DryStoneGarden

Just after Gothenburg, I rode past Peter Korn’s old garden and checked it out. Peter Korn is a horticulturalist with some garden-world reknown for using thick top-dressings of sand in his plantings. I’d read about him and his sand technique here and here and maybe a couple other places, and I’d listened to a couple of talks on youtube; I like this one he gave for a Beth Chatto Gardens conference, but the others are good too. The sand thing is interesting. I recommend listening to his talk to really learn about it.

The garden I visited is his first garden, the one where he developed his sand technique. He left it some years ago and moved to southern Sweden; it’s now tended by another professional gardener, Max, who was kind enough to let me visit. Maybe I’d have have done better to visit the garden during its heyday or maybe I’d do better to visit the new garden, but I liked seeing this one in its post-creator phase. It’s nicely maintained by Max with a bit of a loose grip, a lovely expansive space, fun to explore, charming.

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I was back doing a bit of work in a garden from a couple years ago, took some photos.

The front included a lawn conversion.

I found a watercolor rendering in the ten year old real estate listing. I respect the watercolor technique but it’s a dated vision of suburbia. No one plays on a front yard lawn anymore, and guests should have a path to the front door that doesn’t squeeze them past the cars in the driveway.

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Photos of another lawn conversion. Olive trees, Lavender, Grevillea, Manzanita, Westringia, succulents, California version of a mediterranean palette.

The photo above is in the fourth year.

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This was the other garden I photographed in Sweden, the Paul Jonska garden. Paul Jonska, the legend, the luminary. Apparently he was a sea captain who travelled the world and brought home many worldly items along with an English garden sensibility. The garden is old-fashioned, but a charming place to take a break during a bicycle tour.

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This was a fun lawn conversion. I got to seed native wildflowers during the initial planting, Baby Blue Eyes and Meadowfoam, possibly my two favorite native annuals. The key is that the lawn was in a fenced backyard so the deer weren’t a problem.

Wildflower island in the fire resistant gravel area.

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I try to do one or two posts about lawn-to-garden conversions every spring, sort of an annual contribution to the anti-lawn propaganda movement. So far this is the only one I’ve photographed this year. I don’t have a lot to say about it, just that it seems clear to me how much better the planting looks than the lawn. I guess the previous owner kept the lawn so it would be possible to drive a camper van to the backyard. You can’t drive into the backyard anymore.

During the drought the new owner let the lawn dry out, then we replaced it with this simple little planting — mostly evergreen, some purple flowers and purple foliage, a bit of eye-catching yellow when the Kniphofia blooms, low-water, relatively low-maintenance, plants that are long-lived and can survive the unskilled ministrations of the mow-and-blow gardeners. Like many lawn conversion projects, it needed a low-cost path through the planting and, in this case, a couple of steps made with granite curbstones. Pretty straightforward, and such a huge improvement. These are the kind of ‘before and after’ images that I think about when I get pushback against the idea of removing front yard lawns. I really struggle to understand why people cling to their lawns.

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We sheet mulched over the dead lawn, but more to smother weeds than the grass. The grass was pretty well dead by the time I first saw it, and to me the planting brought the space back to life.

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