PALM SPRINGS — TO the north and south of my plebeian ranch-style home here, my neighbors are transforming their pads into midcentury modern showplaces. At one time all you needed to accomplish this was some orange paint and concrete blocks; nowadays the makeover involves a lot of chopping.
One neighbor ripped out the fig and lemon trees planted there 40 years before by the original owner. To the north, modernistas tore out a jungle of honeysuckle vines and asparagus ferns weaving in and out of an old fence.
All around my neighborhood, new owners are hacking off the blond skirts of the Washingtonia filifera palms and amputating tendrils of black dates. In the latest development, they are even shaving the rough bark of the palms, leaving a shiny blood-like surface.
The skinned palm look is very sleek, very atomic -- it goes back to the early days of modernism in the '40s. But it leaves nowhere for a collared lizard, roadrunner, orange oriole or barn owl to hide. It's not even good for the tree.
As I walk around the neighborhood, it's beginning to look like some modernists are intent on annihilating habitat and banishing nature. More yards -- some had resembled gardens in Pasadena with a loose, shady ambience and alcoves of privacy -- sport a minimalist look, with soldierly rows of tufted grasses, or lone agave spikes in seas of gravel or lawn.
But it wasn't supposed to be this way. The giants of modernism wanted their open floor plans and walls of glass to bring the outdoors in. One of the pioneering modernist landscape architects, John Ormsbee Simonds, aimed to work with the "want to be" of the land, just as Alexander Pope -- an 18th century English poet who protested an earlier wave of sterile landscaping -- urged consultation with "the genius of the place."
A man who understood the genius of the desert was Albert Frey, one of this region's most famous of modernist architects. When I moved here -- before the rediscovery of modernism -- he was a somewhat obscure eccentric who lived in a house on the hill with a boulder in his bedroom. He stood on his head daily, and studied the position of the sun for a year before deciding where to put his house.
When asked his guiding design principle, Frey once answered: "The respect for nature."
