A cattle drive along State Road 44 at the entrance of The Villages' Brownwood town square is overlooked by most passersby, but the sculpture garden caught my eye on a recent cool, sunny day. The J. Michael Wilson bronze sculptures depict a scene from Florida's past before bulldozers remade these sandhills into a Disneyesque utopia for retirees dubbed 'America's Friendliest Hometown.' The garden includes 12 sculpture, my favorite being the dog, of course (below).
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Carrying the Legacy
The Brownwood sculptures appear almost lifelike as the cattle are herded across the Brownwood entrance. The cowboy's expression was much like my own the first time I witnessed the rows of fancy golf carts parked nearby in the commercial center disguised as an old western town. You see, here in The Villages golf carts are as numerous as cars and everything is manufactured (fake). What? Yeah, its something you have to see to believe (or not). Its also kind of hard to miss the Roadhouse restaurant and all the other commercial crap disguised to look like an old western town, directly behind the sculpture. But that's Florida, and that's The Villages, it is what it is until some climate change born super hurricane comes along and flattens it all back into the dry sandhills it once was.
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| Carrying the Legacy sculptor J. Michael Wilson |
The cowboy carries a calf in his arms symbolizing the cowboy's hope for the future and this scene led the sculptor to name the installation "Carrying the Legacy."
Adam Warner, who owns Mountain Trails Gallery in Park City, Utah, has known and represented Wilson for years. It was Warner who was first approached by The Villages to find a sculptor who could complete the Brownwood project within a year. Warner put together a specific proposal with Wilson in mind.
Both Warner and Wilson say that everyone involved in the project was committed to making the scene realistic and educational. Why? Everything else about The Villages is manufactured and artificial, from the lush green lawns to the manicured gold courses to the artificial lake in the Village's center.
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| Carrying the Legacy with commercial area, Brownwood, The Villages, Florida Photo: Donald Baird |
The bronzes are meant to reflect Andalusian steer which were raised on these lands for a time in the 19th to early 20th century. In November 2011, Wilson began making small models for the installation. The process included using computer scans that would enlarge the forms into Styrofoam bases where Wilson would begin applying clay. As soon as he finished one piece, the Adonis Bronze Foundry would pick it up and he would continue with the next wone. The project took about nine months. The finished sculptures are 1-1/4 life size because Wilson says outdoor pieces need to be slightly larger than life. "It's very different from a sculpture for someone's home," he explains. "The [artificial] water tower and [imported] palm trees near the entrance would have dwarfed them."
The City of Okeechobee so liked this sculpture installation that they started raising money for one of their own. No where on their GoFundMe brochure does it mention that the sculpture exists 150 miles to the north in The Villages. Don't get me wrong. I liked the sculpture enough to stop and take some photos, but do we really need more than one in Florida?
No information is available on how much The Villages paid for the sculptures but from the donation prices listed on the Okeechobee brochure it looks pricey, like everything else in The Villages.
With spherical clusters of fan-shaped leaves swaying gracefully atop slender trunks that reach high into the sun drenched Southern California skies, no tree is more iconic of Los Angeles than the Mexican fan palm. As an ornamental plant, they can be seen lining streets or planted in loose stands, a bobbing hypnotic mass which perfectly frame an LA sunset. As ingrained into the city aesthetic as they are, it is fitting that these trees are one of the most common wild plants in the urban environment.
Mexican fan palms are native to the central desert of Baja California and Sonora, Mexico, where they are restricted to oases, springs and other areas of constant water. Trees can grow over 100 feet tall, on narrow trunks with flared bases. The fan-shaped leaves are roughly three feet long and wide, with spines along the leaf margins. In the wild, dead leaves cling to the plant, forming a shaggy skirt below the living leaves. Plants flower in spring, sending up long flowering stalks up to nine feet long that are hung with small white flowers. These flowers develop into dark fruits, which are thin-skinned but edible. Beyond California, the Mexican fan palm has naturalized in Florida, Hawaii, Texas and various parts of Mediterranean Europe.
Naturalized fan palms (above and below) in Los Angeles are often small, gnarled saplings growing out of the minutest cracks in concrete or asphalt. But in some areas, such as the Arroyo Seco in Pasadena, they have grown to their full stature in wild stands that rival the height of their landscaped brethren. Unlike most cultivated plants, which have their dead leaves removed, these naturalized stands wear skirts of dead leaves like those one would encounter in native stands in the Mexican desert. These shabby assemblages of dead leaves can also be seen on old palms growing in private lots where the residents don't want to pay to have them trimmed. They look majestic in the right conditions, but are a fire concern, and tend to harbor rats and other unwanted wildlife. The tenacity of wild trees is impressive; it's not uncommon to see a plant several feet tall growing out of a sidewalk crack. Before they develop their fan-shaped leaves, young seedlings grow a simple linear leaf. These are found all over the city, often tattered, dusty and sun-bleached, poking out of sewer grates, streetside planter beds and pavement cracks.
In Trees in Paradise, Jared Farmer gives a fascinating breakdown of the history of palm trees in Los Angeles. He documents the changing horticultural trends in the city, from the early days when California fan palms were the plant of choice, to the rise of the Canary Island date palm, to the mass plantings of the Mexican fan palm which occurred just in time for the 1932 Olympic Games. These mass plantings are the sources of the tall palm trees which dominate the LA skyline today. They are also the source of parentage for the many wild seedlings which grow throughout the city. Farmer goes on to describe the subsequent backlash in the 1950s when suburban developers moved away from palms in favor of trees with a more generic 'Anytown, USA' look, and the quick resurgence of the palm as a complement to postwar modernist architecture. To provide context for the palm as an LA institution, he quotes Peter H. King, an LA Times editor who in 1992 used the palm as a metaphor for the complicated city of Los Angeles: "My colleagues and I always were looking for the perfect Los Angeles logo, a singular image to evoke the city in all its wonder and misery... We tried out a lot of them, but never did we do better than a palm tree with bullet holes."
The metaphorical power of the fan palm predates Californian statehood. An 1848 article in the California Star, San Francisco's first newspaper, is entitled The Gourd and the Palm Tree. By today's standards, it is a strange article:
"A gourd wound itself around a lofty palm, and in a few weeks climbed to its very top. 'How old mayst thou be?' asked the new comer. 'About a hundred years,' was the answer. 'A hundred years and no taller! Only look, I have grown as tall as you in fewer days than you can count years.' 'I know that well,' replied the palm. 'Every summer of my life a gourd has climbed up round me, as proud as thou art, and as short lived as thou wilt be.'"
Many of the lofty Mexican fan palms of modern-day Los Angeles are approaching the 100 year mark, and perhaps the end of their natural lifespan.
Many Mexican fan palms in LA are nearing the end of their lives, and new ornamental plantings are rare. It seems inevitable that the LA skyline will change, and the classic sunset view of swaying palms may disappear in the future. What these articles don't mention is the success of the Mexican fan palm as a wild plant of the streets. Long after the last planted tree falls, their gnarled, sidewalk-crack offspring will persist, dominating the Los Angeles aesthetic in their own way.
A version of this article by Evan Meyer appeared in the Los Angeles Times under the heading "BOTANY" with the title "Mexican Fan Palm, Washingtonia robusta H. Wendl., Palm Family (Arecaceae): Ageing Icons of Los Angeles and Their Rambunctious Offspring."
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