[ 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 »