[ Lost in the Landscape ]

you paid money for that?

At the plant sale attached to the recent suc­cu­lent show a cou­ple of the soci­ety mem­bers looked at one of the plants I had in my hands and made all sorts of approv­ing noises. “Great plant!” or “Wow, you scored!”

That was not the reac­tion when I got the plants home.

While John didn’t quite come out and say some­thing like, “You paid good money for that?,” it was there in impli­ca­tion in what lit­tle he said.

I sup­pose it’s the curi­ous gardener’s curse, get­ting all excited over some of the odder botan­i­cal life forms that didn’t get sprin­kled on with the magic uni­corn glit­ter that makes a plant con­ven­tion­ally pretty. Add to that the more gen­eral gardener’s curse of being able to see the future in rec­og­niz­ing the promise in a packet of black seeds indis­tin­guish­able from dust or a bag of brown bulbs look­ing no more promis­ing than a heap of shallots.

Here’s one of the lit­tle plants, Ipomea platen­sis, a species in the same genus as morn­ing glo­ries. This is the young plant.

Some day it’ll grow up into some­thing look­ing like this plant in the main suc­cu­lent show. Very cool, but we’re miss­ing the magic uni­corn glitter.

This is a cool plant with a Latin name that would draw snick­ers from a junior high school sci­ence class, Fockea edulis.

Some day I hope mine grows up into some­thing look­ing like these larger plants in the main show…

Here’s a more mature spec­i­men of Dioscorea elaphan­tipes, another of the lit­tle plants I got. I think the form of the caudex on this one looks pretty amaz­ing. So far these are three caudex-forming (cau­di­ci­form) species, but the inflated plant parts all look quite dif­fer­ent from each other. The foliage, too, looks totally dif­fer­ent one plant to the next.

Oper­culi­carya decaryi also has a cool inflated stem…

…and tiny, dark, del­i­cate leaves.

And then there was this one, Tyle­codon stria­tus, a plant that even I think is kin­duv ugly. Lots of brown stem and not much else. They have com­pe­ti­tions to find the ugli­est dogs. Do they have ugly plant con­tests? This species stands a pretty good chance of win­ning. And I paid good money for it!

Not all was lumpy and bul­bous at the plant sale, and there actu­ally was a lot of uni­corn glit­ter spread over many of the plants.

There were succulent-friendly pots, too. Just look at all that drainage.

And of all the pots I came so close to going home with this one by Don Hunt Ceram­ics. Isn’t the glaze ter­rific? You wouldn’t care if the plant inside was as ugly as one of my new ones!

Con­sid­er­ing what I purchased–and espe­cially what I did not buy–this might just be the last time I’m allowed to go shop­ping unattended.

June 25 2011 | Categories: gardening • my garden | Tags: magic unicorn glitter • pots • shopping • succulent shows • succulents • ugliness | 8 Comments »

après le déluge

Six days of wet weather were com­ing to an end this morn­ing when John and I left the gar­den with its pock­ets of stand­ing water and did a lit­tle gro­cery shop­ping. We weren’t far from the San Diego River, and we’d heard it was run­ning high. With the storms clear­ing and being more curi­ous than cau­tious today we headed over for a look.

The estu­ary where the chan­nel­ized river flows into the Pacific flowed with more water than I’ve seen in it. The ducks took to it like…ducks to water.

Head­ing east, Friar’s Road was down to one pass­able lane.

We stopped at a cou­ple spots. The first was the YMCA, where the park­ing lot was being claimed by the river. Stairs led into water where ordi­nar­ily they deposit you onto dry land.

Most dra­matic was this school­bus. I’m sure it was empty at the time the water rose, but it’s a pretty awe­some indi­ca­tor of what nature was doing.

Stop #2 was Fash­ion Val­ley Shop­ping Cen­ter. Peo­ple look at its siting–on the banks of the San Diego River–and some­times won­der whether plac­ing it there was such a good idea. Today, right about the time these pic­tures were tak­ing, the river was crest­ing at the high­est level it’s reached since 1980–the high­est water level in a gen­er­a­tion. The park­ing garages were par­tially sub­merged. Under­ground park­ing became under­wa­ter parking.

Access into the mall shuts down from one direc­tion when­ever the river runs high. Today there was only one way in and out of the mall.

All the sights until now were pretty amaz­ing, but being good con­sumers we were almost more shocked at this sight: two open park­ing spaces. On Decem­ber 22. In the mid­dle of the day, dur­ing prime shop­ping hours.

And just as shock­ing was this: Inside the mall. Where’d all the shop­pers go? Let me remind you it’s still Decem­ber 22…

Well, that was pretty much the end of our expe­di­tion. Our hol­i­day shop­ping was pretty much com­plete except for the kinds of things that don’t grow in shop­ping cen­ters. So it was back home, where the stand­ing water in the gar­den was start­ing to drain. Will we remem­ber this freak­ish week once the sun comes out and all the rel­a­tives descend?

December 22 2010 | Categories: landscape • places | Tags: December • flooding • Pineapple Express • rain • San Diego River • shopping | 9 Comments »

my new natives

Sat­ur­day was my local Cal­i­for­nia Native Plant Society’s annual plant sale.

Eight hours on my feet, vol­un­teer­ing, had me pretty exhausted, but not too exhausted to shop! Still, I thought Saturday’s haul showed remark­able focus and restraint–except for one plant.

I’ve threat­ened to start a col­lec­tion of dud­leyas, that cool mostly-California genus of rosette-forming suc­cu­lents. I have sev­eral species in the gar­den already, and I’ve always been struck by the sub­tle vari­a­tions between the dif­fer­ent kinds. I think that you can make out some of the dif­fer­ences pretty eas­ily in the big group photo above, though a cou­ple are imma­ture plants and will look a lit­tle more like their rel­a­tives when grown up.

So here are the new addi­tions:

Dud­leya abram­sii, Abrams’ dud­leya.

Orcutt’s dud­leya, D. atten­u­ata ssp. orcut­tii.

Britton’s dud­leya, D. brit­tonii, a Baja species, prob­a­bly one of the biggest, splashiest of this genus.

Can­dle holder live-forever, D. can­de­labrum, another of the larger, more charis­matic species. This hails from the Chan­nel Islands off Santa Bar­bara.

Bright green dud­leya, D. virens ssp. has­sei (also called D. has­sei). The “bright green” in this Catalina Island species appears to be a mis­nomer since my plant looks really white or blue-green, as do the pho­tos up on CalPho­tos.

Sticky dud­leya, D. vis­cida, a plant only found in the low south­ern end of the state.

Look­ing at the first photo you’ll prob­a­bly notice a plant that looks noth­ing like a dud­leya. That plant is thick-leaved yerba santa, Eri­odichtyon cras­si­folium. With a rep­u­ta­tion for spread­ing when it’s happy, this isn’t a plant for every gar­den. There’s a spot behind the back fence on the slope gar­den where there’s a tan­gle of ice­plant and ivy. If any plant stands a chance against those two neme­ses it might be this one. I’ve loved its laven­der flow­ers in the spring and the strik­ingly mod­ern upright growth habit. It’ll give me more excuses to tend this lit­tle waste­land of a gar­den space, my lit­tle secret gar­den with big, scary datura flow­ers and the even scarier ice­plant and ivy.

October 18 2010 | Categories: gardening • my garden | Tags: dudleya • native plants • shopping | 15 Comments »

scrub your air

This was fun: I opened up the Museum of Mod­ern Art gift cat­a­log yes­ter­day and saw this on page 2, the Andrea Air Puri­fier. Instead of fil­ters or elec­tric charges, Matthieu Lehanneur’s machine from 2007 uses a live plant.

Once again I get the feel­ing that gar­den­ers are way ahead of the curve. Plants to clean the air? Who’d have thought such a thing was possible?

And then there’s the mat­ter of the price tag $199, plant not included. Yikes. But the man­u­fac­turer makes some claims about how the gizmo is lots more effi­cient than tra­di­tional puri­fiers or even plants:

Based on exper­i­ments per­formed by RTP Labs, Andrea improves the effi­ciency of formalde­hyde removal from the air rel­a­tive to plants alone by 360%. Rel­a­tive to HEPA and car­bon fil­ters, com­par­i­son between the RTP Labs data and lit­er­a­ture data show an improve­ment in formalde­hyde fil­tra­tion effi­ciency of 4400%. These data con­firm that while plants alone in an inte­rior set­ting are more effi­cient than HEPA and car­bon fil­ters at remov­ing toxic gases from the air, they are sig­nif­i­cantly less effi­cient than Andrea. Even more impor­tant, the rate of gas removal by Andrea is, accord­ing to the RTP Labs data, over 1000% faster than for plants alone.

Much of the tech­no­log­i­cal magic appears to be due a fan that cir­cu­lates air around the plant and then into the room–something that you could prob­a­bly rig up in the pri­vacy of your own home. (Be pre­pared to water your plant more often.) As a fun piece of con­cep­tual art that was part of MoMA’s Design and the Elas­tic Mind show, the price wouldn’t be that out­ra­geous. But as a func­tional appli­ance I’d prob­a­bly opt for a few lit­tle green machines, grow­ing and pho­to­syn­the­siz­ing and bloom­ing through the win­ter dol­drum months…

August 17 2010 | Categories: art • gardening | Tags: air purifiers • air quality • shopping | 7 Comments »

my haul

In the spirit of the “haul video,” the art form in which a fashion-conscious usu­ally young con­sumer describes his or her lat­est finds from the last shop­ping trip to the mall–a video in which the word “cute” has to appear at least four­teen times–let me show off my lat­est finds on my recent excur­sion to the Theodore Payne Foun­da­tion. (You didn’t think I’d go there and only pick up a cou­ple plants for Aunt Bar­bara, did you?)

This first photo, a dark-flowered selec­tion of desert wil­low, Chilop­sis lin­earis, is a plant I did not buy. But if I man­age to kill of one of my exist­ing large shrub-sized plants in a spot that receives some sum­mer water, this plant will be near the top of my list.

I also didn’t picky up any of the cool selec­tion of pots.

But I did buy a few plants, including:

Ver­bena lilacina ‘Paseo Ran­cho,’ a light pink selec­tion of the usu­ally laven­der Cedros Island ver­bena. You might call its color a lit­tle on the pale and insipid side, but it’s dif­fer­ent from the other clones in my gar­den. Insipid but dif­fer­ent, and maybe just a lit­tle cute. Rea­son enough to have it.

Cliff let­tuce, or Dud­leya cae­spi­tosa. Cute, huh? Ever the col­lec­tor, I think it might be fun to explore some of the dozens of Dud­leya species that grow in California.

Coast buck­wheat, Eri­o­gonum lat­i­folium. I don’t really know this plant–which is some­times rea­son enough to try to get to know it bet­ter. It’s been described as being sim­i­lar to San Miguel Island buck­wheat (E. grande). To me it looks like the leaves are a lit­tle more deluxe, thicker, fuzzier.

This plant, along with the pre­ced­ing two selec­tions, isn’t native to my imme­di­ate area. But being coastal or island plants, I’m hop­ing they’ll like what I have to offer them. The rest of my haul, how­ever, con­sists of species that grow in my county, some of them not far from me.

San Diego rag­weed, San Diego ambrosia–whatever you want to call Ambrosia pumila. The leaves are really del­i­cately cut, like some artemisias, and I think this diminu­tive plant really does qual­ify as “cute.” This is a species that’s listed on the CNPS list of rare plants and pro­posed for the Fed­eral Endan­gered Species list. It’s weird to travel 140 miles to get a mile that grows nearby, but that’s the respon­si­ble thing to do. Our local CNPS plant sales also have offered this plant. Yank­ing these up out of the ground where they grow nearby would be grossly tacky and totally illegal.

San Diego wil­lowy monardella, Monardella linoides ssp. viminea, is another local plant that’s listed by both the state and fed­eral agen­cies as endan­gered. It’ll have del­i­cate whorls of laven­der flow­ers when it blooms. But like most (or maybe all?) monardel­las it has intensely fra­grant leaves that I can enjoy right now.

And finally, one of my favorite of the softly del­i­cate grasses, Aris­tida pur­purea, pur­ple three awn. It’s slightly more coarse than the pop­u­lar Mex­i­can feather grass that’s non-native and start­ing to look like it’s inva­sive. But it moves just as amaz­ingly in the wind, and has a del­i­cate pur­ple tinge part of the year, some­thing feather grass doesn’t offer.

August isn’t high sea­son for plant­ing, but with this cool summer-that-never-was I fig­ured I could get away with it. And really, here, not that far from the coast, the main issue with many plants is water.

I hate to show newly installed plants before they have a chance to fill in, but here’s the fin­ished bed where all of the plants except for the monar­das went into. These Cal­i­for­ni­ans should be bet­ter choices for this exposed, dry spot than some of the exotics that I had in there before. Not shown in this photo is a very happy Cleve­land sage and some ecsta­tic pur­ple three awn plants that I grew from seed.

I haven’t counted all the “cutes” in my writeup. I know I’ve failed mis­er­ably, partly because I really dis­like the word unless I’m dis­cussing my extremely cute cat. I will try to do bet­ter if I decide to com­mit my shop­ping trips to video.

August 14 2010 | Categories: gardening • my garden | Tags: native plants • shopping • Theodore Payne Foundation | 5 Comments »

agonizing over the right pot

I’m a lit­tle embar­rassed to admit that peo­ple often hate to go shop­ping with me. Plants, clothes, paint col­ors, cheese…it can some­times take me a long time to make up my mind. I admit that these aren’t life-or-death deci­sions I’m mak­ing. But as far as I’m con­cerned that’s no excuse not to pay atten­tion to the process. Some things in life are still very impor­tant.

Dur­ing last week’s plant shop­ping adven­ture I picked up three lit­tle aloes I wanted to pot up for the back patio. I was sur­prised by how quickly I was able to pick between all the cool offer­ings. Some col­lec­tors like one of every­thing that catches their eye. By con­trast I guess I like to col­lect one thing in depth. Accord­ingly I picked an inter­est­ing genus of plant (Aloe) and then decided on three con­trast­ing but com­ple­men­tary exam­ples. I was a lit­tle both­ered that two of the three were unknowns, but I don’t begin to con­sider myself an aloe col­lec­tor. They looked cool and the price was rea­son­able. Deci­sion made.

Then came time to select pots for the plants and for the loca­tion where they’d live. The local Home Depot had some func­tional designs but noth­ing that excited me. Then I was off to my favorite local nurs­ery. Even when I set some basic rules for myself (“noth­ing match­ing,” “a sim­ple design not detract­ing from the plant,” “earth tones or glazed blue for color”) I ended up with lots of work­able options. Since the nurs­ery has a good return pol­icy I picked six to take home to see how they looked on the patio and with the plants.

None of the pots were really pricey, but in all cases they were priced higher than the plants. A lot of the prof­its in the nurs­ery and land­scap­ing biz aren’t the plants them­selves, but all the stuff that goes with them.

So in the end I kept four of the pots and rejected the cen­ter and right of the largest pots in the first photo. The extra pot now houses a lit­tle divi­sion of Aloe mac­u­lata (a.k.a. A. saponaria) that I dug up from the front yard. It’s typ­i­cally an aggres­sive colonizer–the Matil­ija poppy of aloes–spreading under­ground via long stolons. I’m not sure how it’ll do in a pot, so this is an experiment.

Here’s part of the fin­ished edge of the patio. Clock­wise from the top: Aloe andon­gen­sis, A. saponaria, unknown red aloe.

And here’s the last of the aloes, yet another unknown, nearby in its new pot.

In my teen years I did some infor­mal study of Japan­ese bon­sai and ike­bana, the art of arrang­ing branches, leaves and flow­ers. Pro­por­tion pro­por­tion pro­por­tion were big themes in both, and one of the stan­dard for­mu­las was that the con­tainer should be approx­i­mately one and a half times the height of the plant mate­r­ial. In all my pots the plants seem too small, but as we all know plants do that amaz­ing thing: grow. Since some of these are unknown species I have no idea how much they’ll grow. But I hope they’ll come to look more at home in their new digs.

Okay, now it’s time to worry about the next big thing…

July 19 2010 | Categories: gardening • my garden | Tags: aloes • pots • potted plants • shopping | 5 Comments »

a retail landscape

Here’s a post in com­mem­o­ra­tion of today, Black Fri­day, the day after Thanks­giv­ing when the hol­i­day shop­ping sea­son gets going in earnest.

When one of South­ern California’s first Ikea stores opened at the Tustin Mar­ket­place in Orange County twen­ty­ish years ago I was excited. I’d been over­sat­u­rated with the cheap, ugly depart­ment store mer­chan­dise that was avail­able in my bud­get range at the time, and the sim­ple and ratio­nal Ikea designs wafted in like a breath of Nordic oxygen.

The build­ings of the Tustin Mar­ket­place were dif­fer­ent from any­thing I’d seen at the time. They were huge and painted in intense col­ors of the earth. Although the archi­tec­ture shared some of the color sen­si­bil­i­ties of post­mod­ern archi­tec­ture of the 1980s, it was noth­ing like what was being done in sub­ur­bia at the time. The cen­tral land­scap­ing was also dis­tinc­tive: geo­met­ric, spiky, sculp­tural. Once again, this wasn’t straight out of the rule­book for how you do land­scap­ing for a sub­ur­ban shop­ping center.

I had seen designs by the Mex­i­can archi­tect Ricardo Legor­reta in archi­tec­ture mag­a­zines, and the com­plex in Orange County reminded me a lot of his work. Lit­tle did I know until fairly recently that he actu­ally was respon­si­ble for design­ing the com­plex. On my last trip up to Los Ange­les I made a point of stop­ping by the stores on the way home. Unfor­tu­nately, the Tustin Mar­ket­place hadn’t aged gracefully.

The Ikea was long gone. One of the main roads into the com­plex dead-ended at a stark earth-red wall, eas­ily forty or fifty feet tall, that bore the ghostly remains of where a Linens ‘n’ Things store sign had been removed. I’ve never vis­ited the pyra­mids of either Egypt or Cen­tral Amer­ica, but this is how I imag­ine it would feel: over­pow­er­ing, des­o­late, scaled to some over­in­flated sense of human self-importance.

It was late on a Sun­day morn­ing and most of the remain­ing stores were just open­ing up. It’s the time of day when you’re con­fronted with the acres of blank, blank, blank asphalt that make up so many of this country’s retail land­scapes. This is land that lies bar­ren and unused for fifty weeks out of the year and only springs into use for those few and intense days of hol­i­day shopping.

But not every­thing was over­whelm­ing bleak­ness. The park­ing area next to the food court sported this dense grove of palm trees. The space made me think of the agri­cul­tural groves where dates are grown Indio, south of Palm Springs, in their sense of grace­ful geom­e­try over­head and shel­ter from the ele­ments. Pretty good for a retail park­ing lot, I thought.

A few of the geo­met­ri­cal land­scap­ing details remained from the orig­i­nal design. In the first of these, the orig­i­nal slop­ing lawn had been replaced by one of the arti­fi­cial lawn replace­ment prod­ucts out there. It looks real enough when you’re zoom­ing by in a car, but even with its hype of look­ing bet­ter than Astro­turf, it’s noth­ing I’d want to have to stare at from the win­dows of the house.

And here, in the part­ing shot of the shop­ping cen­ter, a row of white mono­liths marks the tran­si­tion from the park­ing lot to the pub­lic street beyond.

So, is the Tustin Mar­ket­place a great exam­ple of archi­tec­ture or land­scape design? I’d argue no. Even though it’s right on Inter­state 5, I wouldn’t go out of your way to visit it any­more unless you need a snack or bath­room break from the free­way. But the com­plex was dif­fer­ent in its day, and I give it points for that. Addi­tion­ally, the land­scap­ing didn’t require much water to sus­tain it.

Inter­est­ingly, Ricardo Legoretta was behind the late 1980s redesign of Per­sh­ing Square in Los Ange­les, one of the city’s his­toric open spaces and a past gath­er­ing point for a diverse mix of the pop­u­la­tion. Sev­eral years ago I attended a con­fer­ence at the Bilt­more Hotel, which is located on the square. Even at that time Legorreta’s huge slabs of con­crete that had been painted pur­ple looked hos­tile and dated. Per­sh­ing Square was another of the architect’s pub­lic spaces that hadn’t aged grace­fully. There’s now talk of replac­ing the design with some­thing else.

November 28 2008 | Categories: gardening • landscape • landscape design • places | Tags: architecture • Black Friday • drought-tolerant landscaping • retail • Ricardo Legorreta • shopping • suburbia • Tustin Marketplace | 3 Comments »

shopping with a camera

I swear that I’m not try­ing to look like Annie Liebovitz or some wacked paparazzo, but I often drag a cam­era along when I go look­ing for plants at nurseries.

I used to take a pad of paper and a pen, but this method has started to prove a lot more use­ful. I can quickly “jot down” the names of plants by tak­ing a pic­ture of the signs that most nurs­eries thought­fully provide.

Those signs often have inter­est­ing cul­tural infor­ma­tion as well. And if I’m taken with a plant I’ve never seen before, it’s easy to com­mit it to pix­els and bring the photo back home to think about whether the plant could pos­si­bly have a place in an already over­crowded garden.

And should Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie stroll through, I can dis­cretely snap their pic­ture for the next install­ment of Access Hol­ly­wood. I’m sure the world wants to know what plants they want to have in their garden.

November 07 2008 | Categories: gardening • photography | Tags: cameras • plant names • shopping • taking notes | 5 Comments »

at the tree of life nursery

The plant cat­a­log of the Tree of Life Nurs­ery is impres­sive. Selec­tions hail mainly from the state of Cal­i­for­nia, but they carry a few selec­tions from the South­west United States. Refresh­ingly they also aug­ment their selec­tion with plants from Baja California.

(The bio­log­i­cal zones of South­ern Cal­i­for­nia spread south of the imag­i­nary line of the inter­na­tional bor­der, so the inclu­sion of plants from Baja makes per­fect sense. The divi­sion of Alta Cal­i­for­nia from Baja Cal­i­for­nia is a purely human and arbi­trary one. There’s no river, no range of moun­tains to divide the two coun­tries, only an arbi­trary line on a map and stretches of bor­der fenc­ing that range from wispy strands of barbed wire to welded pieces of steel left over from Oper­a­tion Desert Storm.)

The Tree of Life cat­a­log even lists poi­son oak! (“Decid­u­ous shrub, vin­ing, shiny leaves, skin irri­tant, valu­able for wildlife, reveg­e­ta­tion.”) When I vis­ited on Sat­ur­day I didn’t see any out on the sales tables, though I wouldn’t have been sur­prised if they’d have offered to don their haz­mat suits and bring me up a cou­ple from the prop­a­ga­tion areas… They did have a good sam­pling of much of the rest of the cat­a­log, and I had the time to care­fully look over each of their offerings.

The nurs­ery is sur­rounded by plant­i­ngs that include a few of their offer­ings. Grown-up spec­i­mens are often com­pletely dif­fer­ent from the one-gallon babies, so it’s a great oppor­tu­nity to see how some plants will mature.

To give every­thing an authen­tic early-California feel they appar­ently have even thought to pep­per their grounds with period-appropriate rep­tiles. Unfor­tu­nately I didn’t see any.

The new dis­cov­ery of the week­end was a del­i­cate but stun­ning stand of late-autumn golden grasses of the pur­ple three-awn (Aris­tida pur­purea). Sway­ing gen­tly in the after­noon breeze and back­lit with the day’s sun, they looked like a slightly larger, less floppy native take on the Mex­i­can feather grass that’s get­ting to be a beau­ti­ful cliche in our gar­dens and quite poten­tially a new pest in our local canyons. Unfor­tu­nately I was so taken with the grasses that I neglected to take their portrait.

It was tough to say no to so many inter­est­ing plants, but I was there on a mis­sion: I needed some­thing extremely low and spread­ing for next to some step­ping stones that I’d installed last week­end. The loca­tion gets close to zero addi­tional water through­out the year, so the plants had to be happy with that kind of deprivation.

Trips to nurs­eries with­out a plan in hand can some­times lead to a bad case of assortment-itis, with a trunk-load of wildly dis­sim­i­lar plants with clash­ing cul­tural needs. I ended up with three selec­tions which, though dif­fer­ent species, have sim­i­lar cul­tural needs. Also I thought their strongly con­trast­ing plant forms and col­ors would look well together: a pros­trate form of the gray-green foliaged coastal Cal­i­for­nia sage­brush (Artemisia cal­i­for­nica ‘Canyon Gray’), a low selec­tion of Cal­i­for­nia buck­wheat (Eri­o­gonum fas­ci­c­u­la­tum ‘Dana Point’), and the almost white-foliaged Carmel aster (Lessin­gia filagini­fo­lia v. cal­i­for­nica).

And, um, yes. I did get a cou­ple other plants. But not too many…

November 04 2008 | Categories: gardening • my garden • places | Tags: Artemisia californica • Artemisia californica 'Canyon Gray' • California coastal sagebrush • Carmel aster • Dana Point buckwheat • Eriogonum fasciculatum • Eriogonum Fasciculatum 'Dana Point' • Lessingia filaginifolia v. californica • native plants • sagebrush • shopping • Tree of Life Nursery | 1 Comment »

chairs: style vs. comfort

Here are notes that on a small hand­ful of chairs that we’ve tested. Most are in the style-fetish school of mod­ern fur­ni­ture design. With the excep­tion of the first model, all are chairs that we’ve tested at the bizarrely-named retailer, Design Within Reach. (“Within reach?” Oh really?) Most, how­ever, can be had a num­ber of places, bricks-and-mortar and online.

Look­ing at our expe­ri­ences I think you’ll get to see why it’s always a three-bears, “this one’s too large/small” expe­ri­ence for us when­ever we go shop­ping for any­thing we have to share. Wish us luck. Maybe some­day we’ll find seat­ing we can agree to want to spend the money on. And look­ing at some of these prices, you might feel com­pelled to microchip your lawn furniture.

Seat	Price	Com­fort: Me (5′ 10″ 160#)	Com­fort: John (6′ 9″ and big-boned)	Notes on Comfort	Style Notes
Anony­mous Home Depot chair pur­chased sev­eral years ago Comfy Cheap Chair	about $12	B–	A–	Nice molded back. Good for a taller/larger per­son; basi­cally tol­er­a­ble for me	C: Noth­ing fab­u­lous, but is a sim­ple, fairly neu­tral mod­ern design
Bellini Chair Mario Bellinia	$130	A–	D+	Form-fitting and very com­fort­able for a smaller-to aver­age per­son; not sturdy for heav­ier sitters	B+: It’s almost the plas­tic ver­sion of the clas­sic Mario Bellini “cab chair,” updated from–and curvier than–the 1970s model
Hud­son Side Chair Hud­son Side Chair	$640/$1315	A–	B	Another tai­lored chair for an average-sized per­son; can make a larger per­son feel huge; stead­ier than the above seat; may get hot in the sun, but being alu­minum will dis­si­pate heat quickly	A-: A clean, ver­sa­tile design by Philippe Starck, avail­able in brushed or pol­ished alu­minum, also comes with arms–for more $$$; a good indoor/outdoor model–we have a cou­ple counter-height ones of these in the kitchen
Sil­ver Col­lec­tion Arm­chair (from Design Within Reach) Sil­ver Col­lec­tion Armchair	$1000	D+	B	Extremely deep seat screams out for a back cush­ion for all but the tallest sit­ters; pro­motes poor pos­ture for us aver­age size persons	B-: A fairly undis­tin­guished though fairly clean mod­ern design; I thought the finial-looking feet to be pretty dorky
Bub­ble Club Armchair Bub­ble Club Armchair	$680	F	C–	I’ve been test-sitting this chair for years, hop­ing it’ll mirac­u­lously become an even tol­er­a­ble fit; absurdly deep seat, not even comfy for some­one 6′ 9″	A: Another Starck design, I really dig the looks of this, even with it’s echoes of pre-modern styles I don’t usu­ally swoon over; the fairly mas­sive front con­trasts amus­ingly with the hol­low back; the design makes me smile, but the fit makes me wince
Aero Chair Aero Chair	$160	D–	F	We both detest chairs with no lum­bar sup­port, and this has that fatal flaw; even I found it a tad wobbly	B-: Sim­ple, ser­vice­able design for when you want some­thing that doesn’t scream atten­tion to itself; DWR rec­om­mends tak­ing this chair in when­ever it rains to pre­serve the fin­ish; Uncom­fort­able and high main­te­nance! At least it stacks and weighs next to nothing
Ronde Arm­chair Ronde Arm­chair	$100	C–	D	It looks more com­fort­able than it actu­ally is; the arm­rests are great unless you want to put your arms on them; John found it flimsy and confining	B: Light and attrac­tive. Another light­weight stack­ing chair

August 17 2008 | Categories: landscape design • rambles | Tags: garden furniture • seating • shopping | 2 Comments »