[ Lost in the Landscape ]

getty garden, light and shadow

I try to stop by Robert Irwin’s Cen­tral Gar­den at the Getty Cen­ter when­ever I’m nearby. This early august day was bright but cool, a per­fect day for a stroll through the gar­den to see what new things I’d find.

If you’ve never been to the gar­den, it divides into two large parts: a cen­tral bowl hold­ing a maze of two col­ors of clipped aza­leas and its sur­round­ing plant­i­ngs, and, above it, a straight water­course that is shaded all along its length by Lon­don plane trees, a cousin of the Amer­i­can sycamore.

This trip I was con­cen­trat­ing on how the idea of light and shadow, dark and light played out in the over­all design and plantings.

To expe­ri­ence the upper water­course, you fol­low a path that zigzags back and forth. It takes you in and out of the shade and shel­ter of the trees, let­ting you expe­ri­ence the bright Los Ange­les sun­light and how it con­trasts with the dap­pled light the trees pro­vide in the spring, sum­mer and fall.

The water­course near the top of the Cen­tral Garden

The water­course, the shel­tered core of this top gar­den, changes from a noisy stream with large stones in its path at the top, to a water­way that glides qui­etly over a tex­tured streambed down below.

The effect of the dap­pled sun­light is repeated in the plant­i­ngs. Dark, almost black-leaved, plants alter­nate with light-colored ones. In this photo it’s almost hard to dis­tin­guish the alter­nat­ing light and shadow of the trees above from the dap­pled plant­i­ngs below. It’s a lit­tle con­fus­ing, a tad dis­ori­ent­ing. And if you’re fas­ci­nated with the effects of light and shadow as I am, you might find it a qui­etly thrilling experience.

Even this lit­tle detail, a plant­ing of suc­cu­lents, plays with con­trasts, light and dark. It’s a lit­tle cor­ner that would look great in a home gar­den, and here it fur­ther helps to rein­force the vibra­tions of light and dark in the upper garden.

When I first saw the gar­den I thought the plant­i­ngs were a lit­tle chaotic. All this light and dark, all this con­tin­ual con­trast­ing of col­ors and plant shapes seemed rest­less. Small doses would look great as perky lit­tle con­tainer plant­i­ngs, but it seemed way too much of a good thing. It seemed like a lit­tle Eng­lish cot­tage gar­den doped up on steroids.

But I’ve been chang­ing my mind. All this crazi­ness rein­forces the intense vibra­tion of con­trasts that you expe­ri­ence walk­ing the zigzag path.

Once you make your way out of the upper por­tion of the gar­den you’re set free into the rel­a­tive calm of the lower bowl. There’s no more zigzag­ging in and out of the shade, there’s no more quick shift­ing from light to dark. Still, the sunken design of the lower gar­den ensures that one of the sides will expe­ri­ence shade dur­ing most of the day. And the plant­i­ngs down here, still alter­nat­ing dark and light, tell you that you’re still in the same garden.

Yes, each trip here I see some­thing new. But I also real­ize that mak­ing this kind of gar­den hap­pen is such an extreme com­mit­ment of resources and labor.

I haven’t quite fig­ured out a way to pho­to­graph the cap­i­tal out­lay it takes to keep this gar­den look­ing great. But I’d like to end this post with a trib­ute to the heroes, those ded­i­cated gar­den­ers who make this place a gar­den worth vis­it­ing sev­eral times a year.

Thanks, guys!

August 07 2010 | Categories: art • gardening • landscape design • places | Tags: J. Paul Getty Museum • light and shadow • Robert Irwin | 8 Comments »

interesting, challenging reading

This is a post for the reader who might enjoy an occa­sional book on gar­den­ing and land­scape archi­tec­ture that isn’t designed to sit on your cof­fee table or nightstand.

The British Library has recently unveiled EThOS, a por­tal to elec­tronic the­ses and dis­ser­ta­tions from the UK. If the the­sis has been dig­i­tized, it’s avail­able to you for down­load once you reg­is­ter. Reg­is­tra­tion is free, and so are most of the texts. If some­thing isn’t avail­able yet, you can request it to be dig­i­tized within thirty days so that you can down­load it. Once again, that process is usu­ally free.

Only a small minor­ity of the­ses and dis­ser­ta­tions writ­ten these days is on gar­den­ing of course, but there’s some great work being done on the topic in British insti­tu­tions, with the Uni­ver­sity of Sheffield lead­ing the way.

Do a basic search on “Sheffield” and “land­scape” and you’ll get titles like the fol­low­ing that are avail­able with­out wait­ing thirty days:

Wu, Jiahua. Land­scape mor­phol­ogy : a com­par­a­tive study of land­scape aesthetics.

Jor­gensen, Anna. Liv­ing in the urban wild woods : a case study of the eco­log­i­cal wood­land approach to land­scape plan­ning and design at Birch­wood, War­ring­ton New Town.

Alturki, Ashraf. Atti­tudes towards designed land­scapes in two desert cities : Med­ina, Saudi Ara­bia and Tuc­son, Arizona.

Zhao, Jijun. Thirty years of land­scape design in China (1949–1979): The era of Mao Zedong. (The abstract for this one out­lines some fas­ci­nat­ing ideas about designed land­scape and ide­ol­ogy: “[L]andscape archi­tects first emerg­ing in early twen­ti­eth cen­tury China con­cerned them­selves espe­cially with the design of gar­dens and parks. This sit­u­a­tion remained almost unchanged dur­ing the rad­i­cal social­ist rev­o­lu­tion, which resulted in the found­ing of the People’s Repub­lic of China in 1949 that was led by Chair­man Mao Zedong (1893–1976). Dur­ing the Mao era (1949–1979), the impact of the Chi­nese com­mu­nist ide­ol­ogy on land­scape was far-ranging and ground break­ing. Besides exten­sive devel­op­ment of pub­lic parks for social­ist edu­ca­tion as well as recre­ational pur­poses, cities were reshaped with large hous­ing areas cre­ated for workers–the pro­le­tari­ats, and urban squares play­ing a cru­cial role in exhibit­ing polit­i­cal power, while the coun­try­side was reshaped from a hier­ar­chi­cal land­scape with an exploita­tive nature to an egal­i­tar­ian one, where the broad masses were to ben­e­fit from improvements.”)

Alter­nately, try a search on “Sheffield” and “gar­den” and you’ll find titles like these, dig­i­tized and ready to download:

Gilberthorpe, Enid Con­stance. British botan­i­cal gar­dens in the 1980s : changes reflected by bib­li­o­graph­i­cal and social survey.

Kel­lett, J.E. Pub­lic pol­icy and the pri­vate gar­den : An analy­sis of the effect of gov­ern­ment pol­icy on pri­vate gar­den pro­vi­sion in Eng­land and Wales 1918–81. (Sheffield City Polytechnic)

…and then there are intrigu­ing titles like these that still need to be dig­i­tized though you could be read­ing them in not much more time than it takes for a book to be deliv­ered to your doorstep:

Qasim, Moham­mad. The poten­tial role of pri­vate gar­dens in devel­op­ing greater envi­ron­men­tal sus­tain­abil­ity in cities.

Can­non, Andrew R. Wild birds in urban gar­dens : oppor­tu­nity or constraint?

Be fore­warned. From the skim­ming I did, these texts read like…well, col­lege dis­ser­ta­tions. Even among the authors who write really clearly you sense a cer­tain amount of them play­ing aca­d­e­mic buzz­word bingo. After all, the authors have to tell their profs that they know the lit­er­a­ture and can use their lingo. In addi­tion, the pho­tos accom­pa­ny­ing the texts aren’t picture-book qual­ity the way they appear online. But once you get beyond that, you cross over to a world rich in ideas.

[ Elec­tronic The­ses Online Ser­vice ]

July 29 2010 | Categories: gardening • landscape design | Tags: books • dissertations • Electronic Theses Online Service • EThOS • theses • University of Sheffield | 2 Comments »

fairly cool plants

On my recent trip to the San Diego County Fair the hor­ti­cul­tural dis­plays seemed to divide into two big cat­e­gories: exhibits that fea­tured cool designs (usu­ally entered by a land­scape design firm or indi­vid­ual) and those that fea­ture some pretty cool plants (mostly in exhibits assem­bled by spe­cialty nurseries).

I’ve talked enough about the cool designs. Here are some fairly cool plants. Some have been around for cen­turies, oth­ers are fairly new to our gar­dens. Hope­fully the new intro­duc­tions are fairly tame, oth­er­wise you might be see­ing here the new exotic weed pests that’ll be keep­ing us busy for the next hun­dred years.

Ptilo­tus exal­ta­tus \‘Plat­inum Wal­laby,\’ a plant that has been show­ing up in nurs­eries this past year.

Oh look: Another note­wor­thy plant, another ptilo­tus, Down Under.

Christ­mas in July? The Ecke poin­set­tia ranch folks who sup­ply a huge per­cent­age of the world’s poin­set­tias were show­ing off this new white vari­ety, Polar Bear. My county used to be poin­set­tia cen­tral for the world, but cheaper pro­duc­tion costs have dri­ven a lot of that to Cen­tral America.

Char­treuse, green, white and near-black: Lob­u­laria Snow Princes, two kinds of ipo­moea, with Coleus Col­or­Blaze Alli­ga­tor Tears.

Gera­nium crispum, var­ie­gated form. This is one of many foliage plants that have flow­ers that don’t seem to add much to the foliage.

Gosh, yet another note­wor­thy plant with a ‘Note­wor­thy Plant’ sign next to it. (Kin­duv reminds me of those turnoffs labeled ‘scenic view­point’ on high­ways through spec­tac­u­lar land­scapes, as if you needed the sign to tell you you were look­ing at some­thing scenic or–in this case–noteworthy.) This was labeled a ‘Pine Nee­dle Fern,’ but not with its species name. My quick web trawl didn’t turn up much with that name, only a fact that it’s con­sid­ered one of the more pri­mae­val kinds of fern. Very cool, what­ever it is.

Rice flower, Ozotham­nus dios­mi­folius, a plant drought-tolerant selec­tion that, like the ptilo­tus plants, comes from Aus­tralia. You’d think they’d have run out of their notable plant signs by now.

Men­tion the word suc­cu­lent and peo­ple have visions of a fairly desert-ey land­scape. Here’s a dis­play by Cor­dova Gar­dens that instead comes off as a really lush flower arrangement.

Deute­ro­coh­nia bre­v­i­fo­lia, a fairly amaz­ing suc­cu­lent. (Edit: this is actu­ally a bromeliad!)

Mam­mi­laria parkin­so­ni­ana, a fairly amaz­ing cactus.

A nice mixed plant­ing of cac­tus and suc­cu­lents at the Solana Suc­cu­lents display.

A gor­geous pur­ple prickly pear Opun­tia Santa Rita, part of the Solana Suc­cu­lents exhibit.

Agave victoria-reginae, a nor­mally prim lit­tle bun­dle of green and white botan­i­cal joy. Check out bloom stalk in the next photo, however…

OMG, when that thing blooms, stand back! This lit­tle two-foot plant has prob­a­bly pro­duced a twelve-foot inflo­res­cence. How do you design with this plant? Is it a fore­ground plant? Or some­thing for the back­ground? Not a bad quandary to be in.

July 03 2010 | Categories: gardening • landscape design • places | Tags: San Diego County Fair • succulents | 7 Comments »

colleen goes national

Colleen Miko, owner of the Pacific Northwest’s Colleen’s, a Land­scape Design Com­pany, has one of her gar­den designs fea­tured in the cur­rent issue of Organic Gar­den­ing Mag­a­zine. In the inter­est of full dis­clo­sure I’m glad to say that Colleen also hap­pens to be my cousin through a cou­ple of for­tu­nate mar­riage links in the fam­ily. She’s received well-deserved regional notice for her land­scape work, but this is her first national print expo­sure. (Edit, May 19: Any­one with access to cable might have seen her on TV ear­lier, when she was the final­ist in HGTV’s Landscaper’s Chal­lenge program.)

Rah Colleen!

Here’s a peek at one of the spaces in her design. I like how the gen­tly sym­met­ri­cal plant­i­ngs helps focus atten­tion on the water fea­ture. In other gar­dens, foun­tains and other focal points some­times feel too small for the spaces they’re allot­ted. But Colleen’s strat­egy here gives greater visual weight to the bur­bling water and the area around it. The whiff of sym­me­try also brings visual calm that com­ple­ments the calm­ing sound of water. I’d love to spend some time in this space on a warm after­noon with a glass of North­west riesling.

Pick up the June/July issue and see more of her work!

And be sure to pop over to Colleen’s web­site, where you’ll find other exam­ples of her designs, as well as instruc­tions on how to build this fun bird­house with a green roof.

May 18 2010 | Categories: gardening • landscape design | Tags: birdhouses • Colleen Miko • Colleen's • green roofs • water features | 3 Comments »

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 | Categories: gardening • landscape design • places | Tags: color combinations • University of Southern California | 11 Comments »

a visit to the l.a. county museum

Another quick stop over the hol­i­days took the form of a visit to the Los Ange­les County Museum of Art.

Installed at the new main entrance is this bat­tal­ion of 202 antique street­lights, Urban Light, by artist Chris Bur­den. Street­lights like these of course were posi­tioned at curbs in straight lines, spaced reg­u­larly. Clus­ter­ing them together like this accen­tu­ates that fact, and to me makes the whole instal­la­tion seem maybe just a lit­tle bit militaristic.

Arranged behind the Bur­den piece are some palm trees, the first plant­i­ngs of what will be a large instal­la­tion of palms by Robert Irwin. Irwin is the design force behind the Cen­tral Gar­den at the J. Paul Getty Museum, but here the trees will read less like a sep­a­rate gar­den than plant­i­ngs inte­grated into the art and architecture.

Their trunks echo the posts of the street­lights, as does the fact that they’re planted in a reg­u­lar pat­tern. Also, as with the street­lights, they’re a col­lec­tion of dif­fer­ent kinds. A press release states: “Along with the palms, Irwin’s other medium is South­ern California’s light, and the species of palms have been spe­cially cho­sen to gather and reflect the inter­play of light and shadow native to L.A.” [ source ] I love Robert Irwin’s work [ here’s a sam­ple ], and I’ll be check­ing back on this instal­la­tion as time goes on.

The whole ver­ti­cal shaft thing becomes a theme around the Museum’s lat­est build­ing, the newish Broad Con­tem­po­rary Art Museum, which has red exte­rior accents, includ­ing plenty of red columns.

The land­scap­ing in this part of the museum is inter­est­ing in that it uses palms or flat plant­i­ngs. Vir­tu­ally no shrubs. It’s a pretty urban plant­ing that in part seems designed to give the home­less no place to camp.

Most hor­i­zon­tal sur­faces, using decom­posed gran­ite or this Turf­s­tone prod­uct, are designed as walk­a­ble exten­sions of the con­crete paving. Where does the land­scape end and the urban fab­ric begin?

Here’s an inter­est­ing gar­den­ing aside: The Muse­ums are located on the same big city block as the famed La Brea Tar Pits, where the ground oozes black, gummy tar, a sub­stance that has pre­served bones of saber­tooth tigers and woolly mam­moths from the last ice age that got too close to the stuff. Just imag­ine try­ing to gar­den where dig­ging a hole to plant a shrub might put you in con­tact with the deadly sludge! I have yet to pick up a gar­den book that even begins to dis­cuss what to do with this kind of soil prob­lem. While the park con­tain­ing the tar pits has a few gooey shoe-grabbing spots, these plant­i­ngs seemed free of the muck.

My main rea­son for vis­it­ing LACMA was to take in a photo exhibit that reassem­bles many of the works that were seen in the sem­i­nal 1975 “New Topo­graph­ics” exhi­bi­tion of land­scape pho­tog­ra­phy. These works in the show sig­naled a break from the more roman­tic takes on what land­scape pho­tos ought to look like and engaged a land where the human pres­ence reigned supreme.

One of my favorite pho­tog­ra­phers in the show, Robert Adams, often com­bines the roman­tic sub­lime with a cooler take on what the world really looks like. To the left is “Mobile Homes, Jef­fer­son County, Col­orado” from 1973 [ source ], a great exam­ple of what his eye sees. You get the sense in his work that the human land­scape often fails to live up to the stun­ning geog­ra­phy where it’s sited.

See­ing his work again prompted me to reread some of his Beauty in Pho­tog­ra­phy: Essays in Defense of Tra­di­tional Val­ues. (From this photo you can see that he takes “tra­di­tional val­ues” pretty broadly.) Here’s a quick snip­pet gar­den­ers and land­scape design­ers might like to think about.

Not sur­pris­ingly, many pho­tog­ra­phers have loved gar­dens, those places that Leonard Woolf once described as “the last refuge of dis­il­lu­sion.” Gar­dens are in fact strik­ingly like land­scape pic­tures, sanc­tu­ar­ies not from but of truth.

–from the essay, “Truth and Land­scape” in Beauty in Photography

In part­ing, let me move from beauty in pho­tog­ra­phy to beauty in art. Here’s a closeup of Urban Light, back­lit by the after­noon sun:

(For another exam­ple of Burden’s work, check out the instal­la­tion of 50,000 nickel coins and 50,000 match­sticks that the San Diego Museum of Con­tem­po­rary Art exhib­ited: The Rea­son for the Neu­tron Bomb.)

January 12 2010 | Categories: art • landscape • landscape design • photography • places • quotes | Tags: architecture • architecture and landscaping • art and landscaping • Broad Contemporary Art Museum • Chris Burden • Los Angeles County Museum of Art • palm trees • robert adams • Robert Irwin | 8 Comments »

“plants are up to something”">“plants are up to something”

I loved this ban­ner at the Hunt­ing­ton. Hang­ing out­side the instution’s con­ser­va­tory build­ing, it announces that the exhibits inside might be more ori­ented towards edu­ca­tion than the gar­dens that make up the rest of the grounds. The con­ser­va­tory also houses plants that might have spe­cial needs beyond the “just add water” plant­i­ngs located in the sub­trop­ics outdoors.

Pass through the front doors and you step into a green­house space con­tain­ing a minia­ture trop­i­cal rain­for­est, a cloud for­est and a bog gar­den, along with lots of edu­ca­tional signs and inter­ac­tive exhibits scat­tered through­out the space.

For me most green­houses and con­ser­va­tory gar­dens suf­fer from being exam­ples of nature-in-a-can, and to me they tend to look and smell and feel very sim­i­lar in their her­met­i­cally sealed spaces. If only the Hunt­ing­ton were located on some bar­ren snowy tun­dra plain, where enter­ing a trop­i­cal rain­for­est on a cold win­ter day might be a stun­ning revelation.

Even on this cool Decem­ber South­ern Cal­i­for­nia after­noon, the tem­per­a­ture dif­fer­ences between inside and out weren’t that pro­nounced. And the lush plant­i­ngs out­side the front door seemed to mir­ror the lushly planted indoors. Still, lack­ing the stun­ning con­trasts that might help to set the con­ser­va­tory apart from the out­doors, it was a fun place to con­nect with a lot of cool plants. When the Huntington’s giant corpse-flower (Amor­phophal­lus titanum) blooms, there is where you’ll find it. It wasn’t bloom­ing, but there were lots of other inter­est­ing things inside.

The bright red-orange trunks of the sealing-wax palm, Cyr­tosstachys renda were pretty amazing.

My visit was two days before Christ­mas, so there were this hol­i­day dis­play of poin­set­tias and amaryl­lis. At first they seemed like gra­tu­itous hol­i­day dec­o­ra­tions but then the aha moment struck me that these plants orig­i­nate in the trop­i­cal and sub­trop­i­cal belt of the Americas.

Flo­ral parts of a large anthurium species…

This car­niv­o­rous Asian pitcher plant (a species of Nepenthes) greeted vis­i­tors as they entered the cloud for­est display.

And drop­ping down into the bog gar­den, Amer­i­can pitcher plants, Sar­race­nia, and sun­dews, Drosera sp., let view­ers see other ways plants have taken up car­niv­o­rous ways. (Do you detect a theme of the con­ser­va­tory play­ing up the idea of scary, creepy plants, going from these car­niv­o­rous species to the stink­ing giant corpse flower that lines up vis­i­tors by the hun­dreds when it does its thing?)

At this point the blog­ger ram­bles on a bit: These days it almost seems that every botan­i­cal col­lec­tion feels to have its very own giant corpse flower plant that will draw the vis­i­tors when it blooms, some­thing of the way medieval churches tried to draw pil­grims by hav­ing unique relics of saints, or how many tem­ples in Asia will claim to have pre­served hairs of the Bud­dha. So it seems that the giant corpse flow­ers has become a mod­ern sec­u­lar botan­i­cal relic. It’s a lit­tle odd, since you can occa­sion­ally find the plant for sale on eBay–granted for a good chunk of change–but still noth­ing much more than you’d pay for a pair of high-end jeans.

Okay, now back to the trip…

I’m com­ing to the real­iza­tion that green­houses always scare me a bit, like I’m enter­ing a world that’s on per­pet­ual life sup­port. Upon leav­ing the con­ser­va­tory I stepped out­side into the bright Decem­ber after­noon. Not far away a reader was seated in warm­ing sun­light on a Lutyens bench, enjoy­ing the moment. I’d had a good time on my visit to the syn­thetic trop­ics, but return­ing to the real sun­shine and real weather out­doors I sud­denly felt free.

January 04 2010 | Categories: gardening • landscape design • places | Tags: Amorphophallus titanum • carnivorous plants • conservatories • greenhouses • Huntington Library Art Collections and Botanical Gardens • tropical plants | 11 Comments »

the huntington desert garden

The late-December light was fad­ing when I headed to the wild and won­der­ful plants that make up the Huntington’s Desert Gar­den. The gar­den dates back many decades and fea­tures some immense spec­i­mens the likes of which you’ll almost never see. But what I love most about the gar­den is that it incor­po­rates these great plants into land­scapes that both honor the plants and use them in strik­ing combinations.

Many aloes were bloom­ing with their dra­matic spikes of hot, bright col­ors. The the­atri­cal light­ing helped to make some of the scenes even more dramatic.

(Be sure to click onthe third image to enlarge it. In its unearthly weird­ness, it’s got to be one of my favorite gar­den pho­tos I’ve ever taken.)

One zone of the gar­den focuses on plants you’d find in Cal­i­for­nia. Here a cre­osote bush serves as a screen for a radi­ant gray-white agave.

And this scene employs the coastal and Chan­nel Island buck­wheat, Saint Catherine’s lace (Eri­o­gonum gigan­teum)–a plant that tech­ni­cally doesn’t come from a desert–with other dry­land plants. The gray-green foliage on all of them helps to unify this diverse planting.

The Hunt­ing­ton is in a warm sub­trop­i­cal area just east of Los Ange­les. That doesn’t mean that it’s warm enough for all of these plants. Patio heaters of the kind that you see out­doors at restau­rants keep plants warm at night in one area of the gar­den. (These are the frigid depths of Decem­ber, after all.)

Now, as much as I was try­ing to focus on the over­all land­scape, I have to share a few pho­tos of indi­vid­ual species that caught my eye.

Look­ing up at a very large Yucca fil­if­era from Mexico…

(There’s an extremely sim­i­lar shot of the exact same plant on the Germanatrix’s post on her visit to this same gar­den at the end of Novem­ber. Check it out: here.)

Two tall palms with immense tree aloes, Aloe bar­berae. At the Hunt­ing­ton the species is iden­ti­fied as A. baine­sii, but the tax­on­o­mists have had a change of heart. I have two of these in my lit­tle front yard, the tallest of them still under twenty feet but still impres­sive at that size. The writeup on this plant says it can hit fifty feet or more. The Hunt­ing­ton spec­i­mens are just about there, I’d guess.

A dynamic and lyri­cal tan­gle of leaves on sev­eral plants of the var­ie­gated form of Agave amer­i­cana… (Homage to some­body… later Willem de Koon­ing? Franz Kline?) Agaves with their per­fect rosettes seem to appeal to the part of our brains that appre­ci­ate sym­me­try and order. This plant­ing sub­verted the expected into a beau­ti­ful mess.

A tall, dense stand of Cleis­to­cac­tus straus­sii…

As we left the Hunt­ing­ton the light that had made the Desert Gar­den extra-interesting was col­or­ing up the flanks of Mount Wil­son and the the rest of the San Gabriels.

Not far away from the Hunt­ing­ton is Pasadena, the site of the annual New Year’s Rose Parade, which should be get­ting under way not long after this post hits the web. (Okay, it’s sort of a lame way to try to segue this post to the topic of New Year’s Day, but–hey!–I had to give it a try.)

Happy New Year’s to all of you, and best wishes for a healthy and pros­per­ous year filled with amaz­ing botan­i­cal highlights.

January 01 2010 | Categories: gardening • landscape design • places | Tags: agaves • aloes • cacti • desert plants • Huntington Library Art Collections and Botanical Gardens • plant combinations • succulents | 11 Comments »

the huntington’s japanese garden

After vis­it­ing the dense and some­what fre­netic new Chi­nese Gar­den at the Hunt­ing­ton I was feel­ing like I needed to unwind a bit. For­tu­nately a short walk at the Hunt­ing­ton deliv­ers you from the Chi­nese Gar­den to the Japan­ese Gar­den.

Along the way, before you get to the gar­den itself, as if in a cal­cu­lated attempt to tran­si­tion the viewer from one gar­den to the next, you pass a cou­ple bloom­ing plants that have “Japan” in their species name. Although most of the camel­lias in bloom were the sansan­quas, a few of the Camel­lia japon­ica plants were start­ing their bloom.

And there was this perky yel­low species, Far­lugium japon­icum–with a plant label (Thank you!–I love my plant labels).

One of the first details that I noticed in the Japan­ese Gar­den was this walk­way edge detail con­sist­ing of lit­tle loops of thin bamboo.

Whereas many of the hard­scape ele­ments in the Chi­nese Gar­den seemed to be built to last for the centuries–this photo shows one of the edg­ing details there–the frag­ile lit­tle detail in the Japan­ese Gar­den appeared to be set up to cel­e­brate the ephemeral.

All the approaches to the gar­den deliver the vis­i­tor to high van­tage points over­look­ing plant­i­ngs around a small pond. A moon bridge pro­vides a focal point.

A recre­ated tra­di­tional upper-class Japan­ese home occu­pies the high­est spot in the garden.

Its doors slide open so that the view from the house is of this gar­den. Stand­ing out­side, you can peer in and get a sense of how life indoors would look like and feel. This struc­ture was moved to this site in 1912, so it and the gar­dens have been around many more years than the Chi­nese Gar­den next door.

Steps from the home lead down and then back up to a walled garden.

A broad walk­way divides the gar­den into two parts. To one side is a sym­bolic gar­den of stones and raked gravel, or Kare­san­sui.

To the other side is a sim­ple plant­ing of clipped aza­leas, ginkgo trees and what I’m guess­ing is lawn. The lawn and the tops of the aza­leas mounds, how­ever, were cov­ered with fallen leaves off the ginkgo trees. I loved this space in its sim­plic­ity and could have spent hours there.

A very few of the ginkgo trees still held on to their star­tling yel­low leaves.

But most of the leaves on the ground were pro­gress­ing from bright yel­low to tan to brown.

Here’s a sug­ges­tion for the Hunt­ing­ton: How about set­ting up a ginkko hot­line or RSS or Twit­ter feed? Desert parks com­monly offer wild­flower hot­lines to alert you of peak flow­er­ing. Some­thing sim­i­lar to let you know when the falling leaves would be at their most spec­tac­u­lar would be great too. Still, it was a gor­geous effect, and it high­lighted the nat­ural process of bright yel­low leaves aging into less col­or­ful ones.

After the walled gar­den is a bon­sai court con­tain­ing some spec­tac­u­lar spec­i­mens in a sim­ple, rus­tic set­ting. The Hunt­ing­ton is in the process of enlarg­ing the dis­play area to make room for more bon­sai.

My last shots from the Japan­ese Gar­den are of two gor­geous stands of bam­boo. A small grove adja­cent to the “model home” has a small wooden path­way through it.

A more mas­sive stand occu­pies a spot at the edge of the gar­den.

Inside the dark thicket Camel­lia sasan­qua blooms.

What is it about a grove of bam­boo that dri­ves vis­i­tors to carve their ini­tials into the culms? Grrrrrrr.

A final look at the rhythms and con­tra­pun­tal inter­play in the bamboo…

December 30 2009 | Categories: gardening • landscape design • places | Tags: bamboo • bonsai • Ginkgo biloba • Huntington Library Art Collections and Botanical Gardens • Japanese gardens • those autumn leaves • walled gardens | 9 Comments »

framing the garden view

Here are just a few more pho­tos left over from my post yes­ter­day on the Huntington’s recently-opened Chi­nese Garden.

I men­tioned how there were many lay­ers to the spaces there. The fol­low­ing are some of the doors and win­dows in the gar­den that help to frame the views and con­tribute to the sense of layering.

Leaf-shaped win­dow near the Stu­dio of Pure Scents.

Stacked por­tals of the Ter­race of the Jade Mirror.

These last two win­dows in the out­side wall, the Wall of the Col­or­ful Clouds, are inter­est­ing in that they’re not per­fect squares. The top, left and right sides form part of a square, but their bot­tom sides par­al­lel the con­tours of rolling ground where the wall is sited. Even though you’re look­ing at an ele­ment in the human-created hard­scape, this tech­nique acknowl­edges the earth where the wall stands.

Yet to come: posts on the Huntington’s Japan­ese Gar­den, Con­ser­va­tory and Desert Gar­den.

December 29 2009 | Categories: gardening • landscape design • places | Tags: Chinese gardens • garden walls • hardscape • Huntington Library Art Collections and Botanical Gardens • views | 5 Comments »