Fight Love Life

Fight for a just cause,

Love your fellow man,

Live a good life.

It doesn't look like the weather is going to hold up. As we walk across the parking lot, strong gusts of wind bend back the olive tree branches, knock about the straggler flowers on the side of the road and cause many to zip their jackets up the last few inches. There are gray skies overhead, but it's not raining, yet. For the moment, the cloud cover is providing almost perfect lighting for photographing all these flowers. So many flowers because not only are we at the Filoli gardens, but we have arrived on Daffodil Day. It took a moment to gather at the bottom of the visitor center steps, bright floral photo opportunities distracted more than a few who dispersed, eyes on their camera screens. Photographers, like cats, are sometimes hard to herd.

We met our tour guide, knowledgeable but soft spoken, and followed her through the tall deer-proof gate. The wind sounds different here, outside the landscape of roads and buildings, it rustles through leaves and bushes. Half way through a daffodil field, it starts to mist, making my macro photos twice as cliche now that it's all raindrops on petals. By the time we reach the reflection pool it has started rain so umbrellas are fetched so we can continue our tour.

It seemed that beyond each moss and vine covered wall lay another perfect garden, each path leading from one composed vista to the next, distinct in design but all equally demonstrative of horticultural skill and intensely detail-oriented planning. We followed our guide in a herd of umbrellas, winding through the immaculate beds and occasionally hearing her commentary when her voice wasn't drowned out by raindrops on nylon. She seemed unperturbed by the weather, "I've never really grown up, so I still enjoy walking in the rain".

And why should we be stopped by the whims of nature? To let it win while wandering through such a beautiful example of man's successful domination of flora would be a failure to the very spirit of the place. So we may have hastened, but indeed completed a full tour of the grounds before our retreat into the shelter of the Filoli house.

Not all seek shelter though, even when it pours the gardeners of Filoli work on. Planting, pruning, weeding, they create living art through constant effort since their masterpiece is perpetually changing. As a California State Historic Landmark, there is an understandable interest in preserving the gardens as they were originally designed. Yet of course since you can't stop living plants from growing, change is unstoppable, a quandary. So often I think of preservation as trapping a single moment in time, like a photograph of a daffodil in the breeze, like the table settings in the dining room at which no one will sit, like each page of the florilegium collection chronicled for, a perfectly preserved slice for the future. Inside the Filoli house they preserve by disuse, outside it's a constant battle to keep a semblance of history.

For me, it was interesting to see this struggle with time. I think of most designs as being manufactured in a moment, but some plants can take decades to train, and could be built into far more than just nice looking landscaping. While green design continues to gain ground, maybe building more like gardeners will lead the way.