Tag Archives: garden tours

garden signs of the times

Part of this weekend’s tasks was to help install signage at a couple of the gardens that will be on the Garden Native garden tour this weekend. How many times have you gone to a garden and seen the perfect plant, but you no have idea what it is and there’s nobody around to ask? That’s exactly the scenario the organizers are trying to avoid.

One of the tour signs, with a QR code at the top that leads you to a page with information about the plant
One of the tour signs, with a QR code at the top that leads you to a page with information about the plant

The signs have the name of the plant, but they also have this little handy QR code at the top. When you read the QR code with a smart phone you’re transported to a PDF with more information–and usually, photos–of the plant, with notes on things like the plant’s eventual size, its water needs and often with notes on how to use it in the garden. These PDF files are downloaded to the user’s device, so they can have a record of what they’ve viewed. Unless your cell phone reception is really poor or you have a limited data plan–or have no smart phone at all–this arrangement works really well.

A sign for a buckwheat, and a signed San Diego sunflower
A sign for a buckwheat, and a signed San Diego sunflower

Who wouldn’t want to know the name of the perky yellow San Diego sunflower in the distance?

Out to pasture...
Out to pasture…

Of course not everything requires a sign. If you have an old lawnmower, but have native plants instead of a lawn, what do you do? How about making some garden art out of the old lawnmower? Brilliant.

It’s interesting to see how many uses these QR codes are being put to. They’re used all over for advertizing. And you’re starting to see them more frequently on interpretive signage, like here. I wasn’t responsible for making these signs, but even I haven’t been immune to using QR codes. In my case they’ve appeared in some artwork of the last couple of years.

Here’s a short video of a temporary installation I had up at the San Diego International Airport from May to December of last year. It’s simply titled Twenty-Two Flags. Each of the 22 flags has 33 QR codes, each with fragments of text from the Bardo Thodol, the Tibetan Book of the Dead, a book I’ve described elsewhere as a Fodor’s Guide to reincarnation and the afterlife.

Twenty-Two Flags (Bardo Thodol), 2014 from James SOE NYUN on Vimeo.

Add up all 22 flags and 660 QR codes and you have the entirety of the two books that make up this first-millennium text. Unlike the garden signs, the codes in my piece link directly to the text and don’t rely on using the web to connect to more content. Each QR code can be asked to store over 1200 different characters. That’s a lot of text!

The piece was part of a show looking at the art/science/tech interface. Something appealed to me about encoding a fairly ancient text that’s endured through the years using a very contemporary and most likely to be short-lived technology. In the end you can call me a bit of a Luddite. I love tech, but I don’t really entirely trust it. Give me a handwritten note, a letterpress book–or a plant. Those things I can trust.

getting close to the 2015 garden tour

Native Plants Live Here Sign_WEB

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
Winter blooms on the Howard McMinn manzanita

The sheltered woodsy plants beneath a dark-trunked 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
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!
Lupines at their peak in Old Town
Lupines at their peak in Old Town
Fuchsia-flowered gooseberry, in crazy bloom at the Old Town landscape
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
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!

photos for a garden tour

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:
Caprio_Front_Signature_SMALL

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.

Walsh2_SMALL WEBAlso, 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. Caprio-Hummingbird_SMALL WEBA 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!

Pullenza-Bee in Aster_SMALL WEB

native garden tour highlights

When I decided I had some time this last weekend I volunteered at the last minute to be a docent at one of the gardens on the recent San Diego Go Wild garden tour. I was assigned to a garden where there had been a cancellation and I was glad to help out. But I did worry: What if the garden wasn’t particularly exciting? Well, I worried for nothing. It was a really nice home garden with interesting plants used in interesting ways.

Unfortunately, being tethered to one garden on the first day, I missed out on all the other gardens in the central and southern part of the county. But the following day I got a chance to check out Day Two of the tour as it moved to North County. Here are some photos from the weekend. Enjoy!

First Impressions
Some of these are the first things you see at some of these properties. Others are little surprises to discover inside the garden.


Seating
Some places to rest, places to enjoy the garden…



Native Plants Mixed With Other Species
None of the gardens were totally California native, though many were in the 75-95% range. People mixed natives with their favorite ornamentals, veggies, fruit trees or–in one case–with a full-on residential vineyard with Cabernet and Sangiovese grapes.



Homeowners Having Fun
All of these were at one stop, where the homeowner really got wild with some of the garden artifacts…

A dead and dried Hesperoyucca whipplei that's been turned upside down and spraypainted to look like a giant flower. (There's a blooming live one in the background.)
A wall of quarried stone and a piece of a broken headstone (the dark piece on the ground). If you stand on your head you can make out the word "beloved."
Pretty cool rock collection. Check out the one on the right!
In the adjacent succulent garden (mostly non-natives) the mower gets a shed of its own.
Mermaid with a cool hat--or is it a rare cannibalistic baritone horn?


Plants
Some people were there for the landscaping. But I tried to stay focused on the plants. It’s hard, though. How do you compete with naked mermaids?

Arctostaphylos Baby Bear: This manzanita had been planted seven years ago but was already quite a bit taller than I am. I was impressed.
Calystegia macrostegia: Island morning glory
Fallugia paradoxa: Apache plume
Salvia Desperado: a hybrid of S. apiana and S. leucophylla, a glorious mound of big lavender-pink flowers


Random Vignettes
Some random sights I liked.

Alternating bands of blooming ceanothus and light-green-leaved manzanita
Here's a detail for all of you who like themed gardens, this at the house with the vineyard...
Grasses and a rush aside a long streambed with active water
Not-native poultry

Fremontodendron, ceanothus, bear grass, against a fence made out of dried ocotillo stems