on the road: cornerstone sonoma

The big gar­den des­ti­na­tion for the Sonoma County week­end ended up being Cor­ner­Stone Sonoma. Imag­ine a giant gar­den show with totally unre­lated demon­stra­tion gar­dens lined up next to each other in their own stalls like some big hor­ti­cul­tural pet­ting zoo. But instead of nice-but-not-so-interesting gar­dens assem­bled by local land­scap­ers, you have some really strik­ing spaces put together by some of the big­ger names in the land­scape archi­tec­ture field.

Cornerstone Flying Fence

Find­ing the place isn’t hard–Jenny was along for the out­ing and had brought her GPS. We fol­lowed the nice, polite direc­tions of the GPS unit until we got close. The Cor­ner­Stone lit­er­a­ture says to look for the white picket fence as a sign that you’ve arrived. This is CornerStone’s take on a white picket fence, and it’s good prepa­ra­tion for what you’ll find there.

Cornerstone shopping yardphenalia

Like many des­ti­na­tions in Sonoma, Cor­ner­stone com­bines wine tast­ing oppor­tu­ni­ties (4 vine­yards), with chances to get a bite to eat, and places to shop for gifts or things for your gar­den. How are you set for some rus­tic archi­tec­tural details to set into your landscaping?

Cornerstone mermaids

Maybe your koi pond needs some mer­maids? (John wanted one of these very badly.)

Cornerstone flowerbeds 1

The facil­ity has some pleas­ant lawn spaces with flowerbeds of cool­ing pur­ples and blues and whites that were being set up for some social event.

Cornerstone Oehme va Sweden 1

But what sets this place apart are the main gar­dens in the back. And of all of them it’s hard not to love this one by Oehme & van Swe­den, the Gar­den of Contrasts.

Cornerstone Oehme va Sweden 6

Big, sturdy agaves con­trast with soft grasses that move in the wind.

Cornerstone Oehme va Sweden 3

As the sea­sons change, plants move in and out of promi­nence in this plant­ing. Here are the last Cal­i­for­nia pop­pies of the sea­son planted in the grasses.

Cornerstone Ken SMith Daisy Border

This one might be a lit­tle harder to love–or at least it was for me, Ken Smith’s Daisy Bor­der. From the astro­turf to the plas­tic tubes to the plas­tic flow­ers, there’s noth­ing alive in this “plant­ing.” But I sup­pose it’s nat­u­ral­is­tic in the sense that some of the daisies in this bor­der look pretty good, while oth­ers seem the worse for wear because of what the ele­ments (and prob­a­bly small vis­i­tors) have done to them. Who ever has a bor­der where every sin­gle plant is metic­u­lously well-groomed?

Cornerstone Greenlee river of grasses

John Green­lee cre­ated a soft, rolling plant­ing that con­sists entirely of grasses, his Mediter­ranean Meadow. Peo­ple do all-grass plant­i­ngs all the time–call it “lawn.” But it’s a brave thing to do a gar­den with all sorts of con­trast­ing grasses. Here a low river of fes­cue runs through the plantings.

Cornerstone Greenlee mixed grasses

Taller, stiffer grasses (edit: or are these restios?) line the “banks” of the river.

Cornerstone Greenlee mixed grasses 2

I wish this scene pho­tographed bet­ter than it did. The fore­ground fea­tures soft seed heads of a short grass, with a more archi­tec­tural species planted on the top of the low mound.

This and so many of the other gar­dens were bub­bling over with all sorts of ideas you could repur­pose in another gar­den set­ting. I’ll share more scenes from Cor­ner­Stone in the next post.

August 22 2009 05:00 am | Categories: gardening • landscape design | Tags: • • • • • •

5 Responses to “on the road: cornerstone sonoma”

  1. Alice Joyce on 22 Aug 2009 at 6:42 am #

    Ah, James,
    Here you are in my back­yard, and what a coin­ci­dence! I’m up early this morn­ing in order to drop by Cor­ner­stone to pho­to­graph John’s grass plant­i­ngs for a fea­ture I’m writ­ing. Any chance you’ll return to Sonoma for The Late Show Gar­dens in Sep­tem­ber at Cor­ner­stone?
    You might be inter­ested in the new Greenlee/Holt book. I reviewed it recently for fall pub­li­ca­tion: The Amer­i­can Meadow Gar­den: Its impact should be con­sid­er­able for any­one think­ing about replac­ing a lawn, or want­ing to learn about how grasses grow in var­i­ous cli­mates.
    Your GPS served you well! Sorry it did not detour after this jour­ney, and arrive at my front gate. Alice

  2. George on 22 Aug 2009 at 5:53 pm #

    Alice, is there a link for the review you wrote? We want to replace our lawn and this book sounds worth­while. (sorry to use your blog as a chat room, Jim!)

  3. Alice Joyce on 22 Aug 2009 at 6:48 pm #

    George,
    It will appear in the Amer­i­can Library Jour­nal ‘Book­list’ in a fall issue.
    Prob­a­bly will be quoted on the Tim­ber Press Web site (pubisher) & Amazon.com often links to my reviews. I may fea­ture in on Bay Area Ten­drils Gar­den Travel, too.

  4. lostlandscape on 24 Aug 2009 at 6:59 pm #

    Alice, so that’s where you are! Small world. The Late Show Gar­dens sounds won­der­ful, but I’ve done my trip before the year’s seri­ous gar­den­ing starts up… I’ll have to check out the new grass book, though. A trip to the library or book­store is a quicker detour than back to Sonoma.

    George, I’m glad to see you try­ing some­thing so green. It’ll be a big project, but worth it. We lost the front yard ca. 1990 and haven’t regret­ted it. And the back­yard is approach­ing a postage stamp size.

  5. DryStoneGarden » Blog Archive » The Late Show Gardens at Cornerstone Sonoma on 24 Sep 2009 at 7:54 am #

    […] lead­ing land­scape archi­tects.” Lostinthe­Land­scape has pho­tos from a recent visit here and here. The Late Show Gar­dens, “the lat­est in design every fall,” is the new fall […]

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