[ Lost in the Landscape ]

some plant ideas to borrow

Last weekend’s Los Ange­les trip included a short stop by the Getty Museum in Brentwood.

I’d posted ear­lier about their exhibit fea­tur­ing botan­i­cal illus­tra­tions by Maria Sibylla Mer­ian that con­tin­ues through the end of August. It was a com­pact, intense show with art­work by Mer­ian and her con­tem­po­raries, along with exam­ples of some of the ear­li­est illus­trated botan­i­cal books.


Unfor­tu­nately it was one of those thou-shalt-not-photograph exhi­bi­tions, so I had to be con­tent with snap­ping these two for-sale prints in the kiosk out­side the gal­leries. Mer­ian was inter­ested in plants, but even more so in the crit­ters that live in them. Here you see var­i­ous creepy crawlies cavort­ing with the plant life.

When vis­it­ing a place like the Getty it’s easy to get over­whelmed with the sheer unap­proach­able­ness of every­thing you see–the Acropolis-like site, the billion-plus dol­lar con­struc­tion bud­get, the irre­place­able art­works. But look­ing around the grounds there are all sorts of cool details that would be at home in a back yard plant­ing or patio project.

Here are some of the plant­i­ngs that I thought were cool. Some were in the Robert Irwin-designed Cen­tral Gar­den, oth­ers were around the museum grounds that were designed by the land­scape archi­tec­tural firm of Olin Part­ner­ship. (The best piece I’ve run across on the Web about the less famous gar­den plant­i­ngs was in, of all places, The Aus­tralian Human­i­ties Review.)

Many of the shady plant­i­ngs under­neath the plant­ing of Lon­don plane trees use light-colored foliage to make the plants pop in the shade. It’s a tech­nique that you read about a lot–but it works won­ders. Here’s a nice com­bi­na­tion of light-color suc­cu­lents.


Again in the shade, here are some plants with green-and-white var­ie­gated foliage, includ­ing a New Zealand flax.


And the last of these shade pic­tures, a plant­ing fea­tur­ing a chartreuse-leaved oxalis species. John thought it looked a lit­tle ane­mic, but I thought it was pretty cool.


Out of the shade, a plant­ing of con­trast­ing foliage col­ors can be a great accent. Here the plant­ing avoids green alto­gether, and com­bines plants pre­dom­i­nat­ing with red and yel­low tones, includ­ing the “Sticks of Fire” clone of the evil pen­cil tree.


In a gar­den with a large num­ber of dif­fer­ent plants it helps to have zones with less con­trast. Here a long, curv­ing row of pink crape myr­tles were bloom­ing over an extended bed of var­ie­gated soci­ety gar­lic bloom­ing with their lavender-pink flow­ers.


Mass plant­i­ngs don’t have to go into rows or grids. Here’s my favorite plant­ing on the entire prop­erty, a seem­ingly ran­dom arrange­ment of golden bar­rel cac­tus. The arrange­ment is infor­mal, but it’s as much a prod­uct of human inter­ven­tion as some­thing that’s overtly geo­met­ri­cal. The Robert Irwin-designed Cen­tral Gar­den draws most of the vis­i­tors, but this area is the most spec­tac­u­lar to my eyes.


If you have a billion-dollar view most peo­ple decide to chop down all the plants between you and the view. Here, the almost-transparent, unob­tru­sive, but still dra­matic spent flower stalks of these var­ie­gated cen­tury plants (Agave amer­i­cana ‘Mar­ginata’) actu­ally helps com­plete the view, giv­ing focus to what would be a run-of-the-mill spec­tac­u­lar view of the West Side of L.A. The actual flow­ers on these sculp­tural inflo­res­cences died months ago, and the stalks are actu­ally black and not green. But they’re cool as all get out–So why not leave them be?


Plant­i­ngs soften a lot of the hard geo­met­ri­cal edges. Here some pros­trate rose­mary cas­cades over the hard edge of the traver­tine wall.


And here, the baby’s tears grow­ing between the rough traver­tine squares soft­ens the tran­si­tion from human hard-edged geom­e­try to the softer forms of the vin­ing Boston ivy.

Next post I’ll share some of my favorite details from the hard­scape around the Getty.

August 28 2008 04:30 am | Categories: gardening • landscape design | Tags: foliage plants • J. Paul Getty Museum • plant combinations • shade • shade plants

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