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 »
One of the bits of ugliness that we uncovered as part of our current household projects is this wall in the garden that we’re trying to figure out what to do with. When we look out the dining room, kitchen and bedroom windows this is what we see, and it has the potential for being a cool accent wall for the garden in front of it.
You shake your head in disbelief at how some things get constructed backwards and this was one of them. Apparently there was a low retaining wall with a fence on it to begin with. Then the previous owner wanted a nice concrete bench and outdoor fireplace on the other side. Instead of taking down the wall, they just cast the concrete bench around the wood. And then they stapled chicken wire to the fence and used it as scaffolding for the fireplace.
Wood being wood rots away after a few decades. After we moved into the house we basically replaced some of the problem spots and called it good enough, but twenty years later there was no salvaging it. Time to fix it and fix it right. But you know me: Whatever we do has to look really cool. What to do?
Leaving it alone is one option. It does have a certain warehouse chic look to it, although nothing else in the house has anything else to do with that look.
This wall detail in the Topher Delaney garden that I’ve written about recently serves as one inspiration. I wouldn’t recreate it literally, but it shows how something bold and dynamic can animate the garden space. It would be easy enough to chip off the mortar and detach the chicken wire from my wall and tile something geometric and bold.
I do wonder, though if it might dominate the space a bit too much. And how well would something so bold would wear after a few decades? Would a simple background divider, a foil for plants, be a better option?
It’ll be several months before I’ll be able to take on this part of the project, so I’ll have some time to come up with a plan. What would you do with a problem wall like this?
September 14 2009 | Categories: gardening | Tags: garden walls • hardscape | 11 Comments »
My last post has me thinking more about the backgrounds that plants grow against.
I was getting excited that the San Miguel Island buckwheats(Eriogonum grande var. rubescens) that I’d grown from seed were coming in to bloom. But standing back from them, I realized that the place where I’d transplanted them—a raised bed with a red brick retaining wall behind it—might not have been the best place for the plants.
The dusky pink flowers blend so well with the reddish colors of the brick that they practically vanish. And the busy gridded background of the brick and weeping mortar draws so much attention that anything in front of the wall just gets ignored.
What would it look like against a more neutral backbround? I wondered. And so I went to grab a piece of white matboard and positioned it behind the plants.
Wow. Big difference. It’s suddenly easier to make out the shapes of the umbels of flowers, and you can begin to appreciate the subtle color of the flowers.
Up close, the white background almost made the plant look like a botanical illustration.
The low contrast against the background didn’t prevent this bug from finding the buckwheat. Clearly, a bug’s eyes and brain don’t work the same way our human ones do.
Once these plants grow in more and achieve some more height they should stand a better chance of holding their own against the background of busy brickwork. But the plants will never “pop” against the wall in the same way they’d show against a simpler, more neutral background. So, in the “note to self” category, I’ll be paying more attention to contrasts between the plant and the hardscape around it.
July 10 2009 | Categories: gardening • landscape design • my garden | Tags: contrast • Eriogonomu grande var. rubescens • garden walls • hardscape • native plants • San Miguel Island buckwheat | 10 Comments »
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…
February 28 2009 | Categories: art • gardening • landscape • landscape design • photography • places | Tags: architecture • brick • Chicago • concrete • Frank Lloyd Wright • garden walls • planters • Robie House • walls | 8 Comments »
If I gave out awards to my neighbors for beautifying their public spaces, this house would definitely win one of them.
This is their garden wall right next to the front sidewalk. It’s topped with attractive latticework, but what’s special is the tile below. Gray field tiles give way to a central area of colorful glass mosaics. Glass tile has been catching on for indoor use, but it can make a most excellent statement outdoors.
If there’s a down-side to this project, it’s the disconnect between the hardscape and the green materials. You can see that the horsetails have already started to spread throughout the strip. Within just a few years you won’t be able to see the glass tiles. And that cute little agave planted up against the wall. Yikes! That’ll be a big monster before you know it, fighting it out with the horsetails in a mess of planting.
My advice? Lose the agave. It’s a beaucoup spectacular plant, especially when it blooms. But this is just about the wrongest place to put it. And lose the horsetails, too. Their upright geometry has always appealed to me, but they spread like syrup on a pancake.
Southern-hemisphere restios are starting to become more commonly available, and they have a striking vertical architecture that would be a worthy replacement for the horsetails—visually between a grass and a horsetail in appearence, depending on the species. A couple clumps of it in front of the wall would let you see around and through the plants, and the plants wouldn’t stray far from the base of the leaves.
Two good choices for this spot in the three-foot range: Chondropetalum tectorum and Thamnochortus bachmannii. The first is getting to be available many places. (The photo to the left is from San Marcos Growers, who distributes it to nurseries.) The second…well, I’m growing some from seed right now as I write this…
February 17 2009 | Categories: gardening • landscape design | Tags: equisetum • garden walls • glass tile • hardscape • horsetails • restios | 5 Comments »
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.
January 04 2009 | Categories: gardening • landscape design • my garden | Tags: concrete • garden walls • hardscape • recycling • rock gardens | 7 Comments »
I was thinking about doing a flat wall art-piece incorporating living plants, and what should I run across but this on Landscape + Urbanism, a creation that was featured in Metropolitan Home.
Panel planting
It’s a panel of living succulents that were establish in a normal, flat orientation. Then everything was rotated 90 degrees and mounted on the wall.
So is this realization a good idea? It looks cool, for sure. But the plant choices make me think that this effect might not last for long.
Aeonium arboreum ‘Zwartkopf’, Kalanchoe fedtschenkoi and Echeveria ‘Afterglow’ are the named plants. But all of those—like most plants—will grow up, away from gravity just like they’d grow in the garden, and away from the panel in search of light. This tailored wall piece, over the course of a year or so, could turn shaggy and scrappy, like a florist’s bouquet once the flowers start to wither.
I like the basic idea, but I think other plants would probably stay looking nice for longer, particularly plants that were adapted to growing in a horizontal orientation: Creeping fig (Ficus pumila) in its various color forms, various colors of clinging ivy (Hedera sp.), Virginia Creeper (Parthenocissus quinquefolia) or many vines that attach themselves to walls using aerial roots. Yes, I know, all these are potentially over-exuberant to invasive plants. But constrained to a panel separate from a wall, and with a shallow, constrained root system, I’d reason that you’d stand a chance of keeping these plants well behaved.
And you wouldn’t have to re-plant the wall panel over and over again.
August 06 2008 | Categories: gardening | Tags: garden walls • vines | 1 Comment »
