[ Lost in the Landscape ]

on the road: cornerstone sonoma

The big gar­den des­ti­na­tion for the Sonoma County week­end ended up being Cor­ner­Stone Sonoma. Imag­ine a giant gar­den show with totally unre­lated demon­stra­tion gar­dens lined up next to each other in their own stalls like some big hor­ti­cul­tural pet­ting zoo. But instead of nice-but-not-so-interesting gar­dens assem­bled by local land­scap­ers, you have some really strik­ing spaces put together by some of the big­ger names in the land­scape archi­tec­ture field.

Find­ing the place isn’t hard–Jenny was along for the out­ing and had brought her GPS. We fol­lowed the nice, polite direc­tions of the GPS unit until we got close. The Cor­ner­Stone lit­er­a­ture says to look for the white picket fence as a sign that you’ve arrived. This is CornerStone’s take on a white picket fence, and it’s good prepa­ra­tion for what you’ll find there.

Like many des­ti­na­tions in Sonoma, Cor­ner­stone com­bines wine tast­ing oppor­tu­ni­ties (4 vine­yards), with chances to get a bite to eat, and places to shop for gifts or things for your gar­den. How are you set for some rus­tic archi­tec­tural details to set into your landscaping?

Maybe your koi pond needs some mer­maids? (John wanted one of these very badly.)

The facil­ity has some pleas­ant lawn spaces with flowerbeds of cool­ing pur­ples and blues and whites that were being set up for some social event.

But what sets this place apart are the main gar­dens in the back. And of all of them it’s hard not to love this one by Oehme & van Swe­den, the Gar­den of Contrasts.

Big, sturdy agaves con­trast with soft grasses that move in the wind.

As the sea­sons change, plants move in and out of promi­nence in this plant­ing. Here are the last Cal­i­for­nia pop­pies of the sea­son planted in the grasses.

This one might be a lit­tle harder to love–or at least it was for me, Ken Smith’s Daisy Bor­der. From the astro­turf to the plas­tic tubes to the plas­tic flow­ers, there’s noth­ing alive in this “plant­ing.” But I sup­pose it’s nat­u­ral­is­tic in the sense that some of the daisies in this bor­der look pretty good, while oth­ers seem the worse for wear because of what the ele­ments (and prob­a­bly small vis­i­tors) have done to them. Who ever has a bor­der where every sin­gle plant is metic­u­lously well-groomed?

John Green­lee cre­ated a soft, rolling plant­ing that con­sists entirely of grasses, his Mediter­ranean Meadow. Peo­ple do all-grass plant­i­ngs all the time–call it “lawn.” But it’s a brave thing to do a gar­den with all sorts of con­trast­ing grasses. Here a low river of fes­cue runs through the plantings.

Taller, stiffer grasses (edit: or are these restios?) line the “banks” of the river.

I wish this scene pho­tographed bet­ter than it did. The fore­ground fea­tures soft seed heads of a short grass, with a more archi­tec­tural species planted on the top of the low mound.

This and so many of the other gar­dens were bub­bling over with all sorts of ideas you could repur­pose in another gar­den set­ting. I’ll share more scenes from Cor­ner­Stone in the next post.

August 22 2009 | Categories: gardening • landscape design | Tags: agaves • CornerStone Sonoma • fake plants • John Greenlee • Oehme & van Sweden • ornamental grasses • plastic | 5 Comments »

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.

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.

June 05 2009 | Categories: gardening • landscape design | Tags: CMG Landscape Architecture • concrete • fake plants • hardscape • James May • plastic | 10 Comments »