The rain last weekend cleared out long enough for us to install the shade panel we’d constructed.

The fence you see faces north by northwest. Anything growing in the bed is in total shade for several months. About this time of year, though, the sun swings north, and things start to get sun exposure in the later parts of the day. We removed the termite-munched patio cover that shaded the delicate plants last fall—it had to go—but suddenly time was of the essence in restoring shade.

This is where a few shade denizens live in the bed…

…along with John’s collection of orchid cactus, Epiphyllum, that he’s amassed over the years. We also have a small assortment of hanging tillandsias and some tropicals, including a few surviving orchids from my rabid orchid-growing days two decades ago.

This weekend has turned rainy again, filling many of the holes in the shade screen with water. It’s slowed down moving the plants to their new home, but I won’t complain about the water we’re getting.

We’re already two inches ahead of the entire rainfall for last season (July 1, 2008 to June 30, 2009). And last month’s rain accumulation alone, 5.4 inches, came close to the 5.5 total for all of 2009. Still we have a couple inches to go before we can even claim an average rainfall year.

This season’s rain is filling up vernal pools after several years of disappointments. Friday I stopped by some pools with a biologist to scope out a potential field trip for the local native plant society. Vernal pools are among the most threatened habitats locally. The occur on our mesa tops, areas that prove irresistible to developers because they’re flat and require less soil preparation than canyon bottoms or slopes.

Young plants were everywhere, including those of San Diego mesa mint (Pogogyne abramsii), a plant on several endangered species lists. If the rains keep up, it looks like it’s going to be a great year for them.

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.

On the way up to Los Angeles we had a chance to make a quick stop at the Huntington Library, Art Collection and Botanical Gardens in San Marino. Their Chinese garden, Liu Fang Yuan, the Garden of Flowing Fragrance, opened to the public just last year. Fund-raising is ongoing for a second phase of construction, and the plants that are there are still on the young side. Still, it’s not too early to take a look at what’s being billed as the largest garden of its kind outside of China.

Two stone lions guard one of the alternate entrances into the garden.

Hand-carved stonework and elaborate hardscape details figure prominently in the garden’s design. It’s worth taking your time to appreciate the details close up.

This walkway resolves to the adjacent planting in swooping tiled edges.

Patterns made from pebbles fixed in cement take several forms. Here’s one design.

…And a detail of another designs…

…And an overview of yet another of the patterns using pebbles.

These hardscape details are dense and busy. Plantings are also fairly dense, with many kinds of plants used in a small space. Move a few feet in any direction and your view of the garden changes radically.

The overall effect is kaleidoscopic, and the garden encourages active engagement with the space.

Several structures within the garden add even more to the layering of space. This is the lotus pavilion.

Pavilion of the Three Friends (San You Ge)…

Terrace of the Jade Mirror (Yu Jing Tai).

And several large taihu rocks—“scholar’s rocks”—enjoy places of honor around the gardens central pond.

Walkways curve, bend and buckle. There aren’t many direct ways to get from one place to another. Here’s the Corridor of Water and Clouds, zig-zagging its way along one of the garden’s edges.

Even this bridge, the Bridge of the Joy of Fish, participates in the garden-designer’s manipulation of the viewer’s experience of the spaces.

So what did I think of all this? Overall it’s a pretty spectacular garden. The hardscape is inventive and beautifully done. I’m no expert on Chinese gardens, so I can’t tell you how well it represents the concepts and experience of a true Chinese garden. But the Huntington’s press release makes it sound like they went through great pains to aim for accuracy:

Two firms based in China have worked with The Huntington to provide authenticity to the project. The Suzhou Institute of Landscape Architectural Design, developed detailed construction plans, working from the initial conceptual drawings done by Jin Chen. Among the challenges faced by the architects was adapting traditional Chinese structures to meet U.S. regulations for seismic safety and wheelchair accessibility. Fabrication and construction was provided by the Suzhou Garden Development Co., Ltd. The firm sent 11 stone artisans to The Huntington in 2006 to install the hand-carved bridges and to place the stones around the lake. Another 50 wood carvers, roof tile experts, stone pavers, and other specialists arrived in summer 2007 to work on the structures. Nearly all materials except structural steel and concrete have come from China, including highly sculptural “scholar rocks.”

After making a couple rounds through the garden, with my steps carefully manipulated by its designer, I’ll have to admit to feeling a little bit like a puppet. All gardens are manipulated spaces, of course, and you’re given limited ways to experience them. But in this garden I felt that outside control more strongly than in many other spaces.

Once the plants fill in more, I’m sure I’ll take more time, planning my pacing and enjoying the stops. Many of the garden’s plants have symbolic meanings. Learning to appreciate the layers of subtleties will take time.

The Huntington’s Chinese garden will become more rewarding and interesting over the years, and I’ll look forward to visiting it in the future.

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?

We’ve just started a project of our own on a little detached studio room behind the house. It began innocently enough with thoughts about replacing the patio cover that was starting its slow descent to the ground. (No piece of wood is safe in the land of termites.) Maybe two or three weekends of hard work to replace it. Yah, right.

As long as we were removing the patio that was attached to the room, we thought it would be a good time to redo the siding that has some spots that are failing. And as long as the walls were open, we really should insulate. And as long as we had things partly dissembled it made sense to replace the old single glazed windows and doors with better insulating ones. (The local power company provides rebates towards insulation, and one of the federal stimulus packages features 30% rebates on super-insulated replacement windows.) Now that the walls are starting to be opened, it’s clear that some of them are so gone that we’re having to re-frame them completely. So the little two weekend project has grown to two months or more. If it doesn’t rain.

Right: Just some of the spots we’re having to reframe.

With a fairly long-term project like this, we didn’t want to damage the plants in the middle of it. John’s assortment of epiphyllum cactus plants in pots needed shelter, and less portable plants planted in the raised shade bed around the pond wouldn’t be able to take much sun. The waterlilies in the pond would do okay with full sun, but the extra sun causes algae to grow and we didn’t want to have to battle pond scum as another house project.

So the weekend we took down the sheltering patio cover, up went these little portable cabanas and beach umbrellas. It looks like we’re having a big garden party, but it’s going to be a lot less relaxing the next couple of months.

This is my main workstation where I do my blogging, layered over by protective sheeting and open to the great outdoors. I suspect my blogging is going to take a big hit for a while as all my waking hours start to be consumed with the project.

And all this is happening during the prime planting season in Southern California. I have seeds to sow and plants to plant. I’m stressed. But with my university job being one of those impacted by state furloughs, I’ll be having lots of time to work on the project. I suppose that’s seeing the silver lining to the dark cloud that’s about to send lightning bolts in my general direction…

Here’s a hanging screen in the garden, a project from a decade or more ago that I still like. It helps separate two levels of the garden: a lower level that has black bamboo planted in a corner, and an upper one where there’s a long tiled bench and outdoor fireplace.

The screen hangs in an opening that’s five feet high and six wide, and features opaque white polycarbonate in the frame that allows the shadows of the bamboo to provide interesting shadows on long, sunny afternoons.

The style of the screen is a little more overtly Japanese than where I’m in my life stylistically right now, and comes from a time when I was exploring Asian influenced craftsman designs as I was trying to improve my woodworking skills. (There’s a whole bedroom in the house that features similar woodwork.)

The materials are redwood for the frame and polycarbonate for the “windows.” The whole assembly was made with no tools more specialized than a hand-held circular saw and router. Everything is held together with screws, pegs, caulk and an unspeakable amount of waterproof glue.

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.

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.)

Okay, ASLA. I’m ready for my Honor Award.

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.

I showed the almost-complete version of this front porch screen earlier, but that was before we applied the final stain to the wood. Here it is in the really final version.

As long as we were staining wood, we got up to the deck and attacked the railings with the same stain. It had been more than a year since we’d done it last and things had faded. You can see the before and after pretty clearly in these pictures. (This project used an oil-based stain for hardwoods. They make a water-based stain that claims to last seven years, but it ended up flaking off this oily ipe hardwood on the small project we tested it on. Total disaster. Save it for softwoods.)

How do all of you react to exterior wood that’s aged to a silver color? This project is still on the new side for us and we wanted to keep it looking as it did when we first finished it. Staining all the tops and bottoms and sides of the wood is a lot of work, though. As we get less able or motivated to keep up with details around the house, I’m sure we’ll let things assume more of a Gray Gardens look.

But back to the front screen… After the project was complete there was a gap between where the screen ends and the driveway. While I’m not one to put up castle walls and a moat between us and the busy street, a little more privacy seemed like a good idea.

Before, we had a couple low lavenders in front of the screen: Nice enough and they survived with virtually no summer watering. But they weren’t much of a privacy screen. Yank. Out they went.

In their place is this new Ceanothus ‘Tuxedo.’ I’d done a post on some garden ceanothus not long ago, and I couldn’t stop thinking about the near-black foliage of this variety. With the lavenders gone, there was a perfect place for it.

Okay, stare at the picture of the little gallon plant and ask the obvious question: “Wasn’t the idea to install a plant that would screen the view from the street?”

Ceanothus tend to be rapid growers. This selection is new to the trade this spring, so I’m not sure exactly how rapid it’ll be. Still, I expect that it’ll approach its target size of six feet by six feet before too long. I’ll post more pictures as it fills in.