Tag Archives: concrete

gardening, landscape design, my garden

reclaimed from concrete

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Two posts ago I mentioned the Crack Garden, a winner in this year’s ASLA awards program that made me think in a new way about dealing with too much concrete. Ryan over at Dry Stone Garden has some different thoughts on the project that are worth a read.

porch-1

And as long as we’re talking about reclaiming space from what used to be paved over, let me show you a few shots of my front porch. (Notice how fanatically I staged the space for these photos, including coiling the leaky old hose off in the corner. That’s a level of creativity you never see in the garden design mags.)

The area was all concrete until two, three years ago. This was from the years when a lot of concrete was poured with strips of wood to break the expanse of concrete into neat rectangles. Nice idea, but over the years the wood rots. The concrete shifts.

porch-from-above

So I dug out all the decaying wood with a chisel. Next John and I spent a couple hours with a sledgehammer removing some of the big squares of concrete, and then I poured black-pigmented cement to grout between some of the slabs.

I probably didn’t do enough to prepare the ground. Why spend time doing that when there’s bare dirt where you can put plants? So in went some blue fescue in a grid pattern. (Fortunately a few of the plants died, breaking up what would be a cliche of little blue fescues all lined up neatly in their rows.) And then a plant of red shisu for contrast, two standing stones, three stepping stones, a potted euphorbia, gravel mulch and the coiled garden hose to complete the picture. (The shisu is an herb that dies back every year, but it reseeds like crazy, letting you decide where you want some dark red foliage this year.)

porch-with-hose

Okay, ASLA. I’m ready for my Honor Award.

gardening, landscape design

avoid, or embrace the inevitable?

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Today I want to talk about a couple things that seem inevitable: Garden plants will die; and, concrete hardscape will develop cracks.

Strategy 1: You could try avoidance, developing ways to get around those facts.

You may have heard of the recent garden at the Chelsea Garden Show designed by James May of Britain’s Top Gear automotive program. The plants (and insects) were all made of plastic modeling paste. It was totally artificial. A garden that will never experience death—but neither will it ever experience life. (And what would you call a “garden” like this? Landscape or hardscape?)


If you want to avoid cracks in concrete walkways or patio covers, you could avoid concrete altogether. For instance, you could employ alternate materials like decomposed granite or one of the attractive alternative paving systems highlighted over at Steve Snedeker’s Landscaping and Gardening Blog.

Or you could embrace what’s going to happen anyway.

chicago-lurie-snow

Some plants look attractive after they’ve passed on for good or just for the season. To the left are some plants at Piet Oudolf’s Chicago Lurie Garden as they appeared this past February. Picking structurally interesting plants like those can keep things looking good, even in the presence of things in the garden that may be dying. This is a big and rich topic that I’ve touched on occasionally in my posts, and I’m sure to return to in the in the future in more detail.

And how do you embrace cracked concrete? I was over at Pruned, where this brilliant winner from the 2009 American Society of Landscape Architects Awards was highlighted. The project by CMG Landscape Architecture of San Francisco played up the natural tendency of concrete to crack, as well as the tendency of plants to colonize those cracks.

Crack garden(Photo: Tom Fox)

The recipe:

Take one piece of cracked pavement.

Jackhammering

Apply a jackhammer to widen the cracks. (Photo: Kevin Conger)

Planted crack garden

Amend the soil, and then place plants of your choosing in the enlarged cracks. (Photo: Tom Fox)

Total project cost, with homeowner labor: $500. The final results are surprising, and so is the final cost, particularly when you consider it’s a project involving professional landscape architects.

gardening, landscape design, my garden

recycling concrete

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One of the easiest ways to reuse broken concrete is to stack up the pieces to make a low garden wall.

recycledconcretewalloverview

My house came with an expanse of dangerously uneven, cracked concrete that needed to be removed. One option would have been to haul it off to the landfill. But turning the scraps into this little wall for a raised vegetable garden ended up being a greener solution.

The hardest part was breaking up the concrete into manageable pieces. (We used a sledgehammer). And lifting the twenty to sixty pound chunks into place made for some hard work. But it was basically an “easy” job in that it wasn’t particularly technical and didn’t demand too many brain cells.

If your soil is especially unstable, the concrete could be set on top of a foundation. But for almost all soils, and for a low wall like this one–about twenty inches tall–don’t bother. Try to stagger the joints between pieces from row to row to make the wall more stable. Work to nest the pieces together as tightly as possible to minimize soil loss out the sides if you’ll be using the wall for a raised bed.

If you would like a softer look, you could also plant little succulents or compact rock-garden plants into the crevices. Creeping sedums, alyssum, low varieties of thyme or trailing strawberries would be good, easy choices for a wall that has a sunny exposure. You could also plant low-growing bulbs or annuals in front of the wall.

recycledconcretewalldetail

The result is definitely on the rustic end of the spectrum, more “cottage” than glam or glitzy. But you’ll feel better about not filling up the landfill. And in the end the project could be easier than loading the chunks into a truck to haul them away.