Califonia Scenario

Our last field trip for the quarter blitzed all over south Orange County. We started at Roger's Gardens, a lovely nursery in Corona Del Mar. It's one of my mom's favorites: a bit spendy, but everything is beautiful there. They have interesting specimen trees (i want a Harry Lauder Walking Stick) and the plants aren't laid out in boring flats; they are arranged tastefully. Being near Christmas, all the colors were silver-sage, pink, red, white and green, not my favorites, but our prof took us there to see micro-design and planting arrangements--a very nice idea.

The next stop was the Irvine Water Management District and the Sea & Sage Audubon duck area. That was a quick stop and parking was amusing. We followed the visitor signs, honest, but somehow all eight cars were parked somewhere we should not have been, and we got locked in, and probably heads rolled. (Not ours--security's). (The construction guys didn't do a good job directing us past rumbling lorries, either. Yikes!) I want to go back with my bird book over Christmas break, although it seemed to be mostly coots.

The final stop was in Santa Ana near South Coast Plaza. This is a square in-between several large office buildings, and the designer is Isamu Noguchi. It was a cold day, and dreary. One of my classmates said that in summer, it's quite hot--the walls are white, the ground is stone, there is little shade, and the albedo of the surrounding buildings is high. There are concerts there during lunch time sometimes too...a mini Pershing Square, albeit more successful? I want to return and observe more here too. I got lost looking for this California Scenario: there are no signs, and parking is limited and expensive. No one knows it as "California Scenario" either--but a man from whom i asked directions did know of it as "the Noguchi place".

I thought this tree looked like a dear, but what's with the picket fence? That made it a bit kitschy.

This is the mountains, whence our water comes. It trickles down the groove in this sculpture and meanders through the plaza. There are foot bridges but, if you aren't wearing heels and are feeling bold, you can leap over the stream in most places.

This is Los Angeles, which sucks up all the water. The stream disappears under Los Angeles to the right. Notice the grid line? That's supposedly a reference to city streets. Bad Los Angeles (whatever). The scale is hard to detect: the sculpture is about ten feet high at the peak.