Here’s a little plant-tidying tip that I picked up years ago. If you have sword-shaped leaves that have died on their ends, instead of chopping off the ends blunt and square, trim them into a pointed shape using very sharp pruning shears or scissors. This gives you a more natural shape to what’s left.
If someone looks really closely they won’t be fooled by your handiwork, but it’ll draw less attention than if you’d just lopped off the brown tips.
Before:
After:
Some of my garden shots have had some perforated concrete pavers shown in them. In case you’re wondering what it is, it’s called Turfstone, and is one of several products out there that are designed to allow you to have a lawn that you can drive onto.
The basic idea is that you interplant the little holes with grass, and the concrete blocks keep vehicles from cutting ruts into the lawn. You of course could also fill the holes with other kinds of plants.
If you don’t want to have to water your driveway, or if you want a sturdy but porous material to use to cover a French drain–which is what we wanted–you could fill the holes with material like crushed rock or pebbles, as we’ve done here. Using a contrasting material brings out the interesting grid pattern.
The material is somewhat specialized, so you local home store probably won’t have it in stock, though they may be able to order it for you. Failing that, the blocks seem to have a pretty wide distribution so that a landscape materials firm could probably find it for you.
Picasso and on occasion other artists have been credited with the quote that goes something like, “Good artists copy, great artists steal.”
Left: Garden at the Getty Center, Los Angeles [ source ]
The garden designed by Robert Irwin at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles has both received raves and been the topic of rants. After my visits there I’m torn somewhere in between. There are things I like about it, and there are things that seem like missed opportunities or inappropriate choices.
One of the things I really like is its use of sheets of steel for retaining walls. (You can see it in the foreground and middle-ground in this picture.)
Each material that you use in a garden–whether it be wood or stone or steel–has its own personality. I particularly like the warm brown color that that steel ages to, as well as the industrial vibe that it brings.
While it probably doesn’t rise to the Picasso’s level of theft, using sheet steel for retaining walls is an idea I’ve incorporated into my own garden. Two sides of the raised bed I put in last fall use the material.
My gardening budget is nothing like the Getty Museum’s, so instead of inch-thick material I used 11-gauge sheets (just shy of 1/8 inch thick). Also, since steel is heavy stuff, thinner sheets don’t require heavy equipment and can be handled by two people. I welded inch-and-a-half angle iron to the top edges, both to give it extra rigidity to help hold back the soil and to give my scrawny little sheets some visual heft.
Over eight months the walls have taken on a warm patina and are almost as alive as the plants in the bed.
I don’t consider myself to be mainly swayed by practicality over aesthetics. Since steel rusts and degrades over time, using it for a retaining wall is probably a less durable option than using other materials. Still, as far as the longevity of the steel is concerned, I’m encouraged by a scrap that I’ve had outdoors for the last ten years. When I cut into it recently the interior was pristine and shiny. Only the outer shell showed any signs of rust. Of course, steel that’s in constant contact with the ground and moisture–like my garden retaining wall–will degrade quite a bit faster.
We’ll see whether this is a five-year solution or one that will outlive me.
Here are a couple cool wedding presents that we’re enamored with, a pair of solar-powered garden lanterns, a square bronze-colored one and a moss-toned teardrop shape.
During the daytime, they’re beautiful garden ornaments with their traditional silhouettes and delicate colors. They soak up the sun’s rays to charge their batteries, and then at night they let off a gentle bluish-white glow that lights up the lantern’s graceful outline. Turns out one of the gifters, Sheila, an avid gardener that we hadn’t seen for years, now is involved with the website Isabella, where they’re available.
Here they are in the garden. I didn’t spend the hours to set up a catalog shot, but I think you can get an idea of how great they look. The first shot is right before dusk showing the lanterns, the second after dusk, after the lanterns have turned themselves on. The last image is the official catalog shot.
Note that this blog isn’t a way to get you to click over to Amazon or other retailers to buy stuff. We genuinely liked this product. If they look cool to you and you’re having trouble deciding which style to pick, my recommendation would be to go for the rounded shape if you have a lot of wind since it’s more aerodynamic. In a light breeze or a sheltered location both would be good choices, and it actually adds to the effect as they sway gently.
Here’s a cool artwork by Heather Ackroyd and Dan Harvey that was featured at the recent Wimbledon tennis-thing. It’s made of three panels of grass.
The sections were grown in a darkened space under artificial lights that projected through photographic negatives. The brighter the exposure, the richer the green color.
It’s the reverse principle at work as leaving a hose or board on your lawn for a week: When you pick up the hose or board you can see how the grass grew pale where it was deprived of sunlight.
So what would you call this art process? It’s basically using light to effect a transformation of some kind of material, and that’s pretty much the definition of photography.
Photography’s first revolution was the ability to use chemical processes to fix an image made by light–think of the photographer disappearing into a darkroom with some unpromising plates or film and coming back with a magical image. Then the physics of turning light sensors into electrical impulses made chemistry-free imaging possible, leading to things like television cameras and your cellphone camera.
And now comes this process where the recording device is biological. Of course, relying on something living and growing, the result is anything but permanent, but that’s also one of the nice things about the pieces. Nothing lasts forever.
The grass artwork reminds me of Dennis Oppenheim’s brilliant 1970 photographic performance, Reading Position for Second Degree Burn, where he leaves a book on his chest as the exposed parts of him sunburn on the beach. The first picture shows him at the beginning, with the book. In the second, hours later with the book removed, a sunburn describes the area where the book protected him.
Dennis Oppenheim. Reading Position for Second Degree Sunburn. Chromogenic prints with applied text.
It’s just as much a “biological photograph” as the Wimbledon piece. While the grass piece stuns most in its execution, the Oppenheim piece, coming out of conceptual art, buzzes with ideas and humor.
Next time you come back from the beach with untanned patches where your swimsuit shaded your body, why not consider yourself a walking photograph?
[ Thanks to Landscape+Urbanism, where I first saw the Wimbledon grass pieces, and to Creative Review, where I’ve linked. ]
Last year we were staring at an awful lot of exposed soil while the plants in the new bed were filling in slowly. To liven up the space we stuck almost a hundred little pansies into the ground.
Pansies are fairly short-lived annuals for us, especially as the weather heats up. After a couple of freakish heat waves in early spring, with temperatures up to 98 one day, the plants looked like hell, and so I pulled most of them. By that point they’d had a chance to set seed and drop some into the garden.
For the last several weeks, there’ve been little pansy seedlings coming up all over. Here’s the first one of them to bloom.
This plant came up in an area that had only been planted with small-flowered pure white pansies. But with lavender swooshing on the two upper petals it clearly shows characteristics of some of the pansies that were planted nearby. Some pollinator probably visited one of the other pansies before stopping by the all-white one that set the seed. Who’s the father? The big white pansies with the purple faces? The dark blue-purple variety with the almost-black mask? I have no idea.
Since I’m no expert on pansy genetics, I suppose there’s even the possibility that white hybrid pansies don’t come true to seed. But I bet on the hybridization scenario.
This little seedling didn’t come up in an ideal location, but I’ll definitely keep it. Pretty and delicate, it looks nothing like what you find in the seed catalogs.
Thanks to Mary Ann at Urban Garden Journal, this blog has been tagged. Actually, it’s the second time I’ve been tagged. (Thanks, In the Garden!) But I was swamped at the time and didn’t get a chance to respond. Also, I was even newer to blogging than I am now, and wasn’t familiar with the game of blog tag. In my occasionally over-cynical mind I mistook it to be some sort of suspect blogger’s pyramid scheme. But in the meantime I’ve realized it’s actually a fun game and a terrific way to get to know more about your fellow bloggers.
The rules as passed down to me from the two taggers are simple, though the two sets of rules vary a bit. If I’ve tagged you, you can pick whichever version you like, or make up something along these lines:
So…some randomness about me:
And now for the bloggers I’m tagging:
Garden History Girl: Excellent insights into gardens today, informed by gardens past, as well as notes on cultural influences that can influence garden-making.
The Midnight Garden: A blogger on Cape Cod enjoying his garden and its seasons–as well as his morning cups of coffee.
Garden Wise Guy: Always informative, usually funny, sometimes even a little snide–and coming from me that’s a compliment! You might not want your garden to appear on his blog…sometimes like a 10 worst-dressed list…
Landscape + Urbanism: A great roundup of things in the outdoor urbanism realm. Lots of fun ideas to steal and down-size for your own garden.
Pacha Mona: What’s it like to live and garden and cook with interesting ingredients in Costa Rica? This blog captures the textures and flavors of a place that’s on my “visit someday” list.
Garden Porn: With a name like that what’s not to like? A fun read and some great spaces to boot.
There are more–lots more–that I enjoy and would have loved to have tagged. But I need to keep some in store for the next time I’m tagged. And if I haven’t tagged you but you’d like to play, please do! I’ll add you to my list here.
Saturday night I was at a gathering that included Michael Lundgren, a photographer visiting from Arizona where he teaches and works. He’d brought along a portfolio of prints from his Transfigurations series, images that will be included in his upcoming book by the same title to be published at the end of this year by Radius Books.
The photographs in the series work together beautifully, murmuring softly to each other, echoing each other’s forms or textures or moods. With bodies of interrelated work like this it’s almost a shame to isolate a single image. But books being what they are, you generally have space on the front cover for just one, and the one that was picked for Transfigurations is a beauty.
So here we have a single, perfect, amazingly symmetrical juniper tree on a little rise or ledge overlooking an expanse of desert. It feels like the end of the day, that special time when the land seems to glow from within, when the earth seems to gently release its last reserves of the day’s light, like power discharging from a battery, as it prepares for night.
People often think of the desert as a hostile world, but for plants like this juniper that are adapted to what the desert offers and demands, there’s no better home.
To see more images, visit Michael Lundgren’s site.
I’ve been waiting impatiently for my plant of the Early Girl tomato to bear fruit, and Saturday turned out to be the day. There were five in total, smallish, but a beautiful red color, with just a flash of green on their shoulders. (Greg on Cape Cod also commented that this reputed early bearer was taking its time for him as well.)
Here’s the loot from the Saturday: the first Early Girls, as well as some Mr. Stripeys.
They made for a tasty, quick black bean salad for lunch. But they really came into their own sliced up with some Mozzarella di Bufala Campana (a.k.a. buffalo mozzarella), olive oil, basil, pepper and a smidge of salt–your basic caprese salad.
Simple, uncomplicated foods, fresh and delicious from the back yard. Summer doesn’t get much better than this! If only I had some water buffalos to make my own fresh cheese…
Last fall’s big planting effort was a big raised bed of perennials, shrubs, bulbs, a tree fern and a tangerine tree, most of which went into the ground over the course of two months. While I don’t strive for total order in everything in my life, I was worried that assembling a bed of so many different kinds of plants all at once might quickly lead to total chaos, something on the order of those “color bowls” that they sell at nurseries and home stores.
(Okay, yes, some color bowls are well done and actually quite nice, but the worst are tossed-together plant combinations that provide work for the color-blind and are the garden equivalent of making yourself a cafeteria plate of spaghetti, frozen yogurt, fried chicken, and creamed corn, all mixed together and doused with ketchup and caramel sauce.)
To help tame the potential disorder I set myself one basic organizing principle: Nothing yellow (and only small doses of orange).
I have nothing against the color yellow, and in fact I have yellow all over the garden. But I wanted to create a quiet zone with soothing colors that would harmonize with each other. Also, one of my least favorite garden color combinations is the mix of yellow flowers with gray foliage. Banishing yellow would let me feature plants with interesting gray foliage. Still, even after ditching yellow and most oranges, it still leaves reds and purples and whites and pinks and blues–and of course the all-important green!
But once a year, for a couple weeks, the color scheme will fall apart as a cluster of kahili ginger break into bloom with spectacular and amazingly fragrant spikes of yellow flowers. There’ll be nothing else yellow in that part of the garden, and your eye will go right to the lewdly sensuous rulebreakers. Once that quick philander off the color wheel passes, though, the garden will return to its former order. Only now it’ll be enriched by heady memories of its brief indiscretion. (Hmmm, sounds like a few plot lines I’ve encountered…)
Speaking of organizing something around the absence of certain colors–and things with plot lines, John and I were watching some of the bonus features on the DVD of The Hours. In one of them the costume and production designers were talking about how they arrived at a rule to help pull together the look of the film: Nothing red, and nothing blue. Partly as a result of that organizing principle the film sustains its earth-bound moodiness as the plot hops decades and moves back and forth from England to New York to California.
So…whether you’re planning a garden or shooting a movie, remember: Pay attention to the power of color!