DryStoneGarden

I went to two other gardens on the tour. At Town Mouse’s recommendation, I went to see the Greywater Wetland Garden, a new house and garden built with a lot of green features, inlcuding stormwater catchment and a greywater system. The owner, Catherine Mohr, has a TED talk that got a quarter of a million views and she kept a blog during construction which includes a plant list and photos of the greywater system. Everything in the garden was young, but I liked the design, by Green Pad Design, and the greywater system was interesting to see.

More photos are below. (more…)

Last weekend I drove down to the peninsula for the Going Native Garden Tour, which of course meant a visit to Town Mouse’s lovely garden, one of the staple gardens of the tour. It wasn’t really photography weather and I probably didn’t photograph anything that Town Mouse hasn’t already shown many times on her legendary team blog, but it’s always nice to have my own photos of things. And I’m not complaining about the weather; it was a beautiful day, perfect for seeing and enjoying the gardens. While I was there I met her esteemed co-blogger Country Mouse and also Helen Popper, author of California Native Gardening: A Month-by-Month Guide, which Town Mouse reviewed when it came out, and I also bought some Lewisias from Gold Rush Nursery who was there selling plants. It’s a very pleasant garden to hang out in, and I stayed for a while.

Among other reasons to see the garden, I wanted to take a photo of this little patio I made a few years ago. The only photos I had were from the stoneyard where we mocked it up and from the end of the day with the wet DG still covering the joints. Town Mouse wrote a series of posts about it, parts 1, 2, and 3. It makes a sweet little sitting spot.

The garden also has a section of urbanite, more recent than the patio, that I wanted to check out. Anita and I are often trying to convince people that recycled concrete with saw-cut edges can look as good as many other kinds of paving, and this is a great example of that; we already sent this photo along to a friend who is demoing an area of concrete. The recycled glass for the joints is a nice touch.

The backyard has a sunny section and a shady area beneath a redwood tree. I liked how the California fescues were catching the sunlight. I’m down to only a couple of them in my own garden, but I started thinking I should get a few more.

The focus of the garden is of course the natives, but there are some nice non-native plants too. I’ve never planted hellebore and dicentra together, but it makes perfect sense, winter bloomer with winter-deciduous/spring bloomer.

And back to the natives in the front yard. There was lots more to see, but it was really sunny and bright. I went to two other gardens on the tour that I’m putting in a separate post. I was glad I drove down, and appreciative that Town Mouse and the others put their gardens on the tour.

Lawn Converted to Low Water Plants

Just in time to stay with the topic of lawn coversions, a friend of ours in Los Angeles sent us photos of a project we helped with. He’s a former roommate of Anita’s from the years when she was in grad school; he is now married and living in Los Angeles, and he recently bought a home with one of those terrible Southern California front yard lawns. He sent us some photos, asking for a planting plan to replace it. He and his wife wanted to keep the existing citrus tree and Brugmansia, they liked lavenders and succulents, and they wanted to do the work themselves. We sent him a drawing with some big caveats about how we had never gardened in Los Angeles so he would need to double check the plant suggestions with the local nurseries.

Before

That was last winter. This week he emailed us photos of the project, now completed. We had argued for taking out the red walkway heading straight to the door. We suggested replacing it with a DG path, figuring it would be easy to install and easy to upgrade to tile or flagstone in the future. They went ahead and installed the upgraded path right away, hiring a contractor for that part of the project and doing the rest of the work themselves. Most of the plants vary from the ones we suggested (probably a good thing), but they follow the basic layout of the drawing.

The Layout We Suggested

When we named our lawn-conversion/sheet-mulch class Lawn Begone, we were joking about how sheet-mulching can have a certain magic to it, that it’s the closest thing you get to just pointing a wand at the lawn and casting some kind of goofy Harry Potter spell. This project — before and after photos appearing in our inbox, the not-quite-real quality it has because we never physically saw or visited the site, I never saw any of the work happen — takes the magic even a bit further. I’m about as skeptical of designing over the internet as I am of Harry Potter, but in this case it feels a little like we cast a spell and it worked.

Lawn-o Begone-o!!!

This weekend, I went to a talk at Annie’s Annuals by Bart O’Brien, co-author with Carol Bornstein and David Fross of Reimagining the California Lawn. I bought a copy when it first came out, as their previous book California Native Plants for the Garden is pretty much the gold-standard book about California natives and one which I use all the time. I haven’t really read the new one yet. I looked through it enough to make sure that I wanted to keep it, but that’s it so far. I’m teaching our Lawn Begone class at Heather Farms again this year, October 22, so I’ll go through it more carefully when I’m prepping for the class.

In the meantime I was interested to hear one of the authors give a talk on the subject, and I was also just generally interested in what he had to say as he’s one of the prominent figures in the native plant movement and a director at the Rancho Santa Ana Botanic Garden, which I’ve been wanting to see for a long time now. I haven’t been to any of the other talks at Annie’s, but it was pleasant to sit and listen there in their demo garden.

He started with some info about California’s mediterranean climate and then talked about the Garden/Garden project in Santa Monica, which is pretty much the internet’s best comparison of a traditional front yard and a sustainable one. Basically, the city of Santa Monica had two side by side properties and decided to install a lawn/mow-and-blow yard for one and a native garden for the other. They’ve been tracking the results for 6 years now, and it’s of course unfavorable to the mow-and-blow yard. The native garden uses one fifth of the water, generates less than half as much green waste, and requires much less time and money to maintain. Plus the traditional garden looks like a relic from the 1970’s. I linked to a Sustainable Sites Initiative report on it back in the early months of this blog, but O’Brien said the city’s website was really good, and he’s right, it gives a lot more details, including plant lists and construction photos. Worth checking out if you haven’t seen this project before.

He listed 7 design possibilities for replacing a lawn:

Greensward — His term for a no-mow lawn. He liked Carex praegracilis as a no-mow lawn substitute. He said Carex pansa and Carex divulsa were fine, too, he just happened to have the most experience with C. praegracilis. Interestingly, he said that high-elevation carex varieties tend to rarely bloom at lower elevations.

Meadow — An open expanses of grasses, sedges, annual and perennial wildflowers, and bulbs

Rock Garden — Traditionally made of alpine plants but in California just a planting with rocks and low plants

Succulent Garden — Self-explanatory

Carpet and Tapestry Garden — A broad category meant to include most plantings of mixed perennials, grasses, succulents, and shrubs

Kitchen Gardens –Edibles! More relevant for backyard lawns around here.

Green Roof — He joked that this got included because his co-author David Fross is a green roof expert.

He listed 4 ways of eliminating the lawn:

Sod cutter — A lot of work and it doesn’t get rid of the problem weeds of the Bay Area: Bermuda Grass, Oxalis, and Bindweed

Sheet-mulch/Lasagna method — He was rather neutral about it. Not skeptical or dismissive, but not as enthusiastic as I am. (I think it’s far and away the easiest and best way to remove a lawn.) The book says to cover the layer of newspaper with at least 12 to 24 inches of organic matter, but that is excessive. The general consensus is that 4-6 inches of organic matter is the right amount, and I’ve done it successfully with just two or three inches of mulch when it wasn’t practical to mound any higher because of grading issues. He didn’t discuss the process in depth during his talk.

Solarization — He says it takes three months to solarize the soil for the wildflower meadow at Rancho Santa Ana. It’s most effective at combatting annual grasses, actually increases germination with some things like lupines, and is not likely to work well in cooler parts of the Bay Area. I’m not enthusiastic about pasteurizing the soil for a garden.

Judiciously applied chemicals — He removed his own lawn years ago by letting it go brown, then watering it to stimulate growth of the Bermuda grass, and then spot-spraying the growth. He repeated this cycle for three years to completely eradicate his deeply-rooted Bermuda grass. This sounds crazy, toxic, and impractical to me.

He said that he let his garden go completely dormant once, as an experiment, one year when Southern California had only 2.7 inches of rain all winter. Almost all of his plants survived but they looked dead and he was cited by the city for having such a brown unattractive landscape. The city backed off when he told them about his credentials and what he was doing.

He finished by talking about individual plants that he liked and he gave out a list of recommendations which was rather varied, ranging from Dudleyas to Sedums to Buckwheats to Wild Grapes. His focus was on native plants, though I like that the new book gives info on a lot of non-natives too. There were a lot of questions from the audience and he said other things I’m not remembering at this moment and by the end everyone seemed gung ho to go right ahead and remove their lawns. Good stuff.

I don’t know about following the master with one of our own gardens, but the same day as I visited the Tommy Church garden, I also took photos at a garden we installed three years ago in Redwood City. The house is on the market, so this was a good opportunity to photograph it.

It was a good opportunity, but it also a farewell to the garden, too. Before I started working in gardens, I really had no idea how often Americans move. The statistics say that 1 in 5 Americans move every year, and it sometimes seems that 1 in 5 of our clients move every year as well. The real estate listing called this an ‘Oh, Wow’ Rear Garden,’ which sounds good, but it also said the paver patio was made of stone, so the real estate agents might not have the most reliable opinions. I was going to link to the listing, but it’s already been taken down; there was a sale pending last I heard, so the house has probably sold already.

The stonework is all veneer, thin pre-made panels made of saw-cut stone. If you look closely you can see the seams. We were going to do dry-stack walls, but when I was walking around with the clients at the stoneyard, it became clear that this was the only look they liked. A bigger carbon footprint, a bit more expensive, and a much slicker look than dry-stack. Some more photos and a plan of the garden are below. (more…)

A couple of weeks ago I got to see a Tommy Church garden in Burlingame. Tommy Church is often called the father of modern landscape architecture, and he’s the one most responsible for the inside/outside California-living concept, the idea of ‘garden rooms,’ and the now-cliched kidney-shaped pool. He did a huge number of residential gardens, but not a lot of them are still intact. I only knew his work from drawings and from photos; the Donnell Garden is his most famous. His designs tend to have a lot of lawn, hardscape, and juniper, and to be more like what people now call landscaping rather than a garden, but they were very influential at the time.

This Tommy Church design, however, is an actual garden. It’s also quite close to his original design, perhaps because it’s more formal than most of his other work and there’s something about formal designs that make you afraid to change them; I think you sense that everything has already been thought out and decided and that your role is just to keep it from ever changing. I don’t know the story of the garden or when it was put in or any of those details, but most of the plants and materials clearly date from Tommy Church’s era. It’s pretty much the complete opposite of the gardens that Anita and I design, but I found it surprisingly interesting and engaging as I wandered through it. There are some nice spaces and moments within the formal structure. More photos are below. (more…)