[ Lost in the Landscape ]

outdoor rooms versus the garden

I’m start­ing to worry about the Jamie Durie’s of the world. I, as a gar­dener, am get­ting con­cerned that the kind of land­scap­ing he represents—outdoor spaces that are becom­ing increas­ingly indis­tin­guish­able from tightly dec­o­rated indoor spaces—seems to be tak­ing over.

Take a look at what peo­ple are doing on home makeover shows, includ­ing Durie’s own The Out­door Room on HGTV. Look at the increas­ing bulk of out­door fur­ni­ture in cat­a­logs. Or just go shop­ping for a patio set, which is what we did recently.

The mis­matched plas­tic sets we’ve from as long as fif­teen years ago that been liv­ing with were look­ing long in the tooth. We wanted a sim­ple table and chairs for the roof deck, and maybe some­thing for the back patio. Yes, we found tables and chairs in the stores…

…But there’s been a huge explo­sion in huge-scaled resort-themed seat­ing, much of it wrapped in syn­thetic wicker. They tell you to “think big” when select­ing fur­ni­ture scaled to the larger out­doors, but so much of this would be all out of pro­por­tion to the aver­age gar­den. In all this McMansion-scaled fur­ni­ture I kept see­ing Jamie Durie, and I wondered:

A. Who has space for all this huge fur­ni­ture? and,

B. What hap­pens to the space devoted to gar­dens when the inside starts to sprawl outdoors?

A 2010 inter­view in the LA Times didn’t raise my com­fort level. When asked about the basic focus of his recently launched TV series Durie replied, “The rea­son I cre­ated this show was to cast a wider net and reach the non-gardener. I want to encour­age peo­ple inter­ested in travel, archi­tec­ture, design, food or even fash­ion — and the show really encom­passes all that. It’s really just laced with gar­dens, which is the icing on the cake.” How do you rec­on­cile this state­ment with the tag line for his web­site, jamiedurie.com: “Con­nect­ing peo­ple with plants”?

These out­door rooms are spaces where pot­ted plants are largely inter­change­able with throw pil­lows. Planted sur­faces and gar­den beds give way to hard­scape. The domin­ion of humans, shel­tered indoor spaces, make their move to trans­form the out­doors into places where nature gets increas­ingly mar­gin­al­ized. Humans dom­i­na­tion marches ahead.

Con­trast these with gar­den rooms of the past, which seeme more about the plants, often fea­tur­ing walls made out of plants and liv­ing green things under­foot. Our generation’s out­door rooms seem to be all about the humans. For a pur­port­edly green-conscious era all this seems backwards.

Is any­one else both­ered by this? Or is it just me?

July 03 2011 | Categories: gardening • landscape design | Tags: chairs • Jamie Durie • outdoor furniture • outdoor rooms • rants • tables | 18 Comments »

more from the county fair

Let me share my favorite gar­den design from this year’s San Diego County Fair. If I tell you that I grew up on Sun­set Mag­a­zine and that I fre­quented the Sun­set demon­stra­tion gar­dens at the Los Ange­les County Arbore­tum in the 1970s, you can see why a gar­den like this pushes my but­tons. This space my North County’s Akana Design really embraces the Sun­set aes­thetic of com­bin­ing mod­ern design with liv­able out­door spaces. (Ignore the ugly black shade cloth back­ground that’s been draped over the plas­tic white lat­tice that the fair pro­vided for their displays.)

I’ve been known to grouse about out­door spaces where the gar­den has been sac­ri­ficed at the expense of adding yet another room to a McMan­sion, but the plants in this design seemed to be inte­grated into the results and not so much an after­thought. This space fea­tures a com­pact eat­ing space on gold-colored decom­posed gran­ite, with a whiter stone mulch used for most of the grow­ing areas. Two sim­ple wooden walls pro­vide some pro­tec­tion, at the same time they define the space and pro­vide a back­drop for plantings.

A sin­gle lounge chair sits off to one side at the end of a DG walk­way. A stone in front serves as an ottoman. When the chair is stored indoors for the win­ter, the ottoman stone could serve as an accent at the end of the lit­tle path. The seat is sur­rounded by fra­grant rose­mary and cleve­land sage, as well as plants that pro­vide visual inter­est and variety.

This detail shows some of the plants used to pro­vide tex­tural inter­est: loman­dra, phormium, aeo­nium, tea tree (I think), and–uh oh–Mexican feather grass. Well I had to find some­thing about the plant­i­ngs to cri­tique. Might I sug­gest using the native Aris­tida pur­purea instead? Sorry to quib­ble too much. Over­all I thought it was a really suc­cess­ful presentation.

Among the other dis­plays, Pond-Ology fea­tured a lit­tle yoga deck in the mid­dle of a trop­i­cal par­adise. It pushed my Sun­set but­tons a bit too.

I’m not into mak­ing a zoo of cap­tive angels in my back yard, but I thought this menagerie by Blue Pacific Land­scape Design was well done. I espe­cially like how the color of the blue pots echoes through the plant­i­ngs around them. The cas­cad­ing pink gera­ni­ums pro­vide nice con­trast. Pots full of blue flow­ers would have been way too matchy-matchy.

At this gar­den show, as at many oth­ers these days, one of the big themes is green walls. Anan­das­capes incor­po­rated this wall into a pretty mod­ern display.

Take four green walls and attach them side to side and you have a green obelisk. The Good Earth Plant Co. and Green­scape Build­ing pro­vided this 3D ver­sion of the flat green wall.

You could walk around it and look in detail at the var­i­ous suc­cu­lents that made the plant­ing possible.

Liv­ing in a near-desert I’m still not con­vinced that green walls make a whole pile of sense. Why not plant an easy-care vine instead? But you’ve got admit they’re spec­tac­u­lar, and “spec­tac­u­lar” works well at a noisy county fair with lots of distractions.

In my next and final post from the fair I’ll show you some of the things that inter­ested me most: Plants!

June 30 2010 | Categories: gardening • places | Tags: Akana Design • green walls • outdoor rooms • San Diego County Fair | 12 Comments »