avoid, or embrace the inevitable?

Today I want to talk about a cou­ple things that seem inevitable: Gar­den plants will die; and, con­crete hard­scape will develop cracks.

Strat­egy 1: You could try avoid­ance, devel­op­ing ways to get around those facts.

You may have heard of the recent gar­den at the Chelsea Gar­den Show designed by James May of Britain’s Top Gear auto­mo­tive pro­gram. The plants (and insects) were all made of plas­tic mod­el­ing paste. It was totally arti­fi­cial. A gar­den that will never expe­ri­ence death—but nei­ther will it ever expe­ri­ence life. (And what would you call a “gar­den” like this? Land­scape or hardscape?)


If you want to avoid cracks in con­crete walk­ways or patio cov­ers, you could avoid con­crete alto­gether. For instance, you could employ alter­nate mate­ri­als like decom­posed gran­ite or one of the attrac­tive alter­na­tive paving sys­tems high­lighted over at Steve Snedeker’s Land­scap­ing and Gar­den­ing Blog.

Or you could embrace what’s going to hap­pen anyway.

chicago-lurie-snow

Some plants look attrac­tive after they’ve passed on for good or just for the sea­son. To the left are some plants at Piet Oudolf’s Chicago Lurie Gar­den as they appeared this past Feb­ru­ary. Pick­ing struc­turally inter­est­ing plants like those can keep things look­ing good, even in the pres­ence of things in the gar­den that may be dying. This is a big and rich topic that I’ve touched on occa­sion­ally in my posts, and I’m sure to return to in the in the future in more detail.

And how do you embrace cracked con­crete? I was over at Pruned, where this bril­liant win­ner from the 2009 Amer­i­can Soci­ety of Land­scape Archi­tects Awards was high­lighted. The project by CMG Land­scape Archi­tec­ture of San Fran­cisco played up the nat­ural ten­dency of con­crete to crack, as well as the ten­dency of plants to col­o­nize those cracks.

Crack garden(Photo: Tom Fox)

The recipe:

Take one piece of cracked pavement.

Jackhammering

Apply a jack­ham­mer to widen the cracks. (Photo: Kevin Con­ger)

Planted crack garden

Amend the soil, and then place plants of your choos­ing in the enlarged cracks. (Photo: Tom Fox)

Total project cost, with home­owner labor: $500. The final results are sur­pris­ing, and so is the final cost, par­tic­u­larly when you con­sider it’s a project involv­ing pro­fes­sional land­scape architects.

June 05 2009 | Categories: gardening • landscape design | Tags: • • • • • | 10 Comments »