[ Lost in the Landscape ]

house project update

We’re just about done with the exte­rior paint­ing of the stu­dio. Ear­lier I’d asked peo­ple for their opin­ions for plant-friendly col­ors to use. Town Mouse and Coun­try Mouse each weighed in for lighter, warmer col­ors, partly in reac­tion to my say­ing I was lean­ing towards a dark urban gray. Bar­bara sent this link to a house (here, this first photo–this is not my stu­dio) that had been painted a dark gray that had me kin­duv excited. And Greg offered his idea for a bold color choice: lavender!

I was all set to go with the gray in the end, and then decided that it might be wise to try some big swatches against the gar­den. So I painted a panel with a sam­ple patch of a color called “pen­cil point.” And while I was in the paint aisle I grabbed a cou­ple of lighter col­ors to try for con­trast, a pale faded green called “wasabi pow­der” and a light putty-gray-green called “organic field.” (How’s “organic field” for a color name that exploits today’s eco-consciousness?)

Here’s the final color test of pan­els laid up against the stu­dio behind a bloom­ing camel­lia and some emerg­ing nar­cis­sus. I was hop­ing the plants would pop against the dark gray color, but was dis­ap­pointed that they seemed to recede into the gray dark­ness. The lighter col­ors seemed to show off the plants bet­ter. Even the light­est gray-green didn’t seem to be too harsh in the way plants showed up against it.

I ended up lik­ing them all, and after some con­ver­sa­tions that went on for sev­eral days, John and I decided to use them all. Why choose?

This is the west side, the only side that will have plants against it, a com­bi­na­tion of wasabi pow­der below and organic field above.

This is the south side, pen­cil point below, organic field above.

East side, pen­cil point and organic field. The greens don’t clash so badly in real life as they appear to in this photo taken in the tawny light right after sunrise.

…and finally the north, all organic field. (The door has just been painted gray, not shown here.)

Okay, it’s all almost a bit much. As Tim Gunn has said on Project Run­way, “It’s a whole lotta look.” We’ll live with a while and use one of these col­ors for the fas­cia trim instead of the dark olive we used to tie it together with the main house in front. But there’s still a patio cover to rebuild, which will bring in another oppor­tu­nity to tie things together.

Every time I get over­whelmed with what’s left to do I can pull out one of the early “before” pictures–this one of the south side. I’d call it progress.

And now back to things more botan­i­cal for a piece of trivia. The first photo has a shot of a young bloom­ing Camel­lia sasan­qua ‘Cleopa­tra.’ A lit­tle detail on this species of camel­lia ver­sus the other com­monly grown species, C. japon­ica, has stuck in my brain ever since I read it in Jake Hobson’s Niwaki: Prun­ing, Train­ing and Shap­ing Trees the Japan­ese Way:

The most notice­able dif­fer­ence between the two lies in their flow­ers: C. sasan­qua flow­ers drop petal by petal, while C. Japon­ica flow­ers drop off whole, which–as every Japan­ese per­son will tell you–made them unpop­u­lar among the samu­rai class, who were put off by the sim­i­lar­ity they saw between the flow­ers and their own heads.

December 07 2009 | Categories: my garden | Tags: remodeling • studio | 6 Comments »

providing shelter

It’s one of the sad­dest things to see: A house under­goes a remodel or even minor revi­sion like a new paintjob, and in the course of of the project the land­scap­ing gets run over by equip­ment or tram­pled by work­ers obliv­i­ous to estab­lished plants that may be as old as the house.

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…

September 10 2009 | Categories: gardening • my garden | Tags: hardscape • remodeling • shade • shade plants | 3 Comments »