I’ve been MIA from reading my favorite garden blogs, and I’ve been AWOL from posting. You know the story…life happens.
At least the first distractions was garden-related.
I posted this photo months ago. It’s of the backside of an outdoor fireplace after we removed a rotted wooden fence that the previous owners poured concrete around to form a garden bench. The world has only a certain amount of abject ugliness and a big pile of it sat in the back yard. So…what to do with it?
We thought about cladding it in something, maybe some cement panel pieces leftover from a previous house project. Or maybe grow a vine. Ryan suggested stuccoing the ugly mound.
We ended up with one of the more radical solutions: Make the whole mess go away.
Well, actually, it’s been several weeks of chiseling out the old bricks, one at a time, trying to save them for some something. But hopefully not another house project using brick. I’m coming to hate the stuff. This house 25 years ago came with brick walkways, brick walls, brick patios, brick everything. Enough already! There may be a Craigslist ad in our future.
And after the brick there were a few hundred little tiles that had to be chipped off the bench. I can blame the ugly mortar mess on the back of the fireplace on the previous owner, but the tile was my own bit of youthful excess, trying to prettify a seriously imperfect slab of concrete. Paint is easy to undo. Tile is not.
So that’s been distraction #1.
Distraction #2 hasn’t got much to do with the garden. Recently I got it in mind that I wanted to learn a new piece of music, the piano part for John Adams’ wild Road Movies, for violin and piano. Here’s a YouTube video of a nice performance of the last movement, particularly of the swinging piano part. (Ignore the screaming child near the conclusion.)
The garden project should be done before too too too long–more to follow for sure. But this music is going to take a while longer. It almost makes you pine for living in a climate where the garden shuts down for six months, leaving you with little to do but indoor stuff…like baking and art and music.
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…
