Two posts ago I mentioned the Crack Garden, a winner in this year’s ASLA awards program that made me think in a new way about dealing with too much concrete. Ryan over at Dry Stone Garden has some different thoughts on the project that are worth a read.
And as long as we’re talking about reclaiming space from what used to be paved over, let me show you a few shots of my front porch. (Notice how fanatically I staged the space for these photos, including coiling the leaky old hose off in the corner. That’s a level of creativity you never see in the garden design mags.)
The area was all concrete until two, three years ago. This was from the years when a lot of concrete was poured with strips of wood to break the expanse of concrete into neat rectangles. Nice idea, but over the years the wood rots. The concrete shifts.
So I dug out all the decaying wood with a chisel. Next John and I spent a couple hours with a sledgehammer removing some of the big squares of concrete, and then I poured black-pigmented cement to grout between some of the slabs.
I probably didn’t do enough to prepare the ground. Why spend time doing that when there’s bare dirt where you can put plants? So in went some blue fescue in a grid pattern. (Fortunately a few of the plants died, breaking up what would be a cliche of little blue fescues all lined up neatly in their rows.) And then a plant of red shisu for contrast, two standing stones, three stepping stones, a potted euphorbia, gravel mulch and the coiled garden hose to complete the picture. (The shisu is an herb that dies back every year, but it reseeds like crazy, letting you decide where you want some dark red foliage this year.)
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.
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.
(Photo: Tom Fox)
The recipe:
Take one piece of cracked pavement.
Apply a jackhammer to widen the cracks. (Photo: Kevin Conger)
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.
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…
One of the easiest ways to reuse broken concrete is to stack up the pieces to make a low garden wall.
My house came with an expanse of dangerously uneven, cracked concrete that needed to be removed. One option would have been to haul it off to the landfill. But turning the scraps into this little wall for a raised vegetable garden ended up being a greener solution.
The hardest part was breaking up the concrete into manageable pieces. (We used a sledgehammer). And lifting the twenty to sixty pound chunks into place made for some hard work. But it was basically an “easy” job in that it wasn’t particularly technical and didn’t demand too many brain cells.
If your soil is especially unstable, the concrete could be set on top of a foundation. But for almost all soils, and for a low wall like this one—about twenty inches tall—don’t bother. Try to stagger the joints between pieces from row to row to make the wall more stable. Work to nest the pieces together as tightly as possible to minimize soil loss out the sides if you’ll be using the wall for a raised bed.
If you would like a softer look, you could also plant little succulents or compact rock-garden plants into the crevices. Creeping sedums, alyssum, low varieties of thyme or trailing strawberries would be good, easy choices for a wall that has a sunny exposure. You could also plant low-growing bulbs or annuals in front of the wall.
The result is definitely on the rustic end of the spectrum, more “cottage” than glam or glitzy. But you’ll feel better about not filling up the landfill. And in the end the project could be easier than loading the chunks into a truck to haul them away.
I wrote earlier about Linda offering to make a wedding gift of a quilt for John and me. I got word last week that all the squares were completed, and Sunday I stopped by to consult on their arrangement.
Our quilt nearing completion
Here’s how the quilt looked in its near-final version as it was all laid out on her living room floor. Come on everyone, tell Linda how gorgeous her quilt looks!
Linda likes to live with these arrangement decisions before stitching things together, and we had fun moving a few blocks around, fine-tuning the arrangement. On the table in front of the quilt you can see the rough mockup I did of the quilt after scanning the fabrics and playing a morning with Photoshop. It ended up being a great way to pre-imagine how things would look. The blocks are in different places, but the overall quilt looks a lot like the early sketch.
The design is based on a quilt by Liz Axford that was exhibited in the Quilt Visions quilt show in 2002. Entitled “Bamboo Boogie-Woogie,” that quilt was an abstracted take on bamboo stems.
Bamboo at the Neurosciences Institute
Closeup of Bamboo at the Neurosciences Institute
Speaking of bamboo, it was an interesting bit of coincidence that the night before I’d attended a concert by the Hillcrest Wind Ensemble, a band that John sometimes plays in. The venue was the Neurosciences Institute in La Jolla, a nice piece of architecture by Billy Tsien and Tod WIlliams, with striking landscaping done by the San Diego County firm of Burton Associates. The grounds feature this amazing long rectangle filled with golden bamboo that must be my favorite single planting of bamboo anywhere. (The planting is even more impressive by day, but that’s not when I was there…)
The bamboo connection goes even further. The architects of the Neurosciences Institute designed an exhibition at the National Building Museum devoted to concrete as a building material. Part of the space included these forests of steel reinforcing rods, rebar, that are used to strengthen concrete. At least to my eyes the installation bears more than a passing resemblance to the bamboo planting at the Neurosciences Institute. Or am I just delusional? (This photo by Frank Oudeman [ source ] )
Another of Linda’s Quilts
But back to quilts…
Linda’s house, like the home of many quilters, is a one-person quilt show, with lots of great examples of her work. I’m a pretty visual person and I can always look at more cool things. It so happened that the Quilt Visions quilt biennial was happening up the coast at the Oceanside Museum of Art. That was an obvious extension to the afternoon if I ever heard of one.
Some museum exhibitions allow photography in the galleries, others don’t. Unfortunately this was one of those no photography ones. You’ll have to take my word that the show had a few drop-dead spectacular art quilts, as well as several that spoke quietly and revealed their secrets slowly as you looked ever closer at them.
It’s the sort of show that will either inspire you to take up quilting or to intimidate you into giving up all hope of ever making anything beautiful out of fabric and thread. Even though I have a Y chromosome and quilting isn’t typically a guy thing, I think I ended up being inspired. Now, someone please give me a few months of free time so that I can start up yet another obsession…
The pont in front of Oceanside Public Library
And here’s one final picture. The museum was part of a civic center complex designed by the architect Charles Moore. The very comfortable, human-scaled buildings take their design clues from Irving Gill, San Diego’s most daring architect of the early 20th century. Gill used the Spanish-inspired arches of this region and stripped them down to their essential geometry: tradition and history meets modernism.
Part of the complex is the Oceanside Public Library, and here’s the pond in front of it. Sorry, no more bamboo, but what a terrific way to plant palm trees, each on its own little geometric island…
(Photo: Tom Fox)
The bamboo connection goes even further. The architects of the Neurosciences Institute designed an exhibition at the National Building Museum devoted to concrete as a building material. Part of the space included these forests of steel reinforcing rods, rebar, that are used to strengthen concrete. At least to my eyes the installation bears more than a passing resemblance to the bamboo planting at the Neurosciences Institute. Or am I just delusional? (This photo by Frank Oudeman [ 
