Tag Archives: outdoor rooms

gardening, landscape design

outdoor rooms versus the garden

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I’m starting to worry about the Jamie Durie’s of the world. I, as a gardener, am getting concerned that the kind of landscaping he represents—outdoor spaces that are becoming increasingly indistinguishable from tightly decorated indoor spaces—seems to be taking over.

Take a look at what people are doing on home makeover shows, including Durie’s own The Outdoor Room on HGTV. Look at the increasing bulk of outdoor furniture in catalogs. Or just go shopping for a patio set, which is what we did recently.

Some of the smaller-scale outdoor furniture we saw...
...and more of the smaller-scale furniture...

The mismatched plastic sets we’ve from as long as fifteen years ago that been living with were looking long in the tooth. We wanted a simple table and chairs for the roof deck, and maybe something for the back patio. Yes, we found tables and chairs in the stores…

Some of the bigger-scaled seating, as uncomfortable as it is large.
Yet more. At least this set was comfortable.

…But there’s been a huge explosion in huge-scaled resort-themed seating, much of it wrapped in synthetic wicker. They tell you to “think big” when selecting furniture scaled to the larger outdoors, but so much of this would be all out of proportion to the average garden. In all this McMansion-scaled furniture I kept seeing Jamie Durie, and I wondered:

A. Who has space for all this huge furniture? and,

B. What happens to the space devoted to gardens when the inside starts to sprawl outdoors?

A 2010 interview in the LA Times didn’t raise my comfort level. When asked about the basic focus of his recently launched TV series Durie replied, “The reason I created this show was to cast a wider net and reach the non-gardener. I want to encourage people interested in travel, architecture, design, food or even fashion — and the show really encompasses all that. It’s really just laced with gardens, which is the icing on the cake.” How do you reconcile this statement with the tag line for his website, jamiedurie.com: “Connecting people with plants”?

These outdoor rooms are spaces where potted plants are largely interchangeable with throw pillows. Planted surfaces and garden beds give way to hardscape. The dominion of humans, sheltered indoor spaces, make their move to transform the outdoors into places where nature gets increasingly marginalized. Humans domination marches ahead.

Contrast these with garden rooms of the past, which seeme more about the plants, often featuring walls made out of plants and living green things underfoot. Our generation’s outdoor rooms seem to be all about the humans. For a purportedly green-conscious era all this seems backwards.

Is anyone else bothered by this? Or is it just me?

gardening, places

more from the county fair

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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!