Hometown Hero: Nancy Goslee Power

“Trust your instincts and throw fear away” is the advice Nancy Power gives to garden designers. Advice that is seen in her own garden designs and which has brought her many notable awards, among them: House Beautiful Giants of Design Award for Landscape Design, Pacific Design Center Star of Design for Landscape Design, and an American Academy in Rome Residency in Landscape Architecture.

“I’m mad for plants and it’s hard to restrain myself when it comes to saying ‘yes’ to garden projects.” For the past 5 years Nancy has been the Chair of the Board of Trustees for the Garden School Foundation and the garden designer for the 24^th Street Elementary School.

The 24^th Street School Project began when the LAUSD announced a plan to re-asphalt the school grounds. The neighbors wanted to create a school garden where children could experience growing fruits and vegetables in a beautiful and healthy environment.

Nancy was asked to create a garden plan and present it to the School Board. The Board approved Nancy’s plan, but trees and plants cost money. To raise money they had to become a non-profit, and so the Garden School Foundation was formed.

In the past five years, over 1,000 students have benefited from the garden curriculum. The students have become the proud chefs and boosters of the broccoli, cauliflower, chard, and greens that they grow. The garden changes how the elementary school students think about nature, about themselves, about food and about what they want from life.

The Garden School Foundation is a continuation of Nancy’s work creating gardens for children, including Kidspace in Pasadena and the non-profit Children’s Institute in downtown LA. Whether designing a school garden, the Master Plan for the 127-acre LA County Arboretum, the Norton Simon Museum garden, or a private home garden Nancy has the same vision.

“People want the same things in a public space that they want in a private space and these goals can be achieved through design. Through the placement and choice of trees and plants and the use of space, color, light, sun and wind to create a sense of place.”

Nancy is from a long line of Delaware farmers and remembers her family farm. The farm and her mother’s interest in gardening informed her values. Her real education, she believes, began when she lived and studied in Florence, Italy. Returning to the States, she worked in New York and then moved to California.

“I worked as the West Coast Editor for House Beautiful and scouted gardens for the magazine. For myself I created small landscapes, plants in terra cotta pots and so on. Other people liked them and asked me if I would do the same for them. I soon realized I was much happier when outdoors.”

A chance meeting at Merrihew’s Nursery brought Philip Chandler into Nancy’s life and he became her mentor. He was a well-known garden designer and a respected member of the SMC faculty. They talked about plants and from there things began to ‘just happen.’ Moving into garden design from her success at the magazine was a natural move for her.

“All the gardens I like relate well to their sites. I travel to see gardens. I’ve seen the Villa Gamberaia in Florence Italy and the Courances in France, Dumbarton Oaks in Washington DC, the Winterthur Gardens in Delaware and private, home gardens all over the world. My favorite garden is a fabulous ruin in Sri Lanka called Sigiriya.

“‘My basic ideals have come from the Persian and Mediterranean gardens that are based on science and hydrology and from the American agrarian past. American farms are based on the efficient use of water and so we get orchards, rows of trees and walled gardens, but you have to be able to see out. Gardens have evolved and they keep evolving and adapting to their climate and their conditions.”

The same ideals are true in the home garden. Nancy’s advice is to “look outside and think about what you see and imagine what you’d like to see. Then stand outside and look at the house and think about what you see and what you’d like to see. Think of wind, sun, shelter, calm. The more you define your space the larger it becomes.”

California historian Kevin Starr has named her style ‘Eclectic Boldness’ and describes her as blending culture and landscape, color and light, and human use and comfort. Nancy says of her self, “I’m really very old fashioned and believe in the Aristotelian golden mean of beauty.” You can see for yourself the gardens she creates in her book, “Power of Gardens.”

What Say You: Stars of the Garden

The stars of this show have names that aren’t household words yet. But, if you go on the Theodore Payne Garden Tour this weekend, you just might come home lauding the Pacific Coast Iris, the California Poppy, the many varieties of Ceonathus, and the Bush Anemone. http://www.theodorepayne.org/Tour/

The tour showcases fifty regional gardens featuring native plants and water conservation. Two of the fifty gardens on the tour, the Williams and the Zinner gardens, are in Santa Monica. The plants are showing off for spring and docents are there to answer all your questions.

The Williams, retired scientists, are passionate about their grandchildren, travelling and gardening. They bought a house on 23rd Street with a front lawn and an overgrown back garden. Gone, along with the maintenance and the water bills, are the lawn and thirsty plants. The natives that have taken their place are hardier and easier to care for.

Filling the front yard is a scent created by the mingling of flowers. Two rock doves sit like old friends on the garden bench and greet me. The front entry is green, welcoming and water conserving. The back is exuberant with ceonathus, irises, and poppies, all in bloom. Rocks and a re-circulating water pond bring a fresh coolness to the garden. It’s easy to imagine the games their grandchildren could play in such a yard.

The Zinners moved to their house on 21^st Place with the intent to make their garden an environmental showcase and they succeed. The Yankee Point Ceonathus, at this time of year in full bloom and making people, birds and bees happy, sets the tone for a garden with gracious outdoor eating and seating areas and play areas for their son.

Next to the Ceonathus is a rocky dry creek bed, designed to collect and filter roof and garden storm water. As storm water run off is now the main polluter of the Santa Monica Bay, allowing the storm water to infiltrate on site is the number one way to protect the Bay.

Lisa Novick, Theodore Payne Staff Member, teaches, “Native plants save water and save insects and animals. Only 10% of all insect species can eat non-native vegetation and insects are an essential part of the food chain. Many land animals are dependent on the work of the insects. All plants may be green, but they are not all equal. Any drought tolerant plant is beneficial in Southern California but native plants conserve water and provide habitat that non-native plants can’t.”

Garden/garden, 1718 Pearl Street, is a demonstration project sponsored by the City of Santa Monica and the DWP. There, you can see two, side by side, gardens, comparing the use of native and non-native plants, designed to show the water conservation, low maintenance, and habitat benefits of the native garden. Their web site has good information on sustainable plants. http://www.smgov.net/Departments/OSE/Categories/Landscape/Demonstration_Gardens.aspx.

More information is available through the City Office of Sustainability. There is even a registry in the City that matches people who want to garden with people who need help in their gardens! Go to ‘garden sharing’. http://communitygardens.smgov.net.

I wish you the joys of the spring garden, the virtues of providing habitat, the benefits of conserving water. To that list I’d like to add one more thought. Southern California is often seen as an impermanent stage set. Visit one of the well-designed native gardens and I think you will find there a sense of permanence. What Say You?

Hometown Hero: Nancy Cattell

Nancy wanted to major in Political Science and International Relations. She asked her professor what she could do when she graduated. He said, “Be a good citizen.”

“He wouldn’t have said that to a man. It was a prejudiced world in those days,” remembers Nancy. The year was 1937. She was a freshman at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor.

Born in 1921 into the Gossard family in Ohio. Her father, a banker, had a degree in agriculture. The mission of his bank was to loan money to farmers. Her mother was a housewife. “My father didn’t think I should work. He gave my brother summer jobs at the bank I wished he would have given me. But he believed in education for girls. The tradition of getting an education was in their family history.”

Nancy followed the family tradition and graduated from the University of Michigan in 1941 with a Bachelor of Science in Psychology and went into the Women’s Auxiliary Army Corps in 1942. Her first job was as a Company Commander for a 150 women unit. The women were drivers and mechanics and cooks and office workers.

When WWII ended in Europe Nancy was assigned to Germany.
“I played a significant role in running the country as Chief of Military Personnel for the U.S. Military Government in Germany. Our job was to restore Germany and make it function.”

“We should be taking lessons from our successes in Germany. We are taking the wrong approach in the Middle East. We need to focus on education; especially for women, and we need to make sure people have clean, running water and electricity, food, safety and health care. Look at the billions we spend on military campaigns and look what we could do if we spent billions doing a better job of giving people life’s necessities.”

Returning to the States after two years in Germany, she went to Columbia University on the GI Bill. At Columbia Nancy met David Cattell, the man who was to be her husband of 20 years and the father of her two children. When they both graduated from Columbia he got a position as a professor at Brown University. Nancy also wanted to teach, but wasn’t able to get an interview, much less a job. Her husband taught both at Brown and then, in 1952 he became a Political Science Professor at UCLA. The Department had 48 professors, all men. “After WWII there was a discernable improvement in opportunities for women – but only up to a point.”

“The most blatant discrimination for me was that UCLA Law School, in 1968, would not accept me. Fortunately, Loyola took me right away – those Jesuits were not as prejudiced as UCLA.” Now Nancy Cattell, Esq., is a graduate of Loyola Law School (1971) and practices law in Santa Monica.

Nancy’s love of education led her to Santa Monica College, where she taught Political Science for 31 years and was elected, twice, to be a Member of the Santa Monica College Board and is now a Member of the Santa Monica College Foundation Board. “In this country, when we supported education, we formed the Community Colleges and what do you know, we educated people, they got good jobs and they became good taxpayers.”

It was while Nancy was teaching at Santa Monica College that she resumed her pilot’s training, finally getting her license. She was thrilled to be flying at Santa Monica Airport (Clover Field), where Amelia Earhart, Nancy’s childhood hero, used to fly.

In 1998, now single, she re-met and married the man who had been her commanding officer in Berlin. To read about that story or the story of how she met her hero, Eleanor Roosevelt, and all the triumphs and difficulties of her life, you’ll have to wait for the autobiography she is writing to be published.

When Nancy was 4 and her brother 5, they took the train to visit their grandparents. She is still travelling. Mementos from her travels, photographs of her family, her law books and her library fill her living room to overflowing.

“My advice to women today is do whatever you want. Pay no attention, just do what you want.” If you look at her life, she took her own advice.

What Say You? Santa Monica 2025

Santa Monica 2025. The elegant and welcoming gardens and park in front of City Hall are very busy this summer Saturday in the year 2025. A jazz concert is the center of activity, with people sitting on blankets on the lawn and listening to the music. Nearby, children who live in the Civic Center Village are playing a game of tag between the trees. The day is warm and clear. There is a view all the way to the ocean and the horizon. It’s a postcard Santa Monica moment.

To get to the park, Santa Monicans walked on wide, tree lined sidewalks, rode their bikes or took local jitneys. Visitors from, really, everywhere, came by light rail; some to the park, some to the beach, some to shop at Bloomingdales or Nordstrom’s at Santa Monica Place or at the 3^rd Street Promenade, and some to eat in Santa Monica’s restaurants. Others came, along tree lined boulevards, by car and have parked their cars in a central location, planning to spend the day and to get around by walking, renting a bike, or by using the fun, local transportation.

Are you wondering if I’ve been reading too much Alice in Wonderland? In fact, I’ve been reading the Santa Monica Draft Land Use and Circulation Element, affectionately called ‘the LUCE.’ Produced by City Planning, the LUCE document was developed through a strong and deep process of public discussions and meetings with the community and with the full participation of all the City Boards and Commissions and the City Council.

As described in the LUCE, in 2025, our neighborhoods will look pretty much the same as they do today, each with its character and identity carefully protected. Our local shopping streets will have almost everything we need, making it easier to get our errands done without getting into our cars. Neighbors and friends meet at local cafes with outdoor seating. New neighborhoods have taken root at Bergamot Station and in the Creative Arts District. New development will be designed to protect existing neighborhoods and our historic buildings and places will be protected.

All neighborhoods, from Sunset Park and the Pico Neighborhood on the East to Ocean Park and North of Montana on the West, will be connected by ‘green streets’; with bike lanes, a substantial tree canopy, and wide and safe sidewalks.

Santa Monica has made the responsibility for environmental stewardship a core responsibility of the City and that is expressed throughout the LUCE. By 2025, through our stormwater infiltration designs, we protected the Santa Monica Bay and made it cleaner and safer for swimming and surfing. As a City, we developed systems for the use of recycled water for landscape and so our water conservation is very high. We changed the way people get to Santa Monica and we changed the way people get around the City and so have greatly reduced both traffic congestion and environmental pollutants.

This LUCE represents the dreams, hopes and aspirations of our City. Will those dreams translate to reality? Some parts of the plan are already in the works. Expo (light rail) is coming to 4^th and Colorado and is planned to be here by 2015. Planning for the Civic Center Park is underway. It is scheduled to open in 2014. The green design for Ocean Park Blvd from Lincoln Blvd to Neilson Way is in progress and construction is planned to begin in early 2011. Santa Monica Place will reopen, in August of this year, with Nordstrom’s and Bloomingdales as its anchor stores.

But the LUCE is really a vision statement. The reality will come from how well we, as a City, can implement the vision. That will take real work, over time. And it will take the continued actions of a concerned and caring community.

For now, please read, for yourself, the LUCE, available online at www.shapethefuture2025.net or in hard copy at all our City libraries. It’s a thick book. But it has a good, short, Executive Summary and is clearly divided into sections by issue and by area and so it’s pretty easy to fine the sections that interest you.

What Say You?

Hometown Heroes: Our Students

Ithaca, NY. Cornell University. Ezra Cornell, the great, great, great grandson of the Ezra Cornell who was the founder of the University, describes it as “the first truly American university, rich in traditions of learning, teaching, service and doing the right things for the right reasons.” Have you seen the Santa Monica City Hall posters with the motto “we do the right thing right”? Perhaps a Cornellian, who made their way to Santa Monica, brought their motto to us? It expresses a Santa Monica spirit and it is one we share with Cornell University.

I made my way through winter airports to give a talk on Civil Rights at the Alice Cook House at Cornell in celebration of Black History Month. The campus was covered with snow. In stark relief in the snowy landscape, Gothic and neoclassical architecture co-exist with the modernism of the I.M. Pei designed Art Museum, the Richard Meier (a Cornell graduate) designed Life Sciences Center, and the, under construction, Rem Koolhaus designed addition to the Architecture School.

As I met and talked with students, I thought of the first Ezra Cornell: Senator, Farmer, Carpenter, Telegraph Investor, Quaker, and of his commitment to “Any Person, Any Study.” The university was inaugurated on October 7, 1868, with an enrollment of 412 men. Two years later, Cornell admitted women students, the first to do so among what came to be known as the Ivy League. Today, in 2010, walking the campus, you see a visual testament to the success of the school’s commitment to its inclusionary ideals.

Associate Provost Doris Davis has been a key to this success. “Policies that support our mission include our need-blind admissions policy that ensures that a student’s financial circumstances are not taken into consideration when we review a student’s application for admission. We award financial aid to student based on one factor, and one factor alone: because they need it. These admissions and financial aid policies have allowed us to be successful in enrolling students who are academically talented and from all racial/ethnic, geographic and religious backgrounds.”

Thinking about today’s students and his own student days, Professore Ross Brann says, “Our students now are far more diverse than back in the day and that alone is all for the good; they are arguably smarter and certainly savvier than we were. If at times they appear to be jaded and cynical, they inhabit a world that is surely more complex than ours was and the deep interconnections between political, economic and media elites has its way of discouraging activism. And yet…I encounter so many students committed to various forms of social change. It is heartening to observe them readying to become leaders in education, service, non-governmental organizations and more.”

Brother and sister graduates from New Roads School, Sammy and Ruby Perlmutter, along with Samohi and Crossroads students, are among the Santa Monicans at Cornell. Sammy, an editor at the independent student paper, the Cornell Sun, talks about his personal expression of his political views and principles. "Personally, beyond frequent discussions with friends and intellectual conversations in classes, I express my opinions through my writing at The Sun. This has helped to forge my own viewpoints and also become highly critical of all political talk and policy."

A historic Cornell venue for the expression of political talk, philosophy and ideas is the Sage Chapel. The non-sectarian Chapel has a mosaic mural behind the altar paying homage to the nine muses of arts and science and to Plato’s philosopher king. New to the Chapel is a stained glass window honoring the civil rights martyrs, James Cheney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner. Schwerner was a Cornellian.

I stood on the bridge over Cascadilla Creek at one of Cornell’s famous Gorges and thought of the first woman Architecture graduate in the 1880’s, Michael Schwerner in the 1960’s, and the students I had met. Water still ran in the icicle-covered gorge. I felt a bond with past and future students from knowing we shared the inspiration of this natural beauty and the knowledge of the values and ideals of the University, carefully carried throughout succeeding generations.

Ezra Cornell states, “President Lincoln was born in 1809 and my great, great, great grandfather was born in 1807. He supported Lincoln, was a Republican and attended Lincoln's inauguration. Both men recognized the challenges of their day and were determined to make a difference that would benefit the nation.” I believe the students I’ve met, in Santa Monica and at Cornell, share that determination.

What Say You? Paul Hawken and Arianna Huffington

“Our time is either the end of civilization or the transformation of civilization. We are at risk, but the risk we take in not changing is worse than the risk in changing.” So believes Paul Hawken, economist, businessman, and environmental guru. He spoke persuasively, part professor and part preacher, before a capacity crowd of, mostly, business professionals at the Sustainable Industries Forum in Santa Monica.

In what he described as a speech in three acts, Hawken’s first act was one of certain doom, the second act had the good guys down but not out, and the third act closes the play with hope for the future. “For hope to be hopeful it has to be pragmatic. It has to pass a sobriety test and walk a straight line to reality.”

Hawken notes that we now accept the reality of climate change but still throw billions of dollars into oil as an energy source when oil is a finite resource being used at a pace that’s unsustainable. “The sun is a 100% renewable energy source and supplies all the energy we could ever need, but we don’t know yet how to access and distribute it We are an accumulative society. Our consumption patterns are growing in logarithms. We will prevail only by capping the energy we use and by changing to 80% solar/wind.

“We are borrowing money from the future and using it to steal from the future. No reason we couldn’t borrow from the future to benefit the future,” said Hawken. “I don’t care about who you voted for I care if you care about your children.”

In his latest book, Blessed Unrest, Hawken talks about the unprecedented and uncounted global growth of NGOs. “NGOs and business have a bias for innovation and they drive change.” Hawken promises, “when they come together as allies in sustainability they are unstoppable. Nature always makes allies. It draws in. Nature is our greatest design teacher and our greatest ally.”

Hawken shared the stage with media star Arianna Huffington, author, journalist and co-founder and editor-in-chief of the Huffington Post. Huffington said, “The Media is obsessed with the idea that every issue has two sides and that truth is always somewhere in the middle. But that is often just wrong. The world is not flat. It is not a little flat and little round. It is round. There is only one correct answer.”

Huffington also identifies Washington as part of the problem, saying, “Everything we are talking about today is representing the future, but Washington is about the past and present. Detroit wanted Washington to protect them from the future. Detroit won in Washington but they ended up in bankruptcy because what they fought so hard for was in their short-term interest only.”

Huffington shares the Hawken view of Act 1 as doom, getting to fathom the depth of the environmental threat. She sees us as being in Act 2, suffering disappointments and setbacks but having some triumphs and gaining allies. Finally, she is optimistic that the environmental movement, when it reaches a critical mass, “ a number infinitely smaller than everybody,” will bring us to Act 3. “When we do our part 100%, grace is extended to us.”

What Say You? Will you, are you, doing your part to reach ‘critical mass”?

http://www.sustainableindustries.com/forums/82393332.html will get you to the event video

Hometown Hero: Sheila Kuehl

You may have seen the 1964 red Porsche Cabriolet 356C being driven around Santa Monica by a shorthaired woman with an impish smile. Originally bought when she was Zelda on the Dobie Gillis show, it now has 523 thousand miles on it. If you’ve seen the car, you’ve seen Sheila James Kuehl.

Many of you know her as the Assembly Member and State Senator representing Santa Monica. “Being in the legislature was the best job I ever had. It was an opportunity to do big, overarching change in family law, domestic law, and environmental law. The canvas is so huge. The sheer variety of the issues is compelling.”

When she was in the Senate, Sheila twice introduced a bill for single payer health insurance, once in 2006 and again in 2008. Each time the bill passed out of both houses of the California Legislature. Each time Governor Schwarzenegger vetoed the bill.

“We moved the concept of single payer insurance from a pie in the sky idea to a credible, well drafted, fully developed, serious concept. And our work has had an effect on other states. Now California needs a governor who will sign a single payer health insurance bill.”

When asked about working with Governor Schwarzenegger, Sheila said, “He is an irresponsible governor because he doesn’t understand the virtue of the law. His administration is chaotic. And, unlike the Wilson or Davis administrations, his staff doesn’t work with legislators to resolve differences in bills.”

Sheila’s path to acting and politics started when her family moved from St. Louis to Los Angeles. Sheila was two. By the age of eight she was taking lessons in drama and tap dancing. The instructor told Sheila’s parents that their child was talented and asked if Sheila could read for a part on the Penny Williams radio show. That was the beginning of Sheila the actor. Sheila loved acting and she loved school.

Acting gave her confidence. She went to public school and she had a teacher on the set. She worked 16-17 weeks out of the year, earning $275 per week. Encouraged by her teacher at the studio, Sheila enrolled at UCLA in 1957 with a major in Theater Arts, the first in her family to go to college.

She became famous playing Zelda on the Dobie Gillis show. That job ended and the pilot for a show written especially for Sheila wasn’t picked up. “I worried that my acting career was over and I was devastated. It was the lowest point in my life. Since I was 8 all I had ever wanted was to be an actress.” The gossip in Hollywood was that the network executives thought Sheila seemed ‘too gay.’

“ I was in my late twenties and, like most humans, I didn’t know much about myself then. My sexuality was confusing to me and my political ideas unformed.” Needing work, she took a job at UCLA, at the height of the student movement, advising student organizations and said she felt “it kind of saved my life.” Her students advised her to go to law school. She started Harvard Law in 1975.

“Harvard was a revelation to me. It was the best intellectual training of my life. I became a disciplined thinker, thinking clearly and creatively. Justice is an exciting endeavor.”

Thurgood Marshall was the Presiding Judge at the Harvard Moot Court when Sheila was awarded ‘Best Oralist’ and Justice Marshall came off the bench and said to her, “Lady, I like your style.”

Also, at Harvard, she had a relationship with another law student who was openly lesbian. It was because of that relationship that Sheila felt “she was able to come out, slowly, to family and friends, one at a time.”

She returned to LA and a series of jobs in law firms working on family law, domestic violence and other legal issues where she could combine her love of the law and her commitment to social justice. But it was the California Women’s Law Center, which Sheila co-founded, whose purpose was to develop feminist theory and apply it to the law, that gave her a place to use all her legal and organizing skills working with local, state and national organizations on shaping laws regarding domestic violence.

Sheila and her then partner, Torie Osborn, lived on Pearl Street, where she still lives. She volunteered for the Sojourn Shelter for Battered Women. In 1979 she was asked to form the Sojourn Board, which she chaired for 15 years.

“Late January1994 Assemblyman Terry Friedman announced he wouldn’t run again. Filing date was two weeks away, on February 9. Folks were encouraging. Feb 9 is my birthday. I decided it was a good omen.”

Sheila served for six years in the assembly and eight in the Senate. “Because I had a safe seat, I raised money for other democratic candidates. The most fun was when I wrote the lyrics for a “Wizard of Oz” fundraiser. Even the Los Angles Times pronounced it ‘very clever’ and we raised lots of money.”

“My plan for the far future is to run for Zev’s seat when he is termed out in 2014. Right now, I’m looking for my next job. But I will always be committed to the issues of social justice.”