[ Lost in the Landscape ]

no drought in these gardens

After liv­ing with drought for the last sev­eral years it’s refresh­ing to take a look at some gar­dens where water appears as an unlim­ited resource. Last weekend’s L.A. Times Home sec­tion fea­tured an arti­cle on iwagumi, the art of aquas­cap­ing. Take a Japan­ese gar­den aes­thetic, only apply it to a fish­tank, and you have a basic take on iwagumi.

Above: Luis Car­los Galar­raga, Sao Paulo Brazil, “When the rocks flow.” [ source ]

Each year the Aquatic Gar­den­ers Asso­ci­a­tion hosts a com­pe­ti­tion for pho­tographs of these care­fully planted tanks. (This year’s con­test dead­line is Sep­tem­ber 30.) Con­tes­tants have to apply the same design sense that they’d need to work with in a gar­den on land. But instead of the famil­iar plants of the ter­res­trial realm, they’re using aquatic species, most fre­quently plant­ing them among an assort­ment of strik­ing stones. In these gar­dens the del­i­cate crea­tures over­head aren’t birds, but fish.

The image above and the two below are medium-sized tanks from last year’s com­pe­ti­tion. Click on the “source” link and you’ll be taken to the page where you’ll see more images of each project, along with com­ments from the competition’s judges. It’s a very spe­cial­ized aes­thetic that they’re employ­ing in the scor­ing, but the com­ments are inter­est­ing to read with a grain of salt, and might give you ideas on how to play with plants and space in gar­dens that live on the other side of the water table.

Above: Mélisse Moireau, Sar­celles France, “Grass­land sun­set.” [ source ]

Above: Michal Paster­nak, Krakow Poland, “Sun­set.” [ source ]

Since we’re air-breathing crea­tures these tanks trans­port us to a realm where we nor­mally don’t have an oppor­tu­nity to look at in any detail. They remind me a lot of the pho­tog­ra­phy of Karen Glaser, a Chicago pho­tog­ra­pher that I had a chance to exhibit with a few years back in a group show here in town at the Museum of Pho­to­graphic Arts. Much of Karen’s work is taken under­wa­ter, in the oceans or in swamps. Her mag­i­cal, mys­te­ri­ous work is noth­ing like the clichés that make up most other under­wa­ter photography.

This image: Karen Glaser: Dust Storm in Cat­fish Sink, 2006, Pig­ment Print on Hah­nemühle Photo Rag, 37x25in.

Check out her web­site for lots more exam­ples of her beau­ti­ful work.

September 25 2009 | Categories: art • gardening • landscape design | Tags: aquariums • aquatic plants • iwagumi • Karen Glaser • underwater photography • underwater plants | 12 Comments »

lawn reform

Susan from Blue Planet Gar­den Blog dropped me a note about a new ini­tia­tive she was involved in. Lawn Reform, a col­lab­o­ra­tion of nine blog­gers from around the US, is try­ing to reshape how we all think about lawns and their roles in gardens.

If you’re not already out there cry­ing, “Kill your lawn” (or at least some­thing like “Reduce the size of your lawn”) the site lists six good rea­sons to think again about the green mon­ster out­side your house, “Pol­luted Water­ways,” “Pesticide-Treated Lawns that are Toxic to Humans and Pets,” “Guz­zling of Water, a Resource in Short Sup­ply,” “Single-Species Mono­cul­tures that Pro­vide Noth­ing for Wildlife,” “Fre­quent Mow­ing, with Air Pol­lu­tion” and “Overtreated and Over­wa­tered Lawns that Waste $$ and Keep Ask­ing for More.”

To that list I’d add a more philo­soph­i­cal rea­son to rethink a green expanse, the idea that a lawn rep­re­sents some weird macho dom­i­na­tion of all things nat­ural, that nature isn’t accept­able to live with until it’s been chopped to smithereens and reshaped into some­thing that’s a pale imi­ta­tion of itself. Start with this mind­set and it’s not a a big leap to Silent Spring, global warm­ing or The Bomb.

To promo Lawn Reform, Susan is host­ing an “I used to have a lawn but now I have…” con­test, where you’re encour­aged to sub­mit pho­tos and sto­ries related to trans­form­ing lawn into some­thing else. The win­ners, drawn at ran­dom, will receive a copy of John Greenlee’s new book, The Amer­i­can Meadow Gar­den: Cre­at­ing a Nat­ural Alter­na­tive to the Tra­di­tional Lawn.

I’ll share a cou­ple of life-after-lawn pho­tos of my own. The newest expanse, which might be described as “I used to have a lawn but now I have dead grass,” is a fairly unat­trac­tive alter­na­tive to lawn, a patch of unwa­tered grass that’s in part a response to our cur­rent water rationing. This is prob­a­bly noth­ing that’s going to make any­one do some­thing else with their lawn, but it’s ugly enough that we’ll have to do some­thing about it.

The sec­ond shot is an overview of my front yard, taken dur­ing the unflat­ter­ing light of mid­day in the heat of Sep­tem­ber, some­thing like 18 years after the we took out the front lawn. At the time we, along with much of South­ern Cal­i­for­nia, were into a lot of South African species, so there are a cou­ple dif­fer­ent forms of a stately tree aloe, Aloe bar­berae (a.k.a. A. bain­seii) to the right, along with a big mound of Aloe arborescens. To the left is a big clump of the maligned red foun­tain grass from far­ther up in the African con­ti­nent; it’s a plant that peo­ple tell you not to plant because of its inva­sive ten­den­cies, although this ver­sion hasn’t self-sown in two decades. (Other ver­sions of foun­tain grass, how­ever, can take over an ecosys­tem in no time.)

We’ve tried var­i­ous Cal­i­for­nia natives over the years in this space. The most suc­cess­ful has been the row of coy­ote bush brush cas­cad­ing over the front wall, Bac­cha­ris pilu­laris ‘Pigeon Point.’ It’s a plant that’s been said to have a ten year use­ful life. For us it’s dou­bled that num­ber of years, though it’ll prob­a­bly get renewed this plant­ing sea­son. Another cor­ner of the ex-lawn, not shown here, fea­tures some buck­wheats and plants from the Chan­nel Islands. They’re fill­ing in nicely as they pro­vide more of a Cal­i­for­nia fla­vor to the yard and soften a yard that used to be a lot more about succulents.

Before we under­took this big lawn replace­ment we asked a ques­tion about what we really used the front lawn for. Mostly we walked through it on the way to the front door. Why not put big mound­ing accent plants where we’d never walk? And in the place of where we used to have one species of grass that required lots of water and pam­per­ing we now have sev­eral dozen species of plants, almost all of which will make it through the sum­mer with next to no addi­tional water­ing. Greater diver­sity, check; less water use, check. The project also suc­ceeds in all the other ways Lawn Reform sug­gests a lawn replace­ment would succeed.

But that’s just one suc­cess story. There are prob­a­bly as many dif­fer­ent ways to replace a lawn as there are gar­den­ers. What would you do?

September 22 2009 | Categories: gardening • landscape design | Tags: Lawn Reform • lawns • succulents | 11 Comments »

but they said to cut down on watering…

I read this in the week­end paper and had to share: It looks like the pop­u­la­tion of San Diego County is doing so well in cut­ting down our water use that the water dis­tricts that sup­ply us are sud­denly feel­ing the finan­cial pinch. Here’s a snip­pet from the San Diego Union-Tribune arti­cle:

“We don’t need to keep telling (cus­tomers) to do a bet­ter job,” said Bill Rucker, gen­eral man­ager for the Val­lecitos Water Dis­trict in San Marcos.

His agency’s sales fell 20 per­cent in the April-to-July period com­pared with the same period in 2008. To make up for the down­turn, the dis­trict will leave some posi­tions vacant and roll back con­ser­va­tion education.

Dur­ing a meet­ing of the region’s top water man­agers in late August, “every­one was con­cerned about the lost rev­enues,” said Den­nis Lamb of the Val­lecitos district.

He said the decision-makers expressed sup­port for allow­ing res­i­dents to con­tinue water­ing their lawns and other land­scap­ing a max­i­mum of three days a week dur­ing the win­ter and spring, even though cur­rent reg­u­la­tions call for irri­ga­tion only once a week from Novem­ber through May.

After read­ing reac­tions from the author­i­ties I’m left won­der­ing: Should it really be the water dis­tricts that are at the pub­lic fore­front of water con­ser­va­tion? On one hand they’re telling us to do the right thing. But at the same time it’s in their finan­cial inter­est if we don’t. Con­flict of inter­est, anyone?

September 15 2009 | Categories: gardening | Tags: water conservation • water use | 8 Comments »

dilemma: that ugly garden wall

One of the bits of ugli­ness that we uncov­ered as part of our cur­rent house­hold projects is this wall in the gar­den that we’re try­ing to fig­ure out what to do with. When we look out the din­ing room, kitchen and bed­room win­dows this is what we see, and it has the poten­tial for being a cool accent wall for the gar­den in front of it.

You shake your head in dis­be­lief at how some things get con­structed back­wards and this was one of them. Appar­ently there was a low retain­ing wall with a fence on it to begin with. Then the pre­vi­ous owner wanted a nice con­crete bench and out­door fire­place on the other side. Instead of tak­ing down the wall, they just cast the con­crete bench around the wood. And then they sta­pled chicken wire to the fence and used it as scaf­fold­ing for the fireplace.

Wood being wood rots away after a few decades. After we moved into the house we basi­cally replaced some of the prob­lem spots and called it good enough, but twenty years later there was no sal­vaging it. Time to fix it and fix it right. But you know me: What­ever we do has to look really cool. What to do?

Leav­ing it alone is one option. It does have a cer­tain ware­house chic look to it, although noth­ing else in the house has any­thing else to do with that look.

This wall detail in the Topher Delaney gar­den that I’ve writ­ten about recently serves as one inspi­ra­tion. I wouldn’t recre­ate it lit­er­ally, but it shows how some­thing bold and dynamic can ani­mate the gar­den space. It would be easy enough to chip off the mor­tar and detach the chicken wire from my wall and tile some­thing geo­met­ric and bold.

I do won­der, though if it might dom­i­nate the space a bit too much. And how well would some­thing so bold would wear after a few decades? Would a sim­ple back­ground divider, a foil for plants, be a bet­ter option?

It’ll be sev­eral months before I’ll be able to take on this part of the project, so I’ll have some time to come up with a plan. What would you do with a prob­lem wall like this?

September 14 2009 | Categories: gardening | Tags: garden walls • hardscape | 11 Comments »

providing shelter

It’s one of the sad­dest things to see: A house under­goes a remodel or even minor revi­sion like a new paintjob, and in the course of of the project the land­scap­ing gets run over by equip­ment or tram­pled by work­ers obliv­i­ous to estab­lished plants that may be as old as the house.

We’ve just started a project of our own on a lit­tle detached stu­dio room behind the house. It began inno­cently enough with thoughts about replac­ing the patio cover that was start­ing its slow descent to the ground. (No piece of wood is safe in the land of ter­mites.) Maybe two or three week­ends of hard work to replace it. Yah, right.

As long as we were remov­ing the patio that was attached to the room, we thought it would be a good time to redo the sid­ing that has some spots that are fail­ing. And as long as the walls were open, we really should insu­late. And as long as we had things partly dis­sem­bled it made sense to replace the old sin­gle glazed win­dows and doors with bet­ter insu­lat­ing ones. (The local power com­pany pro­vides rebates towards insu­la­tion, and one of the fed­eral stim­u­lus pack­ages fea­tures 30% rebates on super-insulated replace­ment win­dows.) Now that the walls are start­ing to be opened, it’s clear that some of them are so gone that we’re hav­ing to re-frame them com­pletely. So the lit­tle two week­end project has grown to two months or more. If it doesn’t rain.

Right: Just some of the spots we’re hav­ing to reframe.

With a fairly long-term project like this, we didn’t want to dam­age the plants in the mid­dle of it. John’s assort­ment of epi­phyl­lum cac­tus plants in pots needed shel­ter, and less portable plants planted in the raised shade bed around the pond wouldn’t be able to take much sun. The waterlilies in the pond would do okay with full sun, but the extra sun causes algae to grow and we didn’t want to have to bat­tle pond scum as another house project.

So the week­end we took down the shel­ter­ing patio cover, up went these lit­tle portable cabanas and beach umbrel­las. It looks like we’re hav­ing a big gar­den party, but it’s going to be a lot less relax­ing the next cou­ple of months.

This is my main work­sta­tion where I do my blog­ging, lay­ered over by pro­tec­tive sheet­ing and open to the great out­doors. I sus­pect my blog­ging is going to take a big hit for a while as all my wak­ing hours start to be con­sumed with the project.

And all this is hap­pen­ing dur­ing the prime plant­ing sea­son in South­ern Cal­i­for­nia. I have seeds to sow and plants to plant. I’m stressed. But with my uni­ver­sity job being one of those impacted by state fur­loughs, I’ll be hav­ing lots of time to work on the project. I sup­pose that’s see­ing the sil­ver lin­ing to the dark cloud that’s about to send light­ning bolts in my gen­eral direction…

September 10 2009 | Categories: gardening • my garden | Tags: hardscape • remodeling • shade • shade plants | 3 Comments »

thinking about water

It’s easy to obsess about some­thing you don’t have enough of, and water in Cal­i­for­nia is one of those things.

On my recent trip to North­ern Cal­i­for­nia it was hard not to notice the dozens of signs stuck along the side of the inter­state like so many Fox News soundbites-on-a-stick. I can’t tell you all the details about our water-use wars, but it has some­thing to do with ongo­ing drought, over­pop­u­la­tion and a man­date to return water to nat­ural water­courses in attempt to keep some small fish from van­ish­ing from the face of the earth for­ever. As cheap, plen­ti­ful water is shut off or diverted to the big cities with more polit­i­cal clout, it’s easy to see that some farm­ers aren’t happy.

Back home, we’ve been reminded that water doesn’t just mag­i­cally fall from the sky in plen­ti­ful amounts. The cast-iron water lines that sup­ply the neigh­bor­hood have been fail­ing, and the old lines are being replaced with new, bright baby-blue water mains. All sum­mer long the street out front has been a con­struc­tion pit as they installed tem­po­rary sup­ply lines, cut through pave­ment to remove the old prob­lem pipe, installed the new lines and pre­pared to hook up the houses to the never-ending font of the life-giving fluid. They’ve said that the street will be a no-parking zone for the next six weeks. Feels like it’s been for­ever already.

Of course that water sup­ply isn’t with­out lim­its. The city has been on a manda­tory water-reduction pro­gram since June, and I was happy to see that city water use dropped 20% that month. But as the nov­elty of sav­ing water wore off, July’s num­bers fell to 12%.

I’ve been try­ing to do my part. Over­all I feel pretty good about it, but I’ve found myself falling off the wagon a bit myself. My new offense is this lit­tle num­ber, a reverse-osmosis purifi­ca­tion sys­tem to improve the water qual­ity I can offer a new lit­tle col­lec­tion of car­niv­o­rous plants (more on that in a future post). A real­ity with almost all R/O sys­tems is that pro­duc­ing one gal­lon of good water gen­er­ates sev­eral gal­lons of waste. I knew that going into it, but the real­ity of it is pretty stunning.

But instead of fol­low­ing the instal­la­tion instruc­tions, which out­line in detail how you send all the waste­water down the drain through the spe­cial pipe fit­tings the man­u­fac­turer thought­fully sup­plies with the unit, I mod­i­fied the instal­la­tion to aim the waste stream into a water bot­tle. The rejected water ends up being a lit­tle saltier and grosser that what comes from the tap, but it’s still cleaner than the gray­wa­ter we’re recy­cling from our show­ers and is per­fectly good for water­ing the plants that aren’t among the cho­sen few.

Now that I’ve lived with this setup for a cou­ple of weeks I’m find­ing that lug­ging around five gal­lon water bot­tles can be a bit of a chore. Maybe I’ll rig a way to divert the waste directly to the gar­den. But that’s a project that will have to wait. Fall plant­ing sea­son is com­ing up, as well as a pile of house projects. And then there’s that new col­lec­tion of plants to play with…

September 05 2009 | Categories: gardening • my garden | Tags: reverse osmosis • water purifiers • water use | 6 Comments »

not in the doldrums

It’s the end of sum­mer and most areas of the gar­den seem to be in some sleepy botan­i­cal tor­por, exhausted from the heat. Not much is bloom­ing. Brown is everywhere.

And then by con­trast there’s this lit­tle over-performing cor­ner, formed in large part by chunks of suc­cu­lents that John has col­lected over the years…

Cas­cad­ing over a back wall are the shock­ing red flow­ers of this cras­sula (I think it’s Cras­sula per­fo­li­ata var. minor, a.k.a. Cras­sula fal­cata). Its com­pan­ions in this photo are a cou­ple of other suc­cu­lents, one of the goth-black aeo­ni­ums (Aeo­nium arboreum ‘Zwartkop’) and what’s likely Grap­topetalum paraguayense. The three are pretty easy to find and like nice combined.

After the win­ter rains the foliage on all of these plants plumps up and looks pretty spec­tac­u­lar. But as sum­mer set­tles in the aeo­nium and and grap­topetalum drop their larger leaves in favor of a tight clus­ter of leaves packed at the grow­ing end of the stalks. The big­ger the leaf the greater the water loss. The cras­sula will retain its leaves, how­ever, although they’ll look a lit­tle shriv­eled in the drought. The fact that the leaves are folded in half prob­a­bly helps to shade the leaf, reduce tran­spi­ra­tion and reduce mois­ture loss.

The flow­er­ing of the cras­sula varies by year. The photo above is from this sea­son, actu­ally not one of the bet­ter years. To the left is a shot from last August. This year’s not quite as flashy, but in the slow heat of August and Sep­tem­ber, I’ll take it.

September 01 2009 | Categories: gardening • my garden | Tags: Aeonium arboreum • Crassula perfoliata var. mino • drought-tolerant landscaping • Graptopetalum paraguayense • succulents | 7 Comments »