[ Lost in the Landscape ]

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 »

some plant ideas to borrow

Last weekend’s Los Ange­les trip included a short stop by the Getty Museum in Brentwood.

I’d posted ear­lier about their exhibit fea­tur­ing botan­i­cal illus­tra­tions by Maria Sibylla Mer­ian that con­tin­ues through the end of August. It was a com­pact, intense show with art­work by Mer­ian and her con­tem­po­raries, along with exam­ples of some of the ear­li­est illus­trated botan­i­cal books.


Unfor­tu­nately it was one of those thou-shalt-not-photograph exhi­bi­tions, so I had to be con­tent with snap­ping these two for-sale prints in the kiosk out­side the gal­leries. Mer­ian was inter­ested in plants, but even more so in the crit­ters that live in them. Here you see var­i­ous creepy crawlies cavort­ing with the plant life.

When vis­it­ing a place like the Getty it’s easy to get over­whelmed with the sheer unap­proach­able­ness of every­thing you see–the Acropolis-like site, the billion-plus dol­lar con­struc­tion bud­get, the irre­place­able art­works. But look­ing around the grounds there are all sorts of cool details that would be at home in a back yard plant­ing or patio project.

Here are some of the plant­i­ngs that I thought were cool. Some were in the Robert Irwin-designed Cen­tral Gar­den, oth­ers were around the museum grounds that were designed by the land­scape archi­tec­tural firm of Olin Part­ner­ship. (The best piece I’ve run across on the Web about the less famous gar­den plant­i­ngs was in, of all places, The Aus­tralian Human­i­ties Review.)

Many of the shady plant­i­ngs under­neath the plant­ing of Lon­don plane trees use light-colored foliage to make the plants pop in the shade. It’s a tech­nique that you read about a lot–but it works won­ders. Here’s a nice com­bi­na­tion of light-color suc­cu­lents.


Again in the shade, here are some plants with green-and-white var­ie­gated foliage, includ­ing a New Zealand flax.


And the last of these shade pic­tures, a plant­ing fea­tur­ing a chartreuse-leaved oxalis species. John thought it looked a lit­tle ane­mic, but I thought it was pretty cool.


Out of the shade, a plant­ing of con­trast­ing foliage col­ors can be a great accent. Here the plant­ing avoids green alto­gether, and com­bines plants pre­dom­i­nat­ing with red and yel­low tones, includ­ing the “Sticks of Fire” clone of the evil pen­cil tree.


In a gar­den with a large num­ber of dif­fer­ent plants it helps to have zones with less con­trast. Here a long, curv­ing row of pink crape myr­tles were bloom­ing over an extended bed of var­ie­gated soci­ety gar­lic bloom­ing with their lavender-pink flow­ers.


Mass plant­i­ngs don’t have to go into rows or grids. Here’s my favorite plant­ing on the entire prop­erty, a seem­ingly ran­dom arrange­ment of golden bar­rel cac­tus. The arrange­ment is infor­mal, but it’s as much a prod­uct of human inter­ven­tion as some­thing that’s overtly geo­met­ri­cal. The Robert Irwin-designed Cen­tral Gar­den draws most of the vis­i­tors, but this area is the most spec­tac­u­lar to my eyes.


If you have a billion-dollar view most peo­ple decide to chop down all the plants between you and the view. Here, the almost-transparent, unob­tru­sive, but still dra­matic spent flower stalks of these var­ie­gated cen­tury plants (Agave amer­i­cana ‘Mar­ginata’) actu­ally helps com­plete the view, giv­ing focus to what would be a run-of-the-mill spec­tac­u­lar view of the West Side of L.A. The actual flow­ers on these sculp­tural inflo­res­cences died months ago, and the stalks are actu­ally black and not green. But they’re cool as all get out–So why not leave them be?


Plant­i­ngs soften a lot of the hard geo­met­ri­cal edges. Here some pros­trate rose­mary cas­cades over the hard edge of the traver­tine wall.


And here, the baby’s tears grow­ing between the rough traver­tine squares soft­ens the tran­si­tion from human hard-edged geom­e­try to the softer forms of the vin­ing Boston ivy.

Next post I’ll share some of my favorite details from the hard­scape around the Getty.

August 28 2008 | Categories: gardening • landscape design | Tags: foliage plants • J. Paul Getty Museum • plant combinations • shade • shade plants | No Comments »