DryStoneGarden

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.

The Garden

I took some photos of the garden on Wednesday during a break in the weather. Something about the light misting rain made everything look like spring had begun. The foliage on the plants was green and happy, and now today, three days later, a number of new plants are in bloom. The first Sisyrinchiums opened, the first of the species Tulips, the first Oxalis cultivar, the first of the Bearded Irises, and the first Cal Poppies on the block opened next door, with ours sending up buds. I was wondering if the warm dry January might have brought an early spring, but looking at a post from last year it seems that the plants are leafing out on a similar schedule, and looking at last year’s March bloom day post I think the bloom times are nearly the same. I’ll be able to compare on bloom day, and I’ll probably do a post later this month when more things have leafed out.

Favas, Parsley, Chard

The veggie garden liked the February weather, the alternating rain and sun, and the abundance of worm juice produced by the rain. The favas were planted earlier this year, and as a result are blooming earlier too.

Chaos

Our shadiest bed is now devoted to three blueberries and chaotic mix of Yerba Buena with reseeding Miner’s Lettuce, Mache, and Cal Poppies.

Rocoto Pepper

I havent been giving the Rocoto Pepper enough credit for its ornamental value. The peppers have been the most consistently bright thing in the garden all winter. There used to be more of them on the plant, but the last couple of storms have knocked a lot of them to the ground and we’ve been of course harvesting them. The red ones are hot, so we rarely use more than one of them in a single dish. Last winter the plant went mostly deciduous, but this year it didn’t drop any leaves. If it were rising out of a denser planting it would look great.

Rocoto Pepper

New Zealand Tree Fuchsia and Tasmanian Tree Fern

The New Zealand Tree Fuchsia has about a dozen flowers but they have the same green to red coloring as the leaves and you can’t see them unless you’re up close. It had flowers for last months bloom day, but I didn’t notice them.

Ribes sanguineum, Colocasia Black Magic

I like how the Ribes looks with the Colocasia and the bamboo. A lot of the woodland natives look rather tropical when surrounded by all of the bamboo in our garden.

Ninebark Leafing Out

The ninebark leafed out after the Ribes sanguineum ‘White Icicle’ in the shade but before the seed-grown Ribes sanguineum in the sun. The Ribes sanguineum opened its first flower yesterday.

Tulipa saxatilis

And its nice to see the first of the species Tulips opening. They are a week earlier than last year, but I think that’s because they are naturalized this year. Last year was the first time I planted them and they have about doubled in number. Pretty nice.

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.

Before -- June

‘Having a casual, wild, productive, diverse, beautiful vegetable garden is frankly a lot more fun than watering and mowing and pouring pesticides on our lawns.’ Fritz Haeg

Another collection of photos from last year, shots of a lawn-to-vegetable-garden conversion we did. Before this one, we hadn’t had good success installing veggie gardens for clients. We’ve incorporated them into larger designs and helped with ideas for the layout and so forth, and a lot of our clients have already had an area of veggies somewhere in their yards, but the couple of veggie gardens that we had personally installed and planted just ended up being neglected and later converted to ornamentals. Veggie gardens seem to require a certain amount of personal involvement and DIY spirit; you have to really want to go out and dig and weed and plant, and the sweat equity of the installation seems to be part of the motivation for following through and making it a success. Anyways, with this garden we did the layout and the lawn conversion around the beds, and left the installation and planting of the veggie beds to the client. It was a lot of fun to go back and see what got planted and to hear about the harvests.

After -- Late June

The installation was actually pretty simple and easy. We dug out a little bit of the grass in the corner near the gate, but for the most part we left the lawn in place and just put the paths, boxes, and plantings on top of it, laying weedcloth in the places where we wanted gravel, cardboard where we wanted plants or veggie boxes. The clumps that we did dig out we buried at the bottom of the raised beds underneath cardboard. None of the grass has come back, without using any chemicals or hauling any of the grass to the dump.

Late June

The raised beds are prefabbed from a company in Oregon, just plopped down on top of the lawn and filled with soil. The client is a good carpenter and would have normally built the boxes himself, but the logistics of the project were much easier with them ready-made. It’s a pretty slick design (the boards are modular, the pins that hold the boards in place can also serve to anchor hoops or stakes, the wood is a rot-resistant hardwood) and installation took only a couple of hours, one of those things where it’s easy to copy the design but even easier to just buy it. A nice aspect of this site was that putting the veggie boxes on the diagonal made them orthogonal to north.

July

November

December -- Favas Newly Planted in the Front Bed

There’s an architect, Fritz Haeg (he has a blog while he is in Rome on a fellowship), who has made lawn-to-veggie-garden conversions a big focus of his career. He has a book, Edible Estates, Attack on the Front Lawn, and there’s an interview on the ASLA blog from shortly after I did this project. Clearly, he doesn’t work in deer country, or his attack would include 8-foot-high fences, but it’s great to see someone really promoting the idea of changing lawn to edibles as a political, cultural, and environmental act.

Indian Paintbrush

As a year-end housekeeping task I’ve been going through all the photos I took this year, and I thought I’d post some of the ones that never made it onto the blog. It’s not exactly the year in review, but it does cover some of the things we did this year.

Playa Ligui, Baja

About a dozen photos are below. Read the rest of this entry »

Around the time I went to Stern Grove, Andrea Cochran gave a talk at UC Berkeley. She’s another one of the west coast landscape architects with interesting stonework in her projects. She mostly spoke about the projects in the recent book Andrea Cochran: Landscapes, but with a lot more photos, including construction photos and some before photos of the projects. I was most interested in the stonework at two of her projects up in the Napa area.

I smile every time I look at photos of the riprap at the base of the wall in this landscape. It’s as if the stonemasons never cleaned up after the project or as if they were building a breakwater for a flood that has yet happen. It’s landscape humor, whether or not the designer actually meant it to be. But it also works visually; breakwaters and seawalls are always striking, and most mountain headwalls have talus heaped at their base, so it’s a familiar form to have the clean face of the wall above the jumble of the riprap. She said that she added the riprap because the walls were too strong visually, that their line was dominating the landscape and she needed something to soften the effect. It’s not often that adding stone will soften a landscape.

The other interesting stone element from her book and presentation is a pyramid made from construction rubble. After excavating for a building on the site, they had literally tons of rock to get rid of and the landscape needed something to fill the view across the reflecting pool, so she channeled Michael Heizer and had the rubble stacked into a pyramid. She said everyone was skeptical until it was built. Like the riprap, a bold design move.

Both projects won ASLA awards, with more photos and info about the projects, titled Walden Studios and Stone Edge Farms, at the ASLA website. There’s also a recent interview with her on the ASLA blog, covering a lot of the other topics she talked about at the slideshow.

There’s a video about her here.