DryStoneGarden

Piet Oudolf documentary teaser from Thomas Piper on Vimeo.

There’s a Piet Oudolf documentary in the works. I’m looking forward to it; even the trailer is worth watching.

Another Oudolf video, about the Boon Family Garden in the Netherlands, and one more here.

The Fountain Concept

This should be my last post from the garden show, though I’ve been installing a lot of the materials used in the show — the basalt kickboard and walls, the chozubachi and birdbath, the limestone pavers, many of the plants — into real gardens, so they’ll probably show up again in photos at some point. But this is the last post specifically from the show. And actually this fountain was the starting point for the garden; before I signed up for the show, this was the first idea that got me thinking I might actually want to do a garden and what kind of garden I might want to make. It’s a fountain I had seen in photos from a temple in Japan where the monks place a leaf each morning for the water to spill from. I loved the concept — plants and stone and water joined in a single simple ritual — and the closeup image, but the actual fountain is not very graceful. I wanted to do something similar, but with a less formal piece of stone. I spent some time looking around for a suitable piece, but I couldn’t ever find anything I liked. Everything was either very rough or very slick, nothing in between, and nothing had the lip or overhang that I was looking for. I ended up having to fabricate the stone for the fountain myself.

The Original Block

The best prospect I could find was this chunk of basalt at the stoneyard. The stone had a weakness in it that I thought I could exploit to get a suitable shape for the fountain. I bought it and, because it was too heavy to move without equipment, I started working on it right there in the stoneyard. It was far and away my best prospect for the fountain and I felt like I had only one shot at getting it right, so I started slowly. I went all around it with a big chisel at first, then a single jack, and finally a heavy sledgehammer, tracing the weakness, hitting it softly at first and then harder and harder with each tool. I was very patient with it, so slow that the little crowd that formed got bored and wandered away. I can’t describe how pleased I was when it finally broke in the shape I wanted. In the photo below, you can see that it didn’t break perfectly straight, but the ragged section of the break was low on the stone where it would be out of sight, so I was immensely satisfied. I may have even danced a jig.

The Block Split in Two

Reverse Angle of the Split Block

After breaking it out of the block, I had the stoneyard drill a hole through it, and then I carved out a basin at the top. I cleaned up the edges at the top a little with my chisels, but I left the outer shape pretty much as it came out of the block. After that, I fed a hose into the hole, hooked it up to the pump, and tested it. I thought it might take some finagling to get the water to spill properly from the leaf, but that worked fine almost from the beginning. I tried a Camelia leaf first — the leaf the monks use in Japan — and then switched to Arbutus ‘Marina,’ a plant that’s more to my taste. Toyon and Madrone would also work but I couldn’t find good specimens to include in the display garden and I wanted the leaf to be from a plant that was present in the garden. In the future I plan to try Western Spicebush and Redtwig Dogwood leaves as well, but they weren’t yet in leaf at the time of the show. The stone holding the leaf in place is one I found on the beach in Baja. The flower is a Hellebore. I think a Spicebush flower might work; I’m not sure what other natives to try (if anyone has one to suggest, please let me know in the comments). I’m pleased at how it all came together, and I got a great response from people at the show, so I’ll probably make at least one more like it in the future.

The Final Stone Fountain

Here are the photos I took during the show. I may be biased, but I thought the gardens were really good this year, with a lot of cool things to see. This first one was probably my favorite, a nautical/waterfront themed garden by McKenna Landscape. All of the wood is repurposed from old fences and decks. The seating area was great and I liked the discrete little water feature reminiscent of the bilge holes of a boat.

Terra Ferma had a great trellis built with old grape vines lashed onto a metal frame, and most of the plants around it were native.

Greenlee made a sublime meadow with grape vines, grasses, and scattered flowers. The photo doesn’t do it justice.

The water wheel and submarine were both fun.

This garden did a great job of making stormwater tanks (the black plastic drums inside the metal frames) look good. I also liked the dry streambeds designed to hold the overflow water from the tanks.

And I also liked the chairs made out of old propane tanks in the garden by the students at ASU. I sat in this white one for a while during a slow point in the show; very comfortable and one of the many nice places to hang out during the show. It was great to have seen all of these gardens get built and then to spend so much time at the show amongst them.

Here are the photos of my display garden in the flower and garden show. I thought of doing posts during setup and during the show, but, wow, the garden show has a way of swallowing you up and not giving you a moment of free time.

Even after doing the show twice, it still kind of blows my mind that the gardens are all setup indoors on top of concrete slabs and that it all gets built during a few hectic days.

Two similar views from the side of the garden, early in construction and then during the show.

Meadowfoam was one of the plant stars of the garden. The garden also had Species Tulips, Irises, and a Western Azalea in bloom, and a Redtwig Dogwood cultivar, ‘Arctic Fire,’ that had everyone admiring the orange-y red stems.

The Western Azalea was intensely fragrant the first few days of the show.

This is the stone basin from my last post, after I polished it. I floated hellebore flowers in it.

And a photo of the fountain I made. The Irises in front of the fountain were full of flowers when we setup the garden, but I accidentally knocked them off while I was adjusting the flow of the water. I took photos of some of the other display gardens too. There were a lot of nice ones this year. I’ll probably post those photos in a few days.