Posted by David Hamilton on December 10th, 2009

My favorite moment in publishing is the end-of-year retrospective.  The New York Times Magazine is set to publish its Year in Ideas, which this year includes Virginia’s recent action to promote connectivity in new subdivisions.  As is often the case, a very well-intentioned idea that generally promotes good planning practice is, in the context of preservation development, counterproductive.  Lousy development patterns have given dead-end roads a bad name (though the French is certainly better than “dead-end”).  At Bundoran Farm, the extremely low density, and our insistence on the roads’ resemblance to historical rural roads, makes dead ends the best solution for shaping development to the seams between pasture and forest.  This is simply a response to the “mountain-hollow” landscape of southern Albemarle.

Another fascinating idea in the issue comes from California, where an artist, Laura Parker, is arranging “soil-tastings.”  Ms. Parker claims that landscape and other products of a particular farm share flavor which can be discerned in tastings of the food, paired with, well, smelling the soil.  Her website offers some strange photos of people exploring dirt in wine glasses.  A lot of people talk about terroir, and we certainly talk about the topsoil at Bundoran Farm as being key to current and future productive activity, but this takes it to a whole new level.

I eagerly await next year’s apple harvest, and I hope the Baldwin Center is able to recruit some folks to investigate and attempt to detect Bundoran Clay in the granny smiths.

Filed under: Agriculture, Baldwin Center for Preservation, Education and Inspiration, General