Cedar roses

I was walking Jack one morning, and down at one end of my street, I noticed that in a clearing beneath a tree, the ground was littered with needles and fan-shaped brown bits, and some things that looked like wooden rosettes.


I put some in my pocket and brought them home. Here's how they look, close up:

They look like roses. Charming shapes, you could use them in crafts.

Next time I walked out there, I looked up at the tree. There were cones up in the branches, but they were bigger, barrel-shaped; not like the roses. What was the story? I took pictures of the needles and bark, and started to research.

This is a Deodar Cedar tree - native to the Himalaya, while its cousins the Atlas Cedar, the Lebanon Cedar, and several others are native to the Mediterranean region. There are at least three growing on my street. These are true cedars, prized for their fragrant and insect-repelling wood. They are magnificent and beautiful trees, regaled in the Bible and in Greek and Arab lore
The Lebanon Cedar is a powerful symbol of nationalism, and appears on the flag of Lebanon.

Like their kin, Deodar Cedars have clusters of short needles, glaucous blue or bright green. Their branches droop gracefully at the ends. They have two kinds of cones - male cones which produce pollen, and female cones, which produce seeds.


The female cones of the Deodar Cedar are barrel-shaped, like the ones I saw up in the branches, but after a year, they disintegrate, falling apart to release the wing-shaped seeds. What remains at the end, falling to the ground, are these last seeds clinging together, like a wooden rose.

The specific epithet and English vernacular name derive from the Sanskrit devadāru, "wood of the gods", a compound of deva (god) and dāru (wood). The Deodar is worshiped as a sacred tree by those of the Hindu faith, and is the national tree of Pakistan.


The Deodar is prized for its aromatic wood, which is used to make incense, and essential oils derived from its wood and resin. Indian Ayurvedic medicine uses it as a curative for digestive disorders and also for curing skin diseases. Its fresh scent is important in aromatherapy.

They're beautiful trees here in Topanga, and they seem to thrive in our Mediterranean-type climate - and leave us their little cedar roses.

Pink Saturday - The Pink Lantern

Pink Saturday - Beverly, at the blog "How Sweet the Sound" hosts Pink Saturday. Let the color pink inspire you!

One of the things I like best about our house is the vine-covered deck on the side of the house. It was once a dry and sloping hill of bare dirt, seared by the heat of the summer sun reflecting off the windows beside it. Nothing grew in such a blasted place, and the rooms inside baked during the day.

Our friend Peter came up with the idea - one day he suggested we build a ramada, an open lean-to shelter with an arbor roof to provide shade, like the Native-American and early Mexican dwellers in this part of California used to do.

It took some time, but when we finally managed it, we hired our friend Foster to build it. Our other friends, John and Anthea, designed the garden, planting a wisteria and an ornamental grapevine over the arbor and creating our water garden, nestled into a corner of the deck. Anthea planted a jacaranda tree for even more shade, and the beauty of its fine pinnate leaves and purple-blue flowers.

Wisteria in full bloom in May

Combining imagination, craft, skill and ideas, our friends gave us a greater gift than we could ever have done ourselves, and it's turned into an even greater gift than we had thought at the time.


The arbor deck transformed a useless patch of dirt into an outdoor room dappled with shade where you can sit, dine, talk and relax in comfort. In turn, its shade made the hot and airless office behind it into the coolest room in the house. The water-garden tucked into the space under the stairs gives us a sense of tranquility with its gentle fountain. The vines make a stunning display of blooms in the spring, food for birds in the summer, and brilliant red leaves in the fall. The deck even provides a dry and sure path to the laundry room, and shelter from all but the heaviest rain.

Geraniums in pots on the deck, in the dappled shade

The first year, I strung an extension cord through the kitchen windows above, and plugged in a cheap lantern I bought at Target. It's made of nylon, not paper, and to my amazement, it's endured for several years.

Though a bit dusty, it still gives off a soft pretty light when you plug it in.

The deck is a perfect place to sit and look out across the canyon. We take our Sunday newspapers out there, or a magazine, the dog lying by our side. [The Man I Love] even takes his laptop out there sometimes. The vines shade us from the hot sun, and we can look across the canyon to the mountains.

Even now, when it's turning to fall, there are nights we like to sit outside on the deck under the wisteria. It's nice to watch the sun set behind the mountain, through the pretty leaves of the jacaranda, framed by the timbers of the arbor.

After a while, it's dark enough to light an oil lamp and go plug in the pink lantern. And enjoy its mellow, warm light in the cool of the evening.

Window Shopping in Paris

This building - pale stone, with a corner cupola'd tower, is in Paris's Sixth Arrondissment, on the corner of Rue de Rennes and Rue Blaise Desgoff. Though it conforms with the Haussman-ian look of Paris streets, with its uniform height, color, and window boxes, its exuberant and sensual Art Nouveau curves and flowing vegetal motifs distinguish it from its staid neighbors. It's like an orchid among a group of daisies.

Built in 1904 for the department store chain Felix Potin, it was designed by architect Paul Auscher. Its windows' arches are hooded by eybrowed stone awnings, ornamented with flowing crescents and curves. Decorations drip from its cornices like piped sugar icing, not stone. The gentle curvilinear panels above the second floor picture windows are tinted in gold and lettered in flowing Art Nouveau script. The intricate traceries of the clock tower turret are lined in gold, too.

Photo of the turret from Wikipedia

Felix Potin was a retailer who pioneered the old model of department store. He began the practice of manufacturing and packaging an assortment of goods in-house and selling large volumes at deep discount. At one time there were stores all over France. The business went into decline in the '50s, and the store was sold - for a while it was a branch of Tati, a deep discount retailer.

The building is now home to the Spain-based women's clothing retailer, Zara.

It's delightful enough to contemplate this Art Nouveau fantasy by itself, but what makes this Paris site magical is how it interacts with its neighbor.

When we visited, FNAC's front was shrouded in scaffolding

The retailer FNAC, or Fédération nationale d’achats des cadres, is today's successful chain store, and a pioneer of a new retail model - the members-only buying club turned public. FNAC's building just across Rue Blaise Desgoff is a flat wall of mirrored glass.

This flat and featureless face reflects the ornate swoops of Auscher's building in a kind of magical mirror, giving it back onto itself as if gazed at in a pool of still water.

The amazing thing, I learned, is that the FNAC building has an Art Nouveau history of its own. It was built as Le Grand Bazar, an open gallery of shops, just a few years after the Felix Potin building, in 1906. It was designed by Henry Gutton, a member of a group of Art Nouveau architects and designers known as the Ecole de Nancy - working in the French city of Nancy. It was an innovative design, employing a vast framework of steel and wide glazed windows. It was considered a masterpiece of Art Nouveau architecture.

This early photo shows the fanciful design, with its intricate ornamentation.

By the 1960s, Le Grand Bazar became a branch of the store chain Magasin Reunis. Its street facade was clad in smooth glass and opaque panels, presenting a dull and boring face to the Rue de Rennes. Finally, the building became the FNAC store, and was transformed into the sheer and featureless mirror it is today.

Reflected in its blue glass, the curved balconies and window boxes of the Felix Potin building seem to ripple, as though gently undulating. One can imagine standing on such a balcony and gazing across the street, mesmerized by the image, brilliant in the opaque mirror.

Does any trace of Gutton's bazar remain behind the glass?

At once time, two masterpieces of Art Nouveau architecture faced one another across the Rue Blaise Desgoff. Today - one's there, the other is only in the looking glass.

Windows in Paris - pretty magical.

If you want to see the buildings by Googlemaps, go here:


View Larger Map
Click on the picture and move your mouse to see the street view.

Thematic Photographic - Travel

Each week Carmi at Written, Inc. has challenged readers with a theme for photographic inspiration. This week the photographic challenge continues with the theme TRAVEL.

This is a photo I took from the window of a plane this summer as we flew out of Los Angeles International Airport, heading to Paris. Planes heading east take off west toward the Pacific Ocean, and then bank around to the south, curving over the water. The land mass you see here is Catalina Island. The white streaks in the blue are the wakes of speedboats on the water.

Half Moon memories

Sometimes in Los Angeles, your eye is caught by something that evokes a past you may not really know - it may have been something you saw in a movie, or read about in a book. Nevertheless, when you see it, you think it was something you really lived.

This neon sign is like that for me. It's located in Culver City, on Sepulveda Boulevard just north of Washington Boulevard.

When I was in second grade, in a small town in Illinois, my family lived in a rented house while we were waiting for a house we were building to be completed. It was 1962, I think. And - though I was too young to understand the details - it seemed that the construction took longer than expected, so we had to find temporary housing after the rental lease had run out.

As I remember it, we spent about a month living in a motel called the Tick-Tock Motel, on the eastern outskirts of St. Charles, Illinois. It was a long, low cinderblock structure on the verge of a rural route. It had a neon sign with a clock-face, with hands that rotated around a smile. We rented a suite with a couple of bedrooms and a kitchenette - large enough to accommodate a family of two parents and four kids. I remember sharing a double bed with Brother Two - we were thrilled because it had a Magic Fingers machine that would vibrate the mattress if you put a quarter in it. If we were good, Mom would turn it on after tucking us in for the night - we'd buzz off into sleep while the trucks thundered past on the highway outside.

Whenever I see a neon sign like this one, I remember our month in the Tick-Tock. We kids thought it a fine adventure, but I remember that my parents were less excited, almost as if it were something shameful to live there.

My father had grown up in poverty, and as I remember him, he was always a penny-pincher. So our time in the low-rent Tick-Tock was likely his thrifty alternative to extending the lease on our rental - rather than financial desperation. But the Tick-Tock's tawdry atmosphere may have evoked an impoverished past he preferred not to remember.

In any case, we kids loved it, and over the years we reminisced about the tacky furnishings, the sprung metal lounge chairs, the tiny kitchenette like a playhouse, the funny little park-like yard around the entry - and the Magic Fingers.

On a recent trip to that part of the country, I drove around where I thought the Tick-Tock once had stood. The two-lane rural routes that the trucks had traveled were now six-lane thoroughfares lined with big-box stores and shopping malls. There was no sign of the old Tick-Tock Motel.

But here in L.A., when I see this sign on Sepulveda, it brings back those memories.

Foggy morning

Jack and I took a walk through the park on a foggy morning. We crossed the road and went through the gate, and took the path up the hill.

He'd never been there before, and he was excited - the smells were different from being on the paved streets. Coyote poop, owl pellets, horse manure. Birds in the brush and rabbits hopping away fast.

The trees and grasses closed in over the path, and the dew dripped down on us. The path narrowed and doubled back on itself, ascending by railroad-tie framed steps. Some of summer's flowers still shone, dried and gone to seed.

You know how they talk about sagebrush in western landscapes? This is black sage, and it grows in the hills here. When you brush past the leaves on a foggy morning you can smell the fresh scent.

We looped through the trees, then up the hill, and emerged at the top of the rise, overlooking our neighborhood, and then we went home. We were both ready for a good breakfast.

Saturday flowers

This small flower with its bright lavender stamen never opens further than this. Yet it packs a punch of color. It grows in the yard of my friend Megan down the street. Its botanical name is Malvaviscus arboreus, or "Turk's Cap" and it's related to the hibiscus.

This vine grows on my neighbor's fence - it's covered with bright orange flowers and tons of buds. It's Thunbergia gregorii, also called "Golden Clock Vine."

This vine grows on a gate to a driveway down the hill. More shy to bloom - there were only a few clusters of flowers open, but they are such a pretty color they stand out. It's also a Thunbergia - and how different it is from it's relation, above! I think this is Thunbergia grandiflora, the "Blue Sky Flower."

The bright vermillion flowers of Tecomaria capensis, or "Cape Honeysuckle," a vigorous shrub growing in a front yard down the street, attract hummingbirds in our mild autumn weather.

These are the flowers I encounter on my morning walk. Here in Southern California, they're still blooming, well into November.

Get your Goat

We went to the Alameda Swap Meet a while back, and we were hungry when we got there. The swap meet is dominated by one big restaurant, but there are other small vendors set up selling specialties.

You could get bacon-dogs, tacos, churros, roasted corn, and agua frescas.

I saw this vendor, heating tortillas for tacos, with a big roasting pan of braised meat. I asked her for a taco - they were $1.50 each - and before she fixed one for me, she looked at me a bit sternly and pointed out that this was "chivo" or goat-meat.

I nodded. Fix it up. She gave me a taco on a paper plate, and I added some chopped onion, cilantro, and hot sauce from the bottle.

Roasted goat-meat tacos. It tasted like goat, for sure, but it was pretty good.

Green woods

All it takes is one autumn rainfall, here in the Santa Monica Mountains, and the annual grasses that set seed this past spring sprout up, a tender new green in the shady areas beneath the coast live oaks. This fresh grass will grow through the winter's rains, until the rangy weeds of spring lengthen and flower and, finally, set seed and die again.

The hills, which have been dry and brown since May, are now vibrant with new growth. Here is a shady oak grove we pass each morning on our walk. There's a stone bench set beneath the trees. A nice place to sit and contemplate the changing of the seasons.