DryStoneGarden

This week, soon after my visit to Blake Garden, I went to Filoli down on the peninsula. Most people interested in gardens around here seem to know it, and I’d heard a lot about it and seen a number of blogposts. Chuck B at MyBack40(feet) has done a lot of posts over the years, this being the one I remember best, TownMouse posted about a visit, and a number of other bloggers have posted about it too. But I’d never seen it in person.

Coming right after a visit to Blake, I found there was sort of an interesting contrast. Like Blake, Filoli was set up with a formal design at about the same time period, 1917 to Blake’s 1922. But unlike Blake, which has changed significantly over the years and has sort of a wild and free collection of plants, Filoli still has the formal, carefully controlled aesthetic. And while Blake feels sort of like the forgotten garden up in the hills, Filoli is still in its heyday. There were tour buses in the parking lot and more visitors than I ever see in any of the botanical gardens. It felt immaculate and beloved.

I was a little late to see some of the big floral shows like the spring bulbs, the wisterias, or the camperdown elm. This time of year, the roses and the mediterranean border are probably the highlights, plus of course the formal design. Does anyone know, is it the biggest formal garden in the Bay Area? I can’t think of a bigger one.

This is probably the most successful knot garden I’ve seen. There’s the standard view, where you can see that someone made an elaborate shape with the plants, but it’s also nice when you stand a little closer and just see the repetition of purple foliage.

The purple hedge is a southern Beech, Fagus sylvatica ‘Atropurpurea’ and I think the big tree in the background is the same. Makes me feel sad for the poor little hedged ones.

Lots of plants hedged into architecture. But also lots of great specimen trees like the oak tree towering over the garden house.

Shame on me that I had never been here before. It’s quite the garden, and I definitely want to go back some time earlier in the year when the classic spring bloomers are at their peak. This first visit just begins to scratch the surface.

“A garden is a creation in space and time and must be planned as an ever-changing composition in which human beings at any moment can become the central figures.” Geraldine Knight Scott

I feel like I haven’t been photographing gardens much this spring, so I went up to Blake Garden to take some pictures this week. The garden is only a couple of miles from our house and has an interesting backstory, so I’m not sure why I haven’t posted about it before. I first went there eight years ago, when Anita graduated from Cal; the landscape department owns and runs the garden and holds its graduation ceremony there. Since then I’ve gone a few times. This time I did a little research on the garden before I went, reading a short book about the garden put together by some of Anita’s classmates, and looking through the oral history and the historic photos on the garden’s website. It added quite a bit to my appreciation of the garden.

The garden goes back to the 1920’s. There’s a big house which is the official residence of the president of UC Berkeley, though it’s currently empty. Mrs. Blake was a gardener and her sister was a landscape architect, so they went all out on the landscape. The sister made a formal, Beaux Arts style design, and then over a span of thirty years, they added a ton of plants, apparently getting up to about 2,500 species at one point. Plant ID classes from the university often went up to the garden to study the plant collection, and some of the faculty befriended Mrs. Blake, so when she passed away the property was donated to the UC Berkeley landscape architecture department with the understanding that the university could do what it wanted with the house but that the garden would be maintained at a high level and used as a teaching resource for the students.

Geraldine Knight Scott, who was teaching at Cal at that time, made a plan for the garden that kept the core of the Beaux Arts-style design in place around the house, but adapted the rest of the landscape to a more modern layout, with parking for the public and a new gate and some changes so that the president of the university could live there and host events. From what I can tell, not everything in Scott’s design was implemented — one of her main tasks was editing, several people in the oral history say the garden had become a jungle, and Scott said she spent three years just taking out plants to make space — but the important thing is that the garden became a place for the students to study and work and try stuff out, which continues to this day. Plant ID classes still go up there, students in the construction classes build things there, and there have been student design competitions for trellises and so forth. When you walk around, you get a sense that there are several layers of the garden — the formal elements from the twenties, the plant collecting begun by Mrs. Blake, the mid-century modern layout by Scott, and the scattered student projects. So it’s a historic garden, but not really rooted in a single time period, and it’s still changing and evolving. I seem to find something different every time I go.

This is the formal area from the 1920’s and the part that has changed the least.

Throughout the garden, you can see some of the more formal 1920’s elements juxtaposed with some of the mid-century elements from Scott’s redesign, like here where there are two entrances, the original entrance with classic 1920’s-era Berkeley stonework and the second entrance from when they made it a public garden.

There are a lot of nice trees, especially oaks. This wall is from Scott’s redesign, separating the formal part of the garden from the more modern section.

Scott made a big curvy lawn for hosting events. It was reduced in size recently to save water, but it still vies with the reflecting pool to be the central point of the garden. Anita’s ceremony was held around the reflecting pool; this year the landscape department’s ceremony was here on the lawn.

More photos are below. (more…)

Fawn Lily, Erythronium

Along with Sunday’s landscape architecture tour this weekend, my favorite native plant event of the year — the native plant sale at Tilden — is happening on Saturday. At this point I rarely buy more than a plant or two, but I like seeing everyone lining up before the start of the sale and the mad rush to the rarest plants, and of course the garden itself is amazing this time of year.

Fawn Lilies, Erythronium sp

Fawn Lily, Erythronium

The one thing on my wish list is seed of an Erythronium species. I’ve been admiring them for a while, but have never grown one and haven’t seen them in gardens much. The Pacific Bulb Society webpage makes them sound like they grow similarly to the native Leopard Lilies — slow, easy, likes good soil, and worth the wait. I would love to have a big patch of these.

Fawn Lily, Erythronium

At past years we’ve worked as volunteers and had longer wish lists of plants, but this year Anita and I will just be spectators.

Alders Have Eyes

After years of watching the frenzied native plant shopping at the sale, last year I noticed that the alders in the middle of the sale area were watching it, too.

Dynamic Reflections

I managed a quick visit to the San Francisco Flower and Garden on Thursday. My personal highlight was not a garden, but rather Bee Chama Honey who comes out from New Mexico most years and has about a dozen different kinds of honey (my favorite was oak, followed by Sage/Willow and Meadowfoam). Anita was a judge at the show this year and was especially impressed at the quality of the gardens and the craftsmanship. I agree, though I thought they weren’t quite as memorable or dramatic as some other years. They were well designed and really nice and it takes a lot of effort to do such good work. I haven’t added links to all the garden creators, but you can find that info at the show’s garden creators webpage. Also there’s some cool stuff at the show’s Facebook page, including a timelapse of a nice, relaxing garden that I didn’t photograph.

Dynamic Reflections again

Dynamic Reflections had the most stone interest. Its by the same designer who did angled walls a few years ago. They’re pretty cool. There’s a heck of a lot going on in these walls, with a ceramic face, a container, various slabs and boulders, more than I would want in a real wall, but probably the right amount for a garden show. I found myself wishing more of the other gardens were more over the top this year.

Dynamic Reflections again

Savannah

Savannah was the other garden that felt satisfyingly over-the-top. It was done almost entirely with grasses, a narrow path through a tunnel of grassy foliage. It was a distinct experience, with crickets and other sounds created by a guy does garden sound for a living. It was a hard thing to do it justice in a photo, but this blurred photo sort of gives a sense of it. I felt like it was far and away the most interesting garden and the main one that offered a distinctive experience you wouldn’t see in a real bay area garden. It was also the only garden that truly felt like it was about the plants.

Windows

Windows was more about the hardscape and the design and making a real outdoor space with good attention to materials and details. It swept the awards from the ASLA, CLCA, APLD, and Sunset, all the groups that are focused on making real residential gardens.

Serenity Lounge

I liked the Serenity Lounge also.

Serenity Lounge again

Urban Habitat on the Left, Sculpture Party on the Right

I also liked the big dragon and the juxtaposition of it next to the graffiti garden. I guess there was more over-the-top things than I remember.

La Vie en Vert

The pendulum and the little gabians in La Vien en Vert are the last of my photos. There were other nice gardens — almost all of the gardens were good this year — but I didn’t photograph them for some reason. I guess I spent a lot of my time tasting honey.

La Vie en Vert again

SF Gate has a slideshow here.

This warm weather and lack of rain has me a little unsettled. I remember some winters like this when I was growing up, but that was before my gardening days and I don’t remember how it affected the plants. I guess I’ll be finding out. In the meantime, I’ve stopped at Tilden several times this winter to check out how the manzanitas are responding to this lack of a winter. I thought I could look at past photos to see if the different varieties are acting any different this year, but I couldn’t figure out anything conclusive. I think I’ve seen bigger bloom clusters in other years and I think they started blooming a couple of weeks late this year, but I couldn’t say for sure. In any case, they’re looking good right now in the heart of manzanita season.

The one in the photo below, Arctostaphylos montana-regis, has one of the best tree trunks I’ve ever seen. This little cluster of trees is probably my favorite spot in my favorite garden.

The next thing to keep an eye on is when everything deciduous wakes up. A few things in the garden had buds, but nothing had broken into leaf yet.

Last weekend I went to see the Drew School vertical garden by Patrick Blanc, the French botanist who started the current green wall craze. He designed a wall in San Francisco that was installed this past February . I was a little skeptical of the whole green wall thing, but then looking up at his wall — four stories high of California natives with over 100 species — my doubts evaporated. The whole thing absolutely overflows with enthusiasm for plants. Two big walls covered in natives, what’s not to love.

A pair of gardeners were doing maintenance while I was there. At first I was a little bummed to see this big orange cherry picker in front of the wall, but then I realized that it was a great opportunity to find out about the wall. I mean, I see this thing and I wonder how much does it cost, how will it age, how much maintenance does it need, and who will give me one for Christmas? Watching them work, I was impressed at how easy the maintenance actually seemed. Like any other gardeners, they cut the plants back with Felcos; they just let the green waste fall to the sidewalk and they barely even had to bend over to work. Progress was steady. It looked quite pleasant.

The plants are essentially growing hydroponically. The black flannel acts as the planting medium for the roots, and water mixed with nutrients drips down the wall, collects at the bottom and then recirculates. This is the first time anyone has ever tried something like this with California natives (he usually uses tropical plants), so the project was considered something of an experiment. Some species like Oxalis oregana or Mimulus cardinalis seem like reasonable candidates for a hydroponic wall, but some of the others like Artemisia tridentata and the Fremontodendron were a shock to me. It’s hard to tell from the photos, but up at the top there’s a Ribes sanguineum, a couple of bushy Mallows, and at least one Ceanothus.

The gardeners said they had done some replanting in September, but this was the first full maintenance pruning. They were cutting things back to do a one-year assessment of the planting and see how everything was growing. After a year of growth, some plants were starting to cover others. The Beach Strawberry was running all over the place, the Dudleyas were getting covered by other plants the same as they did in the Academy of Sciences green roof, the Lupines were short-lived, Penstemon heterophyllus looked like it was also going to be short-lived, but overall the plants were doing really well. The shrubs up top were growing exuberantly, maybe a little too exuberantly; the shade groundcovers down towards the bottom had the best year-round appearance. I found that in the places where the fabric showed between the plants, it didn’t bother me or diminish the effect.

Pretty healthy for a bunch of plants on the side of a building.

I definitely want to make it back in the spring when a lot of the plants have grown back in and are blooming. It really does have tremendous impact when you see it on the street.