[ Lost in the Landscape ]

colleen goes national

Colleen Miko, owner of the Pacific Northwest’s Colleen’s, a Land­scape Design Com­pany, has one of her gar­den designs fea­tured in the cur­rent issue of Organic Gar­den­ing Mag­a­zine. In the inter­est of full dis­clo­sure I’m glad to say that Colleen also hap­pens to be my cousin through a cou­ple of for­tu­nate mar­riage links in the fam­ily. She’s received well-deserved regional notice for her land­scape work, but this is her first national print expo­sure. (Edit, May 19: Any­one with access to cable might have seen her on TV ear­lier, when she was the final­ist in HGTV’s Landscaper’s Chal­lenge program.)

Rah Colleen!

Here’s a peek at one of the spaces in her design. I like how the gen­tly sym­met­ri­cal plant­i­ngs helps focus atten­tion on the water fea­ture. In other gar­dens, foun­tains and other focal points some­times feel too small for the spaces they’re allot­ted. But Colleen’s strat­egy here gives greater visual weight to the bur­bling water and the area around it. The whiff of sym­me­try also brings visual calm that com­ple­ments the calm­ing sound of water. I’d love to spend some time in this space on a warm after­noon with a glass of North­west riesling.

Pick up the June/July issue and see more of her work!

And be sure to pop over to Colleen’s web­site, where you’ll find other exam­ples of her designs, as well as instruc­tions on how to build this fun bird­house with a green roof.

May 18 2010 | Categories: gardening • landscape design | Tags: birdhouses • Colleen Miko • Colleen's • green roofs • water features | 3 Comments »

gardens from lands with little water

My thanks to James Golden of View from Fed­eral Twist for bring­ing to my atten­tion a book that he thought would speak to this Californian’s attempts to gar­den in a land with lit­tle water. Pene­lope Hobhouse’s The Gar­dens of Per­sia traces the devel­op­ment of gar­dens in the rainfall-challenged area, begin­ning with the the ear­li­est known gar­den for which we have an archae­o­log­i­cal record, Cyrus the Great’s gar­dens at Pasar­gadae, which date to the 6th cen­tury, BCE.

That ear­li­est gar­den fea­tured a rec­tan­gu­lar space divided sym­met­ri­cally into smaller rec­tan­gles by two water courses that inter­sected at a 90 degree angle. It’s a basic for­mula that would develop through the cen­turies into the Islamic, Mughal and Moor­ish gar­dens which, in turn, went on to influ­ence garden-making in Europe and beyond.

Cyrus’s gar­den used water in a way that treated it as a pre­cious resource in a desert land but also showed off the fact that water was avail­able to the owner of the gar­den, rein­forc­ing the pres­tige and power of the ruler. Sub­se­quent gar­dens in Per­sia con­tin­ued to strike this bal­ance. They used water in care­ful, strate­gic ways, treat­ing it as the rare resource it was, often in nar­row chan­nels where evap­o­ra­tion would have been minized under the desert sun. At the same time they high­lighted the power of the owner of the gar­den, and per­haps helped to con­flate water’s life-giving pow­ers with legit­i­macy of the ruler.

Here in San Diego, you can see an inter­pre­ta­tion of a Persian-influenced Moor­ish gar­den in Bal­boa Park’s Alcazar Gar­den. Pur­port­edly “pat­terned after the gar­dens of Alcazar Cas­tle in Seville, Spain,” the gar­den is a 1935 design by local archi­tect Richard Requa, built for the 1935–36 Cal­i­for­nia Pacific Inter­na­tional Exposition.

View Larger Map

Although I’ve never been to the Alcázar in Seville, a quick trip to the satel­lite overview of the orig­i­nal Alcázar gar­dens on Google Maps reveals the Cal­i­for­nia gar­den to be a fairly loose inter­pre­ta­tion of what you’ll find in Spain. But it retains strong over­tones of tra­di­tional Per­sian gar­dens in its strong sym­me­try and thrifty use of water. (Gar­den sight­see­ing via Google Maps works really well for overviews of large gar­dens with strong struc­ture. Take a look at Ver­sailles or Isola Bella.)

In the Bal­boa Park gar­den each of the inter­sec­tions of the main cen­tral axis and two per­pen­dic­u­lar axes is cel­e­brated by a small tiled foun­tain, six to eight feet across. Nei­ther foun­tain throws water more than a few inches away from the fountainhead.

With San Diego’s cur­rent water restric­tions, home­own­ers can’t have any sort of foun­tain that shoots water into the air. So even foun­tains that are as mea­sured in their use of water as these are wouldn’t be per­mit­ted. But evap­o­ra­tion and water waste on this style of foun­tain is so dif­fer­ent from what you’d have with civic foun­tains that are more like unplugged fire hydrants. (Think of the foun­tains in Las Vegas at Bel­la­gio.) These lit­tle Moor­ish foun­tains cel­e­brate water, they don’t waste it.

The gar­den fea­tures bor­ders of clipped box­wood that out­line the rec­tan­gles of the gar­den beds. Sea­sonal plant­i­ngs rotate in an out of these bor­dered areas. Laven­der, cos­mos, and Shasta daisies were fill­ing in the cen­tral rec­tan­gles on this July after­noon, with rud­beckia, pen­ste­mon, ire­sene, can­nas, sun­flow­ers and other warm-weather plants on the margins.

Are these plant­i­ngs his­tor­i­cally accu­rate? With the excep­tion of the laven­der, not at all. But chances are that if the Per­sian rulers were around today, they would used what­ever mate­ri­als were avail­able to them, espe­cially if they were plants that spoke to power and con­quest over dis­tant lands. Plants from all over the globe and mod­ern hybrids would only serve to rein­force the viewer’s sense of the ruler’s power.

Pene­lope Hob­house makes a sim­i­lar obser­va­tion about choice of plant mate­ri­als in the Persian-influenced gar­dens at the Gen­er­al­ife in Grenada: “Archae­ol­o­gists dis­cov­ered that the gar­den must orig­i­nally have been planted with low-growing flow­ers requir­ing lit­tle soil, although there were some deeper pits obvi­ously made for shrubs, such as myr­tle, and orange trees which had been described as grow­ing there in the 16th cen­tury. After the exca­va­tions the soil was returned to the Ace­quia Court, and today mod­ern annu­als with no his­tor­i­cal authen­tic­ity give a col­or­ful display.”

If you were want­ing to make a historically-correct Per­sian gar­den Hobhouse’s text list many other options through­out, includ­ing var­i­ous roses, tulips, and sev­eral trees includ­ing white poplar, plane trees, plums, apri­cots, and apples.

Another resource for his­tor­i­cal plants would be Ali Akbar Husain’s Scent in the Islamic Gar­den: A Study of Dec­cani Urdu Lit­er­ary Sources, a study that I knew noth­ing about until I hap­pened to see it sit­ting on the shelf next to the Hob­house book in the library. This fairly aca­d­e­mic but quite read­able book con­cen­trates on Mhu­gal gar­dens and pro­vides a long appen­dix of specif­i­cally fra­grant plants men­tioned in gar­den texts. Although the focus is on texts from India, plants of of Euro­pean ori­gin make up a big part of the list.

Many of the selec­tions don’t come as any sur­prise: sev­eral rose species, nar­cis­sus, vio­lets, laven­der, jas­mine, mint, crinum, cro­cus, lilies, iris. But a cou­ple would be sur­pris­ing selec­tions for gar­dens today: one of the stink­ing corpse flower species (Amor­phophal­lus caman­u­la­tus) and cannabis (yes, that cannabis).

July 26 2009 | Categories: gardening • landscape design • places | Tags: fountains • historical authenticity • Moorish gardens • Penelope Hobhouse • Persian gardens • water features • water use | 9 Comments »

some hardcape ideas to borrow

As promised here are some ran­dom notes on hard­scape details at the Getty Museum that I found pretty cool.

The traver­tine tiles that make up most of the out­door paving are laid out in a fairly ran­dom pattern…except for this checker­board spot near the front entrance. I liked how the lit­tle pocket of order sud­denly dis­solves into randomness.

And here large tiles con­trast with smaller ones. By includ­ing a num­ber of smaller, darker tiles at the edge of the tran­si­tion, you notice the dif­fer­ence in scale more than if the were uni­formly the same color.

I liked the spikes of walk­way inter­rupt­ing the green plane of the lawn. Even on a smaller scale this could be fun in a loca­tion where you could view it from above.

Okay, this next detail is prob­a­bly beyond the scope of your aver­age DIYer, but I liked the con­trast of smooth and raw, machined and nat­ural. In this case the saw-cut stone by the walk­way con­trasts beau­ti­fully with its rougher edges.

And this one, too, might be a lit­tle unre­al­is­tic for my back yard, but I really liked it. This is a big pedestal that was built for a Henry Moore’s sculp­ture, Bronze Form. The base is a wide slab that’s been travertine-tiled. A water source on top pro­vides a shal­low sheet of water, maybe about a quarter-inch deep, that crosses the top of the base and dis­ap­pears into a groove at the edge. I thought of it some­thing like a side­ways foun­tain, with water going hor­i­zon­tally instead of straight up…

August 29 2008 | Categories: landscape design | Tags: hardscape • J. Paul Getty Museum • travertine • water features | No Comments »