The · Affected · Provincial’s · Almanack

Pinelands Preservation Alliance 2nd Annual Native Plant Sale (Click here)
April 22, 2007, 1:00 to 4:00 p.m.\17 Pemberton Road
Southampton Township, New Jersey

Join us at the Bishop Farmstead as we welcome spring and celebrate Earth Day at our second annual Native Plant Sale. PPA will have for sale limited quantities of trees, shrubs, and wildflowers that are native to the Pinelands. These plants are excellent for use in backyard landscaping, requiring minimal water and fertilizer.

Why not plant the Pinelands in your garden this spring? Plants include:

--Trees like gray birch, pitch pine, and Virginia pine

--Shrubs like American holly, beach plum, and high bush blueberry

--Wildflowers like purple Joe-pye and cardinal flower

--Ferns like royal fern and cinnamon fern

--Grasses like big bluestem and broomsedge

Pricing: Prices range from $1.00 for 2” seedlings to $12.00 for size 2 containers (9” deep x 8” diameter)
Time: 1:00 to 4:00 p.m.

The Pinelands Visitor Center will be open. Light refreshments will be served. Enter our free drawing for a compost bin--you just might win!

Speaker: Why Go Native? Jane Nogaki, Program Coordinator for the New Jersey Environmental Federation explains how planting natives reduces greenhouse gases, how to choose the right plants for your property and how to count your savings from less mowing and use of fertilizers. 2:00 to 2:30 p.m.

Proceeds go towards furthering PPA’s mission to protect and preserve the Pinelands. Our plants are supplied by Pinelands Nursery, a wholesale nursery that specializes in plants native to the Pinelands.

Questions? Need Directions? Email ppa@pinelandsalliance.org or call 609-859-8860 x 21

Thought this might be of interest to Angelenos and Londoners alike: imomus posted quite an entertaining 1972 BBC program on the Los Angeles hosted by architectural critic Reyner Banham. Jane Jacobs might have been horified at Banham's playful musings...

Reyner Banham Loves Los Angeles.

The program is about fifty minutes, but anyone interested in urban design and architecture should give it a look--it's quite a wonderful time capsule. Never been to LA myself, so I can't comment at length on the city itself--but I've been to London, so I can imagine how Los Angeles is (was?) its opposite in so many respects (although I imagine that London is becoming less like London with each week). One nice little moment is the Eames house, where Banham suggests--convincingly, I think--that modernist design in a Californian context has its own lightness, poise, grace and charm that in certain instances rivals or exceeds traditional forms. Another interesting part is a visit to an artists' studio then to a surfboard shop--and how the indigenous vernacular visual sensibility is (was?) highly polished, glossy--but unfettered by tradition or history. Not a particularly new idea today, but was an apt observation at the time. Ed Ruscha and Mike Salisbury also lay out the changes afoot in LA at the time, namely the transition from the particularity and fantasy of vernacular forms (roadside hot dog stands shaped like hot dogs) to the streamlined uniformity of mass cultural forms (gas station and fast food franchises that are the same everywhere). Personally, I'm on the side of Mike Salisbury's vernacular fantasy--even though it always loses.

The program ends with a vibrant man-made sunset (thanks to smog), simultaneously horrific and lovely.

As someone who grew up near a similarly postmodern environment--Atlantic City--I certainly recognize the power of dreams and fantasy in defining people's public and private environments. My own home and life are infused with those things, as are all of our lives, whether we realize it or not.

So friends: if BBC asked you to do a documentary on a place, where would you go? Why?

~W