June is a lovely time to get out in to the garden. The freezing summer weather is just around the corner though.
My Backyard in June 2020
Lami Safari Fountain Pens
I’m really enjoying sketching with my Lamy Safari pens. I’m most worried about upkeep for them, though. They need to be cleaned regularly and I am not great at that kind of thing. Right now I amusing Noodler’s Ink Black with the special refillable cartridges. Why do they come with non-water resistant blue ink? No one wants that!
Texture and Pattern in the Landscape
It's a cold and damp here in Oakland. We went for brunch and then took a walk over by Lake Merritt, where we played on the Mid-Century Monster and explored the Mediterranean Garden.
The Mid-Century Monster, recently renovated and repainted green, everyone loves playing on this sculpture and it's so nice to see if back up and accessible. It was originally created for the 1952 California Spring Garden Show. I need to look up pictures of that to see how it was displayed.
I'm such a fan of the Lake Merritt Gardens and have been bringing Jack here since riiiiight before he was born. Here is my TMI story... A month before Jack's due date, and just two days after starting my maternity leave, my water broke unexpectedly. I was freaking out, and the doctor advised me to wait before coming in for some reason! To calm me down, we took a walk at Lake Merritt. I vividly remember wearing a muumuu and Crocs—quite the sight! No amount of walking around in a nice garden and looking at Canada Geese was going to calm me down though.
We walked around through the Mediterranean Garden and I was just struck by all the texture and patterns during this walk-through. Once again reminding me of one of my favorite landscape books From Art to Landscape by W. Gary Smith. That book is one of the things that firs got me thinking about the use of these forms and pattern in actual landscape design. When I was in school for Computer Animation creating textures from photographs was one of my favorite parts of modeling
There are a number of patterns found in nature. Types include repetition, symmetry, drift, serpentine, spiral, branching, radial, and fractals.
Of course many of these are used in any kind of design work.
I like this example of serpentine and repetition. The tall upright palms are repeated all along the serpentine path, both drawing the key farther and farther into the landscape.
CA native plant seeds
The S & S Seeds site has a bunch of cool seed mixes AND the extra cool thing is you can request a custom mix based on your particular criteria.
Their database for searching plants is also very granular and so useful.
Picture of bright orange California Poppies,Eschscholzia californica, in full flower and the interesting seeds heads that are exposed when the petals fall off. In the background and out of focus is a Convolvulus cneorum, a low ground cover with silver-grey foliage and white flowers.
Atanasio Echeverria y Godoy
It’s easy to go down a rabbit hole while designing.
Which echevaria do I want to use with this project? Is there an appreciable difference between Echeveria imbricate and Echeveria elegans?
There are a couple of plant sites I tend to click on first from a Google search. Monrovia has a nice site, searchable, nice pictures, good info about plants, often more in-depth articles can be found on the site but the plants are not specifically geared towards our climate. San Marcos Growers also tends to have useful and interesting info, a larger variety of cultivars and extra articles about some species.
For instance, while looking up info on echeverias on San Marcos Growers I fell down a rabbit hole about Atanasio Echeverria y Godoy, a Mexican botanical artist in the early 1800’s, who the genus Echeveria was named after. I just love when I stumble on some serious plant geeks. I’m not really one myself as I just don’t retain enough info in my own brain. But I am geeky enough to want to read about and/or listen to the hardcore geeks.
So anyway, Atanasio Echeverria y Godoy. He was a Mexican botanical artist and naturalist in the 18th century. He joined an Spanish scientific expedition looking at new flora and fauna in the Spanish territories. A bunch of these illustrations were thought lost but then were found in a private collection in like the 1980's.
I just read way too much about Mexican and Spanish dudes gallivanting about California and Cuba etc. All that lead me to an article on Smithsonian.org: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/botanical-wonderland-resides-world-rare-and-unusual-books-180969096/
Which led me to google the name Jane Webb Loundon. OH MY! Gardener, Garden book author, science fiction author and illustrator?! My new historic crush! She wrote a science fiction novel when 17 in 1827 after her father died called The Mummy!: Or a Tale of the Twenty-Second Century (<---purchasable on Amazon! i just bought the kindle edition and I can not wait to read this) in which ladies wore trousers and hair ornaments of controlled flame. John Loudon, the editor of a gardening magazine read her book and wrote a good review in his magazine. When he sought out the author found out it was a female and they got married a year later?! So that's where my google search for Echeverias led me...
http://www.huntbotanical.org - pretty cool! tons of gorgeous and historic botanical illustrations!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Botanical_Expedition_to_New_Spain
https://library.si.edu/libraries/botany
Read more about Jane Loudon here: http://www.artinsociety.com/forgotten-women-artists-2-jane-loudon.html
More about Jane's garden books: http://www.vam.ac.uk/content/articles/m/mrs-loudon-victorian-garden/
Biogenic emissions
I went to a popup at Devil Mountain Wholesale Nursery the other day that was Stew Winchester talking about trees for our various climate conditions. Great info, good handouts, quality plant geeking.
I had Stew for some classes at Merritt and highly appreciate his geekery. You can go on what look like effing insane horticultural back packing trips with him. If you are interested you can find him here.
On his handout, Considerations for Positive Tree Performance, #3 is Biogenic Emissions. Which, I confess, I have never before considered. He mentioned that the Smokey Mountains are so named because of the hazy/smokiness you often see and that that hazy/smokiness is caused by trees. So, yeah, you bet your ass I googled that as soon as I got back to the office. Maybe it's a bit of common knowledge but I had no idea.
That's pretty cool. Biogenic emissions are emissions from natural sources, such as plants and trees. The California Air Resources Board (CARB) estimates emissions of biogenic volatile organic compounds (BVOCs) from vegetation for natural areas, crops, and urban vegetation. Usually I think about plant emssions as good. I have a book called How to Grow Fresh Air that goes in to detail about which plants to use indoors. I never put in to practice anything in this book because my cats eat all plants and knock things over so this house will forever be plantless.
Landscape Sketchbook - Containers
Turquoise pots are just lovely aren’t they? I bought this one at Pottery and Beyond in Emeryville.
What is a Dolly Tub?
One of the interesting things about going on garden tours in other areas is that you get to see the local trends. One thing I noticed at the APLD 2019 National conference in Seattle, WA this year was that almost every garden had Dolly Tub planters, from fancy French vintage ones, to reproductions, to plain old galvanized tubs. This is a very french garden look to my mind and I just love the PNW twist all the local designers gave their pot designs.
This one is probably vintage and fancy but couldn’t you just use a trash can? LOL. Here the pic and then my trashy interpretation.
A dolly Tub is just an old fashioned wash tub and the ‘dolly’ part was the agitator stick women used to swish the washing around. The tubs are barrel shaped to keep splashing to a minimum. Some of the old authentic ones you can see the round marks on the bottom from the dolly. Pretty cool! Here are a couple of other examples from the tour.
You can find these by just searching ‘Dolly Tub’ or ‘galvanized planter’.
Once again I am writing this way after the fact and I don't have all the names of the designers, etc. It's hard to keep pictures and notes straight while out and about on a tour. There are people everywhere, there is no where to sit, the tours are actually pretty short. like how much time do we really spend in each garden. Not to mention that fact that these tours are OVERWHELMING. It is so hard to process all this info in the moment. After the tour of a specific garden you are then hustled on to a bus and I ALREADY am a bit queasy on a large bus so I absolutely do not want to be looking at and typing on my phone on the bus.
What would be ideal organizational method be going forward?
maybe,
1. create directory in Apple Photos for each garden when you get the tour itinerary. 2. then create heading in maybe the NOTES app so that I can write up any specific quick notes I have. 3. have a small notebook to take notes in while walking around?
Moving a Palm Tree
The project we are working on now is big and fairly complicated. They have an amazing palm tree in the backyard that is in the way of the new pool pavilion we have designed for them. It's a residential lot with some weird angles and an existing pool and other built elements that are making siting the pavilion difficult. Hence, we are moving the palm. It is a huge and mature Brahea armata - Blue Palm, how much does this thing weigh?! A lot.
We called in the local 'Palm and Avocado Tree Guy', Gary Gragg, of Golden Gate Palms Nursery fame. You can visit the nursery in Richmond, California; find more info here: https://www.goldengatepalms.com/
We invited Gary out to take a look and to ask about the possibility of moving the palm. He comes out and says, "No problem, let's move this baby girl!" Or something like that, anyway.
Mature Blue Palm getting transplated
Gary is a bit of a character - outgoing, gregarious, knowledgeable, and very positive. A true and delightful plant geek. We actually had him out to our own house a few weeks ago to consult about avocados. My spouse is obsessed with having avocados. We bought three and they got planted all together in one large hole - 3 plants, one hole. Read what Gary has to say about avocados in the Bay Area here: https://www.goldengatepalms.com/avocados
Back to our Walnut Creek project... Gary and his crew arrive and maneuver their excavator/forklift into the backyard. The receiving hole has already been excavated and the palm is ready to go. After lifting the tree out of the hole, they decide to go get a smaller forklift. I love how insect-like this machine is!
We all leave for some lunch and freaking out. But Gary comes back with the new forklift and they get back to work. I go back to standing around watching and kind of squealing in alarm. At some point, the palm is off-balance and all the guys jumped on the back of the forklift to balance it out. I admire this "get it done" attitude that appears to be fairly reckless about personal safety, but at the same time I do NOT want to see someone get flung ass over teakettle onto the pavement.
They can't grab the tree from the base like I was expecting. Which makes sense, there is no way to keep it stable from that position. The thing is dang heavy. Instead, they grab it around the middle and slowly drive around the pool to its final resting place.
The pool toys gently drifting about is making me crack up for some reason. So serene!
HOPEFULLY, it will bounce back from this fairly traumatic move! Palms, as you can see from some of these photos, have a fibrous root ball rather than a tap root. They don’t mind being moved but it’s still a trauma and you never know! They need to keep the root ball HELLa moist for a while, while the palm acclimates.
Iresine herbstii 'Aueoreticulata'
Iresine herbstii 'Aueoreticulata'
This is also called Beefsteak Plant. This particular plant is hanging out outside my hair stylist building. Normally this isn’t a plant that we see planted outside in our Mediterranean climate. But it’s doing quite well in this protected area with reflected heat in a container.
I love how vibrant the variegated leaf and bright pink stems are.
Saxon Holt Photography Workshop
In October I took a Saxon Holt Landscape Photography class through the Sacramento APLD. We had some classroom time, during which I did take notes (which I now can’t find!?!), and we visited two gardens for some field experience.
It is important to have some photography basics if you are a landscape designer. When I visit a new site for a potential project I have to take photographs to help me understand the site, to look at sun patterns, views, and practical locations of things in the landscape. These photos don’t have to be attractive necessarily but they do have to be informative. Sometimes a project won’t happen for months after I have initially visited the site and taken those photos, so they have to be good enough to help me remember all the details.
Having photography skills is also crucial for getting photos of in-progress gardens and completed and mature garden projects. You want o showcase your gardens in the best way and we can’t always afford a professional photographer.
I also love to go on garden tours. It’s a great way to see and learn from mature gardens designed by the best in the industry. It’s also great to visit the same gardens multiple times to see how they change over time. Having great photos to look back on for inspiration is so useful.
There’s this thing about garden photography during tours though… it is hard to not just end up with a camera roll full of pictures of
other people’s butts
other people taking pictures of other people’s butts.
The struggle is real and no amount of workshopping is going to help you.
Fortunately, in this workshop, we formed small groups to visit the garden and all felt pretty comfortable saying, “um, could you move your butt for a sec?”
Photograph of a garden with Salvia leucantha in the foreground and light shinning through Pennisetum seed heads in the background. There is also a staked tree with a bell hanging from it.
The above photo has nice light but really would have been better without the tree stake and rubber. I suppose I could photoshop that out?
Some things to think about while photographing a garden:
Time of day - Harsh midday sun is no good for garden photography, early morning or early evening are best
Composition - The rule of thirds applies to photography as much as sketching
Focal Points - A big -’ole mess of green in a photograph is no good, find a focal point!
Long Shots and Vignettes - Photograph your subject from a variety of angles, distances, and lighting varieties.
Other Things - You can photograph the non-plant elements of a garden to help with the journy you are taking your viewers on.
Garden Tour - Keelya Meadows
I absolutely love the book Fearless Color Gardens by Keelya Meadows. I knew she was a local designer because she has a little exhibit at American Soil and Stone and I knew her home garden was open sometimes but I was not sure of the details. I joined the Garden Conservancy this year and lo! her garden was on the Open Days list! I made T. come with me.
I love all the quirky paving, concrete forms, and amazingly fun use of color. I wish my own garden was just like this. It was a bit over the top for T. though and I suspect he will object.
I’m desperately in love with that leopard-spotted Ligularia and must acquire one for myself immediately.
A Visit to Moose Metal in Concord
I stopped by Moose Metal to inquire about a metal project for a client. How cute is this metal moose logo?!
It was a wealth of fun metal detritus for me to snap pics of.
Many shapes and colors!! I really, really want to include colorful metal elements in my landscape designs. My pinnacle of silly landscape color you ask? I bright pink arbor. I want one myself so surely everyone else will, right?!
More cute moose themed items :)
Right Tree, Right Place
This is a handy tree guide made up for PGE by California Polytechnic State University for the Bay Area, Northern and Central California. If you're working on a site with power line issues this tool can be quite useful.This page has some handy guides for selecting the right tree for the right place based on some other guidelines like allergy and toxicity or fire safety.
You can order a Right Tree, Right Place poster from PGE here and download a cute poster for Palm trees appropriate for use near power lines.
The people who planted redwoods right next to the power lines at a recent client's property could have used this guide 15 years ago...
Getting settled in my new office
Settling in to my new office in Emeryville. The construction at my house is… very disruptive. I was working upstairs the other day and they LIFTED and DROPPED the entire house. LOL. I was def. startled. I’ll be excited to have a basement, for sure.
