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| All selections were taken at a private home in Fontana, California. |
No sprawl all the way to the margins of the desert and colder reaches of the mountains. No fancy boulevards lined with designer boutiques or fast food feeding troughs.
Hell, no lawns. Just some trees to take advantage of the climate both for beauty and practical use.
Sure, the trees and flowers are mostly exotic introductions meant to make California feel more like a tropical paradise (this is why so many palm trees were planted there, to get people to move to an otherwise arid and water-hungry place, palms symbolizing the easy life) than its own interesting unique ecosystems and habitats, but the native life does manage to creep through here and there.
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| California Poppy (Eschscholzia Californica)! |
Native life was easier to come by anyway back then. While outlying non-desert areas did feature extensive orchards and vineyards, the foothills were often left to their own devices. Fires and mudslides were far less devastating mainly because development did not remove the natural California hillsides to leave either weed fields or barren rock wastes on the margins of housing developments that inched closer into what could have been defensible space. The first American Californians considered their new home to be the next best thing to paradise, and the first few immigrant generations felt similar enough feelings that they focused more on what could be grown or appreciated rather than on what could make the most money. These people wanted their California to still be the paradise that the place had come to be known as for centuries.
The homes even tried to pass for something of an earlier era, stuccoed enough to fake the look of adobe mission architecture rather than look like some grand Italianate mogul's estate. Architecture, it seems, is a good indicator of what sort of core interests and values a society is attracted to. Sounds like something to jump around the country looking at, no?
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