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.
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.
(Photo: Tom Fox)
The recipe:
Take one piece of cracked pavement.
Apply a jackhammer to widen the cracks. (Photo: Kevin Conger)
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.
