This kitchen garden in the California Delta, where the Great Valley drains into San Francisco Bay, is below sea level. It consists largely of Chinese fruits and vegetables. It is built in the ruins of a farm camp that was once so busy it had a three-wok kitchen.
Each of these facts could be the beginning of a story about one of the most complex and disputed landscapes in California. The Delta is the largest tidal estuary on the West Coast. Reclaimed by American money and Chinese labor, it has become extraordinarily productive farmland; however, because reclamation caused the ground to subside, it requires constant, vigilant, expensive management. Since World War II it has also become the centerpiece of the infrastructure that supplies water to Southern California. It is being transformed again by environmental politics, suburban development and recreational use.
The Delta’s future depends on broad-based support for difficult compromises among varied constituencies. The region is critically important to California’s economy and ecology, but it is almost unknown in much of the state.
This drawing is part of the Delta Primer, a project conceived to develop methods and means that designers can use to encourage and frame public debate about contested landscapes. The Delta Primer has two aims: to educate broad audiences about the urgent dilemmas facing the Delta and to generate terms for discussion that transcend the usual boundaries of interest groups. Its strategy is to represent concrete documentary stories about the landscape in visual language that most people understand; its premise is that change could and should be informed by the rich- ness and complexity of what already exists.
Drawing by the author, a study for Delta Primer: a Field Guide to the California Delta (San Francisco: William Stout Publishers, 2003).
Originally trained as a documentary filmmaker, author Jane Wolff is a landscape architect and assistant professor of landscape architecture at the Knowlton School of Architecture, Ohio State University. As both a Fulbright Scholar and a Charles Eliot Traveling Fellow, she has studied the history, methods and cultural implications of land reclamation in the Netherlands, research that provides a framework for her investigations of the San Joaquin and Sacramento River Delta.
Originally published late 2000, in arcCA 00.2, “Common Ground.”
