Title: Good mourning California
Description: Good Mourning California is a poetic vision of the landscape, nature, and gardens of California, illustrated with Barbara Stauffacher Solomon's own drawings, collages, and photographs. Her lively, mixed-media illustrations examine the images of the California landscape which so seductively and successfully represent the myth of paradise and the process by which this modern garden paradise is disappearing.

As in her previous book, Green Architecture and the Agrarian Garden, Solomon has also written the text, which traces the history of the "Golden State" from its mention in ancient myths to the present.

She combines her personal interpretations of her home state with the reflections of other California visitors, from early Spanish explorers - such as Hernan Cortes, who was in search of El Dorado, and Juan de Iturbe, who believed California was "a very large island and not part of the continent" - to writers like Mark Twain, Henry Miller, and Allen Ginsberg.

The text is itself a collage, inseparable from Solomon's art and her ideas about nature, and, like the illustrations, it "catches California, suddenly, and for a moment."
Subjects: Description and travel, Landscape, Landscapes, California, description and travel, Gardens, In art, Panoramas, Pictorial works, American Art, Art, Themes, motives, Nature in art
Places: California