Plants, Unlike Westerners, Don't Need Their Space

Westerners don't like to be close to each other. Kinglike, each Joe and Jane strives mightily to enclose his or her immaculate body in a zone of space as vast as possible. The richer the person, the bigger the mansion - each man, woman, and child of the family ensconced in a private room with its own internet and cable hook-up. Want some friend time? Use your hands - to type or text. No muss, no fuss, no awkwardness, and no embarassing revelations that require an emotional response. Want to shop? Cross the sterile lawn to the car and travel in hermetically sealed privilege to the vast emporium of desire with the self checkout machine that sends you off with a chipper "Thank you for shopping at Safeway", every time, perfectly polite and comfortable.

Given the craving for space that Westerners have, it's no wonder that the first thing they did when they took over the Portland Chinese Garden was to create space for the plants, which had started out all jumbled together like they are in nature. They used to shelter bugs, birds, and even a toad. Now the plants are separate clumps in a vast desert of dirt and the toad is gone.

Nature knew what she was doing much better than the gardeners at the Chinese Garden. Plants don't need their space. They grow into each other to shelter a lovely and functional community. They buffer the soil from rain and sun and nourish the animals that do their part to sustain life on this planet.

Separating the plants into regimented and isolated specimens destroys this community as surely as the hurricane that rips off your roof. Not only is giving plants space unnatural and ugly, it's also vandalism, arson, and murder. Unlike us, plants haven't convinced themselves that they don't need anyone else.

Window Pictures

The windows in a classical Chinese garden are more than just apertures to let in light. The view through the window is carefully designed to be pleasing and beautiful. As the seasons change, the view changes as the plants and weather changes. Any rocks in the view acquire moss and patina. The view is an ever changing painting and nature is the painter.

Enter the Portland Chinese Garden and be treated to windows that are blocked by plants and kitschy nick knacks. Instead of viewing a delicate lattice of white camellia flowers kissed by a rare Taihu rock, you view a potted plant and two ceramic lions that probably cost 9.99 at Uwajimaya. Or you get a sign telling you about the furniture. It's like walking into an art museum and seeing some one's beer bottle collection set up in front of a Picasso.

The leap which the people at the garden have yet to make is that the view through a window is worth looking at. They don't see it as art. Not only do they butcher the plants in the view and uncover ugliness like traffic going by, they also desecrate the view with mundane objects. Just because nature is the artist and provides her services for free does not mean that what she offers isn't valuable. She offers us the beauty of diverse and ever changing life, while the people at the garden can only offer us stuff. Beauty is wasted on the ignorant.

I'm a Lumberjack and I'm OK

There's something so satisfying about stumbling through the city and coming upon a grove of trees that look like they haven't been touched for years. If you're a closet lumberjack, it's like heaven. All you have to do is get a job as the gardener and start whacking away. Sleep all night and work all day.

Such is the situation at the Portland Chinese Garden. Magnificent trees that for years have kept their limbs have been turned into timber. A magnolia that used to offer its huge fragrant flowers for people to admire and smell has gone through so many amputations that to smell the flowers a visitor has to be ten feet tall. Pines and larches have been butchered into sticks with tufts of needles on top. The Cat in the Hat and the Sneeches would be quite at home there.

Yes, it's true that there's a whole lot of limbing going on everywhere, not just at the Chinese Garden. It seems that some kind of sickness has taken hold of pruners such that one can't walk down a city street without seeing the wounds inflicted upon our trees by a paranoid corp of "landscapers". Just swing by the Central Library, which used to look like a monastery in the Himalayas, so thick were the rhododendrons around it. Now it looks like the Red Guards have swept through with chainsaws.

Too bad the gardeners at the Chinese Garden aren't secure enough to see that the limbs that trees hold out to humanity shouldn't all be cut off just because every one else is doing it. It's enough that in our war against nature that whole forests have been cut down to assuage our fears. Let's leave the few remaining trees alone, for our sakes as much as for theirs.

Vera Katz Is Chinese

One of the convoluted ways Lan Su Chinese Garden has made money has been to "dedicate" the magnificant convoluted Taihu rocks to people who "donate" a large sum of money to the garden. Almost all the rocks have a shiny brass plaque near them attesting to the generosity of so and so in honor of whoever. The plaques blaze forth in all their gaudy glory now that the gardeners have cleared away the ground cover and bushes that used to balance them out.

A viewer would be hard pressed to say whether the plaque honors the rock or the rock honors the plaque. And since the the plaques have no expiration date, the amortization of the purchase price will eventually result in the cost being pennies per day for the status value of being known as a great guy, even if long dead. Who wouldn't jump at the chance for a plaque?

According to rumor, Vera Katz was offered a plaque for her work as mayor in creating the garden, and not only did she not jump, she might even have winced at the thought of another brass plaque spoiling the view of yet another Taihu rock. In short, she cared more about the viewer's enjoyment than enshrining her name for prosperity.

For this selfless act, she should be awarded the ultimate accolade that scholar gentlemen strived for: "The True Man of No Rank." Although no one will know that Vera chose to preserve beauty over ego glorification, this act, like a white bird singing in the snow, makes the world a better place.

I salute Vera and will think of her whenever I drink in the beauty of the rock that is hers by virtue of her love for it, even if there is no plaque saying so.

Orange Is The New Brown

During this free week when the Chinese Garden is luring people to visit and fall in love with what they see, management is holding out its hands in the form of 4 large solid donation boxes, and just to make sure the free loaders get the message, the boxes are painted orange. That's right, orange, the one color that lovers of Ming Dynasty tastefulness pray never to see used in the garden. The color beloved of hunters, highway construction workers, and Hooters' waitresses.

How did this color breach the walls of good taste that were supposed to keep out the philistines? Lay the blame on the heads of the hydra that is the garden's re-branding effort : new name, new busy-ness, new color scheme. Everything will be bold, bold, bold! You see, orange is the color of the chop that is seen on Chinese paintings. Thus it is the color of the garden's new logo, which evokes a chop. But the orange that is not overpowering when used in a small chop on the edge of a painting positively scorches your eyeballs when covering all four sides and the top of a box. Evidently what's important to management is it gets your attention, even if it makes you want to don sunglasses.

Too bad management couldn't have been more creative with donation containers. They could have just covered the bottom holes of orange safety cones and let people drop money into the top hole. Orange donation cones would have cost less, taken less effort to make, and would have been no less effective at attracting attention.

Groucho Guidebook

This week visitors to Lan Su Chinese Garden AKA Portland Chinese Garden will get in for free. With a new name and touting its tenth anniversary, the garden will seem as if it's just opened. Think of the excitement, the crowds, the opportunities for free publicity and donor development.

Of course, the reality is that the garden is still the same garden, except worse than before. That's why management had to drop the price, way low, to get more people to visit. Hey, it's less work than actually producing a garden that people might want to visit again and tell other people about.

Integral to management's strategy to make people believe that the garden is authentic and beautiful when it isn't is to use the new guidebook to mold visitors' perception of reality. This modestly sized, tea-green booklet is sprinkled with Chinese profundities. stunning photos, and serene Chinese painting motifs. It is absolutely slick in its non-slickness, a quality that could only have come from big bucks and creative minds schooled in consumer tastes and psychology. It's the PF Chang's of guidebooks, promising way more than it can deliver.

Let's tour its earnest and spiritual claims about Lan Su Chinese Garden and test them against what visitors really see and experience.

"It is considered the most authentic Chinese Garden outside China." Who says? Knowledgeable people know it has turned into a plant farm/ tourist trap.

"Hear the distant rushing water." Because the waterfall is shut off and stagnant water doesn't make a sound, the visitor hears the canned music being broadcast over the outdoor speakers.

"Lan Su is a special place in the midst of the city where we can escape traffic...." Then why does the visitor see buses passing by leak windows that used to be screened by plants?

"Enter the Wonderland." With so much ugliness on display, it's a wonder anyone would pay to see it.

Given the utter failure of the guide to describe reality, it must have been management's fervent hope that marketing will triumph over the inconvenient facts. That faced with believing their organic green tea guidebook or your lying eyes that you will do what many consumers do, which is to go in with eyes open but mind unseeing. Perhaps you'll be satisfied with an idea of authenticity, delivered in a truly beautiful guidebook. Let's hope.

You'll Shoot Your Eye Out!

The best thing about being an adult in a free society is that when your mother tells you to be careful, you don't have to listen. You can go ahead with that spelunking trip, dressed only in your underwear and a goofy smile. The time when you had to opt for safeness over adventure because your mother said so is long past. Or is it?

Try to walk through the Portland Chinese Garden and you would swear that some body's smothering mother was in charge. Except this time, every visitor is her special problem child. An entire section of the garden is blocked off with ropes and the message is reinforced by tacky laminated signs. The visitor, stopped in his tracks, strains his brain to figure out why the rockery is off limits, the cave is blocked, and the stepping stone bridge is verboten. Sure, if you were stoned out of your mind and a meteor hits you as you are about to take a step would any of these areas be dangerous.

But just like the paranoid mother whose motto is "You can never be too safe", management isn't going to let you take a chance and ruin their day. What they don't realize is that by blocking these areas that require some exertion, they have managed to eliminate the yang element that is supposed to balance out the ying element in any healthy organism. Yang, the masculine, active aspect of chi, oscillates with ying, the feminine, passive aspect to create a healthy flow of energy in an authentic Chinese garden. As a visitor to the Portland garden encounters the blockages in the garden's chi, his own chi constricts in sympathy.

The blocked chi of the garden is reflected in the frustration and disappointment of the visitors. But apparently it's worth it to give mother peace of mind.