe free movement. Greene provided a place for that roving by building space-exploding terraces that are seen from above and read as large as terraced rice fields in Banaue. She connects the body to the garden to the larger world and puts you in motion (I think of this as radical, it’s so important to overcome passivity). She creates her work that way: “Low where I want you to go and feel welcome, and then high to cradle you” (49). Here was a woman making space exactly how she wanted it. And I responded by craving a large field for myself. I wrote about the garden for magazines and in a museum catalog essay, but, to match my writing to her creation, to get myself in motion and in right relationship to this experience, I really needed the open spaces of poetry, which I had loved since I was a child.

  JT: And that play of shelter and perception gets translated into the work via the sections the book is broken into, titled alternately “View” and “Refuge”. I like how these terms intermingle as well as play off each other. A refuge can have a view and simultaneously a view can be subservient to the welfare of the individual who is viewing. This is true even in the case of broad and uninterrupted views, ones that are seemingly “natural”. I think of the garden designs of 19th Century English landscape architect Capability Brown who, as Lisa Robertson notes in the essay “Arts and Crafts in Burnaby: A Congenial Soil,” creates a seamless transition between wilderness and front door. This sort of gets into the larger issue of walls and borders. You write “Greene silences the architect’s white walls by planting two eucalyptus trees to whistle over it”. Perception feels like poetry in this sense, engaged as it is with altering expectations of what is understood, while simultaneously being a created thing. So, if the idea of a garden assumes a particular type of set-off space (the word garden itself derives from the Old English geard, meaning “fence” or “enclosure”), then how do you think the Valentine Garden and your writing in relationship to it attempt to break down the binary of inside and outside, or explore the porous relationship of these designations? And maybe as a side question, can we have “natural spaces” that aren’t immediately ordered by our perception?

  HW: Isabelle hates walls, she hates separation. It was the architect who built the walls at the Valentine Garden. I think the garden is where we declare or explore our relationship to our habitat. Capability Brown indulged his clients in a pretense—he planted the trees in the distance, redirected the river, stopped the wildlife from approaching the viewer by
  placing a fence at the bottom of an invisible ditch (called a “ha-ha”). Modern gardens may be similarly indulgent by pretending that resources are unlimited—stone shipped from Italy, lawns consuming massive amounts of water, etc. The Valentine Garden is none of that. It’s water-sensitive, and not about grandeur. Rather it throws the viewer/visitor into relationship with land that is immersive, intentionally, provoking liveliness and engagement, driving a writer to write. The way poet Andrew Joron, in The Cry at Zero, talks about language as “an emergent phenomenon, spontaneously springing forth as a pure enigma, an overflowing of reality.” I remember now that Leslie Scalapino, my first poetry teacher, told me I was not writing “about” landscape, I “was” landscape. Does that answer your question about inside and outside? Yes, we do immediately try to order what we are looking at, but when we can’t, it’s an opportunity for hybridity. Joron, if I’m reading him correctly, calls all this the poetic-revolutionary nature of reality.

  JT: I love how your remembrance of Leslie Scalapino’s redefinition of writing about landscape to “you are landscape” serves as another point of shifting perspective, first within the writer and then within the writing itself. It seems apt that so many new approaches to form emerge from self-interrogation. In discussion with other writers, I’ve sometimes been referring to your work as a new approach to the pastoral, one that is, indeed, more risky, more open perhaps to the complicity of voice in poetry. You write “Mutual life—and voyeuristic opportunity.” In this book, much as in your first book Peril as Architectural Enrichment, you are examining individuals examining nature. Often this individual is yourself, but you open the book up to include, and at times be redirected by, quotes from Greene in a manner that often grounds or redirects poetic reverie or psychological/perceptual self-inquiry. This mode of collage or collaborative writing opens up the possibility of an active landscape, one that functions so effectively because of its surprises and shifts of effect, color, etc. Joron’s “emergent phenomenon” feels powerfully connected to this “new pastoral” as a re-imagining of landscape, not as complete, solid, or evidentiary, but rather as something that continues to transform and startle. Do you feel connected to the tradition of nature poetry or of pastoral writing in general? Do you consider your writing to be pushing these forms in new directions purposefully or perhaps even subconsciously?

  HW: Maybe I am, though I have never thought about it until now, pushing the forms of nature writing, or the pastoral. I grew up on English nature poetry—I read Wordsworth’s Prelude walking the hills where he walked, and the first poetry workshop I attended, when I was a teenager, was taught by Ted Hughes, just after Crow was published. I like that you see the writing in Vigilance as an active landscape and raise the idea of landscape as active also. I suppose I do adopt a mode of collage—I think of Mei-mei Berssenbrugge’s laying out on a desk hundreds of fragments of scientific theory and artists’ writings. I do like to let one thing overrun another in long lines, no barriers between landscape theory and a body immersed in its habitat and memory and what just happened right now. Mei-mei’s work has greatly influenced me. And I understand why I might always turn to landscape—I grew up in it, and I’ve worked in and studied it and written about it for decades—but I’m not sure that my primary interest is landscape. Rather I’m fascinated by a human animal body setting itself in motion, knowing already what it wants to do in a space. I read Alva Noe for years, hold close his emphasis on consciousness as action, as in his “perception is not something that happens to us, or in us. It is something we do . . . in a world that shows up for us.” I’m alert to that large space, the thrill of exploration there. It’s the same thing as seeing terraces that mimic a vast landscape and then lifting my foot and stepping down into it. A pastoral project that focuses on movement and immersion, no boundaries? What do you mean by “the complicity of voice in poetry”?

  JT: I think with my statement regarding “complicity of voice in poetry” I’m trying to get at the awareness of a self in the poem, self-shaping the poem through a particular lens. Poetic voice functioning not as an assumed authority, but something that is noted and interrogated by the text. I’m thinking about how the collaging of Isabelle’s voice and
  yours throughout your book suggests a mutable, multiple way of seeing. I read this as a sort of wrestling with the failure or inadequacy of any singular expression of space, much like how the garden invites you into a game of perspective that Isabelle sets up. This seems to correspond with your Noe quote regarding “consciousness as action”. But I’m also dreaming of a garden that, because it can never be viewed “correctly”, never ceases to exist. Maybe that’s what I hope for in poetry too; that its relational quality, existing in an intermediary space between writer and reader, never ceases to be active or to transform. The hybridity of your writing also suggests an openness to systems of design and chance which seem to mirror the garden’s counter intuitive, shifting beauty. Does that make sense?

  Conversely, I was really struck by lines like “gardens flicker in and out of existence”, and the book’s ending: “Because a garden, like a photograph, can die, I’m placing the flat fact of it here, in the dry, like certainty’s stored apples and pears.” Because the Valentine Garden has been rapidly sliding into entropy with the death of Carol Valentine and neglect of the current property owners, do you think we’re left feeling a little bereft as the book closes, perhaps left with only the memory of a previous life? With all of the composite pieces of design muddled by this decomposition, I wonder when it stops being the Valentine Garden.

  I do see this book as a way of perhaps continuing Isabelle’s game, allowing the garden to be, in a sense, renewed by each reader. However, I’m wondering how you feel now that the book is finished and out in the world. In the postscript we are asked to consider “the end of the garden” and you ask the self-reflective, maybe rhetorical question “why did I go in to index its presence, risk such a vascular distribution!”. There’s a feeling here of making a body out of an exteriority, a identity projected onto a landscape. Now with the ongoing erasure of the physical space that initiated your project in the first place, do you find that you’ve been able to let go? Perhaps in a different way than Isabelle, as a commercial landscape architect, had to with her design?

  HW: The feeling is joy now. I survived a long, difficult journey, of relationship and immersion. I was just then wanting to write “without ruining anything.” I am so afraid of failure and neglect. At a recent reading—you were there, and I wonder if your question arose from it—I decided to read more of the poems that address loss and to speak about the garden becoming a ruin. I sensed I needed to read poems that spoke to the beauty of the place also and to plenty. I guess, unconsciously, I was wanting to generate an experience that mirrored my own, to stir people, promote a “vascular distribution,” and bring us through. It occurred to me I might cry. Perhaps I overplayed the loss, the garden being now a ruin. Several people talked and wrote to me about that after. Isn’t it, though, that we are incredibly alert to neglect of our habitat? Maybe that’s what’s triggered. I always wanted to write an essay about neglect. It’s very close to violence. I’m delighted that you see my book as continuing Isabelle’s game. “Making a body out of an exteriority”—yes, the garden’s beauty re-made me, in my writing of it. That initial impetus of dynamic energy, on seeing the image of the garden, became a reverberation that has reordered what captures my attention, where I am drawn. I’m grateful for it. I feel it in the rhythms of my lines. Perhaps it was that voice, in its explorative emergence, that you found complicit in the poetry. The garden will always be the Valentine Garden to 1. Tacita Dean, after spending years studying place, concluded “place is only ever autobiographical.”

  JT: The play between vertical and horizontal perspectives in Vigilance seems important. It feels connected to a sapient sense of progress. Building up, in the sense of civilization. Spreading out, in the sense of defining the borders of a particular landscape. In the section entitled “Forcing a Shape” you write “visible from above, ordered, and solid in its insistence”. Later in the same section you state: “I lumber forward once more to defoliate east or west”. Can you say a little bit more about points of view in the book—how seeing, and perhaps “how to see” (aesthetic sensibilities themselves), emerge from complex systems of security and risk?

  HW: In one of our early conversations, Isabelle spoke of her interest in working low to the ground, and in connecting the small patch of earth that was the garden to the world. She opens up a view by any means possible to pull off that connection. Many landscape architects build up from the ground plane, create large volumes of tree canopies and
  arbors, etc., which gives a sense of power, order, security, stasis. I’m with Isabelle, wanting the sensation of stepping out into the world, while trusting—how could one not trust, with so much beauty—I will arrive home safe. In Jay Appleton’s prospect–refuge landscape theory, risk, as in exploring the world, is deemed “survival advantageous,” and I believe it’s something that can be felt as a pleasure. The play of perspectives, and I hope risk, in Vigilance is explorative, and you are right, “connected to a sapient sense of progress.” Tell me how you approached perspectives and points of view in your ekphrastic book, The Motion Picture, The Village, after Cao Fei’s La Town. There are such thrills of movement in it, aerial views, and drags outward and then zooming motions into small bounded scenes, privacies, and then I’m walking/reading again and something generous expands. Are you also organizing space toward connection?

  JT: Thank you for inquiring about my book! I think there is definitely some overlap in our concerns, particularly regarding the importance of risk which I believe is a precursor to any sort of communal experience. At the end of The Motion Picture, The Village I include a brief dedication to the artist Cao Fei and her film La Town, which became the focus of my writing after first seeing it exhibited at PS1 in New York, about three years ago. This particular exhibition included model sets for the various scenes of the movie La Town, which documents a post-disaster city constructed from the landmarks and detritus of other cities; a city, according to Fei’s own self-generated mythology that travels through wormholes in space and time, accruing and expanding as it goes. The film uses evocative cinematography, slow pans, close-ups, arching overhead shots, to present a series of decimated cityscapes constructed out of customized model railroad layouts. The backstory of La Town is never revealed. Instead we are guided by the disembodied voices of two lovers (text re-purposed from the screenplay to Marguerite Duras’s Hiroshima Mon Amour) through various tableaux that create a sort of metropolitan event horizon. Of course, the aftereffects of massive violence loom over everything. PS1’s exhibit of La Town, where I was able to watch the film then examine display cases with its trainset layouts reconstructed and presented as discrete artworks themselves, focused my responsive writing toward shifts in visual perspective and memory. I began thinking about all the cities that I’ve visited as if they were an overlapping singular space, warped and deconstructed by predatory economics, environmental degradation, racism, as well my complicit engagement in these systems of violence. Now it feels as though perhaps connection, or rather the residue of connection, became the starting point for each “visual shot” of the book. Connection is not always peaceful. The assumption of a city as a solid artifact, as isolating, masks the fact that we are always together creating, shifting, multiplying our environments in ways that can be both affirming and destructive. Because of this I felt the need to interrogate my seemingly isolated day-to-day life the first year of living in Oakland as a collection of scenes and memories that are pointing toward something important that I hadn’t noticed during that time; to take some form of action toward addressing my lack of understanding.

  As a genderqueer writer, my use of the second person pronoun throughout The Motion Picture acknowledges isolation, and the violence that emerges from it, as a construct more than a bare fact. In the postscript I write that La Town functions as a place where “urban space, disaster, and longing merge in a search for points of connection which disregard assumptions of continuity.” I think this has something to do with memory as an imprecise register for an elusive exteriority, and forgetfulness as the site where again and again violence finds a path of least resistance.

  A large portion of The Motion Picture, The Village is composed of a variety of collaged texts whose voices interceded as the writing developed and became the citizenry of my version of La Town. One of those voices is your own from Peril as Architectural Enrichment: “No matter where you stand, at least one surface of the unbuilt garden of planes is hidden. Seeing, anyway, engenders a false sense that all things are knowable”. I’m wondering if you can talk a little bit about the gaps or hidden planes that exist between seeing and knowing, as well as how they fit into your work? Are they
  where exploration or self-interrogation begin?

  HW: I like hearing you speak of your book, which I loved reading. I’m fumbling with your question about perception and knowledge. I realize I don’t prioritize knowledge. At the start of writing Vigilance, I was very taken by Elaine Scarry’s book On Beauty and Being Just. Turning to it now, I find, on p. 81, “The structure of perceiving beauty appears to have a two-part scaffolding: first, one’s attention is involuntarily given to the beautiful person or thing; then, this quality of heightened attention is voluntarily extended out to other persons and things. It is as though beautiful things have been placed here and there throughout the world to serve as small wake-up calls to perception, spurring lapsed alertness back to its most acute level.” Right after that, she speaks of Plato’s requirement that we move from an experience of beauty to caring. I think I’m attuned to experiences of alertness and care, and not knowledge, which feels static and dull in comparison.

  JT: So, the recognition of beauty hopefully leads toward the desire to care? Can you talk a little more about beauty? It’s an idea that has so many complications throughout the art histories of dominant cultures; the esteeming of symmetry, the linguistic privileging of whiteness (the idea of “fair” and fair-skinned connected semantically), rigid conceptions of cultural femininity, and myriad other oppressions. How do we expand the idea of beauty and how it relates to the work we do toward mitigating these systems of inequality? How can our writings recognize beauty in a more holistic manner and aid in our search for justice?

  HW: This is such a large and important topic. Beauty in landscape—is it an escape from engagement with the world and our complicity in injustices, or is it also possibly a base for action. I’ve been investigating the usefulness of beauty in public performances. It began 8 years ago when I was invited to speak at a conference of scientists, architects, and artists. I chose a 14-part form, each part 3 or 4 minutes, and juxtaposed parts on poetry with landscape theory, aesthetics, and what was happening right there in that place, to surprise a topology of connection. It provoked a lively response, so I started using the form in different places—beginning with a public walk at a land art installation at i-park in Connecticut, where I placed colonialism into the mix with landscape, beauty, and language. I’ve done perhaps 12 public performances since then, using the same form. In a walk last year at Headlands Center for the Arts, I mixed parts on beauty (the view, the survival of the tidewater gobi, the intimacy of speaking a little from the heart and being heard, as in the practice of nonviolent communication) with parts on war and injustice (the reflections of an Iraq war veteran from an interview at the Headlands, my experience of white racial violence). The mixing, and the action of walking, perhaps break the habitual frames of thinking. I‘m always moved by people’s readiness to decenter the self and feel empathy with human and nonhuman others, and there’s joy, I think, in experiencing a more distributive agency.

  Denise Newman and I had the problems of beauty on our minds during the 2-year public project we did at the UC Botanical Garden, which is online at bioticportal.com and includes a site essay on beauty. We came across Bruno Latour’s idea of beauty as an actant. See also Kathleen Marie Higgins, “Whatever Happened to Beauty.” And yet,
  returning to your question, is this attention to beauty sufficiently holistic or achieving anything in terms of justice—I’m uncertain about it. My main inspiration is Yedda Morrison’s interview with Myung Mi Kim, Generosity as Method, which addresses this dilemma of what a poet can do.

  JT: This conversation has been so rich and to end on a sense that we are not finished interrogating these issues seems correct, especially in such precarious times. I do, however, have a final inquiry. Considering that an interrogation of beauty, perspective, and risk together seems particularly appropriate because of how they are inextricably connected to systems of power, white supremacy, and isolationism, maybe you can talk about what the end of “Vigilance” has led into. I remember speaking with you several weeks back about the most current writing that you’ve been doing concerning whiteness. Maybe you can discuss that a little more. Do you see this current project as emerging from the afterglow of Vigilance? Are the two connected in any way, or do you feel like this writing represents a break or shift in practice?

  HW: Thank you, Jamie, for such a close reading of my work. The desire to write about whiteness has come through my experience of being the adoptive parent of a black child. I thought I knew about race, but I didn’t understand, viscerally, the cruelty of whiteness until I witnessed it in relation to my son. It made me so angry, and writing poetry about it seemed an entirely insufficient response. Ten years ago, Tony Labat did a public art project at SFMOMA, asking the public to make a demand by completing a sentence beginning with Uncle Sam’s “I Want You.” I want you to end racism, I wrote, and quickly filled the page. It was one of the five publicly voted winners of the live monologue competition, and posters went up all over the Bay Area, I Want You to End Racism. But as the years passed and I continued to speak up, I felt some despair because nothing seemed to change. My son is grown now. Vigilance is published, and I’m hoping the resilience I learned from writing it will transfer into this new project. I’m reflecting on whiteness from two points in time: a police incident involving my son, brought about by a white woman calling 911 (you’ve seen the videos of such calls), and my growing up, and being drilled on how to be white, 40 miles from Bristol, a center of the British slave trade. I’m writing about white violence. I’m no longer writing about shelter. Even in Vigilance, I had to take shelter out of the book to finish it. Someone at the last reading cannily asked me to sign page 6, specifically near the text “For beauty is not shelter, it necessitates a forward momentum.”

  Jamie Townsend is a genderqueer poet, publisher, and editor living in Oakland, California. They are half-responsible for Elderly, a publishing experiment and persistent hub of ebullience and disgust. Their first the full-length collection, Shade (Elis Press), was released in 2015. An essay on the history of the New Narrative magazine Soup was published in The Bigness of Things: New Narrative and Visual Culture (Wolfman Books, 2017) They are currently editing a forthcoming collection of Steve Abbott’s writings (Nightboat, 2019).

  Hazel White is the author of Vigilance Is No Orchard, published in May 2018 by Nightboat Books, and also of Peril as Architectural Enrichment, from Kelsey Street Press. Her public work includes presentations at SFMOMA, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, and Headlands Center for the Arts, where she was an affiliate artist for several years. She’s a recipient with poet Denise Newman of a Creative Work Fund grant, and her poetry has appeared in New American Writing, Denver Quarterly, Elderly, and Fence. She grew up on farms in England, and once wrote gardening books.
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• The Rumpus
  https://therumpus.net/2018/02/the-rumpus-interview-with-denise-newman-and-hazel-white/
  Word count: 3014

  Outlaws in the Garden: A Conversation with Denise Newman and Hazel White

  By Erika Howsare

  February 9th, 2018

  A garden is where plants and people collide. And sometimes, you look down and find words in the garden, too: those little silver placards carrying botanical names, or an instructional voice in your head—an authority’s idea about what should be grown and how. If you’re lucky, the language in the garden might have been encouraged to grow by the poets Hazel White and Denise Newman, two San Francisco-based collaborators who sowed experimental seeds at the UC Botanical Garden in Berkeley for about a year and a half, ending in 2016.

  Their Biotic Portal project is delightfully multifaceted, with Facebook posts and videos and essays, and a multimedia index that mimics the garden’s horticultural records. It shelters such tasty bits of language (“pretend your body is a tentacle”) and is fascinating in that most of those bits were not written by White and Newman, but recorded during their interactions with hundreds of visitors and staff at the garden.

  And why not? Poetry is often so nearly silent, floating on the page, unseen and unheard by the vast majority of people, even those who read. I sense in Newman and White the desire to break down the barriers between poetry and the world, to get out there and chat, even as they undertook brainy inquiries about the nature of beauty and how a seemingly innocent activity, like collecting plants, can conceal human power dynamics.

  Both women have had careers outside the standard borders of poetryland. White has written a number of instructional gardening books, and Newman has supplied opera libretti and made videos of snails. “We advanced by instinct and play,” White told me during our interview, and Biotic Portal—both during its real-time incarnation in California, and at its more permanent home online—issues a serious invitation to the audience to enter the garden and play along with the poets.

  ***

  The Rumpus: Can you describe how this project got started?

  Hazel White: After we got the grant from the Creative Work Fund in 2015 to collaborate with the UC Botanical Garden at Berkeley, we spent a few months visiting the garden and weighing up our grant proposal, which was to place text on-site. During that time, we wrote an article for World Literature Today on the use of text in landscape projects by writers and artists. We then looked at all the fixed, static language in the garden, and decided there was already too much language there.

  Rumpus: I’m intrigued by that phrase, “too much language”—it’s always fascinating to notice and ponder the ways that language in a public/educational space can become authoritative and maybe even oppressive, directing and containing a person’s experience there. Was that your concern—an overly mediated environment, and a longing for the things themselves? Or was it something more practical, like not wanting to require people to spend too much time reading text, thus having less time for plants?

  Denise Newman: All of that. We noticed the scientific signage had considerable authority. The eye would go right to the sign, then over to the plant, and back again. The information (genus and species—in Latin, and often of colonial origin—common name, acquisition date, etc.) often created distance rather than connecting people to the plant or the beautiful canyon in which the garden lies. The large interpretive signs were usually completely overlooked. The passive authority of this “living museum of plants” was our main challenge. We were seeking liveliness. We were particularly excited by a piece of skywriting we wrote about, “Don’t Panic,” by Ruth Sacks. The other projects we wrote about also put language in just as much flux as its surroundings.

  Rumpus: It seems you found plenty of liveliness within the plants themselves. But also, I sense you do believe in the enriching mission of the garden for the public. One of the project essays ends, “Please return to the garden again and again. Nothing would make the gardeners and staff happier.” Is the botanical garden good for people?

  White: Yes, the garden is very good for people! The text you mention is from the site essay on beauty, where I investigated how beauty affects felt experience. I mentioned Simone Weil’s idea that it distributes our attention outside of ourselves, requires us “to give up our imaginary position as the center.” That’s exactly the radical change we need today, we kept thinking.

  Elaine Scarry, in her book On Beauty and Being Just, proposes that beauty can lead to a greater alertness of and desire for fairness. It “seems to incite, even to require, the act of replication,” she writes, so opening oneself to incidences of beauty initiates more acts of beauty, which cause new chains of replication. It was in thinking about that that I encouraged people to return again and again, to make beauty and change a practice, really, to enliven social space with its benefits—chiefly, empathy and generosity.

  What does this have to do with poetry? There is another quote in that essay from poet Andrew Joron about the “poetic-revolutionary nature of reality,” whereby complex systems “comprised of a large number of elements far from equilibrium are prone to beautiful convulsions … [and then] an unexpected, unprecedented superaddition to reality … emerges.” We think poetry, like the garden, is a model of this “overflowing of reality,” and perhaps that’s what made it so easy for the gardeners and our collaborators to connect with our project.

  Rumpus: How did the gardeners and the public become part of the project?

  Newman/White: We took over a large closet between the women’s and men’s bathrooms and held open studios every Friday from October 2015 until September 2016. We had props in the form of a question or an object to draw visitors into speaking about things like shelter and desire. We collected their language, as well as our own thoughts and research provoked by these meetings. The garden staff became valuable collaborators, bringing us animated words like “autumnal recrudescence,” pointing out nests and rat damage and slime molds, describing deer kills and failures.

  Every Friday a sign was put out at the entrance kiosk: “Poets in the Garden.” People expected us to be writing poems. Some, including the garden director, had a hard time understanding how our project had anything to do with poetry. But they said startlingly lively things, bits of poetry floating in the air, which we couldn’t help collecting.

  Rumpus: Was there a moment or an exchange that seemed emblematic of how the public reacted to your presence? Did you get better at explaining the project as it went on?

  Newman: Once we settled on the form of the index, we were able to explain to people how we were going to use their words. We called it a public poem, or a poetic reordering of the collection. We had to keep changing our methods of engaging others because we needed to risk something ourselves if we were going to ask people to step into uncertainty. There was an exciting moment during one of our public walks that seems emblematic: Hazel described to the group a deer kill by a mountain lion on the other side of the boundary fence. She had us think about our love of shelter and security and the traditional idea of the garden as a paradise separate from the world, behind walls. I asked everyone to write down what the boundary fence fails to keep out, and then, as a chorus, we all shouted out our lists: Pollution, noise, crime, birds, clouds, pests, good climbers, wanderers, doubt, smells, drones, bugs, poverty, sounds, imagination, etc. All this appears in the index under the heading “Fence around the garden” and is cross-listed with Grizzlies, Boundary fences, Paradise, and Shelter.

  Rumpus: You have both published work in conventional forms (i.e., books of poetry), but you have both also found ways to put experimental language into other kinds of spaces and planes, like music and social media. Why is that important to you? Is there a gesture toward mindfulness here, in the sense that both nature and language may reward attention anywhere they exist, not only in their respective “gardens”?

  White: Yes, I like that idea of nature and language rewarding attention anywhere they exist. It reminds me of Myung Mi Kim on radicalizing poetry: “to work out as many different models of where poetry can exist, where poetry can be inserted.” She insists that radicalization begins with a rupture, and working with the public, off the traditional page, feels like that.

  While I was at Headlands Center for the Arts, I went twice a week to Battery 129, an old military site, with three tunnels and a gun pit, overlooking San Francisco and the Pacific Ocean. I met tourists, National Park Service employees, and military veterans there. The place is stunning, a complex of shelter and exposure, beauty and war, play and discomfort, and what came out of our mouths surprised us. Buffeted by the wind, affected by the war equipment, in awe of the view, perhaps we were uttering a very somatic/phenotypic language. Something similar happened at the botanic garden. Public work can feel very rich.

  Newman: For me, collaboration and working off the page have been ways to destabilize the process and engage more directly with others and the environment. I started collaborating with composers almost two decades ago, providing text for choral works. For my last project with composer Mark Winges, Pandora’s Gift, I held poetry workshops with the children singers and worked their language into the middle section when Pandora opens the box. The more people involved, the greater the unpredictability, and pressure that it could all fall apart at any moment. Making videos is similar. I’ve filmed insects and other elements moving language around, like this early video of snails, and learned to be patient and ready, setting up the conditions and waiting for something surprising to happen. All of this work prepared me for the poetry collaboration.

  Rumpus: The Cagean imperative is to accept whatever comes into the space you have created through, as you say, Denise, “setting up the conditions.” It’s the idea that anything that enters your designated form is valid, and the possibility of allowing or even loving anything. When I bring this back around to the garden setting, it raises a lot of entrenched binaries to which you’ve alluded, like natural vs. unnatural, invasive vs. native, weeds vs. cultivated species. Is there something to be gained by relaxing our ideas about what should and shouldn’t be in the garden?

  White: The botanic garden is a curated collection, and nothing is allowed to grow there from seed, because its genetic heritage must be traceable or the authority of the collection is compromised. This strict set of curatorial conditions gave us the chance to be Cagean monitors, playing with everything that refused the form. We loved the outlaw intrusions of blackberries, the thefts, the stories of disaster, the “dead file” of plant failures, which are far more numerous than the living. And we loved the animals in the garden, and so did the visitors. Perhaps we delighted in their overturning the set conditions.

  The biggest question there each spring has nothing to do with the survival of anything in the collection but rather how many local newts will make it across the road, through the garden fence to mate in the “Asia” pond. One of the last things we did in the garden was make a night video. We wore uniforms and furtively went around putting black cloths over signs and opening doors, returning the garden to the wildlife. What should and shouldn’t be in the garden—it brings up who’s in charge, what relationship do we want to our habitat.

  Rumpus: It’s so much fun to think of being an outlaw in the garden, and reminds me of evolution—that the dead, or the extinct, are “far more numerous than the living.” Nature, too, might be a trickster, continually disrupting stasis. What was the weirdest biological or ecological phenomenon you witnessed at the botanic garden? The most hopeful human phenomenon?

  Newman: Yes, the outlaws poke holes in the fantasy of a garden as paradise; they keep it real, whereas the anomalies are the darlings of the collection. Weird phenomena of all kinds were a major theme for us; our first entry in the index is “Aberration,” (“only valued when it’s not our own species, See also Affection”) with the photo of a one-of-kind Pachypodium lamerei. If you then go to the entry “Affection,” you’ll find the botanical term “monstrose,” which is what happened to this cactus, it had a growth mutation caused by an injury or disease. What’s so unusual about this plant is how symmetrical its bifurcated mutation is, like a pair of fantastic spectacles.

  This plant might serve as an emblem for the giddy, hopeful atmosphere at the garden. Perhaps the wild abundance and diversity of plant life intoxicated people, enabled them to let down their guards and enter into open-field conversations with us. They said amazing, curious things, and it often seemed like they were saying them out loud for the first time. It made us wonder what it might mean in the larger world. In the right setting, could little awakenings into collaborative participation create a wave that tips toward change, to a greater sense of connectedness?

  Rumpus: At one point in the piece, you mention place being “finally, sturdily, grounded on multiplicities of human relation.” Speaking of human relation, did politics or social issues per se enter this project, given the interest you described above in empathy and de-centering one’s own point of view?

  White: “Pincushion of a million stories,” is how geographer Doreen Massey spoke of place. Our project strikes us now as partly a poetic anthology of place in that sense. People were talking about Hillary vs. Bernie, disability access, global warming, money, the high cost of living in the Bay Area, land sovereignty, religion (lots on religion, actually, which led us to Bruno Latour’s “Will Non-Humans Be Saved? An Argument in Ecotheology”). We often brought up the colonial origin of plant collections, the colonial naming and Linnaean categorization of plants, and also of humans by race.

  On one of our public walks, this one in collaboration with the Architecture of Life exhibit at the Berkeley Art Museum, a professor questioned the garden’s presentation of American Indian “artifacts” and we turned over our audience to listen to him. We had a stirring discussion about race with the garden administration. It was the time of the Clinton-Trump campaigns and continuing police violence against the black community, and the time of Denise’s mother being diagnosed with cancer, and my son, who’s black, facing police guns. The garden is a living scaffold of survival, our project a witness of its survival and people’s survival stories. I think Tacita Dean is probably right. “Place,” she said, “I realized it can only ever be personal.”

  Rumpus: How did you first come together as collaborators? What did you learn about collaboration from this project?

  Newman: We met at California College of the Arts. We were both interested in expanding the scope of poetry, and when the opportunity arose in 2012 to do a site-specific project together, we leaped at the chance. Our first piece was a poetry installation, part of an interdisciplinary group show called Natural Discourse. We discovered that working together we could enter terrain and produce work that would not be possible on our own.

  We find that listening and contributing ideas are not separate activities. The one talking needs the other to listen for the gold flecks in the stream—What did you just say? Say that again! We also find that the decentered process makes us more daring. It’s always about the work, not the creator, but being two somehow reinforces this, the way you might speak up on someone else’s behalf more easily than on your own. The Creative Work Fund grant required that we work collaboratively with our partner organization, the botanic garden. Our well-established collaborative framework expanded easily to include the gardeners, staff, and visitors.

  Rumpus: How did the project wrap up?

  White: In September 2016, we presented the work at a grand closing dinner party at the garden. Attendees drank botanic cocktails and completed our final exercise, a pseudo-scientific “gumball” questionnaire to affirm their affiliations with nature—primordialist or activist or naturalist, etc. Poets Mg Roberts and Sarah Rosenthal presented responses to the project; Anthony Garza, supervisor of horticulture and grounds, wrote us a poem.

  Rumpus: What do plants and people have in common?

  Newman: The meaning of life for both is to grow.

  White: Cells, feet, accidents, tropisms, nights, names, death.

  ***

  Featured photograph of Denise Newman and Hazel White © Alex Nichols. All other photographs © Biotic Portal.

  Erika Howsare lives in rural Virginia, where she mothers full-time and works as a birth doula. With Kate Schapira, she wrote a book-length poetic meditation on waste, called FILL: A Collection, published by Trembling Pillow Press in 2016. She was a co-editor at Horse Less Press for 11 years. Previous projects included a performative multimedia walk across Rhode Island, and she's currently finishing a new manuscript called Coal Is a Food. More from this author →

• Eleven Eleven Journal
  https://elevenelevenjournal.com/issue-14/peril-as-architectural-enrichment-by-hazel-white/
  Word count: 490

  Peril As Architectural Enrichment by Hazel White
  Kelsey Street Press, 2011
  96 pp., Paperback

  By Terrel Adams

  Hazel White’s Peril As Architectural Enrichment is a structural marvel; a complex and compelling edifice that propelled me out of trees and into skies. White’s voice leads the eyes in a dance with gravity and nature. She has a way of illustrating the presence of each word, considering the impact of each expression in a delightfully multiplex manner. This collection of experimental work creates a diversity of worlds in both a literal and spatial sense. White’s poems are a universe in which the meaning of every word is a building block for the next.

  The first installment of the book, “Truant”, is an introduction to White’s verbal arrangements. It moved, as its title suggests, in a wandering motion, enthralling me with a stunt-girl and steeple. The poems compellingly allowed me to be “not too inevitably propelled forward” into an unbuilt garden. Then, through the experiences of a pollen carrier, I witnessed flowers perform frightening feats:

  A flower

  swallows a quarrel-

  drop between petals like a seamstress into fabric, through

  organic pleats of unending enclosure.

  Go down and on. Allow invisibility.

  Fall.

  I landed in a reflection garden, where space is as momentous as any exclamation. In this section White worked her words so that they welcomed me into a scene where the forest swallows the sky, where “one space opens thoroughly to another.” These spaces allowed me to drift according to White’s exploitation of gravitational pull, lulling me into “Gravity Ignobly”.

  Here I was yanked down through lands that crack, while a tree destroyed its own foundations. The pages in this section bloom with vivid glimpses of natural imagery. This is the means by which White drew me in, “Gathering-in-at-great-speed:…because beauty has forward momentum”. The works in “Gravity, Ignobly” revealed to me the ultimate goal: the bird marsh, and a final mandate to build.

  Peril As Architectural Enrichment utilized my perception as a tool, my pre-conceived notions of space and matter a catalyst, boosting me into a poetry narrative that details a familiar yet unknown world. Any understanding of my own physicality was challenged, as the work caused me to consider my own presence’s effect on that which surrounds me. The pieces in the work explore fear and its relation to habit, habit’s relation to writing, and writing’s power over fear. The poems aided me in conquering the crippling comfort of gravity while traveling through its pages; White’s voice made it so that I was willing to submit myself to danger, heeding the guidance of the narrator through disorienting pieces of time, space, and growth.

  —
  Terrel Adams is the Marketing Director for Eleven Eleven.

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