DryStoneGarden

Asarum caudatum, wild ginger

…you reach down to pick off a brown thing and realize that the brown thing is the flower. It’s actually a pretty cool flower, but probably best described as interesting but inconspicuous, as half of them hide under the foliage. I’m just glad to see the plant looking happy. I bought it as a 2″ stubby, and it was miserable for a long time, until I stuck the pot underneath our flagstone bench and ignored it for a while. It’s one of the few California natives that genuinely seems to prefer deep shade, just start it off in really good soil but then completely neglect it. It’s currently in the group of container plants beside our front door, a spot that gets about twenty minutes of direct sunlight during the entire year. (more…)

Eschscholzia californica maritima & Escholzia californica

I like this accidental side by side comparison of the coastal form of the California poppy, Eschscholzia californica maritima or Eschscholzia californica var. californica, and the regular California poppy, Eschscholzia californica. I put in the regular one two years ago and the coastal form last year. Both plants are perennial in our garden, so now we have both. I suppose growing together they could hybridize, but we deadhead pretty regularly and there are many blocks of houses and concrete between us and any “wild” land.

The regular poppy might be the better plant for most gardens–bigger and faster with larger blooms and that unique burnt-orange color–and it’s definitely more common in gardens, but the coastal one has its merits, too, and seems to be getting more popular. I say “regular” and “coastal,” but I’m pretty sure the coastal form is actually the native one for Richmond Annex where I live. In fact, the owner of Larner Seeds, where I got my seed, has a post on her blog that suggests that the prevalence of the more annual form around the Bay Area hills and throughout the state is the work of past generations of Boy Scouts, Sierra Clubbers, and other human seed dispersers, and that there used to be a lot more regional variance across the state. And apparently people are still doing it, James at Lost in the Landscape cites a recent re-gen project in the San Diego area that used the generic poppy instead of the locally native form.

The flowers of the coastal form have an interesting two-tone color, an orange interior fading to a bright lemony yellow on the outer parts of the petals, and they seem to vary a bit in size and coloring; the biggest coastal flowers are often as big as the smaller flowers on the annual form. In the wild I’ve mostly seen the coastal form looking like a woolly little blue-gray thing growing in dry mineral soil, but in the garden they get about a foot tall, and they’ve been quite willing to cover themselves in blooms during the spring and then keep producing sporadic blooms throughout the summer. Their small size works best for our small garden, so we’re thinking of pulling the regular ones this year, and going down to just the single form, the coastal one.

Eschscholzia californica maritima, coastal Cal poppy

Old Town Patio Stone

I wanted to post a few more photos of the freestanding wall from the garden show. I haven’t seen many walls with the courses running at an angle, and none quite like this one. To lay the stones at an angle goes against the “rules” I learned about building walls, but, apparently, stoneworkers have been doing it in Cornwall for centuries. The Cornish call their walls “hedges”, and do things like cover them with sod, and they have a whole tradition of stacking slate vertically or at an angle. Their slate doesn’t support weight well when stacked horizontally, so they turn it on its edge, which makes a certain amount of sense; I’ve worked with slate which would crumble from a single hammer blow across the flat, but could withstand repeated blows against the narrow edge. The Guild of Cornish Hedgers has a collection of photos including some walls built with a herringbone pattern. I particularly like this one with stiles for climbing over it. There’s a photo on a blog here and another photo in the Cornish collection in the Dry Stone Walling Association of Great Britain gallery.

the courses, with my camera rotated

Through the magic of turning the camera sideways, you can see that the wall is built with courses like a traditional wall, just that the courses run at an angle.

transition from traditional to angled

The horizontally laid stones of the arch set the angle for the slanted courses. A lot of the wall’s weight is going to be pushing against those horizontal courses and against that arch, but arches are strong and the wall could have stood for a lot longer than the five days of the garden show. Now it only exists in memories and photos.

The Dry Stone Walling Association of Canada has more photos of the wall on their site, and photos of another angled wall they built for a garden show in Canada last year.

WallsWithoutMortar has photos of another angled wall built in Danville, here.

I stuck a couple of detail photos of the arch below. (more…)

Big Springs Stone Table

It’s not quite April, but we already feel safe to move our cushions outside and get our front porch ready for summer. The table on our porch is new for us this year, assembled from a slab and a block of granite. The stone’s called Big Springs, from somewhere in Utah, boulders cut into slices that are perfect for tables and benches. The stone has a beautiful grain, as if it were wood, and the sides have bluish and yellowish lichen. This table didn’t take any skill to assemble; I just put the flat stone on the flat-topped granite block. It didn’t need mortar or even a shim. The slabs aren’t particularly expensive, so I don’t understand why they aren’t more common. Doesn’t everyone want a three-hundred pound bistro table?

There’s another photo showing the grain of the stone below. (more…)

Sproutopia Display Garden

I’ve noticed that mainstream media articles like to describe flower and garden shows as a sneak peak at the future of outdoor garden design. Personally, I think it’s more of a sneak peak at what will be showing up in garden shows, rather than the overwhelming majority of actual gardens.  For instance, I read two articles talking about how all the colors at the northwest show were hot colors, especially oranges and yellows, and that there were no blues, and that this signals a move towards bold hot colors in the future, but I remember reading the same articles last year and I think it just represents that the designers have an understanding of what looks good at the garden show. I can say from experience that orange and yellow are the two colors which show up best in the indoor lighting at the shows, and that blues completely disappear. Last year we had some Nemophillas (Baby Blue Eyes) in full bloom, but they were invisible in our garden, while a rather garish red Alonsoa meridionalis suddenly became the plant that everyone wanted to have, once the plants were indoors and the lighting had dialed down the colors several notches. Anita and I’d never attended a garden show before, or we’d have used more oranges and yellows and hot reds and pinks ourselves, and if I ever do one again you’ll see a a lack of blues, even though they include many of my favorite flowers. It’s a testament to how much influence site will always have on a design, even when the site is a complete blank slate like in a garden show.

In any case, my skepticism aside, in the spirit of offering a sneak peak at the true future of garden design, I present several design improvisations from Sproutopia, the garden show playland where tomorrow’s garden designers explore their design ideas today. As you will see, the best of the displays show an acute sensitivity towards site and material, a love for mixing different hardscape elements including stone, an interest in the architectural forms of succulents and conifers, and that the concept of “outdoor rooms” seems to have caught on with the next generation of designers. My apologies to the designers for not doing a better job of photographing their work, and a salute to whoever at the garden show is responsible for Sproutopia. The kids I saw were having a really good time. Enjoy.

(more…)

Sing! by Mariposa Gardening and Design

We went to the San Francisco Flower and Garden Show (San Mateo Flower and Garden Show?) yesterday. This freestanding dry stone wall, by Mariposa Gardening and Design and John Shaw-Rimmington of the Dry Stone Walling Association of Canada, was the coolest feature in the show in my rather stone-oriented opinion. There’s something very cool about walking under a dry-stacked stone arch. They said about thirty people gathered around to watch them remove the form from underneath the arch during setup, and I saw a ton of people pose for for photos underneath it during the show.

Cool Living by Fiddleleaf Fine Gardening and Design

I also really liked the living wall by Fiddleleaf Fine Gardening and Design. The other green walls looked to me like they were grown horizontally and then put vertical for the garden show, but you could tell the Fiddleleaf wall was grown vertically from the way the plants oriented themselves. The construction details made me confident that it would actually be sustainable in the effort and resources to maintain it, and that it could evolve over time instead of being static. Green walls certainly seem to be the newest latest greatest; there were three of them in the garden show this year and it’s obviously an intriguing interesting idea, so I want to do some research into them. A lot of them seem to trade on the same novelty that makes Home Depot customers want to try growing a tomato plant hanging upside down in a bag, but I thought the Fiddleleaf living wall was the real deal, a beautiful sustainable feature for a small urban space.

Sky's the Limit by Rebecca Cole

“Look at this!” a woman beside me exclaimed when she saw the green walls in Sky’s the Limit, by Rebecca Cole, and I thought that captured the effect of seeing the tidy geometric mats of living wallpaper. Tons of novelty value, plants growing in a different way than you normally see. It’s impressive how well the shape in the painting matched the shape on the curtains, which matched the custom cushions, which matched the custom tiles. The garden swept most of the awards in the show, and it is the exemplar of a certain type of garden, the all-at-once garden, everything designed simultaneously so that everything matches, a perfect garden for the client who wants to write a check and then never change a thing.

The Return of Paradiso by Quite Contrary Garden Design

Similarly or in contrast to that garden, I’m not sure which, Quite Contrary Garden Design used found materials to make a cohesive whole. The materials all matched, but with the more casual roughness of flagstone, rather than tile. You could see that the designer collected the items, rather than designed them. I didn’t get to try out the wooden lounger, but I really liked how it looked.

There are photos already up on many of the designers’ websites, found through the garden show’s list of garden creators. BayAreaTendrils has photos, and I’m sure there’ll be more on other Bay Area blogger sites.

The show goes on for one more day, and the word at the show was that this won’t be the last year after all, that there’s a contract for five more years. Duane Kelly, the apparently-soon-to-be-former owner, has an interview at NestInStyle, talking about how the show needs to attract a new generation of visitors. It’ll be interesting to see what the new owners do to try to accomplish that.

ryan 3/21