DryStoneGarden

I took a couple of days this week to go climbing and hiking at Salt Point State Park up the coast between Jenner and Sea Ranch. I’d never been before, it’s a little far for a day trip, but now the impending closure of so many state parks has got me motivated to check out some of the parks I’ve always meant to visit. Salt Point isn’t one of the ones that will be closing, but that’s partly because they have already cut back many of the services. The closures didn’t really affect my visit, I had a great time, but it was a reminder of how things are trending. But in any case, I wasn’t dwelling on that during my trip, mostly I was just enjoying the park. Classic Northern California coastline, lots of wildflowers in bloom, and I was lucky to enjoy perfect weather. I’m not sure photos can show how exceptionally pleasant it was.

Salt Point was a quarry in the 1850’s. Sandstone slabs were split and shipped down to San Francisco to use as paving and wall stone; you can still see drilling scars on some of the rocks.

It’s great to see a former quarry site looking so beautiful.

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. Read the rest of this entry »

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. Read the rest of this entry »

I have some photos from one of the gardens on this past weekend’s Garden Conservancy Open Days Tour. It’s the home garden of the Organic Mechanics, the guys who created the giant succulent Borg cube at last year’s flower and garden show. I like seeing designers’ home gardens. They’re usually funky and interesting, and this on’s no exception. Lots of salvaged urban materials, lots of eclectic plant choices, and a fair bit of benign neglect, all hidden away behind an apartment building in the Tenderloin on the kind of block that has transvestite hookers on the corners at night. Part of the experience of this garden is to first walk six blocks without seeing a single plant. You don’t forget that you’re in a city when you enter the garden, but you get a very different city experience.

I love the big brick wall on the neighboring building, with a 5 cent cigar ad painted over a 2 cent cigar ad. I don’t give brick enough credit as a material. This wall is phenomenal.

The other detail I really like is a short path made from repurposed materials. Their website has a photo of an entire patio made from the same stuff.

There’s a write-up at SF Gate telling some more about the garden and the designers. A fun garden to have seen.

It has gotten a fair bit of press, but I wanted to do my own post about the closing of 70 California state parks in September. This has been talked about for a couple of years now, so I suppose I’ve been expecting something like this. Still, I can’t begin to express how bummed I am. Anita and I visit the parks regularly and they’re a big part of why we like living in the Bay Area. At this very moment, she is camping with a friend at Sugarloaf Ridge State Park, one of the parks that will close.

According to news reports, parks were chosen based on their visitation and how much revenue they create. When I read that, I knew that one of my favorite parks would be closing for sure, Castle Rock State Park in the hills southwest of Saratoga. It’s probably one of the lowest fee generators in the system. The park has a paid parking lot, but there is free parking on the street fifty feet away from the parking lot, and everyone, myself included I’ll admit, always parks on the street. It’s popular, though, even if it doesn’t generate revenue. It has great hiking amongst oaks and laurels and redwood trees, and it’s the most significant rock climbing area in the Bay Area, the place where a number of influential climbers including Chris Sharma, probably the world’s top climber, learned to climb. The rock is a sandstone with weird twisted shapes and huecos rising on boulders and spires scattered throughout the forest; guidebooks usually use the word ‘fairy-tale’ at some point in the description. I was planning to go down and take some photos, but I remembered I already have these, from a couple of years ago, in the meantime. After I took the photo below, I realized that a little blond-haired future climber had crept into the frame. He’s pretty much exactly how I looked at that age.

Henry Coe, another favorite and one where I have paid a good amount in fees over the years, is also closing. The California State Parks Foundation has an interactive map showing all 70 of the parks scheduled to close. There’s also a petition to sign, information about efforts to keep the parks open, and a gallery of beautiful photos from the parks.

— Addendum — I found a blog for a photographer who has set himself the goal of visiting and photographing all 70 closing parks.

Ach, I’m a day late for bloom day. I haven’t been paying much attention to our garden or posting much about it lately. I’ve found myself focusing my attention more on other gardens, the ones I work in and a number of ones that I’ve visited this spring. One reason is that Anita and I have been thinking about moving. I think I’ve mentioned before that our house is only 480 square feet (many living rooms are larger than that), and it gets very small in the winter. Anita has an office but I do the design part of our design/build from home. Summer we’re able to spread out into the garden so space isn’t such an issue, but we genuinely need more space and we don’t want another cramped winter. Instead of moving, though, we’ve made a tentative deal with our landlord to build a small garden shed/studio space. I’m not sure if that would lose us our small house movement credit. Anyways, there’s an old existing shed in the garden already, and the plan is to upgrade it to a proper little structure, which I’m sure I’ll have some posts about in the future. For a while there, while we were thinking of moving, Anita and I were physically and psychologically getting ready to leave the garden, but now that we’re staying I can feel myself re-engaging. May is a great month for gardens, a lot of our plants are blooming.

Coreopsis, Triteleia, and Penstemon

Allium unifolium

The Allium unifolium has increased steadily each year. It has reseeded politely in a couple of places, with several of the volunteers blooming this year. I thinks it’s an under-appreciated, under-planted native.

Sacred Flower of the Incas

The Sacred Flower is in a container and would move with us, but tit’ll be happy to stay. Our foggy coastal sun makes it happy.

Canna and Western Spicebush

We had a mishap with our gray water planting a few weeks ago, accidentally switching the hot and cold water hoses on our washing machine, dumping hot water into the planter box. The Canna didn’t care, if anything the hot water made it happier, but the Fuchsia ‘Gartenmeister Bonstadt’ burned to a crisp. We think it will recover, but it lost all of its foliage and at least some of the wood. A gray water risk I wasn’t aware of. The Spicebush is located a little further from where the gray water comes out of the pipe, so it doesn’t seem to have noticed. It has definitely taken over the space.

I thought I might take a few more bloom photos this afternoon, but it has started raining quite hard. The list of other plants in bloom is below. Thanks to Carol at MayDreamsGardens for hosting Bloom Day. Over 150 blogs have posted links to their bloom day posts; I recommend clicking over to check it all out. The list of everything blooming in our yard is below. Read the rest of this entry »