Category Archives: gardening

hanging garden

March 6, 2009 James 8 Comments

These are the last of my Chicago tourist architecture photos, all taken on the campus of the Illinois Institute of Technology.

One of the two buildings we looked at in detail is the recently completed Tribune Student Center, which is located directly underneath the elevated rail that cuts through campus. Most architects would have considered the site a disaster and likely would have shied away from the project. Rem Koolhaas, architect of the Seattle Public Library and some other recent high-profile projects, took the location as a challenge and swooped in with a solution so amazing it makes your head spin.

Noise and vibration would be the worst part of living below the tracks. But what would happen if you made a big burrito of the train by wrapping the rail overhead in steel and concrete? And what if you put holes in the top of the tube to direct the noise up to the sky? Here’s a shot of the exterior showing the tube and one side of the student center.

Inside, the center is a busy concentration of colliding lines and angles. And when a train passes overhead, you can still notice it. Only, it sounds more like a home heater turning on instead of a jet taking off.

One little piece of repose inside is what Koolhaas has dubbed the hanging garden. Part bridge, part green roof, this long rectangle planted with grasses brings light inside and introduces some nature into the dark world of industrial surfaces.

Green roofs are by definition on the roof, so you don’t usually get to engage them as directly as you do here. Dropping the roof down like this was almost as brilliant as wrapping the overhead railway in a tube. Unfortunately, this is the only part of the structure that uses anything resembling a green roof.

Here you see the hanging garden hovering over the tables of the cafeteria. It’s a little hard making it out in the picture, but it’s also a little hard teasing apart all the angles when you’re there in real life. This isn’t an architecture that’s all about clarity and purity and minimalism.

Although it isn’t remotely botanical, I enjoyed this other little detail. An entrance into the student center goes through this big portrait of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, modern master of clarity and purity and minimalism. To enter on this side, you approach the portrait, the automatic sensor notices your presence, Mies’s mouth opens to let you in, and then proceeds to shut tight behind you to swallow you whole. Yum yum. (I’m not sure Koolhaas thinks highly of Mies’s work…)

Here’s an overhead shot of the whole center, based on the aerial photo at Live Search Maps:

Returning to things definitely botanical, here’s a little planting of birches next door to the Koolhaas building, at Helmut Jahn’s student housing structure. Whether it’s a modern planting like this or a cluster in a residential front yard, there seems to be something about birches that makes people want to plant several of them together. Why is that?

Would a single birch look totally wrong? Would it be asking a single tree to stand in for an entire forest? Is this one of our unquestioned social conventions, or would a single birch simply be too transparent to hold its own? I’ll have to pay more attention next time I run across more birches…

While you’re pondering this question, check out the landscaping done at Renzo Piano’s Rue de Meaux public housing project in Paris which uses many oodles of birches in its courtyards. This design doesn’t cluster the trees by twos and threes, but it sure does use a small forest of them. [ Image by lauraknosp via Flikr ]

gardening, my garden, plant profiles

a new groundcover

March 2, 2009 James 8 Comments

Here’s a look at a new groundcover I’m trying out. The plant, Nuttall’s milkvetch (Astragalus nuttallii) is native to coastal Central California, and seems to be adapting easily to my coastal San Diego location–maybe a little too well!

Las Pilitas Nursery, who seems to be the only firm propagating the species, estimates its height to be 3-18 inches and 18 to 36 inches wide. The plant went into the ground October 12, and has topped out at a foot or so high–so far so good. But its spread, now at over six feet, has easily hit more than double the estimated maximum plant size. And that’s with no supplemental watering after the first couple of months in the ground. We’ll see if it slows down as the weather warms and the ground dries out.

The milkvetch bore some of these small, ivory-white flowers on it in October, and it’s never been without them in the intervening six months. Now that the weather is warming, the plant is getting even more interested in flowering.

As much as I enjoy its flowers, my favorite thing about this milkvetch is its delicate foliage. It’s fern-like, and so far has maintained its clean, green-to-grayish green coloration. I have the plant at front edge of the retaining wall next to the front sidewalk, so it’s easy to get face to face with the flowers and leaves. A front of the bed location would also let people enjoy this delicately textured plant.

So, if you’d like a distinctive, delicate, low, mounding groundcover for a dry spot in a zone 9 or 10 landscape, this might be just the ticket, even if the plant might get a little wide and need to be cut back.

PS: I should also mention that one of this milkvetch’s common names is “locoweed,” and the plant is supposedly poisonous. I have no idea whether it’s in the category of nightshade or no more dangerous than tomato plants. Since I have no small children around or pets that get into anything other than catnip, I’ve never let an interesting plant’s supposed toxicity stop me from growing it. But you might consider that before planting a couple acres of it.

gardening, landscape design

“drought emergency”

March 1, 2009 James 5 Comments

Our Governor has declared a drought emergency for California. The state rainfall and snowpack has been lower than average for most of the recent years, and reservoir reserves are dwindling. My county has been slightly over average in its rainfall this season but most of our water comes from the Sierra snows and the Colorado River. So this crisis is very real for us down here as well.

At this point we’re on call for a voluntary water reduction, but if the rains fail us people will be required to reduce their water use 20%, and then–if things get worse–by 40% or more. Since landscapes consumes the majority of the water, our county water authority has started an advertising campaign to deliver these water-overuse doorknob hangers with the Sunday paper. It’s also available online: here.

There are checkboxes for “Your sprinklers are watering the pavement,” “Your sprinklers were on during the rain,” “You have a broken sprinkler, and/or your irrigation system is leaking,” “Your sprinklers are on every day” and “Your sprinklers are on during the day.” My local shopping center is a huge offender in the first category and will be getting a hang tag from me.

But this program is mostly about sprinklers and watering habits and doesn’t really address the underlying causes. There really need to be big boxes saying, “Your huge expanse of grass and water-thirsty plants are attractive, but I’d like to show you how you can have a terrific-looking yard that requires almost no additional water,” or “This extremely well-watered golf course has no place in the desert that is San Diego County.”

The very green golf course in the local canyon bottom would get a violation tag if that were the case. At least, to their credit, they let the driving range go brown with the end of the rains. Maybe in California golf could morph into a seasonal winter sport, like skiing? Maybe I’m delusional?

gardening, rambles

anagrams for darwin day

February 5, 2009 James 5 Comments

The bicentennial of the birth of Charles Darwin (on February 12, 1809) is approaching. How many other people have contributed more to our understanding of natural history? I say, it’s something to celebrate!

Here are some botanical-themed anagrams using the letters of his name. They were generated using the Internet Anagram Server, a totally magnificent way to ~~waste~~ spend your waking hours. (With 7974 anagrams to choose from I’ve probably missed a few other choice ones.)

The first one is so concise and poetic it makes haiku look verbose.

Larch rains dew

Larch aids wren

Earl wins chard

Lawn ires chard

Car: “I shred lawn”

…and last but not least:

Red lawn chairs

[ Image to the right from the Cedar Chair Store website ]

gardening, my garden, photography

my first wordless wednesday: in macro

February 4, 2009 James 4 Comments

[ African daisy (Arctotis x ‘Magenta’), currently in bloom… ]

gardening, my garden, plant profiles

deciding on a small tree

February 2, 2009 James 9 Comments

The record heat in October and November finally did in the Australian tree fern that I’d been nursing. The plant grows in full sun in its native environment, and was supposed to be able to survive full sun in coastal California. But two months of the hottest and driest weather this past year took care of what little will to live the plant had left.

The fern served as a focal point in the garden, and its passing left a big void and a sad stick of dead trunk. It doesn’t help that the neighbor’s basketball backboard lines up almost perfectly with the dead trunk.

We toyed briefly with training a small vine up the dead trunk, celebrating life and death and renewal and all that, but we couldn’t think of something that would look great as the main focal point of the space. So we were faced with coming up with a suitable replacement.

We started with some basic requirements:

The tree should max out in the 12-20 foot range and be not too broad–There’s a young tangerine tree nearby that we wouldn’t want to shade.
Some plants immediately nearby would appreciate some shade, but others are quite happy with close to full sun; a tree that could be trained to have an open branch structure would work well.
Something with a graceful natural form would be terrific–no big green popsicle-looking shade trees, please.
The plant should be pretty easy to find locally, and couldn’t cost too much.
This being drought-prone California, a tree that would be able to get by with much lower water requirements than original the tree fern would be a must.
The “look” of the tree would have to complement Mediterranean, tropical or just plain odd-looking plants.
Though not an absolute requirement, a native plant would be nice.

The short list came down to four trees or large shrubs.

Ginkgo biloba
Pros: Both John and I have always loved ginkgos, particularly their distinctive foliage and incendiary yellow autumn coloration. And their history of being a living fossil is cool. There are strains that range from little round shrubs to massive shade trees, with a couple options in the 12-20 foot range that could be trained with multiple trunks. Though not desert plants, they can make do with fairly low amounts of water.

Cons: Availability, mostly. Local sources carry the itty bitty bonsai-friendly subjects or the big shade trees, nothing in between. The tree grows really slowly, so getting a specimen of the small varieties would be a challenge. The final look of the plant, too, might not be perfect for the location.

Agonis Black peppermint willow (a.k.a. Australian myrtle willow), Agonis flexuosa ‘Jervis Bay Afterdark’
Pros: Striking dark dark dark purple (almost black) leaves, and a neat weeping habit. The bark is shaggy and attractive. Rapid growth to its target size. Drought tolerant.

Cons: The plant seems to develop a dense shade-tree look as it matures–maybe too dense for the spot. The literature says this form only gets to sixteen feet or so, but it’s only been around for a decade. Call me distrustful, but I’m just suspicious that it could be more maintenance than I want to sign up for to keep it small. Mature trunks seem large in scale to the plant. There’s a bamboo nearby, and it might be just too much wispy, willowy foliage.

[ Image from Metro Trees ]

Crape myrtle, Lagerstroemia x fauriei
Pros:Several clones are available locally in boxed specimen size for not too much money–instant gratification! Gorgeous summertime flowers. Interesting exfoliating bark. The fauriei hybrids resist mildew better than the pure species.

Cons: Their colors would look really similar to a pair of nearby bougainvilleas. The rigid forms of the trees would definitely pull the garden in a formal Mediterranean direction.

Dr. Hurd manzanita, Arctostaphylos x ‘Dr. Hurd’
Pros: Perfect eventual size (ca. 15 feet). Fairly fast-growing for a manzanita (though no speed demon). Dramatic red-brown stems with large light green leaves. Drought-tolerant, but also more tolerant of garden water than most manzanitas. Flowers in the winter.

Cons: Sporadic availability locally, and possibly only in small sizes. I’m worried that the spot might be just a little over-wet for even this manzanita.

[ Image from San Marcos Growers, who grew my plant ]

So what was the decision? I put a five-gallon manzanita on order and it hit the nursery a few days later. It’s more of a Charlie Brown shrub at this point and will take some patience and a few years to get to its final size. If it survives the amount of water it gets, if it attains the size I want, if it behaves well with its neighbors, it could be the perfect plant for this location. Check back in five years and I’ll tell you how it’s worked out…

Coincidentally Saturday’s Los Angeles Times had a whole page spread on manzanitas a full eight days after I put mine in the ground. I felt so much ahead of the Times…

art, gardening, my garden, plant profiles, quotes

hot lips

February 1, 2009 James 4 Comments

I’ve heard salvia connoisseurs talk down about this plant, Salvia microphylla ‘Hot Lips,’ mostly because it’s getting to be so commonly available in areas where it grows easily. But of all the sages in my garden this one has been the best performer.

Living in a sunny spot with dry-to-average garden water, the plants are covered with these flowers year-round, hitting a peak in the fall.

Common or not, the flowers make the plant really interesting. Most are two colors, a combination of scarlet and white, with no two flowers exactly alike. But often you’ll get flowers that are almost all white or all red. I’ve heard that cold weather seems to bring out the white, and that syncs up with what I’ve seen. But at the same time you’ll often still have multi-colored flowers–all on the same plant.

The growth habit is like a lot of sages, meaning the plant has the lines of a chocolate truffle left on a warm dashboard. For me, so far it grows about 30 inches tall by 60 wide. It’s supposedly hardy down around 20 degrees, but don’t expect many flowers when the frost starts up.

If you can grow it, this could be a good candidate for your list!

gardening, my garden

view into the january garden

January 30, 2009 James 3 Comments

This is one of the reasons why people live in a Mediterranean climate like San Diego, suffering the frequent 70-plus degree daytime temperatures. Here’s the view out the front room window onto this huge, mounding pile of blooming aloe. I think it’s A. arborescens, one of the more common species that you see all over town. (There’s a little epidendrum orchid blooming just outside the window, but who’s going to pay it any attention with the aloe going off in the background?)

A closer look at the flowers…

…and a closer look at the leaves of the aloe (serrated edges, much softer than they appear) and the agave (straight edges).

For some people, it’s not winter without seeing snow. For me, it’s not winter until I’ve seen the aloe. Okay. I’m ready for spring now.

gardening, landscape design

just about to be published

January 28, 2009 James 5 Comments

Linda brought by my desk the 2009 Spring catalog of the Princeton Architectural Press. She really like the photo on the cover, a planting by Andrea Cochran, a San Francisco-based landscape architect and the subject of a new book, Andrea Chochran: Landscapes, which is just about to be published. (The project shown is the ~~Ivy Street Roof Terrace~~ Hayes Valley Roof Garden in San Francisco.)

You may recall that Linda is a quilter, and the cover design really looks quilt-like in the way it’s put together: blocks of different plantings (not just blocks of single kinds of plants), all assembled together so that one grouping of plants contrasts dramatically against another, like one patterned fabric in a quilt that’s been set against another. In fact the author of of the book describes Cochan’s work as “studies in repetition and order, orchestrations of movement in the landscape, and elements placed in geometric conversation”–which almost sounds like the principles operating behind many quilts.

Check out Andrea Cochran’s website for other examples of her strong, linear landscape designs.

Thumbing through the catalog I ran across another title that made me stop for a closer look, Bamboo Fences, by Isao Yoshikawa and Osamu Suzuki. The catalog says that the book “provides a detailed look at the complex art of bamboo fence design in Japan, presenting these unique structures in over 250 photographs and line drawings. From the widely used ‘four-eyed fence’ (yotsume-gaki) and the fine ‘raincoat fence’ (mino-gaki) to the expensive ‘spicebush fence’ (kuromoji-gaki), these exquisite designs impress with their simple beauty, providing plenty of inspiration for your own bamboo fence.

“Author Isao Yoshikawa gives a brief overview of the history of bamboo fence building in Japan and classifies the different designs by type. A glossary provides explanation of Japanese fence names and structural terms.”

Of course, fences like this probably wouldn’t work so well if your house is in the Tudor or Spanish taste. Unless of course you want your home to develop a “home store Gothic” look that one writer called the look that suburban houses accrue over time as their owners buy whatever strikes their fancy at the local Home Depot, historical accuracy and style be damned.

But imagine these around a clean-lined modern house. In fact, Richard Neutra was known to like his glass-walled homes to look out on a Japanese-styled landscape. And some of the more geometric versions might even look amazing behind a landscape designed the the subject of the first book….

Above: Images from the book, photographed by Osamu Suzuki.

gardening

in the greenhouse, or, the dictator's wife

January 25, 2009 James 5 Comments

I was in the greenhouse Friday morning, watering some pots of seedlings. It seemed funny for a second, because outside the greenhouse it was raining. If I hadn’t gone in there with the hose that morning, the seedlings would have died in the desert for lack of water.

(Left, a Euphorbia characias ssp. wulfenii outside the greenhouse, blooming away in the rain.)

I used to grow and breed phalaenopsis orchids in the greenhouse. It was gonzo amounts of work to keep up with repotting hundreds of plants. And trying to concoct an environment that would fool the orchids into thinking that they were in the lowlands of the Philippines instead of the flats of Southern California wasn’t that easy either. In addition to all the work, the greenhouse was an energy pig, taking as much natural gas to heat as the entire house.

So, end of orchid obsession. End of heating the outdoors and wasting all that energy. (The New York Times has a recent piece on a couple who decided to build themselves a greenhouse. Their heater hasn’t arrived yet, but they’re already way over budget.)

Now that the tropical orchid episode of my life has ended the greenhouse is only heated by the sun via the greenhouse effect. At this time of year it’s handy to have a spot that will help give young plants a head start on spring. That’s pretty much how I use the greenhouse now.

And, um, yes, for a place to store garden clutter. Sort of a garden shed with windows…

Fortunately the windows are an opaque fiberglass, so all the mess inside is obscured. Maybe even a little mysterious and poetic. Here are some potted plants as seen from the outside.

As I was watering the plants in my little artificial outdoor desert I thought back to the 1980s. One the stories from the news that has stuck in my brain all these years was a report on Michèle Bennett, the wife of Haiti’s dictator, Baby Doc Duvalier. The couple was bad news all around, and one of Michèle’s vices was that she’d refrigerate a part of the palace so that she and her friends could strut about in the fur coats that they collected. (Compared to her husband’s brutal ways, it all seems pretty minor, of course.)

Mink and fox and chinchilla coats in Haiti. About as rational as a greenhouse full of warm tropical orchids in San Diego, I thought.

I guess we all want a little of of what doesn’t come easily or naturally. But in an age of a growing awareness of the need to live greener it’s good to stand back and see what we really need.

[ Lost in the Landscape ]