Archive for February, 2009
On my recent Chicago visit I had the chance to stop by Frank Lloyd Wright’s landmark 1909-1911 Robie House in the Hyde Park neighborhood. Unfortunately the foundation that runs it was in the middle of a major renovation inside. Even through we were on an architectural tour the only way to view the interior on this day was stand outside and peer inside through the stained glass windows.
Ooh… (Looking inside, off the second story porch into the nearly finished space…)
Uhhh… (The ground floor, still in the throes of renovation…)
Once we got that out of our system we had to concentrate on the exterior of the building and the gardens. I could think of worse things to have to do.
A pair of side gates opens up to an auto court with a small garden on the side. It was winter and the plantings weren’t any too spectacular this time of year, but the hardscape details were worth a close look.
The thin, wide bricks of the house and garden walls all feature this neat little detail: The mortar between the courses is the typical light mortar color, but the horizontal spaces between the bricks uses a red-colored mortar. The effect is that you notice horizontal bands and not the individual bricks. The house swoops sideways towards the horizon, and the walls do the same, celebrating the ever-expanding horizontal prairie that makes up the Midwest.
Several of the corners of the porches feature these stylized urns. Instead of the chubby Roman models, Wright has designed them to swoop sideways just like the house and walls do.
And there are several of these planters that explode with color in the summer. But now…well, not so green. The story goes that Wright designed these planters without drainage—something that comes as no surprise from an architect who was obsessed with form over function and notorious for creating houses with leaky roofs and suspended terraces that sagged under their own weight.
As I reviewed the photos from the Robie House, though, there’s one thing that starts to gnaw on me. Though it doesn’t look huge, it’s still something like 9000 square feet if you count the outdoor terraces. All the outdoor spaces seemed squeezed in there. Was this a space-intensive urban use of a small lot? Or was it a hundred-year-old McMansion? Even if that, it’s pretty cool as McMansions go…
February 28 2009 | Categories: art • gardening • landscape • landscape design • photography • places | Tags: architecture • brick • Chicago • concrete • Frank Lloyd Wright • garden walls • planters • Robie House • walls | 8 Comments »
I’m not sure what I was expecting out of Chicago’s Lurie Garden in the middle of February.
The core of the garden is a space concentrating on perennials planted by Piet Oudolf, and the winter garden was defined by what perennials do in the winter. Even though Oudolf has selected plants that maintain strong profiles into the winter, the garden looks like it’s seen better days. But really, that’s the outlook that the designer brings to the garden: Things change. Plants grow, bloom, die back. (Oudolf’s book Designing with Plants, after all, even has a chapter called “Death.” What feel-good garden book would even dare to acknowledge such a thing?)
The path through the heart of the garden was off-limits—I guess they were worried about people slipping and falling on the frozen walkways. Still, you can experience the garden’s perimeter with the Chicago skyline behind it. There you see the died back remains of last year’s growth: tall, dark spires of foxglove relatives (probably Digitalis ferruginea or parviflora); light brown clumps of various grasses; delicate, expressive curtains of burnet (Sanguisorba officianalis alba).
No gardener can begin to know every plant on earth, so I’m depending on my identification on the garden’s terrific plant list that you can find online and on what I know from Oudolf’s books to be some of his favorite plants. (Actually, the Plant Life of the Lurie Garden pages have not only plant lists, but photos and cultural tips on most of the plants in the garden. It got to be one of the most impressive online guides to a garden.)
Although probably most famous in the garden community for the perennial plantings, the Lurie Garden was actually overseen by Kathryn Gustafson (with other members of her firm, Gustafson, Guthrie, Nicholand) with input from artist/set designer Robert Israel. Gustafson contributed the overall landscape design, while Israel is credited with the “conceptual review,” signalling that this is a garden of ideas as much as it is a garden of plantings.
The central garden features two sections, a “light plate” and a “dark plate,” representing tectonic geological forces. (Kustafson’s office is in Portland, Israel is based in Los Angeles. Both are locations where people think more about geological movement than they do here in Chicago.) Protecting the garden on two sides is this giant armature that will mature into a hedge that represents Chicago as the city of “broad shoulders,” as made famous in Carl Sandburg’s 1916 poem, “Chicago.”
With Oudolf’s plants now retreating into the ground or only defined by ghosts of themselves, it’s Gustafson’s contribution that you notice most in the middle of winter. The curious structure of dark steel with dark metal cables looks like a zoo pen containing tightly planted alternating blocks of different arborvitae varieties and deciduous hornbeam and European beech. One of the deciduous trees is interesting in that it that holds on to its leaves through the winter. As the year progresses, I can see the deciduous plants leafing out at different times, reducing the contrast between the evergreens and the broadleaf trees.
The effect of the caged greenery is an odd effect, for sure. Any clipped hedge talks about the control of nature, and to put nature in a cage like this, like a botanical zoo, reinforces that almost violent act. It’s not a “pretty” effect, and I’m not sure I love it. But it catches my interest and reinforces this as a garden of ideas.
In the end I guess my reaction to the Lurie Garden in February is similar to what I feel when I hold a dormant bulb. I can appreciate the thing in its current state, but it’s the hope and knowledge of what it can do that really keeps me interested. It’s not really fair to try to give it a fair read in the middle of winter. Too bad I won’t be back every couple of months to check on its progress.
If staring at died-down perennials and caged shrubbery isn’t your cup of java, all you need to do to cross the street to the Art Institute of Chicago. There you’ll find all sorts of amazing artwork celebrating warm, green landscapes, including this lily pond by Monet…
…and this Tahitian landscape by Gaughin.
Paintings and so much of what humans do is all about permanence and things not changing. We purposefully make things that resist change, whether it’s paint that doesn’t fade or Twinkies that will probably remain as edible in three decades as they are today. The garden across the street celebrates what does change.
Give the garden just a few months. The perennials will be spectacular once spring gets going. And the “hedge” will fill in over the next decade and read more like a hedge than a zoo exhibit.
When you’re visiting the Lurie Garden you’ll be just a few dozen steps from Frank Gehry’s brawny new shell for pops concerts on a lawn covered by this lattice trellis structure.
And then there’s this sculpture by Anish Kapoor titled “The Cloud Gate”—which the locals have dubbed “the bean.” It’s major fun to walk around its concave and convex surfaces that give you this cool, distorted reflection of the skyline.
With its convex exterior and concave interior, this is artwork that will make you look fat, a fact that this self-portrait can attest to…
I’m not sure whether it was intentional, but the Gehry bandshell and the Kapoor sculpture and the shoulder hedge of the garden all feature steel—a material that makes possible the skyline that rises around them. Chicago without steel? Unthinkable.
And now, Chicago without the Lurie Garden, the Gehry bandshell and the Kapoor Cloud Gate? Unthinkable, as well.
February 27 2009 | Categories: art • gardening • landscape design • places | Tags: Anish Kapoor • architecture • Art Institute of Chicago • Chicago • Frank Gehry • hedges • Lurie Garden • Millennium Park • Piet Oudolf • steel | 5 Comments »
It’s winter here in Chicago alright. There wasn’t much snow on the ground when I arrived, but a quick look at the leafless trees and a quick duck outside didn’t leave any confusion that it’s any season other than winter. I’ve been pretty busy attending a conference, but I did manage to take a little architectural tour the other day with some of the other conferees.
Here’s a nice house in the Hyde Park neighborhood as seen from the bus. Notice the wintry-looking bare trees. Brrrr, cold, said the California blogger.
Though nice, the house isn’t a major architectural landmark. However, as of last month, it became an important historical one: This is the non-White House residence of Barack Obama. Actually, it’s the side of the house. The road on the front side has been sealed off by the Secret Service.
That in part sums up the experience of visiting here in the winter. There’s a lot of stuff that would be really interesting—if only it were open. Or you see stuff that’s maybe not looking its best.
Still, there are at least a couple bloggable things I’ve run across that I’ll be posting after I return home. If only this were May, when the gardens are looking more extravagant and the garden bloggers will be convening for their Spring Fling…
February 21 2009 | Categories: gardening • places | Tags: Barack Obama • Chicago • Hyde Park • seasons • winter | 4 Comments »
A house down the street has had a contractor’s truck parked outside of it for a while now. The owner said she’s remodeling the kitchen and bath. Not any time too soon, according to John, who during our last time in the house noticed that those rooms oozed the stuff that 1975 was made of: fabulous 70s modern appliances, woodgrained formica, beige tile floors. There’s nothing wrong with any of these materials, but the rooms looked like they were sealed in a time capsule, an easy thing to happen to rooms that are so expensive to remodel.
Some gardens around town seem to have the same aura about them. You sense that the garden was planted all at once—probably by a pickup truck landscaper—from what was available and fashionable and considered reliable at the time. Decades later the plantings will look untouched—the same plants in the same places (often planted too close together or too near a house). Things might be pruned a little, or there might be a mature row of something with a missing plant. But otherwise untouched.
I tend to think of gardens as evolutionary projects, especially when they’re in the hands of curious gardeners. It’s always a bit of a shock to see one of these botanical time capsules. Commercial plantings seem to be the worst offenders. Here, to the right, is a lovely pairing of melaleucas with iceplant at the local EZ-Lube that seems pickled in about 1983.
So which plants shout that they’re from a certain decade? I tried to sort that out based on what you see in Southern California. (Other climates will have their own characteristic plants.)
This is just a quick and impressionistic draft that’s based on when plants were cheaply available and most popular, not necessarily when they were introduced. Many of them are still commonly available today and are hardy, worthwhile choices for the garden. Others have turned out to be invasive disasters that have prompted nurseries to stop carrying them.
I’m sure I’ve misplaced a few plants by a decade or two. You must have additions of your own!
1960s
- Hollywood Twisted Juniper (Juniperus chinensis ‘Torulosa’). “Hollywood” and “twisted” somehow seen to go together nicely… My mother coveted them, and I still think they’re pretty wild and crazy plants. Of course in the 1960s and 1970s, the junipers were a lot smaller than this.
- Italian Cypress (Cupressus sempervirens). The house my parents purchased in 1968 had two little plants of these flanking a window. When we moved out of that house they weren’t so little…
- Arborvitae (Thuja sp.)
- Japanese Pittosporum, Japanese Mock Orange (Pittosporum tobira)
- Japanese Gray-bark Elm, Japanese Zelkova (Zelkova serrata). These go back years, but there were lots of street plantings in 1950s and 1960s suburbs.
And speaking of zelkovas, my neighborhood had hundreds of them as street plantings. Eventually they began lifting the sidewalks, and then grew up into the power lines. One by one the owners took out the trees. Then, the city took out the power lines and put them underground, about the same time they repaired the sidewalks. We have a few of the trees left.
1970s
- Oleander (Nerium oleander), shown here in a freeway planting down the hill from me. They’re hardly ever planted anymore. Although drought-tolerant, they can get bad scale infestations. The nail in the coffin for this plant, though, was the fact that they’re poisonous if ingested or burned.
- Natal Plum (Carissa macrocarpa)
- Iceplant (various species), some are considered invasive in Southern California
- Variegated Japanese Euonymus (Euonymus japonicus ‘Aureo-marginatus’)
- Melaleuca, Paperbark Tree (Melaleuca quinquenervia), now on the federal invasive plant list and the scourge of many states
Here’s a transitional 1960s-1970s planting at the bank down the street. More twisted junipers, paired here with natal plum.
1980s
1990s
- Mexican Feather Grass (Stipa or Nassella tenuissima), now quickly moving onto many people’s lists of obnoxious if not invasive plants. I started with two and now have half a dozen. I’d have thousands if I didn’t pull out a couple dozen seedlings every week! This is the parking strip of a neighbor a few blocks away who probably put in one or two plants herself.
- Lavenders (Lavendula sp.)—I still have one of these.
- Blue Fescue (Festuca ovina glauca)—and several of these…
- Kangaroo Paw (Anigozanthus sp.)
2000s
- ???????
What plants will the future decide define the Bush decade? What sturdy plants are the nurseries offering that will run their course as people get tired of them or the plant’s invasive potential are revealed? For one, I’m seeing a lot of Cordyline australis. I like these a lot, but they suddenly seem to be planted everywhere, many in locations where they look good as two-foot adolescents but will quickly outgrow their spots. And there are cheap queen palms (Syagrus romanzoffiana) going into the ground everywhere.
I’m sure there are dozens more.
February 19 2009 | Categories: gardening • landscape design | Tags: heirloom plants • invasive plants • popular plants | 15 Comments »
If I gave out awards to my neighbors for beautifying their public spaces, this house would definitely win one of them.
This is their garden wall right next to the front sidewalk. It’s topped with attractive latticework, but what’s special is the tile below. Gray field tiles give way to a central area of colorful glass mosaics. Glass tile has been catching on for indoor use, but it can make a most excellent statement outdoors.
If there’s a down-side to this project, it’s the disconnect between the hardscape and the green materials. You can see that the horsetails have already started to spread throughout the strip. Within just a few years you won’t be able to see the glass tiles. And that cute little agave planted up against the wall. Yikes! That’ll be a big monster before you know it, fighting it out with the horsetails in a mess of planting.
My advice? Lose the agave. It’s a beaucoup spectacular plant, especially when it blooms. But this is just about the wrongest place to put it. And lose the horsetails, too. Their upright geometry has always appealed to me, but they spread like syrup on a pancake.
Southern-hemisphere restios are starting to become more commonly available, and they have a striking vertical architecture that would be a worthy replacement for the horsetails—visually between a grass and a horsetail in appearence, depending on the species. A couple clumps of it in front of the wall would let you see around and through the plants, and the plants wouldn’t stray far from the base of the leaves.
Two good choices for this spot in the three-foot range: Chondropetalum tectorum and Thamnochortus bachmannii. The first is getting to be available many places. (The photo to the left is from San Marcos Growers, who distributes it to nurseries.) The second…well, I’m growing some from seed right now as I write this…
February 17 2009 | Categories: gardening • landscape design | Tags: equisetum • garden walls • glass tile • hardscape • horsetails • restios | 5 Comments »
Speaking of topiary, this is the clipped hedge of a neighbor down the street. Another neighbor—one who happens to design cars—thought it looked a bit like some vintage vehicle or roadster.
Well, now that you mention it…
February 16 2009 | Categories: gardening | Tags: hedges • topiary | 4 Comments »
May Dreams Gardens has been hosting the Garden Blogger’s Bloom Day for a while now. This is my first go at it, with a big sampling of what’s blooming in the back yard garden right now. Several of the shots are of the same plant, so it might seem like there’s more in bloom than might first appear: When life gives you fewer flowers, you look at each one closer!
In the photos above are:
- Ranunculus Tecolote (white)
- Oxalis purpurea (white form)
- Oxalis, random self-sown hybrid
- Salvia nemerosa ‘Snow Hills’
- Alysum that has self-sown from a planting 15 or more years ago. The originals were white and purple. The new ones come all-white, or mixtures of white and purple
- African daisy (arctotis hybrids)
- Blue-eyed grass (Sisyrinchium bellum)
- Solanum pyracanthum
- Cestrum fasciculatum ‘Newellii’
- Mother of thousands (Kalanchoe daigremontiana)
- Protea Pink Ice
- Melampodium Derby
- Aeonium species
- Your basic calla lily (Zantedeschia aethiopica)
- Euphorbia lambii, in bud
- Euphorbia characias subsp. wulfenii
- Mizuna, escaped from a vegetable garden planting 10+ years ago
- Alpine strawberry
- Hopi red dye amaranth
- Heliotrope
- Bird of paradise
- Epidendrum orchids (red, orange)
I have a few cool California natives beginning to flower in the front yard, and I’ll post more of them soon.
February 15 2009 | Categories: gardening • my garden | Tags: flowers • Garden Bloggers Bloom Day • gbbd • in bloom | 15 Comments »
A couple of topiary-related reports dropped into my consciousness over the last few days.
First, I think it was hort.net that passed on a sighting of a roadside vegetative formation that resembled a giant chicken. The photo was published in the Telegraph, and was purportedly a naturally occurring plant in Cambridgeshire that had managed to grow itself into a sorta-chicken shape. [ source ]
I could swear it was the English subspecies of the chicken that I posted on a couple months ago, a local topiary creation in the Pacific Beach neighborhood here in San Diego:
And then I was reading an interview with Yelp.com’s local San Diego’s manager. When asked what his favorite weird thing on Yelp was, he piped up that it had to be this gonzo bit of topiary in the Mission Hills neighborhood of town. Although it’s only a few miles from where I live, the house is a little off the beaten track, and I’ve never been by it.
This picture is by Amy C., off the Yelp site. [ source ]
And for a more immersive and interactive look, check out Google Street Views.
Or better yet, visit the house at 3549 Union Street. I’ll be paying a visit soon myself. There will be pictures.
It’s such a great mishmash of geometrical shapes and gunslingers and real and imagined creatures, and as it stands it’s a great piece of folk art. (Could it be inspired by the topiary at Longwood Gardens in Pennsylvania?)
But I could having all sorts of fun with the basic idea: maybe using several kinds of plants, or refining the shapes into more definite forms and layering a more fanatical sense of order that you see in a lot of topiary. But whatever you do it’d be a shame to lose the sense of humor and barely-controlled chaos of the original!
February 14 2009 | Categories: gardening • landscape design | Tags: Cambridgeshire • San Diego • topiary | 6 Comments »
Here are a few more selections that you might find interesting from American Perceptions of Immigrant and Invasive Species: Strangers on the Land, by Peter Coates, published in 2006.
Before Columbus brought seeds and cuttings along on his second voyage to the West Indies, North America was home to less than 1 percent of the world’s total complement of cereals, starches, fruits, and vegetables.
Today, the only crops of significant commercial value native to the territory that became the United States are cranberry, blueberry, pecan nut, sugar maple, sunflower, and tobacco—a fact that offers eloquent testimony to the great service that has been duly rendered by a sting of public-spirited Americans…
No American public servant since [Thomas] Jefferson deserves more credit for transforming the foreign into the common than David G. Fairchild. In his capacity as agricultural explorer in charge at the Section for Foreign Seed and Plant Introduction from 1898 until 1928, Fairchild brought the navel orange to Florida and California from Brazil and oversaw the introduction of Italy’s seedless grape and China’s dry land pistachio. His most notable contributions, however, were in the introduction of the Chinese soybean and…the tree that became an essential prop of Washington, D.C.’s monumental landscape, adorning the Tidal Basin: the Japanese flowering cherry tree.
Fairchild’s encounters with the infamous vine that “ate the South”…left him somewhat chastened. He first came across kudzu about 1900 while touring Japan, where this wild, semiwoody perennial was fed to livestock. In his autobiography he recalled a visit to a “kudzu enthusiast” in Chipley, Florida, who was renowned for singing its praises as a forage crop in the early 1900s, despite his neighbors’ distrust. “Whenever I think of that night’s talk with the kudzu pioneer,” recalled Fairchild, “I have a special feeling of pride in what might be called our American willingness to try something new, whether it be a new forage crop, a new food, or any one of a thousand new, machine-made gadgets.” Fairchild, who confessed that “perhaps I have an undue passion for the new,” retained his faith in kudzu for quite some time, despite its proclivity to spread at will. By the late 1930s, however he was expressing his growing reservations in print. The seeds he brought back from Japan and planted on his property in Florida “‘took’ with a vengeance, smothering everything they got onto, and pretty soon we became alarmed. Feeling that the kudzu was too much for us, we began to cut it out.”
Fairchild finally returned home, so to speak, in 1946, when invited to make his selection for the “My Favorite Tree” guest column in the journal of the American Forestry Association (the nation’s oldest conservation organization, founded in 1875). After mentioning a string of exotic also-rans, but discarding them as unsatisfactory, he recalled that he had seen his first grove of California coastal redwoods (Sequoia sempervirens) fairly late in life, at a time when he was still besotted with exotic Asiatic promise: “A feeling of utter paralysis overtook me and the passion for planting trees, my puny little trees, anywhere, became distasteful.”
The stories in the book are great, and the social commentary is compelling. Unfortunately, every now and then a botanical clinker drops into the book’s pages, such as the one that follows the quote on redwoods immediately above, where the author waxes, “Though the redwood is only really found in California (there is a tiny patch in the most southwesterly corner of Oregon), it is arguably more American than any other tree in the United States insofar as it has no relatives, near or distant, in any other country.” Like, um, what about the Chinese dawn redwood (Metasequoia glyptostroboides)?
Okay, this isn’t a book you read for the botany, but it’s a worthy and thoughtful work on plants and the human condition, perfect for late winter reading as you contemplate the impending blooming of your cherry trees.
Although it’s primarily about biological immigrants to North America, Peter Coates points occasionally out that the immigrant-carrying boats sailed both directions:
The native oaks of Britain and the United States were greatly admired by J.C. Loudon, a leading British horticulturist of the mid-nineteenth century. He pronounced them “the most beautiful of trees.” Yet exotic trees had already become a mandatory ingredient of the “polite” British landscape enclosed within private estates. Loudon himself was one of the trendsetters who insisted that, notwithstanding the oak’s charms, “no residence in the modern style can have a claim to be considered as laid out in good taste, in which all the trees and shrubs employed are not either foreign ones, or improved varieties of indigenous ones.
The most sought-after of these arboreal exotics were hardy North Americans. Britons were ruthlessly condescending toward American artistic achievements at this time. “In the four quarters of the globe,” Sydney Smith famously inquired [in 1820], “who reads an American book?” or goes to an American play” or looks at an American picture or statue?” Yet no one asked “who plants an American tree?”
February 10 2009 | Categories: gardening • landscape • landscape design • quotes | Tags: Add new tag • agriculture • books • David G. Fairchild • exotics • invasive plants • kudzu • native plants • Peter Coates • trees | 3 Comments »
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