DryStoneGarden

The USDA just put out a new zone hardiness map. It’s the first new map since 1990 and they made quite a few changes. Large chunks of the Bay Area, including San Francisco, Berkeley, and our garden here in Richmond, have been changed from zone 9b to 10a, and the 9a areas inland are now 9b. I don’t know how big a deal this is — I mostly use the Sunset zones (which will also be changing in the next edition) — but it is the reference number that orients me to the rest of the gardening world and I even had it noted on the blog’s About page.

For my first bit of culture in the new year, I saw the Richard Serra installation at the Stanford museum. I can’t say enough how much I liked it. Richard Serra can be a bit hit or miss in my limited experience, but this one is great, a big moebius-like double figure-eight, two open circular spaces surrounded by a narrow walkway. At first I thought Sequence was an odd name, but watching people walk through it, I realized that there is an actual sequence to the piece, that everyone does the same thing in the same order. Everyone looks at the walls in the first open circle, then they walk through the outer figure-eight which has a disorienting feel as the walls sinuously narrow and widen, then in the second open space people stare up at the sky, and then when they walk back again through the outer figure-eight they tend to keep looking upwards at the sky. You can feel it change from an object to a space around you.

There’s a slideshow with some great photos at Stanford University News and a time-lapse of the installation at Daily Serving. It’s going to be at the Stanford museum for five years and then it will move to the SFMOMA to a new wing that is under construction, but this time of year, with the sun lower in the sky so you can look up and not be blinded, is a good time to see it.

Monardella micrantha in mid-May

Happy New Year everyone. As part of year end housekeeping I was going through all the photos I took this year, including a whole lot that never made it up onto this blog. Looking back at them all, a few things are noticeable. The first is that I took a lot of photos of gardens in the spring and not very many afterwards. I did a pretty good job of recording our landscape work but after about mid-summer, our own garden went into construction mode and everything tended to look messy. Right now it feels like most of our plants have been stepped on or transplanted or had a 2×4 dropped on them. The photo below is from a few weeks ago. The shed now has a roof, but we’re still shopping around for the door and the relative chaos around it is still representative. In a couple of weeks things should start to get put back together.

To be completed soon

Blondie

I went all year without mention of our red-eared slider, Blondie, who lives in an aquarium tank with about twenty fish. We don’t often take him out into the garden, but he’s actually had a big impact, generating some of the best fertilizer our plants have ever received. Every week Anita takes a bucket of tank water and gives it to our container plants. I don’t have any before-and-after photos of the plants that get the water but it has made them exuberantly green and happy.

Allium unifolium at Salt Point

I took a number of weekend and day trips to the north bay throughout the year. Salt Point was new to me and as a result probably my favorite, but even Ring Mountain (the site of Turtle Rock and Split Rock) just across the bay in Marin was great. I never get tired of these spots in the Bay Area where there’s a big rock or two, some grasslands, and views of the bay or the ocean.

Split Rock at Ring Mountain in Marin

Corte Madera seen from Ring Mountain

Turtle Rock overlooking Sausalito

Rendezvous Caye

We managed one trip out of the country, to Belize. We hopped around to a few little islands and then went to the Mayan ruins at Altun Ha. I want to go back.

Tobacco Caye

The Mist Trail below Vernal Fall

I made six long-weekend trips to Yosemite in the spring and summer. I didn’t think I took photos, but I guess some things lured my camera out, including the Mist Trail while the waterfalls were surging. Even with all the crowds, I would put it up against any hiking trail in the world. Vernal Fall had some double rainbows at one point, but I was too wise to even try to capture the full intensity of that.

Nevada Fall

Rock Ducks at Mirror Lake

One thing I photographed in Yosemite was the collection of rock ducks at Mirror Lake. Some people like it, some don’t. The site used to have a hotel there a hundred years ago, Mirror Lake is partially dammed, and Yosemite Valley is too overrun with people and cars for me to be overly concerned about leave no trace, but I also didn’t find the rock stacking particularly appealing either. I’m more appreciative of the stone steps leading up to the collection and the retaining wall at the edge of the lake.

The steps leading up to the Ducks

Mirror Lake Edging

Half Dome

And of course Half Dome, seen from the foot of the stairs, is on a whole other level.

Joshua Tree

A week in Joshua Tree ended our recreation for the year. Since then we’ve stayed closer to home, focusing on the garden shed and the holidays and getting ready for next year. I had a lot of good things to look back on last year and I hope everyone else feels the same about their year.

Happy New Year

This weekend I pulled out our summer veggies and started most of our winter plants. It was a little late to be taking things out; our basil was starting to brown from the cold, the green beans were being eaten by a pest, and the zucchini was still healthy but had slowed its production. I had planned to wait until we finished our garden shed, but that project has gotten more ambitious and is taking longer than I expected. It will be very cool when it’s finished, but for now it’s just at that tantalizing phase where we can see what it will be like but can’t yet use it. After five winters at this garden, everything this winter will be plants we’ve grown before — favas, snap peas, beat greens, chard, kale, broccoli, parsley, radishes. There’s less of it this year, as our veggie garden has been slowly turning into a fruit garden, with blueberries, huckleberries, currants, and strawberries now filling up the edges

The other change from past winters is the stone edging on three of the four beds. In August, I pulled out the old scrap wood edging I built five years ago and I replaced it with scrap stone from several recent projects. Some of the stone is a little small and raggedy on the backsides of the beds, but overall I had good stuff to work with and it was fun working with four different kinds of stone in one little area. I came up one stone short with the cabernet wall and I bought the two corner stones to use with the beige sandstone, but it was a near-perfect quantity with about eight of the little bluestone squares leftover and nothing else. The saw-finished sandstone is more contemporary than I would have chosen for our garden, but I really like it.

Without the zucchini it looks a little bare and and in need of more tidying, but the stone just makes it so much better.

Today marks the third birthday of this blog. Posting slowed a little at times, but I still managed over fifty posts in the last year, a little more than one per week. When I started the blog, I wanted to post about stonework, plants (especially California natives), gardens, Bay Area and California landscapes, and sustainability, with random other things occasionally thrown into the mix. That’s still pretty much true. I’m not as good as I was about reading and commenting on other blogs, but I do still follow and appreciate a whole lot of them. Thanks to everyone who follows and who comments on this one.

Landscape Architect graffiti that is, not Los Angeles, and with chalk and signs rather than spray paint. Anita is on an ASLA public awareness committee that has organized a national event for today. The ASLA thinks the general public doesn’t really know what landscape architects do and doesn’t realize how much of the world has been designed by landscape architects. It sort of gets back to the inherent problem of good design: when it is done well it often looks like nothing was done. So, like members of any community with graphic skills and the belief that their voice has not been sufficiently heard, some landscape architects — the ASLA says thousands — are going out to bomb and tag the streets. I’m not totally clear on all of the specifics, but the ASLA website has graphics to download and links and info on over 130 organized events for anyone interested. (Actually, the better place to go is probably the Facebook page for the event, with photos uploaded by the various people participating.) Marking stencils on the street did have a fun guerrilla vibe to it; Anita kept checking the label on her can to make sure it wasn’t permanent.

My contribution was to mark the El Cerrito rain gardens near our house. I posted about them last fall after the city first put it in. After about a year now, they’re still doing great.

Anita tagged Cesar Chavez/North Waterfront Park in the Berkeley Marina, a good example of a landscape with a subtle design that most visitors probably don’t think of as a ‘designed’ space. Richard Haag, most famous for Gas Works Park in Seattle, was the landscape architect. I’ve heard his original design was much bolder than what got built, but, as it is, with a lot of grass and subtle topography, there are always a ton of people there and it’s the best place in the Bay Area to fly a kite. Not a bad design if you can say that, and worthy of a little temporary graffiti love.