autumn ginkgo, plaza blocks

I haven't posted many fall photos this year. It wasn't a very photogenic autumn, unfortunately, and I wasn't too enthusiastic about its arrival. I also wasn't too enthusiastic about revisiting the old staples of fall photos: "Leaves Turning", "Falling Leaves", "Fallen Leaves", "Wet Leaves In The Rain", etcetera. But I did take a few of the ginkgo trees in the Plaza Blocks in downtown Portland (just steps from the Thompson Elk fountain, btw). They're attractive trees, with unusual leaves that turn a bright golden color in the fall. They also drop a huge quantity of odd waxy-looking orange fruit, as shown in the next photo:

It all seems very nice and pleasant and photogenic and so forth, which is because there's currently no way to communicate odors over the interwebs. And if that technology existed, I would not inflict this smell on you, o Gentle Reader(s). When I took these photos, the air was thick with a sickening vomit-like stench. The little fruits, you see, are packed with foul-smelling butyric acid, and those that fall on the sidewalk are soon crushed underfoot into a slippery, orange, malodorous paste. It's really quite disgusting. But I endured it on your behalf in order to bring you these photos. You're welcome.

So I was surprised to see a couple of middle-aged Asian women with buckets gathering the fruit. It turns out that the stinky fruit contains a tasty edible nut, widely used in China and basically unknown and ignored here. There are recipes all over the net, though (see for example "Ginkgo Nut Custards", "Japanese Tempura Salad With Ginkgo Nuts", and "Shimeji Mushrooms and Ginkgo Nut Parcel"). I've never tried the nuts myself, but I'm happy to spread the word if it means more people will come and take the smelly fruits away.

You've probably seen various health-fad, not-evaluated-by-the-FDA ads touting ginkgo biloba as a miracle cure for assorted ailments. These, ah, unconfirmed health claims are for an extract of, not the fruit or the nut, but the leaves. But don't rush out and grab an armload of leaves just yet. They (and reportedly other parts of the tree) are also loaded with uroshiol, the same substance that makes poison oak itchy for most people. Apparently I'm not one of those people, which I consider an unusual bit of good fortune. Ginkgo leaves have never given me any trouble, nor have mango skins (mangoes are botanical cousins of poison oak, believe it or not). I also can't recall ever having trouble with poison oak, despite being an avid but somewhat inattentive hiker. (Although I make up for that by magically attracting every biting insect within a ten mile radius, so it's not all good news.)

The smell problem can be avoided by planting only male (and thus nonfruiting) trees. It's just that it's hard to tell the difference. You can do expensive DNA tests, or you can just plant the tree and wait a few decades (yes, decades) until it's ready to start reproducing and hope for the best. We seem to have chosen the latter option. If this was your backyard, you could always just chop the tree down and start over, but it's not that simple in a city park. There will be hearings, and debate, and well-meaning eco types will chain themselves to the trees, and then they'll get all itchy from touching them, and then they'll sue the city for emotional distress, and it'll all be a huge expensive hassle. So I imagine we'll be stuck with puke-smelling mush on our sidewalks for the foreseeable future. But at least the ginkgos are in a part of town where many of those they inconvenience are criminals, lawyers, politicians, bureaucrats, lobbyists, and journalists. A cynic might argue that the ginkgo odor is appropriate here, given these circumstances.

Pettygrove Park

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Downtown Portland's Pettygrove Park often gets overlooked. It's in the middle of the 60's urban renewal maze that is the South Auditorium district, and it's bordered by pedestrian trails rather than streets on all sides, so you aren't likely to run across it if you don't already know it's there. It would be bordered by 2nd & 3rd Avenues, and Montgomery & Mill Streets, if any of them existed. It also doesn't help that most of the other city parks in the area come with big flashy fountains, and Pettygrove doesn't. Instead it has a cluster of grass-covered earthen mounds and a bunch of trees, and at one corner a bronze sculpture in the center of a quiet pool.

I have less of an excuse for overlooking the place, since I walk right through it on my way to and from work. And yet I've never done a post about the place. I've posted individual photos from the park here, here, and here, plus photos of the Dreamer sculpture in the park's SE corner, and a small fountain in front of an adjacent building. But that's all.

So to remedy that, here's a slideshow about the place, with the photos of it that I've uploaded over time. They aren't exactly comprehensive and mostly focus on the art (which I'm rather fond of). I seem to have never posted any photos of the mounds, which is too bad. I'm not sure what their function is here, but they do break the space up and make the park seem a lot larger than it actually is. And to me they look a lot like ancient Celtic or Kurgan burial mounds or barrows. In one of those photo posts I made a crack about either hobbits or barrow-wights living here, come to think of it. Or possibly there's an enormous hoard of Scythian gold buried somewhere around here. Or leprechauns, or a few very small dragons.

Two sides of the park are bordered by condo towers, one completed this year, another converted from a 60's high rise apartment tower. They've had mixed success moving the condos, such that the new tower is being rented out as apartments for now, at least until the real estate market improves. You'd think that it would occur to the developers to spin the neighboring park as a magical land of mystery and magic (of the upscale variety, of course) to make the place stand out in the market, but that doesn't seem to have occurred to anyone except me. In fact, it's possible the entire real estate crisis could have been avoided if only everyone had come to me for advice, for a reasonable consulting fee. Since nobody ever did that, my claim can't be easily refuted, which is convenient.

In any case, there is an amusing reality-based aspect to the place. The two sides of the park that aren't bordered by condo towers face the offices of a large health insurance company. They have signs posted outside their buildings letting everyone know it's a smoke-free campus, which I guess makes sense being a health insurer and all. But since this is a public park and not part of the campus, it effectively serves as the corporate smokers' lounge. And as such it's very, very popular. So every morning I get to walk through a bunch of sullen (and often kind of chunky) chainsmoking office drones, all of them (it seems) griping nonstop about their miserable lives and careers.

So next time your insurance claim gets denied, just know that the faceless bureaucrats who did it subsist on nothing but Snackwells, Virginia Slims, cheap gin, and Prozac. They're far less healthy than you are, and simply can't understand what you've got to complain about: "You think you're sick, huh? Let me tell you about my gout, and my dang bunions..."

Yecchhh.

3rd avenue commute

A few pics taken while walking to the office this morning. It's one of the little perks of living downtown, I guess. And one of the little perks of warm(ish) weather, too.

The soldier statue in Lownsdale Square, one of several Spanish-American War memorials around town. If alien archaeologists ever dig up the city, someday in the distant future, they'll assume that the war was a really big deal, or at least that it somehow affected us in a significant way. I've really never seen a good explanation about why our forebears thought we needed so many memorials back then. But then, society is on sort of a memorial-building kick right now, too. And, sadly, a memorial-generating kick as well.

A rose next to Keller Fountain, since it just wouldn't do to post without including at least one flower. I'd lose my street cred, or whatever.

A bit of Keller Fountain itself. You probably haven't noticed, but I don't post a lot of photos of the thing. It's not for lack of trying. I just don't seem to have the knack of photographing it in a reasonably pleasing way. Even this one isn't all that great of a photo, but I kind of like what the water's doing.

A fern on a stone wall in Pettygrove Park, the often-overlooked little green spot behind the horrible black 200 Market St. building. The park's full of little grassy hillocks, with paths winding around them. In the sunshine, when the light's just right, you half-expect to see doors and chimneys and hobbits gamboling about. When the weather's bleaker, you fully expect barrow-wights.