Category Archives: landscape design

guerrilla gardening

June 17, 2008 James 3 Comments

A topic that’s making its rounds these days is the practice of guerrilla gardening.

It can take different forms, but what’s being talked about most are “seed bombing” and stealthily taking over neglected public spaces.

Richard Reynolds in London has just released a book, On Guerrilla Gardening, and that’s causing a lot of the buzz. The hiply “criminal” nature of what he’s doing has given Reynolds a certain aura. Even Adidas is trying to tap into it with a proposal for an advertising campaign. Think of the “edgy” caché that Shepard Fairey developed with his “Obey” campaign of guerrilla-applied posters featuring Andre the Giant. In addition to now doing signage for the Obama campaign, Fairey has taken that celebrity and channeled into an art and marketing career. Reynolds is poised to do something similar.

In addition to London the practice is happening all over: Berlin, New York, Long Beach in California–lots of places. In Long Beach, for instance, someone recently named in an article only as “Scott” has been beautifying neglected traffic medians by planting them with attractive landscaping. What’s really to his credit is that he weeds and otherwise maintains the spaces, and he’s been doing this for ten years, more than twice as long as Reynolds.

In the same article, Ramon Arevalo, Superintendent of Grounds Maintenance for Long Beach, has said that he has no problem with “Scott’s” illegal activity. “If you want to do this, my advice is to contact myself or the council person. We want to partner with people who care about where they live.”

That sounds like the seed bomb for a whole new program cities could develop. Why not partner people who want to grow living things with governments in possession of butt-ugly patches of untended land?

Here in San Diego there are several beautification programs in and around the city where artists are invited to decorate the mundane electrical utitility boxes that populate street corners and front yards. Hundreds of boxes have sported interesting new paintjobs as a result. Why not do something similar with those dead zones spread throughout most cities by getting people to participate in beautifying their surroundings by planting gardens in neglected spaces?

And–here’s a radical idea–why not pay them something to do it?!

art, landscape design, photography, rambles

more about golf: virtual and in pictures

June 13, 2008 James Leave a comment

In South Korea 200,000 golfers a day are discovering that they don’t need golf courses to play the game anymore. The New York Times site ran a video piece on how virtual-reality golf is taking the golf world by storm. Take a look:

It’s golf–more or less–but with no unnecessary water use, herbicides or pesticides!

Artist Skeet McAuley did an artist’s residency with the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego in 2000. During that time he did a photographic series on golf courses in this area. Conceptually one of the things he was interested in was the total fake-ness of courses in relation to nature. In fact the title of the exhibition that came out of the residency was “The Garden of Golf.”

Skeet McCauley golf image

Skeet McAuley. The Meadows Del Mar Golf Course 4th Fairway, San Diego, California, 2000, Fujichrome print, 32 X 88 in. [ source ]

The resulting works were large, conventionally beautiful landscapes shot on golf courses. “Nature” has been rendered green and friendly, pretty and harmless. The images point out the way golf courses insidiously homogenize the natural world into a pre-ordered set of expectations of what nature should look like. In this world, there’s no room for snakes or tigers, weeds or brown patches of earth.

In this fiction of nature, going to a golf course becomes a virtual experience of the real world. It’s merely an approximation. At some level you may think you’re interacting with nature, but it ends up being as faked an experience as the Korean golfers and their golf simulation facilities.

landscape design, my garden

souvenirs

June 6, 2008 James 3 Comments

I’m back from my trip, and I’ll post some of the trip pictures here soon.

Two weeks away during prime growing season can guarantee that you’ll come back to surprises. I knew tomatoes grew quickly, but, dang, what was I thinking when I put that one indeterminate monster in the flower bed? I don’t usually prune my tomato plants, but that’s what I was doing within fifteen minutes of pulling up in the driveway. A few baby tomatoes of the first crop went with the stems that went into the greens recycle bin, but there will be more where those came from.

The nicest surprise to come back to was probably the opening of the first pitcher on the Sarracenia alata in the new bog garden. I’d been watching the new leaves making their way up from the rhizomes for the last couple of months, and this first pitcher was perfect: elegant, streamlined, and gently striped.

I usually don’t buy piles of souvenirs on my trips. This time I came home with three. One was a little soap in the shape of a cute grizzly bear. (The soap smelled like cheap cologne.) Another was a wild huckleberry-filled chocolate bar for John. (Even though he likes chocolate as much as I do, he agreed that the souvenir bar tasted like bad Hershey’s with a little bit of berry jam spread on it. At least the wrapper was festive.)

And the last souvenir I brought home was for the carnivorous plants in the bog garden. Common wisdom is that carnivores like pure water, with total dissolved solids less than 50 parts per million. The local San Diego water bottoms out at around 180ppm tds and goes up from there, so it’s not ideal–and actually lethal over the long term–for carnivores. At the Norris Campground in Yellowstone on my way out I emptied my 5-gallon emergency water container which I’d filled with disgusting San Diego tap water at the start of the trip. Then I went to the spigot and filled it with five fresh gallons of pure mountain snowmelt.

Cape sundew Not long after I got home I took the mountain water to the bog plants and opened the spigot on the jug and let it dribble into the assorted pitcher plants and sundews. After sniffing the disgusting souvenir soap and sampling the unfortunate chocolate, I know the bog plants got the best souvenir of all from my trip. Nothing is too good for some of my current favorite plants…

A happy Cape sundew (Drosera capensis, broad leaf form) in the bog garden.

gardening, landscape design, quotes

the dark side of lawns

April 28, 2008 James Leave a comment

I was thumbing through The American Lawn, edited by Georges Teyssot, a collection of thoughts on the phenomenon of American lawns by eight contributors. It’s a wide ranging collection of essays looking at the place of lawns in American culture since colonial days. One of the pieces, “The Electric Lawn” by Mark Wigley, has a couple of quotes that interested me in my current disenchantment with all things turf-related.

On lawns and power relationships:

While renderings for clients may show the lawn, and manuals of drawing technique may describe the ways in which it can be represented, the drawings with which architects communicate to themselves and other architects leave the lawn out. It is assumed that wherever there is nothing specified in the drawing there is grass. The lawn is treated like the paper on which the projects are drawn, a tabula rasa without any inherent interest, a background that merely clears the way for the main event. Yet the lawn is always precisely controlled, whether by the architect or landscape designer. Lawns are all about control. The green frame is far from neutral or innocent. What is left out of the picture often rules the picture.

And a look at 50s green-lawned utopia gone bad:

The deadly lawnmower is the star of the dark side of suburban life. Take Stephen King, the high priest of suburban gothic. In his 1985 film Maximum Overdrive, a passing alien spaceship causes all the machines on the planet to turn against their operators–insulting, taunting, torturing, and then killing. A young boy rides his bicycle down the middle of a generic suburban street. Lawns pass by on either side. The only sign of trouble is that the automatic sprinklers uncannily respond to his presence…A blood-stained lawnmower lurks behind a tree, idling, waiting. When the boy finally stops, it roars to life and chases him down the street…

Well, I didn’t see that movie, and Leonard Maltin rates it a bomb: “Stupid and boring.” Maybe a couple of interesting takes on suburbia, but nothing for the Netflix queue…

landscape design, rambles

virtual garden tour

April 17, 2008 James 1 Comment

It’s high spring in Southern California and time for the annual garden tours. The California Native Plant Society offers one, as do a lot of neighborhoods, including my own.

Rather than ponying up the fees and filling up the gas tank this past weekend I decided to make up my own garden tour. Online.

I’m not especially smitten with Hollywood celebrities, but thought that might be an interesting starting point. I randomly pulled up one of the pile of websites with addresses of celebrities, then went to Google Maps with the address in hand. And Google Maps has that controversial feature to actually view at street level what you find on a map. The street view isn’t implemented for much of the country, but it happens to be in place for practically all of Beverly Hills. How convenient.

So…what does Madonna’s front yard look like? What might that tell me about her as a person and about celebrity in general?

First off, let me say that the Google feature indicates that the addresses shown on the screen are only approximate. So this might not actually be Madonna’s front yard. But assuming that it is, I guess I felt a little let down. The yard is really green. Lots of green. Somehow I thought the garden would be a little more…exotic? Out of control shrubberies and lurid statuary maybe? But it does say she likes her privacy. No surprise there.

Then I went over to Mia Farrow’s.

More of the privacy thing, again. But the yard seemed a little more welcoming–probably something to do with the steps leading up to the front wall. And I felt really good that she recycles.

Next was the late Charleton Heston’s pad, which didn’t look like the one in Michael Moore’s Bowling for Columbine. Either he’d down-sized or I was knocking at the neighbor’s.

Nice, conservative landscaping. Private, but not hostile. You know that trespassers would be shot, so there’s no need for higher hedges.

And on to Jay Leno’s:

Walls again. And more hedges. These neighborhoods have abnormally high hedge counts for Southern California.

Then over to Bette Midler’s.

It’s a little hard to see the yard, but it looks like it’d be a nice place to unwind with the divine Ms. M and some martinis.

Maybe the most surprising was Harrison Ford’s.

Like, where’s the killer fence and the yard for the guard dog? And the birch trees make the house look like it’s on the wrong coast. It’s nice enough, but makes me think he’s not much of a gardener. Or maybe this one’s for sure the wrong house. Dunno. Unfortunately, online, you can’t be the obnoxious stalker fan and go knocking on the front door. I might just have to leave these people to themselves.

gardening, landscape design

"away from the soft pornography of the flower"

April 9, 2008 James 2 Comments

The quote in the title is from a statement by Charles Waldheim about the work of landscape designer Piet Oudolf in a January 31 article in the New York Times, “A landscape in winter, dying heroically.” (I ran across this in a post to Alexander Trevi’s interesting Pruned blog.)

Photos by Herman Wouters for the New York Times article.

One of Oudolf’s interests is in constructing landscapes that acknowledge the cycles of nature, the browning and the dying, along with the greening and regrowth.

“You look at this, and it goes deeper than what you see,” Oudolf is quoted. “It reminds you of something in the genes—nature, or the longing for nature.”

“You accept death. You don’t take the plants out, because they still look good. And brown is also a color.”

These are gardens about deeper things. They’re as beautiful as all those merely skin-deep gardens, but they’re so much more nourishing. I wrote earlier referring to a comment about Monet’s gardens being designed to expose natural processes. Oudolf’s gardens do the same thing, and I’d love to be able spend some time lost in his landscapes…

Piet Oudolf’s website.

landscape design

color resources

April 5, 2008 James Leave a comment

Here’s the side view of my studio. The colors are pretty atrocious and I wanted to try out some different options.

Colourlovers lets you play with colors in lots of ways, and I started there. I used their tool to extract some of the general colors of the studio from the picture above. I can’t change the brick easily, so the orange-red color is pretty much a given. I want to use foreground plantings that are mainly green, though I’ve already planted a Loropetalum chinense var. rubrum ‘Plum Delight’ which has vivid purple foliage much of the year. I made a “before” swatch combination incorporating the green and purple foliage with an orange that generally represents the brick. I also used the gray and army green colors from the studio for the first swatch. Those are the colors I want to play with modifying.

My current main idea is to do something a little more daring with the basic color, probably some in the intense blue to blue-violet range. I think the plant colors would look pretty amazing against it. About the time I redo the siding on the studio the patio will also get redone, most likely with charcoal gray/black uprights to mirror some charcoal supports I have going on in the front of the house. I’ll stare at the new swatch below to see if it really would be as cool as I think it might be. And if I don’t like that one, maybe something like the second alternate, something using rusted steel to cover the eaves and a dark, warm gray on the building… And if I don’t like those options, changing swatch colors is lots more workable than repainting everything.

While you’re at the site you can also take your swatches and turn them into plaids or stripes or a whole bunch of other patterns. A few months back I was spending waaaaay too much time playing at Colourlovers!

A similar resource, one that’s devoted just to swatches, is Adobe’s Kuler. It’s not as social a place as Colourlovers, but the interface is beautifully designed. Also, you’ll probably find more professional palette options that people have contributed. Enjoy!

gardening, landscape design, photography

garden photography: beth dow

April 2, 2008 James 1 Comment

I was looking at some of the work of the six finalists who’ve been invited to submit book proposals as part of the Critical Mass photography competition. One of them, Beth Dow, has a beautiful body of work based on formal gardens, many of them landmarks like Sissinghurst or the grounds of Blenheim Palace.

Beth Dow: Standard, Little Moreton Hall, platinum palladium print, 8.5×16″ image, image copyright Beth Dow [ source ]

The images acknowledge the geometries of the gardens, and there’s no doubt that these are human-organized landscapes. My favorite images play with that geometry, not just presenting it, but using the four edges of the photograph to both contain and animate the forms before the lens.

I’d submitted some work to the competition that I did in the late 90s while I was Artist-in-Residence at Yosemite National Park. Although I wasn’t one of the book finalists I was selected as one of the “Top 50,” with the portfolio to be feature online. I’ll link to it once it’s up.

gardening, landscape design

in defense of bees

March 28, 2008 James 1 Comment

A lot of nurseries around here tout plants as being hummingbird- or butterfly-friendly. Those little critters are awfully decorative and fun to have around, but the major work of pollination belongs to the bees. For instance the California almond crop supplies something like 80% of the world’s almond exports, and the crop wouldn’t be possible without all the hives that are trucked into the Central Valley about this time of year. According to the Los Angeles Times, farmers now are spending more on renting hives than they are on watering their trees.

A recent article, The Headbonker’s Ball, in Orion Magazine has a great article on the Urban Bee Project, a project headed by UC Berkeley prof Gordon Frankie that’s designed to educate folks about the value of having bee-friendly gardens. Their Urban Bee Gardens site crawls with all sorts of information on the value of bees and what you can do to welcome them into your garden. Some of it’s under construction still, but there’s already lots of useful information there.

One of the cores of the site is a list of plants that are friendly to bees, and the list is broken into spring plants and summer plants so that you can plan a progression of food sources for the little guys. The list is a little Berkeley-centric, though many of the plants on the list would grow plenty of other places. At first you might worry that you’d have to plant oddball ugly plants just to the do the right thing, but incorporating bee-friendly plants requires no such thing. A lot of the selections are really common garden plants, and you probably have a number of them in your garden already: lavenders, penstemons, salvias, cosmos, sunflowers, and the like.

With all the plants out there the list couldn’t possibly list every bee-friendly plant out there.Various thymes, for instance, have a reputation for being major bee party pads. The Berkeley project came to its conclusions by sending people out into gardens and having them count how many bees visited a plant in a certain time period. (Not a bad way to conduct research, eh?) You could do the same. If there’s something not on the list but you notice that the bees like it, why not plant a little more of it? Give the hummingbirds and butterflies some company.

landscape design, my garden

steel cube planters, part 1

March 24, 2008 James 5 Comments

This is the result of one of my weekend projects:

It’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:

If 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.

[ Lost in the Landscape ]