Darby Strong

Playing point. Delivering the rock.

Green is the New Black

My first visit to Palmetto Bluff served up amazing views and good food, but it was mostly the opportunity to get behind those gates and see what the hell was going on behind them that enticed me. The extremely subtle signage and rumor that last year’s Oscar attendees received a weekend visit in their luxurious gift bags added even more interest. Finding out that Auberge Resorts was behind this Lowcountry treasure was icing on the cake. But the piece de resistance is this: Palmetto Bluff is a leader in sustainable and green building practices, as evidenced by their work with Southface and gracious hosting of the Lowcountry’s first Earth Craft House training seminar, which I had the pleasure of attending last Wednesday.

Let us start at the beginning. Palmetto Bluff is owned and developed by Crescent Resources, a division of Duke Energy. From the Palmetto Bluff website comes the vision of Crescent Resources’ philosophy:

By allowing the land to guide us rather then imposing a “developer template”, we have crafted a plan that respects its physical form — the topography, the wetlands, the diverse maritime forest and the miles of undulating marsh and river edge. This vision of Palmetto Bluff as a place, rather than a project, is a more challenging path. It requires that we remain authentic. That we un-learn much of what the last thirty-five years of development in this region has taught.

Palmetto Bluff is working to qualify each home in its community as an Earth Craft House. The philosophy behind the Earth Craft House is simple and feasible. The concept deals mostly with the process and materials used to build a home, creating a process that is efficient and smart, with the environment as its guide. Points are given within each major category in order to certify each home as an Earth Craft Home. The program is completely felxible and works with each builder to develop their “sustainibility quotient,” with Southface acting as a consultant with each build.

Common sense strategies are part of the point system, like having a central cutting site, which enables the builders to recycle perfectly useable wood throughout the project. More technical aspects, like the building envelope and correct and adequate ventilation, add not only to the homeowner’s improved indoor air quality, but a more efficient, and therefore more affordable, home.

One needn’t be purchasing in the exclusive enclaves of Palmetto Bluff to enjoy what is now the luxury of well-built, healthy homes, but it seems it takes these artisans of the building industry to take this painfully obvious next step within our built environment. Working against this natural progression towards a better and more profitable building process will force the cut and paste schlock of unconscious production builders to their inevitable extinction.

The Resurgence of Wormwood

“What difference is there between a glass of absinthe and a sunset?”
-Oscar Wilde

Native N’awlins microbiologist, Ted Breaux, has been working on debunking the bad reputation of Absinthe, as well as producing the best tasting, authentic Absinthe made in a century, one molecule at a time. Absinthe, long suspected as the cause of “criminal dementia” due to its key ingredient, bitter leaves of Artemisia absinthium, or Wormwood, may not be so bad after all. Plus, its lovely green hue and anise flavorings are romantically alluring, and help even the most mundane feel artsy and sophisticated.

From Wired:

Breaux begins to prepare it in the traditional French manner, a process as intricate as a tea ceremony. First he decants a couple of ounces into two widemouthed glasses specially made for the drink. A strong licorice aroma wafts across the table. Then he adds 5 or 6 ounces of ice-cold water, letting it trickle through a silver dripper into the glass. “Pour it slowly,” he says. “That’s the secret to making it taste good. If the water’s too warm, it will taste like donkey piss.”
The drink turns milky, and a condensate floats to the top. This is called the louche, a word that’s come to mean “disreputable.” Breaux hands it to me and tells me there’s no need to stir away the louche or add sugar to an absinthe this fine. I take a sip. The flavor is subtle, dry, complex. It makes my tongue feel a little numb. “It’s like an herbal speedball,” he says. “Some of the compounds are excitatory, some are sedative. That’s the real reason artists liked it. Drink two or three glasses and you can feel the effects of the alcohol, but your mind stays clear – you can still work.”

The Senses: Smell – First In A Series

I am baking an apple-pie and the smell wafts through the house. I love this smell. Although it doesn’t trigger any specific memories for me, it is a pleasant and warming smell. It reminds me to revisit Diane Ackerman’s book, A Natural History of the Senses. She tells a story describing how Helen Keller ascertained the path that each visitor took throughout her house SOLELY BY THE ODORS they carried with them as they moved through various hallways and rooms.

I ADORE the sense of smell, and am extremely attuned to it. Unlike many, I find pungent smells (body odor, skunks, intense cheeses) rather appealing, mainly because they are incredibly distinct. This brings me to my fascination with nostalgia, as a topic and how it relates to smells (physiologically) and actual longing or grieving, of sorts. Grieving for familiarity, perhaps. Or longing for food, even. Perhaps the smell association is linked to memory (nostalgia) so that we could survive when we were hunters and gatherers. By smells triggering memory, we were perhaps more capable of anticipating weather, tracking prey, and choosing suitable mates through the phermones they released.