DryStoneGarden

I went to Alcatraz last week for the first time since a field trip in grade school. Wow, I should of gone sooner. It’s a fascinating spot and more than just a place to take out-of-town visitors.

The prison is of course iconic and there are great views of the Golden Gate and the rest of the bay, but also the island has some of the most historic gardens in California. They were started by the military in the 1850’s on soil brought over from Angel Island, and then various soldiers, jailers, and inmates expanded and maintained the gardens throughout the years as the island went from fort to military prison to federal prison. The gardens were abandoned when the prison was closed down and a lot of the island was swallowed up by weeds, but a lot of the tougher plants held on. In 2003 the Garden Conservancy took over the gardens and began restoring them. Many, many, many hours of volunteer labor have gone into them. Restoration seems to be about developing or preserving the dichotomies of Alcatraz: a prison garden full of escaped exotics, a weeded garden ruin, wild plants in one of the most human-built sites in California.

There are a ton of different building materials throughout the island, with various types of concrete, stone, and brick mixed and layered in funky ways reflecting the island’s transformations from fort to military prison to prison. Even in the calla lily photo there are two different types of stone. The brickwork in the photo below almost looks like a tapestry the way it is outlined by what were originally the corners of separate stone walls.

I’m not sure what plants are naturalized from before and which ones have been added by the Garden Conservancy. There’s an extensive website for the gardens, including a blog, with a lot of photos and information about the history of the gardens. Quite a few garden bloggers have visited the island; Saxon Holt at Gardening Gone Wild, Far out Flora, and Oakland Guerrilla Gardener are two of the ones I know about.

This hand-carved granite doorway was built when the prison was still a fort. In the upper corners are two pulleys from the original drawbridge door.

Trillium ovatum

I don’t post about many garden events, but one of my favorites is coming up on Saturday, the native plant sale at Tilden. It’s their biggest event of the year with many great plants for sale, some of them quite hard to find. The rush to the Trilliums is the single most frenzied horticultural moment I know of. (Speaking of which, I don’t know if it has been my luck or some kind of bumper year for Trilliums, but I have seen more of them this spring than ever before. I’m curious if that has been anyone else’s experience as well.) The sale starts at 10AM, with people starting to line up about an hour beforehand.

Ready for Tomorrow

A little before we left for Belize I finished a project in Walnut Creek that I’d been working on for a while. No garden is ever truly finished and there are still a few things to do in this one — redoing the handrailing, painting the wall — but I’m not the one responsible for that phase so I get to call it done. Much of this project was done during the period of heavy winter rains in December and then there was a long delay while the light fixture for the wall was decided on and then fabricated. Landscape lighting generally gives more immediate gratification than any other aspect of landscaping, but we had a hard time finding the right fixture for this one. There are tons of lantern-style lights designed for eight-foot-high stuccoed walls, but not many for a three foot retaining wall of stone.

Some photos of lighting (which for some reason has attracted the biggest flurry of spam that I’ve seen in a long time) are below. Read the rest of this entry »

Thursday while I was down on the peninsula, I passed near a house where I did a small stone project last fall, so I stopped by to check out the planting that the client did afterwards. Pretty nice, and fun to see someone else’s plant choices. There wasn’t a drawing or anything when I did the project, just a request for an 8″ high wall to give a back drop to a low planting of color, and I didn’t know exactly what would go in afterwards. You can’t see so much of the stonework at the moment, but it will reappear as the plants finish their bloom cycles.

The yard had nice trees and shrubs before, but it’s a lot more interesting now. This photo from when I finished the project was in my 2010 wrap-up post.

Green Fire: Aldo Leopold and a Land Ethic for Our Time from Jeannine Richards on Vimeo.

‘A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.’ Aldo Leopold

Last week in Berkeley, there was a showing of Green Fire, a documentary about Aldo Leopold that is making the rounds. The trailer embedded above is a bit slow, but the full length film is engrossing and well worth a viewing. A Sand County Almanac made a big impression on me years ago, but there’s more to Leopold’s story than just that, and the film conveys that same sense of a Leopold as a great conservation thinker. It can’t be overstated how far ahead of his time he was.

Among other highlights, the film has footage of the shack and farm — now a national historic landmark — where he wrote A Sand County Almanac. I remember reading the book, reading about his efforts to rehabilitate the land, and wondering how his conservation efforts there endured after his death. Quite well, apparently, no doubt in part because his children were conservationists too. The photo above is from Wikimedia, this blog has a few more photos of the shack and land, and there’s a slideshow of black and whites at the Aldo Leopold Foundation website for contrast. But you get the best sense of the place by watching the film. The KQED climate blog, reviewing the film, says it will probably be shown on PBS in about a year.

I went to the UC Botanical Garden yesterday. Anita and I decided to get memberships for the year. We realized that the garden is actually quite close to our house, not quite as close and convenient as the Tilden garden, but almost, and we should get to know it better. This was the first visit of the year. The garden was in transition between winter and spring, the earliest plants in leaf but most of the other deciduous plants still dormant.

The South Africa section has a new section of moss rock wall. Really nice stonework, dramatic contrast between the boulders and the walls. Be interesting to see what they plant, something with an intense flower no doubt, based on everything else in that section. I think it’s my favorite section of the garden.

It’s hard to think of a flower like this as the natural bloom and not a cultivar that has been bred by humans, but the UC has only wild collected seed.

I don’t remember noticing this vertical stone before. I think that’s a flowering quince behind it.

The ceanothus were going in the native section, but a lot of the other spring bloomers were just getting ready to break. Like the Tilden garden, the UC is a little later than my more coastal garden.

The Summer Holly, Comarystophylis diversifolia, was covered in buds. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen one in full bloom. The Oso Berry, Oemleria cerasiformis, is another one that I don’t often see in bloom.

And there is patch of Giant Coreopsis, the star of my recent bloom day, looking like they wandered over from the South Africa section. Such a strange plant; it’s very clear to me why I need one in my own garden and why I’ve never planted one for anyone else.