well endowed landscaping

Here’s a lit­tle week­end quiz: Any guesses as to where I took this picture?

Does this sec­ond photo help?

Clue #1: It’s in Los Angeles.

Clue #2: It’s a uni­ver­sity campus.

Clue #3: The school col­ors are echoed in the flower col­ors of the landscaping.

If you’re not into uni­ver­si­ties and their col­ors the answer is USC, the Uni­ver­sity of South­ern Cal­i­for­nia, where the plant­ing color scheme fea­tures the cam­pus col­ors of car­di­nal and gold. If you were to ask me for my opin­ion I’d offer that they’re prob­a­bly fine col­ors for foot­ball uni­forms but a lit­tle stri­dent for most gar­den sit­u­a­tions if they were the only col­ors you used. But the entire cam­pus was vibrat­ing with new plant­i­ngs of red salvias and yellow-orange marigolds, with a few left­over win­ter plant­i­ngs of pan­sies in sim­i­lar colors.

I men­tioned the plant­i­ngs to one of the cam­pus reg­u­lars I was up there to meet with. Appar­ently USC has an endow­ment (by what was prob­a­bly an enthu­si­as­tic alum­nus) to sup­ply bed­ding plants in the school colors.

From the themed sea­sonal color, to the lawns, to the hedges, to the fanat­i­cally clipped creep­ing fig around the Romanesque win­dows, to the trees planted in reg­i­mented rows, it’s so not my phi­los­o­phy of gardening.


Trees (and cam­pus build­ings) pro­vid­ing cool­ing shade

A flow­er­ing canopy, dozens of feet overhead

But for an urban cam­pus set where the warm sea­son is just that, the tall trees pro­vide wel­come shade and the many benches set in the plant­i­ngs make for oppor­tu­ni­ties to sit and hold con­ver­sa­tions. And the style of the land­scape seems to come straight out of a tra­di­tion of how a cam­pus should look: neat, orderly, with a sense that many things of worth come from Europe.

My par­ents met on this cam­pus way back when. Look­ing at the com­fort­able but for­mal plant­i­ngs, I think I that can under­stand them a lit­tle bet­ter, the atti­tudes where they came from. Lift­ing my gaze to take in the tall sycamores, the mature mag­no­lias, I know that many of these trees were here when my par­ents attended the campus.

But as far as the team-themed bed­ding plants–Were they here then? I’m not so sure. I’ll have to ask my father about them, though it’s not the sort of detail he’s likely to remember.

A few plant­i­ngs flaunted col­ors other than the offi­cial school ones. The trees and lawns fea­tured green, of course, and here and there you’d find a non-conforming clus­ter of plants. I end with a cou­ple final shots of those.

Another rene­gade plant­ing that didn’t get the car­di­nal and gold memo…

Acan­thus mol­lis, not a sign of car­di­nal or gold


May 02 2010 06:30 am | Categories: gardening • landscape design • places | Tags: •

11 Responses to “well endowed landscaping”

  1. Sheila on 02 May 2010 at 8:40 am #

    Those top pho­tos remind me of a Shell gas sta­tion in town that used to have the most beau­ti­ful dis­play of red and yel­low flow­ers that reflected the col­ors of their logo. They are not col­ors I would ever put together in my own gar­den, but I had to admire their ded­i­ca­tion and cre­ativ­ity because it was one of the best dis­plays in town!

  2. Wendy on 02 May 2010 at 7:29 pm #

    prob­a­bly not my phi­los­o­phy either but it sure looks neat and pretty!

  3. Town Mouse on 02 May 2010 at 7:58 pm #

    Oh, too funny! For a minute there, you had black-red-gold, the col­ors of the Ger­man flag. Well, of course not ;->

  4. Noelle / azplantlady on 03 May 2010 at 10:17 am #

    Well, my entire fam­ily are HUGE USC fans. I love the color coor­di­nated annual flow­ers :-)

  5. noel on 03 May 2010 at 10:40 pm #

    aloha,

    i enjoyed your post and i think its good to include school col­ors into the grounds you walk and the plants you see, i actu­ally think for­mal gar­dens tend to work cohe­sively with col­lege cam­puses, it is less fussy and nice and neat, just right for col­lege settings.

  6. Brad on 03 May 2010 at 10:51 pm #

    “neat, orderly, with a sense that many things of worth come from Europe.” I loved this line. I feel like that has been a gen­eral gar­den­ing phi­los­o­phy in the US for quite a while, but that is thank­fully chang­ing. Not to diss neat, orderly or Europe, but I like some­thing a lit­tle wilder and home-grown.

  7. Susan Morrison on 04 May 2010 at 5:38 pm #

    I always enjoy your trav­el­ogue style posts! I haven’t been on the USC cam­pus since I was a fresh­man at UCSB. And believe me, that was well before I’d devel­oped the slight­est inter­est in hor­ti­cul­ture! Nice to revisit from a dif­fer­ent perspective.

  8. tina on 05 May 2010 at 5:36 am #

    I think they actu­ally look really good. But I’ve always kind of had a thing for com­mer­cial plant­i­ngs. Our local uni­ver­sity does the same. Their col­ors are red and white. It is really nice to show loy­alty by plant­ing the same colors.

    Thanks so much for the info on the green­house. That north wall tip is excel­lent. I haven’t had to heat this one yet except with a brooder light. I hope it doesn’t cause prob­lems but we’ll see. Should be fun. I can just imag­ine a green­house full of orchids. Wow, it must have smelled heavenly.

  9. lostlandscape on 05 May 2010 at 7:30 pm #

    Sheila, it’s inter­est­ing that there are land­scape details that look like some­thing you’d have at home, while oth­ers look cor­po­rate or some­thing a big insti­tu­tion like USC would use.

    Wendy, the plant­i­ngs made me smile because they seemed so over the top.

    TM, if you acknowl­edge the foliage, I was also think­ing of the dis­plays fea­tured red/yellow/green rasta colors–maybe not at all what the donor intended!

    Noelle, there’s a guy here in town whose house, car, clothes–everything he can colorize–are the blue and gold col­ors of the town foot­ball team. Well, there’s being a fan, and then there’s gonzo enthu­si­asm. I guess there’s noth­ing that I’m that infat­u­ated with.

    Noel, there’s def­i­nitely a “look” that seems to go with a lot of insti­tu­tions of higher learn­ing, espe­cially the older ones. USC’s look seems to have a lot to do with that style.

    Brad, UCSD, where I spend a lot of time, has a lot of open space that isn’t what I’d call wild or native, but its fla­vor is def­i­nitely looser than the tra­di­tional col­lege land­scap­ing style.

    Susan, thanks! I enjoy post­ing about places that I find inter­est­ing, and I hope to be able to visit a few more neat places while it’s still high spring.

    Tina, good luck with your green­house. I know you’re really curi­ous and it must be really excit­ing for you! I think some adven­tur­ous gar­den­ers could have some fun with com­mer­cial plant color com­bi­na­tions, only using unusual plants and/or natives instead of the bed­ding plants that seem to be the only plants used for plant­i­ngs like these.

  10. Greg on 06 May 2010 at 6:01 pm #

    I’ll bet they’ll look great as they fill out and get bloom­ing more heav­ily, even if the lim­ited color palate is a lit­tle overwhelming.

    I’m always in favor of more flow­ers in the land­scape, so it’s nice to see all these, tho I bet you and I could both come up with cre­ative ideas in other ways to echo that theme around cam­pus with­out hav­ing to cor­ner the marigold and salvia market.

    Those old trees are pretty swell, though!

  11. Raised garden beds on 13 May 2010 at 3:19 am #

    Wow beau­ti­ful! I’m pretty impressed with the land­scap­ing. What a won­der­ful cam­pus they have.

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