Let me share my favorite garden design from this year’s San Diego County Fair. If I tell you that I grew up on Sunset Magazine and that I frequented the Sunset demonstration gardens at the Los Angeles County Arboretum in the 1970s, you can see why a garden like this pushes my buttons. This space my North County’s Akana Design really embraces the Sunset aesthetic of combining modern design with livable outdoor spaces. (Ignore the ugly black shade cloth background that’s been draped over the plastic white lattice that the fair provided for their displays.)
I’ve been known to grouse about outdoor spaces where the garden has been sacrificed at the expense of adding yet another room to a McMansion, but the plants in this design seemed to be integrated into the results and not so much an afterthought. This space features a compact eating space on gold-colored decomposed granite, with a whiter stone mulch used for most of the growing areas. Two simple wooden walls provide some protection, at the same time they define the space and provide a backdrop for plantings.
A single lounge chair sits off to one side at the end of a DG walkway. A stone in front serves as an ottoman. When the chair is stored indoors for the winter, the ottoman stone could serve as an accent at the end of the little path. The seat is surrounded by fragrant rosemary and cleveland sage, as well as plants that provide visual interest and variety.
This detail shows some of the plants used to provide textural interest: lomandra, phormium, aeonium, tea tree (I think), and–uh oh–Mexican feather grass. Well I had to find something about the plantings to critique. Might I suggest using the native Aristida purpurea instead? Sorry to quibble too much. Overall I thought it was a really successful presentation.
Among the other displays, Pond-Ology featured a little yoga deck in the middle of a tropical paradise. It pushed my Sunset buttons a bit too.
I’m not into making a zoo of captive angels in my back yard, but I thought this menagerie by Blue Pacific Landscape Design was well done. I especially like how the color of the blue pots echoes through the plantings around them. The cascading pink geraniums provide nice contrast. Pots full of blue flowers would have been way too matchy-matchy.
At this garden show, as at many others these days, one of the big themes is green walls. Anandascapes incorporated this wall into a pretty modern display.
Take four green walls and attach them side to side and you have a green obelisk. The Good Earth Plant Co. and Greenscape Building provided this 3D version of the flat green wall.
You could walk around it and look in detail at the various succulents that made the planting possible.
Living in a near-desert I’m still not convinced that green walls make a whole pile of sense. Why not plant an easy-care vine instead? But you’ve got admit they’re spectacular, and “spectacular” works well at a noisy county fair with lots of distractions.
In my next and final post from the fair I’ll show you some of the things that interested me most: Plants!
This is all looking pretty sophisticated for a county fair…must be something in the air down there.
I love demonstration gardens, James, and these look very inviting (especially the yoga deck, which has a sort of Japanese aesthetic). I have fond memories of the LA County Arboretum back in the day when I would make at least a monthly pilgrimage out there. It’s not a polished as the Huntington, but for some odd reason I preferred its environs. Favorite attractions were definitely the Sunset demo gardens (cause for much daydreaming), the orchid greenhouse, the Mayberg waterfall, Queen Anne cottage (hello, Fantasy Island!), and the peacocks galore!
Great find on that first space from North County’s Akana Design…perfect! I could move right in.
i have to agree…your country fair’s are pretty hip and chic …bet you would not find the same approach to design in a UK or Australian country garden fair…i may be wrong
i mean county not country
I didn’t grow up with sunset gardens. I grew up with government issued pocket-handkerchief yards, which were a big step up from the government issued apartments where I was born. A three-foot-square lawn with Livingstone daisies is vastly different from three acres of wilderness and redwoods!
I enjoyed your word pictures from the show, along with the visuals.
Those living walls are probably something we’ll look back on as part of this era, like hula hoops and garden flamingos, other faddish things. Pretty, though.
It is definitely spectacular. Love all the detail of the succulents.
Hi James,
Thanks so much for mentioning my exhibit, and for your thoughtful analysis of it. It’s gratifying to get positive feedback on it.
This is the 2nd year I’ve competed at the San Diego County Fair, and it’s always a learning experience. It’s often kind of tricky entering these kinds of competitions, especially for a small business owner such as myself. By small, I mean a company of one. And by tricky, I mean challenging. There’s always a theme we have to adhere to. This year, it was “Taste the Fun” so we were required to include edibles in our exhibit. As you can imagine, including edibles (often quite perishable) that will not only survive but look good for 5 weeks, was a bit daunting. I spent a lot of time coming up with my concept (using edibles for beverages) so that, as you mentioned, the plant choices wouldn’t be just an afterthought. Also daunting was creating a garden space on a shoestring budget (hence the black shade cloth backdrop) that competed against some who had sponsors and financial backing. Also, I don’t always get the plants I want. Your suggestion for using aristida purpurea is a good one. It just wasn’t available at the 2 nurseries that agreed to rent plants to me.
Why am I explaining all of this? Partly because I wanted to respond to your comments and partly because I’m always excited whenever people talk about plants. Of course I love the fact that you liked what we did. San Diego is still a fairly traditional town so contemporary design isn’t always embraced here. But I also love being a part of the process where people learn about gardening and design, discover what they like and don’t like, and determine why. That’s how we shape our tastes and opinions, and it’s just a really fun process. So thanks for contributing to that. And thanks for giving me a thrill. No one’s ever blogged about my work before, so it was pretty exciting for me.
P.S. Thanks also to Loree @ Danger Garden. I always enjoy reading your blog.
Kristi, well THANK YOU for assembling what was for me the most memorable display at the fair! I appreciate all the background you provided on the decisions you made and the limitations you were working against. I realize the fair is a challenging site at best, and doing an exhibit isn’t exactly the same as doing a real garden space. Your comments help me further appreciate those differences and to even better appreciate what you were able to do. My quibbles with shadecloth and feather grass are pretty minor ones: simple black shadecloth is a huge improvement over the off the shelf plastic trellises, and even most specialty native plant nurseries would have only juvenile specimens of the Aristida. Thanks again for your comments and the nice words on the blog.
Hey there… I LOVE your yoga deck… I’ve been looking for decks to build in my backyard and this is exactly what I’ve been looking for !!!!!
Any ideas on what type of wood and or finish it is? Judging by the plank size, they look like 2″x10″s but it’s hard to judge from the photo…
Thanks !!!
Kel
Hey Kelly,
The yoga deck you mentioned was in the Pondology exhibit, http://www.pondology.com/. If you contact Shawn, the owner, he should be able to answer your questions.
Thanks,
Kristi
Kristi, thanks for helping answer Kelly’s question!
Kelly, if the teak of the deck winds up being too ridiculously priced you might explore an option like ipe. I’ve used it extensively the last five years and really like its looks and durability. I haven’t priced them lately, but the last time I looked at them the ipe was less than half the cost. One drawback is that it’s fairly difficult to work with as far as needing to pre-drill all your holes. (The stuff is incredibly hard and nails are not an option.) If you dont’ do the work yourself the labor might inch the cost of ipe closer to teak.