[ Lost in the Landscape ]

trimming leaves

Here’s a lit­tle plant-tidying tip that I picked up years ago. If you have sword-shaped leaves that have died on their ends, instead of chop­ping off the ends blunt and square, trim them into a pointed shape using very sharp prun­ing shears or scis­sors. This gives you a more nat­ural shape to what’s left.

If some­one looks really closely they won’t be fooled by your hand­i­work, but it’ll draw less atten­tion than if you’d just lopped off the brown tips.

Before:

After:

July 22 2008 | Categories: gardening • my garden | Tags: pruning | No Comments »

turfstone

Some of my gar­den shots have had some per­fo­rated con­crete pavers shown in them. In case you’re won­der­ing what it is, it’s called Turf­s­tone, and is one of sev­eral prod­ucts out there that are designed to allow you to have a lawn that you can drive onto.

The basic idea is that you inter­plant the lit­tle holes with grass, and the con­crete blocks keep vehi­cles from cut­ting ruts into the lawn. You of course could also fill the holes with other kinds of plants.

If you don’t want to have to water your dri­ve­way, or if you want a sturdy but porous mate­r­ial to use to cover a French drain–which is what we wanted–you could fill the holes with mate­r­ial like crushed rock or peb­bles, as we’ve done here. Using a con­trast­ing mate­r­ial brings out the inter­est­ing grid pattern.

The mate­r­ial is some­what spe­cial­ized, so you local home store prob­a­bly won’t have it in stock, though they may be able to order it for you. Fail­ing that, the blocks seem to have a pretty wide dis­tri­b­u­tion so that a land­scape mate­ri­als firm could prob­a­bly find it for you.

July 21 2008 | Categories: landscape design • my garden | Tags: hardscape • turfstone | 7 Comments »

let it rust

Picasso and on occa­sion other artists have been cred­ited with the quote that goes some­thing like, “Good artists copy, great artists steal.”

Left: Gar­den at the Getty Cen­ter, Los Ange­les [ source ]

The gar­den designed by Robert Irwin at the Getty Museum in Los Ange­les has both received raves and been the topic of rants. After my vis­its there I’m torn some­where in between. There are things I like about it, and there are things that seem like missed oppor­tu­ni­ties or inap­pro­pri­ate choices.

One of the things I really like is its use of sheets of steel for retain­ing walls. (You can see it in the fore­ground and middle-ground in this picture.)

Each mate­r­ial that you use in a garden–whether it be wood or stone or steel–has its own per­son­al­ity. I par­tic­u­larly like the warm brown color that that steel ages to, as well as the indus­trial vibe that it brings.

While it prob­a­bly doesn’t rise to the Picasso’s level of theft, using sheet steel for retain­ing walls is an idea I’ve incor­po­rated into my own gar­den. Two sides of the raised bed I put in last fall use the material.

My gar­den­ing bud­get is noth­ing like the Getty Museum’s, so instead of inch-thick mate­r­ial I used 11-gauge sheets (just shy of 1/8 inch thick). Also, since steel is heavy stuff, thin­ner sheets don’t require heavy equip­ment and can be han­dled by two peo­ple. I welded inch-and-a-half angle iron to the top edges, both to give it extra rigid­ity to help hold back the soil and to give my scrawny lit­tle sheets some visual heft.

Over eight months the walls have taken on a warm patina and are almost as alive as the plants in the bed.

I don’t con­sider myself to be mainly swayed by prac­ti­cal­ity over aes­thet­ics. Since steel rusts and degrades over time, using it for a retain­ing wall is prob­a­bly a less durable option than using other mate­ri­als. Still, as far as the longevity of the steel is con­cerned, I’m encour­aged by a scrap that I’ve had out­doors for the last ten years. When I cut into it recently the inte­rior was pris­tine and shiny. Only the outer shell showed any signs of rust. Of course, steel that’s in con­stant con­tact with the ground and moisture–like my gar­den retain­ing wall–will degrade quite a bit faster.

We’ll see whether this is a five-year solu­tion or one that will out­live me.

July 20 2008 | Categories: landscape design • my garden | Tags: J. Paul Getty Museum • planters • raised beds • Robert Irwin • rust • steel | 8 Comments »

garden lanterns

Here are a cou­ple cool wed­ding presents that we’re enam­ored with, a pair of solar-powered gar­den lanterns, a square bronze-colored one and a moss-toned teardrop shape.

Dur­ing the day­time, they’re beau­ti­ful gar­den orna­ments with their tra­di­tional sil­hou­ettes and del­i­cate col­ors. They soak up the sun’s rays to charge their bat­ter­ies, and then at night they let off a gen­tle bluish-white glow that lights up the lantern’s grace­ful out­line. Turns out one of the gifters, Sheila, an avid gar­dener that we hadn’t seen for years, now is involved with the web­site Isabella, where they’re available.

Here they are in the gar­den. I didn’t spend the hours to set up a cat­a­log shot, but I think you can get an idea of how great they look. The first shot is right before dusk show­ing the lanterns, the sec­ond after dusk, after the lanterns have turned them­selves on. The last image is the offi­cial cat­a­log shot.

 

Note that this blog isn’t a way to get you to click over to Ama­zon or other retail­ers to buy stuff. We gen­uinely liked this prod­uct. If they look cool to you and you’re hav­ing trou­ble decid­ing which style to pick, my rec­om­men­da­tion would be to go for the rounded shape if you have a lot of wind since it’s more aero­dy­namic. In a light breeze or a shel­tered loca­tion both would be good choices, and it actu­ally adds to the effect as they sway gen­tly.


 

July 19 2008 | Categories: my garden | Tags: garden ornament • lanterns • solar energy | 5 Comments »

chemistry, physics, biology

Here’s a cool art­work by Heather Ack­royd and Dan Har­vey that was fea­tured at the recent Wim­ble­don tennis-thing. It’s made of three pan­els of grass.

The sec­tions were grown in a dark­ened space under arti­fi­cial lights that pro­jected through pho­to­graphic neg­a­tives. The brighter the expo­sure, the richer the green color.

It’s the reverse prin­ci­ple at work as leav­ing a hose or board on your lawn for a week: When you pick up the hose or board you can see how the grass grew pale where it was deprived of sunlight.

So what would you call this art process? It’s basi­cally using light to effect a trans­for­ma­tion of some kind of mate­r­ial, and that’s pretty much the def­i­n­i­tion of photography.

Photography’s first rev­o­lu­tion was the abil­ity to use chem­i­cal processes to fix an image made by light–think of the pho­tog­ra­pher dis­ap­pear­ing into a dark­room with some unpromis­ing plates or film and com­ing back with a mag­i­cal image. Then the physics of turn­ing light sen­sors into elec­tri­cal impulses made chemistry-free imag­ing pos­si­ble, lead­ing to things like tele­vi­sion cam­eras and your cell­phone camera.

And now comes this process where the record­ing device is bio­log­i­cal. Of course, rely­ing on some­thing liv­ing and grow­ing, the result is any­thing but per­ma­nent, but that’s also one of the nice things about the pieces. Noth­ing lasts forever.

The grass art­work reminds me of Den­nis Oppenheim’s bril­liant 1970 pho­to­graphic per­for­mance, Read­ing Posi­tion for Sec­ond Degree Burn, where he leaves a book on his chest as the exposed parts of him sun­burn on the beach. The first pic­ture shows him at the begin­ning, with the book. In the sec­ond, hours later with the book removed, a sun­burn describes the area where the book pro­tected him.

Den­nis Oppen­heim. Read­ing Posi­tion for Sec­ond Degree Sun­burn. Chro­mogenic prints with applied text.

It’s just as much a “bio­log­i­cal pho­to­graph” as the Wim­ble­don piece. While the grass piece stuns most in its exe­cu­tion, the Oppen­heim piece, com­ing out of con­cep­tual art, buzzes with ideas and humor.

Next time you come back from the beach with untanned patches where your swim­suit shaded your body, why not con­sider your­self a walk­ing pho­to­graph?


[ Thanks to Landscape+Urbanism, where I first saw the Wim­ble­don grass pieces, and to Cre­ative Review, where I’ve linked. ]

July 18 2008 | Categories: art • gardening • photography | Tags: Dan Harvey • Dennis Oppenheim • grass • Heather Ackroyd • lawns • sunburns • suntans | 4 Comments »

who’s your daddy?

Last year we were star­ing at an awful lot of exposed soil while the plants in the new bed were fill­ing in slowly. To liven up the space we stuck almost a hun­dred lit­tle pan­sies into the ground.

Pan­sies are fairly short-lived annu­als for us, espe­cially as the weather heats up. After a cou­ple of freak­ish heat waves in early spring, with tem­per­a­tures up to 98 one day, the plants looked like hell, and so I pulled most of them. By that point they’d had a chance to set seed and drop some into the garden.

For the last sev­eral weeks, there’ve been lit­tle pansy seedlings com­ing up all over. Here’s the first one of them to bloom.

This plant came up in an area that had only been planted with small-flowered pure white pan­sies. But with laven­der swoosh­ing on the two upper petals it clearly shows char­ac­ter­is­tics of some of the pan­sies that were planted nearby. Some pol­li­na­tor prob­a­bly vis­ited one of the other pan­sies before stop­ping by the all-white one that set the seed. Who’s the father? The big white pan­sies with the pur­ple faces? The dark blue-purple vari­ety with the almost-black mask? I have no idea.

Since I’m no expert on pansy genet­ics, I sup­pose there’s even the pos­si­bil­ity that white hybrid pan­sies don’t come true to seed. But I bet on the hybridiza­tion scenario.

This lit­tle seedling didn’t come up in an ideal loca­tion, but I’ll def­i­nitely keep it. Pretty and del­i­cate, it looks noth­ing like what you find in the seed catalogs.

July 15 2008 | Categories: my garden | Tags: pansies • reseeding | 2 Comments »

i’ve been tagged!

Thanks to Mary Ann at Urban Gar­den Jour­nal, this blog has been tagged. Actu­ally, it’s the sec­ond time I’ve been tagged. (Thanks, In the Gar­den!) But I was swamped at the time and didn’t get a chance to respond. Also, I was even newer to blog­ging than I am now, and wasn’t famil­iar with the game of blog tag. In my occa­sion­ally over-cynical mind I mis­took it to be some sort of sus­pect blogger’s pyra­mid scheme. But in the mean­time I’ve real­ized it’s actu­ally a fun game and a ter­rific way to get to know more about your fel­low bloggers.

The rules as passed down to me from the two tag­gers are sim­ple, though the two sets of rules vary a bit. If I’ve tagged you, you can pick whichever ver­sion you like, or make up some­thing along these lines:

1. Once you have been tagged, in your blog you must list six (or ten) weird things, ran­dom facts, or habits about yourself.
2. In that same post, tag five (or six) other blog­gers, by link­ing to their blogs and writ­ing a lit­tle about why you’re tag­ging that blog.
3. Once you’ve done the above, you should leave a note on the blog of the per­son who tagged you. (That would be me.)
4. The per­son that is tagged can’t tag back the per­son who just tagged them.

So…some ran­dom­ness about me:

1. “Mulch” is one of my favorite words–not to gar­den with it, nec­es­sar­ily, just the sound of of the word.
2. My shoe size is 11.
3. When other chil­dren were want­ing to be fire­men or police offi­cers I was think­ing that I wanted to be a col­lege pro­fes­sor. I didn’t grow out of it until I was three years into a grad­u­ate pro­gram in music.
4. Though I enjoy nov­els, I read mostly non-fiction books.
5. The Four Cor­ners region of Ari­zona, New Mex­ico, Col­orado and Utah is prob­a­bly my favorite place on earth.
6. I love good chocolate.
7. In my teen years I appeared as an extra in Paul Bartel’s film, Death Race 2000.
8. I appre­ci­ate order, but I seem to attract chaos at least as much.
9. I have a big yel­low ocean kayak in the side yard that I haven’t taken out on the water in at least four years.
10. I don’t con­sider myself par­tic­u­larly inter­ested in pop­u­lar culture–I wouldn’t know a Brit­ney Spears if one jumped up from the side­walk and bit me on the butt–but I do enjoy Bravo TV’s Project Run­way and Top Chef real­ity shows, as well as the Daily Show.

And now for the blog­gers I’m tagging:

Gar­den His­tory Girl: Excel­lent insights into gar­dens today, informed by gar­dens past, as well as notes on cul­tural influ­ences that can influ­ence garden-making.

The Mid­night Gar­den: A blog­ger on Cape Cod enjoy­ing his gar­den and its seasons–as well as his morn­ing cups of coffee.

Gar­den Wise Guy: Always infor­ma­tive, usu­ally funny, some­times even a lit­tle snide–and com­ing from me that’s a com­pli­ment! You might not want your gar­den to appear on his blog…sometimes like a 10 worst-dressed list…

Land­scape + Urban­ism: A great roundup of things in the out­door urban­ism realm. Lots of fun ideas to steal and down-size for your own garden.

Pacha Mona: What’s it like to live and gar­den and cook with inter­est­ing ingre­di­ents in Costa Rica? This blog cap­tures the tex­tures and fla­vors of a place that’s on my “visit some­day” list.

Gar­den Porn: With a name like that what’s not to like? A fun read and some great spaces to boot.

There are more–lots more–that I enjoy and would have loved to have tagged. But I need to keep some in store for the next time I’m tagged. And if I haven’t tagged you but you’d like to play, please do! I’ll add you to my list here.

July 15 2008 | Categories: gardening • landscape design • rambles | Tags: blog tag • blogging | 4 Comments »

one perfect juniper

Sat­ur­day night I was at a gath­er­ing that included Michael Lund­gren, a pho­tog­ra­pher vis­it­ing from Ari­zona where he teaches and works. He’d brought along a port­fo­lio of prints from his Trans­fig­u­ra­tions series, images that will be included in his upcom­ing book by the same title to be pub­lished at the end of this year by Radius Books.

The pho­tographs in the series work together beau­ti­fully, mur­mur­ing softly to each other, echo­ing each other’s forms or tex­tures or moods. With bod­ies of inter­re­lated work like this it’s almost a shame to iso­late a sin­gle image. But books being what they are, you gen­er­ally have space on the front cover for just one, and the one that was picked for Trans­fig­u­ra­tions is a beauty.

So here we have a sin­gle, per­fect, amaz­ingly sym­met­ri­cal juniper tree on a lit­tle rise or ledge over­look­ing an expanse of desert. It feels like the end of the day, that spe­cial time when the land seems to glow from within, when the earth seems to gen­tly release its last reserves of the day’s light, like power dis­charg­ing from a bat­tery, as it pre­pares for night.

Peo­ple often think of the desert as a hos­tile world, but for plants like this juniper that are adapted to what the desert offers and demands, there’s no bet­ter home.

To see more images, visit Michael Lundgren’s site.

July 15 2008 | Categories: art • landscape • photography | Tags: desert plants • deserts • junipers • Michael Lundgren | 2 Comments »

red, red tomatoes

I’ve been wait­ing impa­tiently for my plant of the Early Girl tomato to bear fruit, and Sat­ur­day turned out to be the day. There were five in total, small­ish, but a beau­ti­ful red color, with just a flash of green on their shoul­ders. (Greg on Cape Cod also com­mented that this reputed early bearer was tak­ing its time for him as well.)

Here’s the loot from the Sat­ur­day: the first Early Girls, as well as some Mr. Stripeys.

They made for a tasty, quick black bean salad for lunch. But they really came into their own sliced up with some Moz­zarella di Bufala Cam­pana (a.k.a. buf­falo moz­zarella), olive oil, basil, pep­per and a smidge of salt–your basic cap­rese salad.

Sim­ple, uncom­pli­cated foods, fresh and deli­cious from the back yard. Sum­mer doesn’t get much bet­ter than this! If only I had some water buf­fa­los to make my own fresh cheese…

July 14 2008 | Categories: my garden | Tags: Early Girl tomato • food • Mr. Stripey tomato | 3 Comments »

nothing yellow

Last fall’s big plant­ing effort was a big raised bed of peren­ni­als, shrubs, bulbs, a tree fern and a tan­ger­ine tree, most of which went into the ground over the course of two months. While I don’t strive for total order in every­thing in my life, I was wor­ried that assem­bling a bed of so many dif­fer­ent kinds of plants all at once might quickly lead to total chaos, some­thing on the order of those “color bowls” that they sell at nurs­eries and home stores.

(Okay, yes, some color bowls are well done and actu­ally quite nice, but the worst are tossed-together plant com­bi­na­tions that pro­vide work for the color-blind and are the gar­den equiv­a­lent of mak­ing your­self a cafe­te­ria plate of spaghetti, frozen yogurt, fried chicken, and creamed corn, all mixed together and doused with ketchup and caramel sauce.)

To help tame the poten­tial dis­or­der I set myself one basic orga­niz­ing prin­ci­ple: Noth­ing yel­low (and only small doses of orange).

I have noth­ing against the color yel­low, and in fact I have yel­low all over the gar­den. But I wanted to cre­ate a quiet zone with sooth­ing col­ors that would har­mo­nize with each other. Also, one of my least favorite gar­den color com­bi­na­tions is the mix of yel­low flow­ers with gray foliage. Ban­ish­ing yel­low would let me fea­ture plants with inter­est­ing gray foliage. Still, even after ditch­ing yel­low and most oranges, it still leaves reds and pur­ples and whites and pinks and blues–and of course the all-important green!

But once a year, for a cou­ple weeks, the color scheme will fall apart as a clus­ter of kahili gin­ger break into bloom with spec­tac­u­lar and amaz­ingly fra­grant spikes of yel­low flow­ers. There’ll be noth­ing else yel­low in that part of the gar­den, and your eye will go right to the lewdly sen­su­ous rule­break­ers. Once that quick phi­lan­der off the color wheel passes, though, the gar­den will return to its for­mer order. Only now it’ll be enriched by heady mem­o­ries of its brief indis­cre­tion. (Hmmm, sounds like a few plot lines I’ve encountered…)

Speak­ing of orga­niz­ing some­thing around the absence of cer­tain col­ors–and things with plot lines, John and I were watch­ing some of the bonus fea­tures on the DVD of The Hours. In one of them the cos­tume and pro­duc­tion design­ers were talk­ing about how they arrived at a rule to help pull together the look of the film: Noth­ing red, and noth­ing blue. Partly as a result of that orga­niz­ing prin­ci­ple the film sus­tains its earth-bound mood­i­ness as the plot hops decades and moves back and forth from Eng­land to New York to California.

So…whether you’re plan­ning a gar­den or shoot­ing a movie, remem­ber: Pay atten­tion to the power of color!

July 13 2008 | Categories: my garden | Tags: color • color combinations | 2 Comments »