Category Archives: landscape design

getting close to the 2015 garden tour

March 8, 2015 James 3 Comments

This weekend I had a chance to revisit five of the twenty gardens that will be on the 2015 Garden Native Tour on March 28-29. One cool sighting was the new CNPS sign that features a monarch butterfly feasting on native milkweed.

The gardens were looking nice now, and should be great at the end of the month for the tour. Here are a few great details:

A compact, long-established garden at a condominium, with large, mature shrubs and lots of dappled sunlight…a step into a bright woodland…

Winter blooms on the Howard McMinn manzanita

The sheltered woodsy plants beneath a dark-trunked Howard McMinn manzanita

Tasty strawberry on a native strawberry--a bright green groundcover that supplies you with treats while you're weeding... — Tasty strawberry on a native strawberry–a bright green groundcover that supplies you with treats while you’re weeding…

The interpretive native plant landscape at Old Town San Diego State Historical Park–The site will serve as one of the sign-in points on the tour weekend.

The historic McCoy House on the edge of the Old Town native plant landscape

White yarrow against the white picket fence in front of the McCoy house--what a cool planting idea! — White yarrow against the white picket fence in front of the McCoy house–what a cool planting idea!

Fuchsia-flowered gooseberry, in crazy bloom at the Old Town landscape

…and some random great ideas…

A delicate planting of our humble ranunculus, R. californica — A delicate planting of our humble native ranunculus, R. californica

A gloriously wild, unmowed "lawn" of sedges — A gloriously wild, unmowed “lawn” of sedges

A bright yellow yarrow selection planted on the edge of a rain-permeable driveway

I have too many things going on this month, but–hey–this will have to be one of them!

gardening, landscape design, photography

photos for a garden tour

December 5, 2014 James 4 Comments

This will be my second year helping out with the photography for the spring native garden tour of the San Diego CNPS chapter. Last year I supplied a few of the images, but I mostly helped editing photos that others had taken, sharpening, cropping, and color-matching everything from cellphone snapshots to nearly-perfect finished photos. This year I actually had a chance to go out a couple days during peak bloom to get some source material myself, and there’ll be a few more of my photos in the mix.

First, the tour specifics:

Garden Native Tour 2015

Saturday and Sunday, March 28-29, 2015
9:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. each day

San Diego and Poway, California

In taking the photos I did a certain amount of randomly wandering around gardens, looking for pretty pictures. But in the end I tried to select for images that showed gardens as intentionally-created arrangements of collections of plants. Although native gardeners often aim to recreate slices of nature on their properties, I tried not to include too many photos of plants that could be indistinguishable from photos that could have been taken out on a hike. These are gardens, after all.

Also, I tried to get a few photos that might appeal to readers of aspirational shelter mags like Sunset, Dwell or Martha Stewart Living. (Five years ago I might have added “viewers of HGTV” to this sentence, but that network has long distanced itself from the “G” in its name. Pity.) A certain part of the public is immune to the siren call of the consumerist lifestyles highlighted in the pages of these magazines, and a large portion of the native plant community is even actively working against lifestyles that tax the earth’s resources unnecessarily. Still, good intentions are no excuse for bad design, and the gardens scheduled for the tour show had plenty of intelligent and beautiful design details that made for good photos. A garden-tour audience is broader than the core native-plant community, and many have some shelter-mag aspirations. What would be a better goal for an event than to show that you can have compelling design that treads lightly on the earth, and at the same time gives back by providing food and shelter for wildlife?

The tour will highlight work by accomplished local designers as well as homeowners, and runs the stylistic gamut from the orderly, decidedly gardenesque spaces of Greg Rubin (as in the one in the tour’s signature image above) to near-wild spaces designed by Wes Hudson. And in between those poles you’ll see lots of other approaches to garden-making.

One of the more gardenesque spaces on the tour... — One of the more gardenesque spaces on the tour….

One of the more nature-like gardens on the tour. — One of the wilder, more nature-like gardens on the tour.

For those of you not in San Diego County, you have almost four months to make your travel arrangements. (Really, it’s not such a stretch. Last spring I ran into a couple from Portland that had read about the event on this blog. Pretty wild!) It’s going to be another great garden tour, and I hope to see you there!

gardening, landscape design

spring garden tour

February 21, 2014 James 9 Comments

Okay, it’s been a while since my last post, but this is definitely something I didn’t want to let pass unnoticed. Fifteen private and public gardens in northern San Diego County will join together for the Garden Native Tour 2014. It all happens March 29-30.

I helped with the photography for the event, either going out to shoot some gardens, or making the garden photos people took look even more glamorous.

I shot these photos one bright January morning. Expect these gardens to be even more inviting as spring kicks the plants into high gear.

You’ll see a variety of garden styles: comfy informal home spaces, garden spaces with adventuresome hiking opportunities, a home mixing natives with a working vineyard, gardens that showcase plant collections, a mature lakeside space perfect for entertaining, an institution that sets art-making in a warm native landscape…you’ll be inspired.

Tickets to the tour and to a pre-tour fundraiser where you can try out your new cocktail attire can be purchased online [ here ].

I hope to see you there!

gardening, landscape design, places

january anza-borrego desert garden

January 23, 2013 James 11 Comments

As far as interpretative visitor’s centers go Anza-Borrego Desert State Park has a pretty awesome one. The area has a rich mix of natural and cultural resources and histories, and the center does a good job of introducing you to some of the highlights. It’s also staffed by knowledgeable staff and volunteers happy to get you started with what to see and do.

The building itself is pretty cool in that it has a green roof–if you can call desert plants with white sand in between “green.” It’s painfully hot (and cold) much of the year, so it helps moderate the temperatures inside the visitor’s center.

Up top they’ve done a pretty good job of disguising the fact that there’s a working building underfoot. A few vents tip you off that this might not be a normal desert floor…

Immediately outside the center’s doors there’s an impressive desert garden that’ll get you up to speed on the main plants you’ll find in the area. And it’s a chance to see one of the locally rare specimens of torote, the elephant tree. Among the more common and more charismatic species:

Beavertail cactus (Is this plant’s name an oxymoron, at least in the sense that you’d never see a beaver anywhere near cactus habitat?)

Barrel cactus…

Ocotillo…

Creosote bush.

Indigo bush, too early for it to be blooming, but a wonderful vaporous texture.

Some things were already (or still) blooming. This is a nice little tableaux of brittlebush, Encelia farinosa with desert agave, Agave deserti in foreground.

And this busy tangle features red blooms on chuparosa, Justicia californica. When you encounter it later in the season the plant is leafless, but there was water enough that you could find leaves on many of its branches.

The last thing I saw blooming with any umph was this fairy duster, Calliandra eriophylla. It’s flowers are smaller, maybe a couple inches across, than those of the Baja fairy duster, C. californica, that is sold more frequently. Yes, California does have a plant that could easily be mistaken for a bottlebrush from down under.

A pond feature provided habitat for the über-rare desert pup fish. There were plenty in the water, but I guess the critters consider photographers predators and scurried off. Justin Bieber behaves the same way.

A few gallon cans lets you know that this, like any other garden, is a work in progress.

And a final shot, a nice grouping of some of the plants above, arranged to please the eye, though the plants might consider themselves a little too close for comfort. But given a little extra water and grooming, you can get away with it.

When “in the neighborhood,” be sure to check out the center and the garden.

gardening, landscape design, places

highlights from 2012: disney hall garden

January 14, 2013 James 6 Comments

Sorting through last year’s photos I ran across many little piles intended for blog postings that never happened.

One of the roads paved with good intentions led to Los Angeles. We were up June 1 to the Walt Disney Concert Hall for one of the premier concert performances of John Adams’ new oratorio The Passion According to the Other Mary, a big and sprawling work with many amazing musical moments. (The piece is being reprised in early March in a version staged by Peters Sellars.)

Disney Hall has established itself as an architectural landmark, for reasons that you can see here. But less publicized is its little roof garden.

The main centerpiece is a delft blue-and-white rose fountain Frank Gehry designed for concert hall benefactor Lilly Disney. During midday the fountain’s blue colors play off the blue of the sky reflected in the thousands of reflective facets of the concert hall’s stainless steel exterior. But we were there at dusk and the reflected colors formed a backdrop of warm tones.

(Writing now, in January, when these short winter days sees darkness falling in late afternoon, it’s comforting to see that within a few months the sun will still be up late into the evening, summer manic to counter the winter depressive. I can hardly wait!)

There was a nod to native California with this clump of coral bells, Heuchera maxima, but the other plants drew on the imported botanical palette that you see around Southern California. This blooming coral trees were probably the most prominent among them.

Going inside the hall, the wacked out organ pipes behind the orchestra always amaze me. The architect refers to them as his “French fries.”

So ends this delayed little tour of a sight from last year. If my blog hosting service spares me further times without service, I’ll have a few more glimpses back ahead, along with what some Southern California gardens are doing in the lengthening days of late winter.

art, gardening, landscape design, places

visiting the fallen star

August 21, 2012 James 7 Comments

Last year I showed you some of the construction leading up to the installation of Fallen Star, this art installation by Korean artist Do Ho Suh. Basically it’s a tiny Providence, Rhode Island-style house and garden that has improbably landed on the edge of one of the engineering buildings at UCSD. The “landing” was a little rough, as you can see, so that the floor of the house is a few degrees off of level. The walls of the little house aren’t quite plumb, either–and don’t quite match the angle of the floor. The whole effect is pretty disorienting.

(You can click [ here ] to see all the other post I’ve done on this installation.)

Aside from creating an intriguing object set helplessly among the brutish concrete structures around, the artist is using the sense of disorientation to conjure up the sense of disorientation he felt when he came to this country to study at RISD. But in addition to the disorientation, he’s also interested in creating an oddly sheltering space. We find community wherever we can, even in the most unlikely places, in this case seven stories off the ground, jutting out alarmingly over the quad below.

I tried to visit on the first day the piece was open to the public. The crowd was way crazy, and it was like trying to view art at a gallery opening. Definitely not the best time.

So, when I got a chance to see it under much more civilized circumstances I jumped–no, let’s use a different verb: I went for it.

So…we approach the house from the adjacent building. The safety railing is perpendicular to gravity. As I’ve mentioned already, the house is not.

This is me, stepping into the slightly under-scaled, seriously slanted interior of the little house.

Most visitors’ first reactions will be to the off-kilter feeling of seeing the positions of house and furnishings not quite lining up with what your inner ear is telling you you should be seeing. The little chandelier in this photo is pretty much the only thing acknowledging gravity.

Looking out the door towards the house’s perch, you can get a really good sense of the crookedness.

Here’s the rest of my little group inside, next to the fireplace. After a few minutes you really start to feel queasy.

Once you get over the shock of the fun-house aspects of the piece you start to notice little touches: family photos, tchotchkes, lucid details that inhabit everyday life and memory. The inhabitant of the house is fictional, but you think that your Aunt Edith or Gramma Olive might have been models for her.

I thought the little views out the windows were especially poignant.

Just outside the house you sense that whoever lives here might just be a gardener. Who else would leave a concrete frog and Corona clippers right at the front door?

If the clippers weren’t enough of a clue, how about a bright green garden hose? Some people do their best to hide away their hose, but the kind of gardener who lives here would have nothing to do with all that silly fakery.

Outside gravity reigns. The plants know which way is up, and by this point you might need to sit down and remind yourself.

There are lots of ornamentals outside. The gentle yellow of this sunflowers looks great against the house’s clapboard exterior.

Morning glories were clearly enjoying their full sun exposure, even though this is about as exposed a spot for garden that you’ll find anywhere. In case you’re dying for the name of this variety–like I was–it’s the heirloom Carnevale di Venezia.

Grandma’s Olive’s fictional double also enjoys her summer vegetables. This is a brown pumpkin…

…and here’s a perfect Persian cucumber, a gift to me from the garden of the Fallen Star.

A perfect conclusion to an amazing tour.

gardening, landscape design

pink lawn flamingoes, reloaded

June 11, 2012 James 5 Comments

When life gives a crappy cellphone video camera, well, you make crappy cellphone videos. Not that the world needs any more of them but I’m such a narcissist that I’m sure these are only crappy in their total lack of technical polish. I’m sure they’ll be going viral any day now…

A trip to Walter Anderson Nursery a few months back netted this find, a wind-activated updating of the classic pink lawn flamingo.

And in keeping with the motif of things blowing in the wind…

At graduation for Pomona College last month they held the festivities outdoors, under old, old sycamores growing in the riparian lawn habitat. Overhead they’d set up blue and white banners that on this mild morning were being set in motion by the breeze.

Two months ago I stopped off briefly at Chapman University, where I passed by this lovely planting of the very lovely and equally evil (in my book) Mexican feather grass, Nassella tenuissima. (Why is this plant evil? you may ask. I was out weeding this morning, and pulled up a dozen or so seedlings from plants that I pulled up a decade ago. It’s also undergoing review for consideration as an invasive exotic species in California. Notice their planting is surrounded by concrete, but I’m sure they have the stuff coming up in irrigated spots nearby. (Maybe this started out as one plant?)) The California native purple three-awn, Aristida purpurea, would do very much the same thing, only with more of a delicate purple tinge. It reseeds, too, but for me not nearly so prolifically as the plant in the video.

art, landscape design, places

nasher sculpture center

April 8, 2012 James 3 Comments

I need to be careful about the things I write. I’d passed along a statement that someone had made calling the area around Dallas as “tornado country,” and look what happened.

Yikes! But unless I’m Zeuss I’m thinking this wasn’t my doing. At least this was one of this situations where you can say that you’re glad it wasn’t worse.

This will be my last tourist post from the land of dangerous tornadoes: a quick visit to the sculpture garden at the Nasher Sculpture Center, a city block of calm in the heart of Dallas.

Let me start off with my award for Best Use of Bamboo in a Museum Setting. Access into the outdoor sculpture garden is blocked by the sort of fence that you see most often in in museums, the kind where there are uprights spaced a few inches apart and set in concrete below the level of the ground. It’s an attractive fence option, and one that’s less confrontational than many. Here at the Nasher it’s softened further, with the uprights camouflaged in a grove of green-culmed bamboo.

Peter Walker gets the credit for designing the outdoors spaces here. He’s probably now best known for joining Michael Arad during the final stages of the winning design for the National 9/11 Memorial, probably one of the highest profile public art and landscape architecture projects out there. I know him best for Library Walk, a design he executed at UCSD, a work that I step on several days a week.

In the phrase “sculpture garden” sculpture comes first. Like the project at UCSD that I walk on, the spaces at the Nasher are deferential to the art. But the spaces never just lurk the background.

Where the art isn’t so prominent are the spaces where you can really notice Walker’s work. Steps leading down from the garden level break up the geometric regularity with two trees, and species of tree change as the spaces go from open to enclosed, small to large in scale.

The plantings and hardscape are flattering participants for many of the works. This is Barbara Hepworth’s Squares and Two Circles (Monolith) a work from 1963.

Walker’s garden glows with an aura of rational structure, a sense that works really well with a lot of these sculptures.

People want to see your Serra if you have a sculpture garden. Here’s theirs, lit with nice dappling light.

Hedges take over the role of walls in interesting ways. Not a revelation, but nicely done. Here you have a short “wall” providing crowd control for George Segal’s Rush Hour.

The members of this crowd haven’t fared as well. (Magdalena Abakanowicz’s Bronze Crowd, bronze, 1990-1.)

In this garden space you’re free to walk around and make connections and receive your own private epiphanies. Like, Joan Miro and Mark di Suvero both used circles and similar diagonal lines! Oh wow.

There’s lots of indoor space here too, with works by lots of modern notables in light-filled pavilions by the ubiquitous museum architect Renzo Piano. I’ll leave that report to Lost in the Museum.

After these Dallas posts it’s feeling like I’ve been away from home too long. It’ll be back to my garden next time.

landscape design, places

not a grassy knoll

March 14, 2012 James 5 Comments

A trip to Dallas gives you the opportunity to visit the Sixth Floor Museum, an institution that “chronicles the assassination and legacy of President John F. Kennedy; interprets the Dealey Plaza National Historical Landmark District and the John F. Kennedy Memorial Plaza; and presents contemporary culture within the context of presidential history.”

Whenever anyone hears about the place, the initial reaction is something like “ooh, creepy.” But the thing is done so simply and respectfully that it’s worth fighting the ick factor.

The museum–no interior photography allowed, sorry–builds a narrative that leads up to and recedes from a re-creation of the sniper’s nest on the sixth floor of what was back then the Texas Book Depository building. From the outside, immediately below the cornice, there on the right, you can see the infamous partially-open window.

Down below there’s an embankment planted with grass, the “grassy knoll” that figures in some scenarios as the location of a possible second gunman.

It’s also the location of a big banner screaming “Grassy Knoll” in case you didn’t figure what it is.

Planting a big banner on an embankment doesn’t make it any more of knoll, however. From my imperfect understanding of landscape terms a knoll is a gentle bump on a flattish landscape. (There might be sheep nearby.) This instead is a grassy embankment beside a road that feeds into a highway. This is not a knoll.

This, however, is a knoll, and quite a grassy one at that. (Image by Rosser1954 at the Wikimedia Commons.)

On the pavement right in front of the G.K., you can see one of the two white X’s that mark the locations of the limousine when it was struck by gunfire. It’s probably the most tacky or mawkish thing you’ll see on your visit.

Down on the plaza you can look up to the open window, across to the “knoll,” or down into a big water feature filled with winter leaves moving slowly in the breeze-driven water currents. You can trance out to the little epicycles that the leaves take through the water, or you can try to ignore traffic and reflect quietly on the events that took place here fifty years ago.

I’d guess that most Dallas residents aren’t so thrilled for being known for living in the city that killed JFK. But this is history, and I’m glad I came to pay my respects.

art, gardening, landscape design, places

lostlandscape does dallas

March 12, 2012 James 6 Comments

An annual work conference takes me to various cities around the country. Some cities have been amazingly cool centers of human civilization, but most others are places that had never been high on my bucket list. Really, I’m going for the conference, and the city is just set dressing. But the trips is a good excuse to get vaguely acquainted with–and sometimes be pleasantly surprised–by the background city.

So…Dallas…

The landscape between the airport and the conference hotel is a pretty bland ooze of industrial housing, strip malls and the occasional mega-church, all interspersed with flat-to-rolling terrain that looked scraped clean of anything resembling like nature. One of my fellow conferees looked at the surroundings, appraised it. “Tornado country,” as if that might actually be the best fate for it.

If you’re able to switch on the selective amnesia and forget about the ride into town, however, the immediate setting of the conference, in a hotel adjacent to the Arts District, was actually a pretty pleasant and interesting place.

This being downtown, most plant-life comes served to you on a tray or in a dish.

Other things also come on plates. This is a hazy, out-of-focus remembrance of dessert, a kulfi “ice cream sandwich,” at the most interesting restaurant I had a chance to sample, Samar.

Back outdoors, back to nature-on-a-plate, planters outside the Dallas Art Museum, in front of Muguel Covarrubias’ glass mosaic from 1954, The Gift of Life. The perfect artwork for a gray day in a gray downtown.

A new museum going up, almost ready to open, the Perot Musuem of Nature and Science. Its architect is Thom Mayne, whose “Death Star” building erected for CalTrans in downtown LA (below) bears more than a passing resemblance to this building…

Thom Mayne CalTrans building in LA (Photo by Magnus Manske, from the Wikimedia Commons.)

A few places had grass around them–and even trees.

This being downtown it wasn’t enough for trees to have branches and bear cooling leaves for the summertime. They also had to light up. This is one of a a bunch of trees I ran across that were thoroughly wired.

And another one…

(Add pigeons…)

The quality of light in a downtown area is always a tad strange. You’d never guess that the sun was straight ahead on the other side of the building when I took this. The light and shadow comes courtesy of the reflection off the glass-walled office building behind me reflecting the sun back towards itself.

Pointy shadows, gumdrop prune-jobs…

(Subtract the pointy shadows…)

The twin gods that preside over Dallas…

Window washers, presiding over Dallas.

The old, with the new rising far behind it.

Thank the shopping gods for these: Jonathan Cross vessels for sale at the gift shop of the Dallas Art Museum. There was no space in my carry-on for anything, even these compact little vessels. Wah. They’re almost too cool to consider adding a plant to them.

[ Lost in the Landscape ]