landscape design, my garden

steel cube planters, part 1

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This is the result of one of my weekend projects:

cubessingleplanted.jpgIt’s one of four steel cubes that I assembled to put in the new raised bed. The sides of the bed are made of sheet steel that’s already weathered to a rich, warm, rusty patina, so I wanted some pots to put in it that were of the same material.

John vetoed my first avant-garde conceptual ideas for arrangements, arrangements that worked with competing systems of geometrical hierarchies, one of them based in part on some of the ideas behind Bernard Tschumi’s postmodernist and highly conceptual Parc de la Villette in Paris. But below is one that I finally came up with that makes us both happy. It has some of the geometrical tensions that I wanted to work with. At the same time, the arrangement of the elements is a little chaotic and whimsical–to the point that none of them sit flat on the ground–a quality that appealed to John.

Each pot is planted with the identical plant material. Euphorbia lambii is placed in the center, pointing as perfectly upright and away from the earth’s core as I could manage without getting out the level, an effect that I’m hoping will point out how crookedly each planter is placed. Creeping thyme will eventually protect the top of the slanted top plane of potting mix.

This is an overview of two of the other containers in the garden space, here in the middle- and background, with part of the new stepping stone pathway:

cubesoverview.jpgIf you have basic of welding chops and a supplier that will pre-cut pieces fairly accurately, you can make them yourself in an afternoon. You could also make similar containers by screwing the steel plate to little pieces of angle iron. Part 2 of this post provides some basic instructions for the welded version shown here.

landscape design

geometry

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I love lots of natural-style plantings that I’ve seen, but I also appreciate a sensitive use of geometry. Click here to see a planting of fifteen Pachypodium geayi (Madagascar palms) that I ran across rummaging through the plant files at the davesgarden site. Wouldn’t this be an awesome planting in a modern outdoor space?

The individual plants have an amazing architecture to them, but they’re fairly slow growing. My representative of this species in the back yard is probably fifteen years old and only about five feet tall. The plants in the picture must be fifteen feet tall and have a few decades apiece–not the sort of planting you’d be able to put together in an afternoon’s shopping at the local garden center…

art, places

the snake path

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I just wrote about Robert Irwin’s terrific artwork in the UCSD Stuart collection. The collection has another piece that I like, Alexis Smith’s Snake Path, from 1992.

From the collection’s page on the artist:

Smith’s work for the Stuart Collection alludes to the complex relationship between nature and culture or, in the context of the university, between knowledge and the landscape. Her Snake Path consists of a winding 560-foot-long, 10-foot-wide footpath tiled in the form of a serpent whose head ends at the terrace of the Central Library. The tail wraps around an existing concrete pathway as a snake would wrap itself around a tree limb. Along the way, the serpent’s slightly rounded body passes a monumental granite book carved with a quote from Milton’s Paradise Lost. The snake then circles around a small tropical garden representing Eden. These pointed allusions to the biblical conflict between innocence and knowledge mark an apt symbolic path to the university’s main repository of books. The concept of finding sanctuary within oneself – outside the idealistic and protected confines of the university – speaks directly to the student on the verge of entering the “real world.”

Here’s their official overview picture of the work:



And here are some snapshots from a walk there last week, first a closeup of the hexagonal slate tiles that make up the snake’s “scales”:

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…and here are a couple shots of Eden, maybe not exactly “tropical,” as described, but a lush planting that contrasts to the surrounding native vegetation:

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The plants in “Eden” are plants that have biblical references or those that somehow look like they’d belong in an eden. In the two pictures above you can see how the Italian cypresses have been pruned in a way that to me recalls some of the plants in the background of Leonardo’s 1470s Annunciation, now at the Uffizi Gallery in Florence:

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So…you can study garden books on how to prune a plant–or you can study a painting by Leonardo da Vinci!

gardening, my garden, plant profiles

return of the native

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I’ve been watching the seedlings, and now they’re just beginning to bloom: Ranunculus californicus, a.k.a. “California buttercup.”

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I bought a plant at a native plant sale maybe ten years ago. The species gows 18-24 inches tall, is drought-tolerant, and stays pretty showy for a couple months in the early spring with bright heads of these simple yellow flowers carried above the delicate and shiny foliage. It self-sowed readily without becoming weedy, so that one plant became a nice handful. That nice handful, however, got run over by a little backhoe a couple years ago when we did a little addition to the back of the house. Where there used to be garden there was just trampled dirt. Now the first ranunculus are back, maybe not exactly where I’d want them, but close enough.

With too many of these native California plants, they show up at native plant nurseries, but when you go out to the wilds you hardly ever run across them. But one of the last times I was hiking around the local San Clemente Canyon preserve, maybe 3 miles away, I looked down and there it was: Ranunculus californica, as happy on the hillside as it was back home in the garden.

art, places

"garden art"

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Set in the fake forest of UCSD’s eucalyptus groves is one my favorite artworks. Robert Irwin’s Two Running Violet V Forms was installed in 1983 as part of the campus’ Stuart Collection of site-specific outdoor art. The piece, like much of the artist’s output, is a subtle presence that takes a while to absorb.

Here’s how you might encounter it, approaching on a path through the trees:
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The piece is pretty unassuming and is almost not there. Stainless steel posts raise two V-shaped runs of a tight blue-violet colored chain-link mesh up into the tree canopy. That’s basically all there is to it, materially at least, which of course would be basically saying the same thing as a Mark Rothko painting is a piece of stretched cloth with some paint applied to it.

Once you add some light, the magic happens. Depending on where you stand and depending on how the light hits it, the piece’s panels are either almost transparent or absolutely opaque. What looks transparent subtly darkens and colors what you view through it. The panels that appear opaque accept shadows of the surrounding branches gracefully.

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Move around the work and things change. What starts out transparent turns opaque; what begins as opaque dissolves into a blue-violet vapor. Visits during sunny weather end up being subtly different from those on overcast days. Like the living trees around it, the piece responds to the weather and its surroundings.


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To the general public Robert Irwin is now probably most famous–to me unfortunately so–for designing the Central Garden at the J. Paul Getty Museum in LA. It’s a beautiful and interesting garden, but not one that shows off what he does best. The Getty website talks about the garden as “always changing, never twice the same,” which any gardener would say about their own garden. But it also is a description I’d apply to the piece at UCSD.

It’s interesting that the Running Violet V Forms, from 20 years earlier than the Getty garden, also has a botanical element. The Stuart Collection description mentions that “[p]urple flowering iceplant, echoing but not matching the color of the chain link, is planted under the fence.” When he was working on the Getty garden, Irwin was quoted declaring himself not to be a gardener, and of his working with plant consultants to complete the design. This is where bringing in a plant consultant at UCSD might have resulted in a different artwork. Today, the iceplants live on only as one or two little mounds that almost never bloom. You wouldn’t take them to be intentional parts of the artwork. Planted in the fairly deep shade of the understory, these sun-loving succulents live out a meager existence, deprived of the very light that gives life to the artwork high overhead.

landscape, places, rambles

a fake forest

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fakeforest.jpg
Last time, I wrote about going to the eucalyptus groves at UCSD to look for wildflowers. I’ve always been fascinated with these areas of the campus. Boston ivy growing on brick buildings might define the look of certain East Coast schools, but here it’s the eucalyptus trees.

At first your eye follows the trunks on these trees, in the summer covered with beautiful exfoliating bark, up to the high branches and out to the weeping branches that come back towards earth, often with vivid red coloration on the stems, contrasting with the slender gray-green leaves. Individually the trees are striking, and growing together they give the impression of a light, sunny forest. Pay some attention to how they’re planted, however, and the initial impression of pristine nature falls apart. Below I’ve taken a picture and drawn black lines that accentuate the rigid rows that were used to plant the “forest.” Not so natural after all. Southern California, home of the simulacra manufactured in Hollywood, the fake features of Disneyland, and the artificially buxom women of West-Side L.A., does it again.

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You probably know that the trees are native to Australia, and may know that down under they’re sometimes called “widow-makers” because of their tendency to drop their branches onto people. You may even know their history in Southern California, that they were planted by the millions as part of various get-rich schemes in the later 19th and earlier 20th centuries, with promises that they’d grow wood for railroad trestles or ocean piers, or that they’d yield essential oils with all sorts of miraculous properties. A great article in the Journal of San Diego History goes into some of their fascinating past.

The plantings that remain throughout Southern California are beautiful stands. The occasional grove even harbors monarch butterflies on the migrations. (An area of the UCSD groves used to be alive with monarchs during the winter in the earlier 1980s, but I haven’t seen more than the occasional monarch since then. Too bad, for sure.) But these groves of perfectly-aligned trees for me talk about culture and nature, and of the ways accidents of history shape how the world looks today.

landscape, my garden, places, rambles

into the wild

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A couple posts ago I mentioned dichelostemma blooming in the garden and I was thinking that they were probably also blooming wild in the natural spaces around me. I took a lunchtime walk through one of the semi-wild areas on the north part of the campus of the University of California, San Diego. The area has been set aside as a natural preserve, although “natural” in this case is actually a canyon of native plants mixed in with some earlier 20th century plantings of eucalyptus. Fake as it may be as a genuine Southern California chaparral ecosystem, the edges where the grove meets the scrub starts to take on more native flavors.

There had been heavy rains this past January, followed by occasional wet periods, so the ground was still moist in spots. The weather was now turning warm, sunny and spring-like. Grasses were growing exuberantly. It wasn’t long before I started to notice occasional flowers in the understory. Although the spaces under the eucalyptus prove hostile to most flowering plants other than the occasional also-imported black mustard, the blue dicks were pretty content to be there, a single plant here, big rafts of them there.

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A flowering head of Dichelostemma capitatum, mixed in with the grasses and eucalyptus

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A larger stand of them, with their little flower heads raised up two feet or more in the dappled shade

I was tuned in to what I was seeing, but in the back of my mind I was aware that back in my garden the same species of plants was also blooming. Back home the blue dicks are part of a long continuum of “springtime” flowers that begin with the first narcissus in October and continue into a number of plants that have yet to bloom. But in the wild areas of Southern California this is it. Spring is short and–in a wet year like this one–intense, orgiastic. As the weather warms the rains will stop. The grasses will die out and the flowers will fade out. Soon the long brown season will begin. But in the fictionalized natural world of my garden, spring will be here for several more months. I’ll enjoy it for sure. But somehow it seems a little wrong.

my garden

shading a greenhouse

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A few years back I wrote an article for The Growing Edge magazine on a fun greenhouse shading system that I’d devised using plywood sheets cut into interesting shapes. I was trapsing around Google Books and ended up googling myself. (Admit it, you google yourself too!) What should run across but the article I wrote, reprinted in a “best of” anthology. You can click here to see the entire article reprinted in the book.

The reprinted article has my shop drawings but doesn’t have the photos of the complete project. So here’s an idea of what it looked like when I was done:

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As a post-postscript to the project, if you do attempt doing this, use wider rabbets than shown in the article. It lets you attach the individual shade pieces more securely than I’d shown. Otherwise the panels start to fall apart as the pieces swell in response to wet weather–nothing you want to have happen after investing some time in making your panels! As cool as it looked, my underengineered panels only last about 3-4 years. Using wider rabbets and plywood thicker than the minimal quarter-inch stuff would have made them last much longer.

gardening, my garden

everything's red and orange and yellow

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I was looking at a bed in the front yard the other day and noticed everything blooming in it right now is in various combinations of red, orange and yellow:
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Freesia hybrid
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Epidendrum ibaguense hybrid

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Gaillardia pulchella

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Linaria reticulata ‘Flamenco’

Okay, okay, I sometimes do have a compulsive side when I decide where to plant things…

an artist loosed in a garden