DryStoneGarden

Nature By Design by Ripple Effect Water Gardens

We went to the SF Flower and Garden Show Friday evening. Overall I thought they were really good this year. Some photos are below. The indoor lighting is weird, and scaffolding or restroom signs seem to find their way into a lot of the shots, but that’s part of the garden show ambience.

Nature By Design

Salvaged Creole Jazz Courtyard by The Artists Garden

I thought the New Orleans courtyard garden was the best garden. Really interesting plants and great attention to detail. Dimly lit to give it a voodoo mood, though, so not the easiest to photograph.

Salvage Creole Jazz Courtyard

The Papillon Pad by Mariposa Gardening and Design

The Papillon Pad

The Papillon Pad

The World Without Us by The Garden Route Company

The World Without Us rainwater catchment well

The Living Room by Organic Mechanics

You will be assimilated.

Inside the Living Room

The garden show website has a list of all the garden creators with descriptions of the concepts for the agardens and links to the creators’ websites. Garden Porn and Floradora and An Alameda Garden and Blue Planet Garden Blog (and probably many other blogs) have photos from the show. The New Orleans courtyard seems to be the consensus favorite.

Sproutopia Display Garden

I’ve noticed that mainstream media articles like to describe flower and garden shows as a sneak peak at the future of outdoor garden design. Personally, I think it’s more of a sneak peak at what will be showing up in garden shows, rather than the overwhelming majority of actual gardens.  For instance, I read two articles talking about how all the colors at the northwest show were hot colors, especially oranges and yellows, and that there were no blues, and that this signals a move towards bold hot colors in the future, but I remember reading the same articles last year and I think it just represents that the designers have an understanding of what looks good at the garden show. I can say from experience that orange and yellow are the two colors which show up best in the indoor lighting at the shows, and that blues completely disappear. Last year we had some Nemophillas (Baby Blue Eyes) in full bloom, but they were invisible in our garden, while a rather garish red Alonsoa meridionalis suddenly became the plant that everyone wanted to have, once the plants were indoors and the lighting had dialed down the colors several notches. Anita and I’d never attended a garden show before, or we’d have used more oranges and yellows and hot reds and pinks ourselves, and if I ever do one again you’ll see a a lack of blues, even though they include many of my favorite flowers. It’s a testament to how much influence site will always have on a design, even when the site is a complete blank slate like in a garden show.

In any case, my skepticism aside, in the spirit of offering a sneak peak at the true future of garden design, I present several design improvisations from Sproutopia, the garden show playland where tomorrow’s garden designers explore their design ideas today. As you will see, the best of the displays show an acute sensitivity towards site and material, a love for mixing different hardscape elements including stone, an interest in the architectural forms of succulents and conifers, and that the concept of “outdoor rooms” seems to have caught on with the next generation of designers. My apologies to the designers for not doing a better job of photographing their work, and a salute to whoever at the garden show is responsible for Sproutopia. The kids I saw were having a really good time. Enjoy.

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Sing! by Mariposa Gardening and Design

We went to the San Francisco Flower and Garden Show (San Mateo Flower and Garden Show?) yesterday. This freestanding dry stone wall, by Mariposa Gardening and Design and John Shaw-Rimmington of the Dry Stone Walling Association of Canada, was the coolest feature in the show in my rather stone-oriented opinion. There’s something very cool about walking under a dry-stacked stone arch. They said about thirty people gathered around to watch them remove the form from underneath the arch during setup, and I saw a ton of people pose for for photos underneath it during the show.

Cool Living by Fiddleleaf Fine Gardening and Design

I also really liked the living wall by Fiddleleaf Fine Gardening and Design. The other green walls looked to me like they were grown horizontally and then put vertical for the garden show, but you could tell the Fiddleleaf wall was grown vertically from the way the plants oriented themselves. The construction details made me confident that it would actually be sustainable in the effort and resources to maintain it, and that it could evolve over time instead of being static. Green walls certainly seem to be the newest latest greatest; there were three of them in the garden show this year and it’s obviously an intriguing interesting idea, so I want to do some research into them. A lot of them seem to trade on the same novelty that makes Home Depot customers want to try growing a tomato plant hanging upside down in a bag, but I thought the Fiddleleaf living wall was the real deal, a beautiful sustainable feature for a small urban space.

Sky's the Limit by Rebecca Cole

“Look at this!” a woman beside me exclaimed when she saw the green walls in Sky’s the Limit, by Rebecca Cole, and I thought that captured the effect of seeing the tidy geometric mats of living wallpaper. Tons of novelty value, plants growing in a different way than you normally see. It’s impressive how well the shape in the painting matched the shape on the curtains, which matched the custom cushions, which matched the custom tiles. The garden swept most of the awards in the show, and it is the exemplar of a certain type of garden, the all-at-once garden, everything designed simultaneously so that everything matches, a perfect garden for the client who wants to write a check and then never change a thing.

The Return of Paradiso by Quite Contrary Garden Design

Similarly or in contrast to that garden, I’m not sure which, Quite Contrary Garden Design used found materials to make a cohesive whole. The materials all matched, but with the more casual roughness of flagstone, rather than tile. You could see that the designer collected the items, rather than designed them. I didn’t get to try out the wooden lounger, but I really liked how it looked.

There are photos already up on many of the designers’ websites, found through the garden show’s list of garden creators. BayAreaTendrils has photos, and I’m sure there’ll be more on other Bay Area blogger sites.

The show goes on for one more day, and the word at the show was that this won’t be the last year after all, that there’s a contract for five more years. Duane Kelly, the apparently-soon-to-be-former owner, has an interview at NestInStyle, talking about how the show needs to attract a new generation of visitors. It’ll be interesting to see what the new owners do to try to accomplish that.

ryan 3/21