I still haven’t gotten around to doing something about the color of the my little detached studio behind the house. Colors of residential neighborhoods and garden walls usually tend towards pretty neutral shades. Here are a couple combinations of walls with plants that I thought were pretty dramatic while still being flattering to the landscaping. They could be interesting choices for garden walls or even–if you’re truly brave–walls of your house.
This first one is the freeway side of the Tustin Marketplace in Orange County, as see from Interstate 5 on my way up to LA last week. The fairly dark burnt red-to-salmon wall coloration mixes dramatically with the green bougainvillea foliage and reddish magenta flowers in the foreground. And the silver trunks and bright green foliage of the trees in the background stand out dramatically against the wall.
The second is another retail situation, the plantings by the parking lot at the Mission Valley Mall here in town. The violet wall, as the preceding reddish one, once again plays against the silver trunks of the trees and the bright green leaves.
The first combination to me feels warming and energetic without being too hyper, with the red being a color that isn’t so far removed from the Mediterranean themed housing that continues to be popular in Southern California. The second is definitely cooler, more restrained–and maybe a little more urban and adventurous.
We’ll see how brave I am when I finally have time to address residing the studio and rebuilding the attached patio cover. But I’m definitely feeling like doing something other than white or beige this time…
March 23 2009 | Categories: gardening • landscape design | Tags: color • color combinations • hardscape • walls | 4 Comments »
On my recent Chicago visit I had the chance to stop by Frank Lloyd Wright’s landmark 1909–1911 Robie House in the Hyde Park neighborhood. Unfortunately the foundation that runs it was in the middle of a major renovation inside. Even through we were on an architectural tour the only way to view the interior on this day was stand outside and peer inside through the stained glass windows.
Ooh… (Looking inside, off the second story porch into the nearly finished space…)
Uhhh… (The ground floor, still in the throes of renovation…)
Once we got that out of our system we had to concentrate on the exterior of the building and the gardens. I could think of worse things to have to do.
A pair of side gates opens up to an auto court with a small garden on the side. It was winter and the plantings weren’t any too spectacular this time of year, but the hardscape details were worth a close look.
The thin, wide bricks of the house and garden walls all feature this neat little detail: The mortar between the courses is the typical light mortar color, but the horizontal spaces between the bricks uses a red-colored mortar. The effect is that you notice horizontal bands and not the individual bricks. The house swoops sideways towards the horizon, and the walls do the same, celebrating the ever-expanding horizontal prairie that makes up the Midwest.
Several of the corners of the porches feature these stylized urns. Instead of the chubby Roman models, Wright has designed them to swoop sideways just like the house and walls do.
And there are several of these planters that explode with color in the summer. But now…well, not so green. The story goes that Wright designed these planters without drainage–something that comes as no surprise from an architect who was obsessed with form over function and notorious for creating houses with leaky roofs and suspended terraces that sagged under their own weight.
As I reviewed the photos from the Robie House, though, there’s one thing that starts to gnaw on me. Though it doesn’t look huge, it’s still something like 9000 square feet if you count the outdoor terraces. All the outdoor spaces seemed squeezed in there. Was this a space-intensive urban use of a small lot? Or was it a hundred-year-old McMansion? Even if that, it’s pretty cool as McMansions go…
February 28 2009 | Categories: art • gardening • landscape • landscape design • photography • places | Tags: architecture • brick • Chicago • concrete • Frank Lloyd Wright • garden walls • planters • Robie House • walls | 8 Comments »
My neighbors catty-corner across the street have been in the throes of a gonzo whole-house remodel. The project is finally nearing its conclusion, with some of the landscaping and hardscape elements finally being installed.
New wall with papyrus
Right by the front door is this detail that I thought was drop-dead brilliant: The tall papyrus rises from behind the half-wall, and your attention focuses on the feathery tops of the plants. But then there’s this cutout in the wall, far below the tops of the plants, so that looking through you notice the geometry of the stems that have been isolated from the rest of the plant. It was like a Cezanne still life or an early cubist painting where multiple views of the same object coexist in the same plane: the exuberant tops of the papyrus, and the geometrical upright lines formed by the stems, two separate but interacting views of the same subject.
I really like what the neighbors have done with their house, but this was the one thing I liked most of all. When I talked to Jackie and told him how incredibly impressed I was with the detail he looked a little puzzled. Turns out the papyrus was just put there for the time being, and that the hole in the wall was going to turn into some sort of low water feature that would only be visible from the back side of the wall. My conceptual take on what he was planning was just an accident of circumstances, and that the finished project would be quite different.
Well, then!
I guess that means I can steal the idea, refine it and call it my own for the next project I do. Why not construct a solid wall with cutouts that show you interesting architectural details of the plants on the other side? So many plants have both amazing branch structure and striking foliage. Why not highlight each feature by separating the views?
And if you beat me to using this idea, be sure to put me in the credit line. As you can see the idea was mine, all mine…
October 23 2008 | Categories: gardening • landscape design | Tags: hardscape • papyrus • walls | 2 Comments »
I don’t mind many garden chores—watering, pruning, tidying, planting—but other tasks are so unpleasant I can put them off for days or years. Dealing with hardscape is one of those unpleasantries, particularly when it’s laborious maintenance and not a crative act. And that was the story of much of the last two weekends.
My neighborhood dates to the very early 1950s, and it was the first in San Diego where a developer cut and filled a hillside to install a subdivision. Some lots—particularly on the fill side of the street—are flat from the front curb to the back fence. But many others—and mine is one of them—slope emphatically. I haven’t hired a surveyor to scope it out, but I’ve figured that the front and back of the property differ something over twelve feet in elevation over 120 linear feet. An additional slope behind the house elevates the folks behind us another six to eight feet.
In Mending Wall Robert Frost dealt with the arbitrary social spaces that some walls define. But without the series of little retaining walls on my lot the walls serve to keep some of gravity’s effects in check the whole hillside would end up on top of the neighbors down below.
Unfortunately, one of those walls had been listing considerably, partly with the help of a nasty pencil tree euphorbia and some errant ivy roots. My solution: Why not try using the hydraulic and bumper jacks that we’ve had sitting in the garage to see if we couldn’t get the wall to standing back at 90 degrees? Then it’d be a pretty simple matter to pour concrete at the base of either side of the wall to stabilize it for the next quarter-century.
All jacked up
Bumper jack
It’s common to call someone a jack of all trades (no pun intended), and it’s usually meant as a compliment. But my work on this project made me think of the “…and master of none” part of the phrase that most people don’t think about. Yes, I did manage to get the wall back to upright. Yes I did manage to do it with the jacks. And yes, pouring concrete around the base of the wall has kept it firmly upright.
But I did however end up having to replace a small section of the wall, and that’s where the master of none part comes into play. You will notice I have no photographs of that patched wall. Trust me. It’s ugly.
Since no one will believe anything these days until they’ve seen a photograph of it, however, maybe you won’t realize how ugly the patch really is and continue to think that I’m this resourceful gardener who’ll tackle anything and do it with spectacular results.
If you’ll believe that, let me give you a cutting of this cute little pencil tree euphorbia that’s guaranteed to stay a cute little well-mannered plant…
August 19 2008 | Categories: landscape design • my garden | Tags: hardscape • Robert Frost • walls | 5 Comments »
The second is another retail situation, the plantings by the parking lot at the Mission Valley Mall here in town. The violet wall, as the preceding reddish one, once again plays against the silver trunks of the trees and the bright green leaves. 
