SPIRIT OF LANDSCAPE: CALIFORNIA’S LOWER OWENS RIVER VALLEY

The 2008 Annual Conference of the California Garden & Landscape History Society will celebrate the beauty and diversity of California’s Eastern Sierra region landscape.  Through talks and tours, we will explore art forms inspired by this dramatic mountain, desert, and river valley landscape. The conference will focus on the literature of Mary Austin (among the first to realize that landscapes don’t have to be green to be beautiful), western films, local native plant gardens, and gardens created by Japanese Americans who were interned at Manzanar during World War II.  We will also learn about significant changes wrought on the land both by the diversion of water from the Owens River into Los Angeles aqueducts, and by the current re-watering of the Lower Owens River.

Image: Lone Pine, California