L.A.'s palm trees owe their iconic status more to Southern California's turn-of-the-century cultural aspirations and engineering feats than to the region's natural ecology. Though watered in some places by perennial streams like the Los Angeles River, Southern California's pre-1492 landscape was decidedly semi-arid, a patchwork of grassland, chaparral, sage scrub, and oak woodland. As monocots, palms are actually more closely related to grasses than they are to woody deciduous trees. They need an abundance of water in the soil to grow successfully, and so they—like the manicured lawns they often adorn—rely on the vast amounts of water that Southern California imports from distant watersheds.
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| Postcard courtesy of the David Boulé Collection. |
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| Young palms line Canon Drive in Beverly Hills, circa 1918. Courtesy USC Libraries. |
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For some reason the title of this post had me thinking of tractors.
ReplyDeleteNow, you may wonder, as I did, just what possible connection there might be between urban californian palm trees and tractors.
There isn't one.
The link finally popped into my puzzled mind at some early morning juncture when every normal person is asleep, and for some reason there in the quiet dark, I'm lying there puzzling about inconsequential matters.
The link between the two was the title of a book, and I'd even misremembered the title to the point that the imaginary link was only notionally there, because your title has 'brief', mine has 'short'
"A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian", by Maria Lewycka.
As, though I've read the book, a couple of years back, I can't remember a single thing about it, I had then to get out of bed, shovel coal into the laptop, await steam-pressure, and open a conduit to the interweb to search for a description. Here's the one off the Amazon U.K. site:
"For years, Nadezhda and Vera, two Ukrainian sisters, raised in England by their refugee parents, have had as little as possible to do with each other - and they have their reasons. But now they find they'd better learn how to get along, because since their mother's death their aging father has been sliding into his second childhood, and an alarming new woman has just entered his life. Valentina, a bosomy young synthetic blonde from the Ukraine, seems to think their father is much richer than he is, and she is keen that he leave this world with as little money to his name as possible. If Nadezhda and Vera don't stop her, no one will. But separating their addled and annoyingly lecherous dad from his new love will prove to be no easy feat - Valentina is a ruthless pro and the two sisters swiftly realize that they are mere amateurs when it comes to ruthlessness. As Hurricane Valentina turns the family house upside down, old secrets come falling out, including the most deeply buried one of them all, from the War, the one that explains much about why Nadazhda and Vera are so different. In the meantime, oblivious to it all, their father carries on with the great work of his dotage, a grand history of the tractor.
From the Inside Flap
"Two years after my mother died, my father fell in love with a
glamorous blonde Ukranian divorcee. He was eighty-four and she was
thirty-six. She exploded into our lives like a fluffy pink grenade,
churning up the murky water, bringing to the surface sludge of sloughed-off
memories, giving the family ghosts a kick up the backside."
See. Absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with palm trees in California.
My brain's a mess.
I find your comment fascinating. Perhaps because we're up to our necks in busty gold diggers at the moment. Mr. Nag has a number of older friends who are developing health problems. Younger women are popping up out of nowhere to assist with their care. Old men are all of a sudden giddily flirtatious, wills are being changed and nieces and nephews are beside themselves. Quite the drama. I'd always thought this type of woman was a myth along the lines of the evil stepmother. Unfortunately both are all too real.
ReplyDeleteI see that the book is available online. It might pop up on my book blog in the coming year.
She's only a myth until she becomes mythis.
ReplyDeleteThey're here in th u.k. in droves.
Polish, Ukrainan, Russian, Estonian, you name it. What we think of as a pretty much no-hoper british male, no matter how rough hewn, is seen as a prince compared to the prospects they have back home.
And the there's no shortage of pretty young women who are happy to marry an older, infirm guy, and wait him out to the end..... Thus disinheriting his own family....
I was going to go into particular detail about two busty gold diggers of our acquaintance but realized that might be indiscreet.
ReplyDelete