Faux Life

Today's Los Angeles Times included a full-page article on a private garden landscaped entirely with fake plants - a concept I wrestle with. I have seen wonderful artificial plants in landscape settings, for example in the forest diaramas at the Chicago Museum of Natural History. When I used to visit the museum in the early 70's, I was astonished at Trilliums and other spring woodland flowers along with life-sized trees presented in near perfection. The purpose of these presentations was not to fool the visitor, rather to create a 3-dimensional compelling image something like a storefront - not meant to deceive but to explain. The visitor understood these were mock-ups and was allowed to marvel at the beautiful craftsmanship of each object.

Adam Issac's terrace garden, pictured in the Times, has a different purpose. It is meant to bring in play the effect of a planted patio garden without the fuss and muss of living plants. And, at least in the newspaper photos, it looks like a diarama that might be in some future anthropological museum - modeling how people lived in Los Angeles in 2009. But Issac's garden brings him comfort I am guessing, as do faux flower arrangements and weeping figs all around the country. Which is nice, I want to think. After all, this reminds us that people like the look of plants, and that plants help to finish a scene. A place just seems more inviting (I want to say "warmer") when plants deck the halls.

The dark other side of this for a botanist is the realization that many people do not quite appreciate the difference between life and faux life. Regardless how pale and unmoving a Pothos may be as it clings to existence in a dim parlor, it is alive. It is a living being, taking in water and nutrients, photosynthesizing, respiring, transpiring, growing, and eventually, dying. When newly brought to the parlor, the plant had a plastic quality, a waxy sheen of perfection. But every fresh moment (though every month is more detectable in our frame of reference) the plant is different, changing for the better or worse. And the body of this plant is fantastically more complex than that of the silk or plastic stand-in. Artificial plants are made of exuded and molded polymers, solids with integral, even color. Living beings are made of cells - for life is, basically, a cellular affair. We know there is a dynamic balance of interactions inside, through, and between cells - orchestrated to acheive self-perpetuation. At the simplest level this may be perpetuation of the individual type of cell; at the most complex level it is perpetuation of whole organisms. This means that a living plant, regardless how plastic it may appear, is made of myriad cells, cells of many kinds. Each cell is totally complex and multidimensional, with its own differently textured and subtly colored parts and pieces. Under a microscope, the cells of the greenest plant are mostly clear, with only the tiniest lozenges of green stirring about. Comparing the microscopic view of a living cell to a chunk of plastic that makes a fake plant is somewhat like comparing the workings and appearance of the most complex flatscreen TV to a sheet of plastic that is dyed and painted the same colors as a picture on the screen - but not really - because the difference is orders of magnitude greater.

Still, at a distance, faux plants can be quite deceiving and alluring. More than twice I have been fooled by them, and have always wondered about people's perceptions of artificial plants. A few summers ago I hosted a group of IEA students for two weeks. We studied many plant topics together, and made some interesting experiments. One study involved purchasing three artificial plants/flowers and three living examples that were as similar in color, shape, and size as possible. The students set up a comparison, asking visitors to select (from a distance) which of each pair was real, and which was fake. The visitors were then asked to view a sample of each specimen through a simple dissection microscope (magnification about 20x). People did pretty well with a fern, and with a Gerbera - selecting the correct one as artificial from a distance and confirming that choice when viewing through the microscope. But a Phalaenopsis orchid proved an interesting case. Visitors correctly selected the artificial specimen from a distance, but in many cases changed their minds when viewing the flower through the microscope. I believe this curious shift came about because even at 20x, the cellular structure of the live orchid flower was not obvious, its waxy petals and column looking for all the world as though they are cast from plastic. The silk specimen, on the other hand, showed its fabric nature under magnification. You could see squares formed by the fibers... hollow squares which I think the public perceived as "cells."

Nifty, and curious. The observations cause me to speculate that people know they should expect to see cells, but they have lttle idea what to expect. The crisscross patterns of fibers, easily visible, come as close as anything else to representing the textbook image of a grid of cells.

So back to the Times and the patio garden, with rules detailed by author Barbara Thornburg in her sidebar that suggest how to "do artificial intelligently." Barbara wants us to keep choices to the ecology of built spaces, which means matching the surreal to the real that is implied by the nature of the space; that is, selecting plants that might actually grow in the space. It also means maintaining a storeroom of artificial plants so the sunflowers do not make an appearance in winter, and tulips do not hang around until August. Another rule bids you take a walk in nature to observe how plants really grow. Actually, you could do that on your patio if you had live plants.

I shouldn't sound snide. I like artificial plants when cleverly used. Even Disneyland has taken to using artificial flowers in the hanging baskets on Mainstreet USA-eh-A. And I see them in yards all around Southern California. One of my particularly favorite displays is a corner home landscape near California and Michillinda, a yard that is completely paved but for a permanent border, a host of golden daffodils. It is the happy land of eternal spring. Though plastic, it is unfair to say the plants in this corner garden, other yards, and balconies over the area do not change. We may all take perverse enjoyment in the way, over the months and years, that plastic leaves and flowers age in the light of day, like tattoos, to a peculiar faded indigo. Change is in order; they are, after all, by strictest definition, organic.