[ 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 »

friday randomness

Here are a few mostly unre­lated things I’ve been stor­ing up.

Shop­ping for Pumpkins

First off, I wanted to share this fun(?) photo that’s only a few days late for Cana­dian Thanks­giv­ing or a cou­ple weeks early for the US hol­i­day. (Be sure to click it to enlarge it to get the full effect.) The image is “McLean, Vir­ginia (1978)” by pho­tog­ra­pher Joel Stern­feld. It’s his best-known photo and the cover to one of the edi­tions of his book, Amer­i­can Prospects.

A big part of pho­tog­ra­phy can be being in the right place at the right time. But then you have to know when to snap the shut­ter. Stern­feld nailed this one!

Orna­men­tal Grasses

Grasses have been used as lawn mate­ri­als for cen­turies, but the last cou­ple decades have seen an explo­sion in the use of orna­men­tal grasses that you don’t attack with lawn­mow­ers. The Cana­dian firm, Bluestem Nurs­ery, has assem­bled one of the bet­ter brief guides to dozens of commonly-used orna­men­tal grasses. When does a grass bloom? How much water does it need? How large does it get? Just take a look at the great sum­mary. Click on the plant name for pho­tos and a more detailed descrip­tion. It doesn’t have every plant you’ll run into in a seed cat­a­log, but it has plenty of the hardier species.

Pen­ste­mons from Seed

A few weeks ago I was plan­ning to sow seeds of a cou­ple species of pen­ste­mon. Some of the species in the genus require a cold snap to ger­mi­nate, oth­ers require light, while some respond to a fairly elab­o­rate string of tem­per­a­ture changes. And some just spring to life after you sprin­kle them in some soil and water them in. I had no idea what kind of treat­ment my species required until I went trawl­ing the web. That was when I ran across Jim Swayne’s pen­ste­mon seed ger­mi­na­tion method­ol­ogy pages.

There you’ll find sev­eral hun­dred pen­ste­mon species listed, along with brief ger­mi­na­tion notes on how you make the lit­tle seeds come to life. (For exam­ple, one of the more elab­o­rate rou­tines, for P. hartwegii, goes some­thing like: “Sow fresh seed @ 70ºF (21ºC), sow stored seed under thin cover 8 wks @ 40ºF (4ºC), move to 50ºF (10ºC) under light; if no germ. in 4 wks, move to 60ºF (16ºC).” For­tu­nately my two species were closer to the “just add water” category.)

An Elec­tion Video You Haven’t Seen

Leav­ing the gar­den, I wanted share this clip in recog­ni­tion of the elec­tions just con­cluded. It may be the last elec­tion footage you’ll need to watch this sea­son: a promo for Please Vote for Me, a Dan­ish doc­u­men­tary from 2007 on an elec­tion for Class Mon­i­tor for a third grade class in Wuhan, China. It’s a lit­tle Sesame Street in parts, but it’s got its Lord of the Flies moments as well.

November 14 2008 | Categories: gardening • photography | Tags: Bluestem Nursery • elections • germination • Jim Swayne • Joel Sternfeld • ornamental grasses • penstemon • politics • seeds • Vote for Me | 1 Comment »