Baby, Let Your Hair Down

Beachtown Bohemia at its most tousled and unselfconscious

My mother with her hair down. And my gouache of a tousled banana leaf palm.

My mother told a story about how in the New York of the 1950s she and her roommate Annie hosted their first cocktail party. As was the uniform of her twenty-something milieu, the women wore wool pencil skirts, cashmere sweaters, and their hair twisted up in tight chignons with a single strand of pearls. This was the era of icy Hitchcock blondes searing the silver screen in french twist hairdos and in clothes that bespoke a gusseted sort of glamour. It was by all accounts a great little party. At the tail end of the night, Annie, my mother, and Annie’s boyfriend Walter were at last, after picking up glasses and beer bottles, able to flop on the sofas to recount the evening’s events. My mother felt at ease enough — and backstage enough — to slowly pluck the hairpins from her thick, luscious long hair. Her locks came tumbling down all around her in a cascade. It must have been a real spectacle because Walter exclaimed, “Jesus Christ. How beautiful.” Which of course irked his short-haired girlfriend, and proved to be a potent life lesson for my mother. (She employed this story as an allegory for me, a reminder to never forget the seductive power of what you withold. To abstain from “giving it all away”, sartorially speaking. To leave a little to be discovered. The desire for the undone.

Another banana leaf palm. And my mother in the 60s.

The lure of the undone rings true for landscapes too, and especially so in Beachtown Bohemia. I am sometimes stopped dead in my tracks by an unruly palm tree with years of untrimmed golden fronds at its base, like an upside down crown. Or a bougainvillea that has overwhelmed a fence to a point that the posts ache and the garden door cannot be budged open. It’s a kind of opulence, this lush, un-manicured landscape. In Santa Barbara and Montecito there are certainly grand gardens that have taken years of careful care and tending. Hitchcock-worthy glamour gardens. I respect gardening as an art form, but here in Beachtown Bohemia, what I really find compelling are the wild messy corners of our landscape. Of Nature with her hair down. There is poetry in the unselfconscious garden doing its own dance — without a human choreographer. Below are some recent photos and a video of these scenarios of undone (or underdone) beauty.

All these scenes are for me, classic Beachtown Bohemia.

And the piece de resistance, the Taco Bell parking lot on Milpas with heaving vine.

I leave you with a video taken by my nine-year-old daughter out the car window as we passed a particularly jungly, messy bit of gorgeous Montecito garden.

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