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.