Sphaeralcea ambigua, Dichondra argentea 'Silver Falls', and Carex testacea.
I got this Sphaeralcea from Mountain States Nursery a few years ago, I can’t remember what variety this nice peach color is. The yard was still being trampled by construction so this spot was where I put all my randomly acquired plants. So far I have NOT cut this plant back in the Fall so it tends to get leggy and awkward looking. It really should be cut back to about 6 in when it is done flowering.
Came across this nice metal garden art a few weeks ago. Desert Steel.
Sometimes you really need a focal point and plants are great for this, so are water features. But art can be a great focal point as well. These all have a really nice level of detail and look amazing nestled among plants.
I really want to use one of these in a project!!
There are no camps I’m willing to send my kid to this year. So I have reduced my work schedule to have one more week day to hangout with him. While it’s okay to visit public spaces I’ll be whisking him away to visit various sites around town. I feel my privilege in being able to do A. work from home most of the time and B. have the ability to adjust my schedule. I’m feeling this privilege even more as I think about the coming school year. Are we really willing to risk the health of our teachers and students just to get childcare?
So anyway, UPS in Oakland is having a covid-19 and crappy equipment related melt down and thusly the shoes I ordered kiddo are not arriving any time soon. He is wearing shoes 2 sizes too small so I MUST get him something. We head to Walnut Creek to get shoes and have our side trip to the Ruth Bancroft Garden. I haven’t been here in several years, in fact, since they have upgrade to have an event space and a nursery.
It looks amazing. The parking lot is even nice and have beautiful Palo Verde trees planted between spaces. At this time, there are strict guidelines in place to stop the spread of Covid-19. Kiddo and I wore masks and kept our hand sanitizer at the ready.
The garden was full of employees/volunteers working, there was a photoshoot/video interview happening, and there were a several other visitors. I was thrilled to find a plant in the nursery that I had been looking for since the beginning of the year, a Eucalyptus cinerea ‘Silver Dollar’. This plant was in a recent landscape design but I ended up having to find a sub and think I ended up using a Chamaecyparis pisifera 'Golden Mop'. This Eucalyptus is great for a cutting garden. You can keep the plants small and shrub formed if you prune it down in it’s second year encouraging multi-branching. Then prune at will to add to flower arrangements.
The Ruth Bancroft Garden has several pamphlets you can pick up at the kiosk. The especially useful ones are the Self Guided Tour and the What’s in Bloom. Oh! Looking at their website just now I see that they have a YouTube channel that gives you a tour of their blooming plants! no need to leave your living room and brave the sweltering heat anymore!
Kiddo and I headed out to Albany Bulb this week to do some exploring. Immediately upon exiting the car I realized I have forgotten my binoculars. Huge mistake! The wetlands were LOUSY with Avocets and other Brown Birds of Medium Size (BBoMS). I’m shocked newly everyday how much my eyesight has deteriorated in the last 5 years and resolve to put my car binocs back in the car where they belong.
Multi-branched tree with a painted trunk and SF and the bay in the background.
I have deep suspicion at this point that my Achilles tendons are royally unhappy but I soldier on and we head out to see what we can see. About halfway in to the Bulb we realize that we need to order Picante for pick up STAT. Thank god we can stop for a sec so I can rest my legs and place our order. In true teenage fashion Kiddo is also more excited about getting a burrito than exploring. :)
Chunk of old concrete nestled in dried grass covered in graffiti. Graffiti says ‘Anxiety’ and also has a picture of a CA poppy with text next to it that says California Poppy.
Why yes this concrete is expressing just how I feel: anxious and excited to look at plants.
At this point I am trying to convince Kiddo that an acceptable summer project would be to think of an art project to do at the Albany Bulb. He is not convinced and continues to be wholesome AF.
Have you been to Albany Bulb? You can read up on it here. The thing I like about the Bulb is all the twisted metal embedded in chunks of concrete. IDK, I just like that kind of thing. Well, I like it up until I start to think on the human race and how it creates massive amounts of construction debris and is ruining the planet.
Now I am trying to convince Kiddo that all this land is manmade and so is Emeryville. I don’t have enough facts at my disposal to be convincing enough, alas. I wander off into a fantasy in which Kiddo writes a high school report on the created and stolen lands of the Bay Area.
On our way back to the car we see some lovely BLM and All Brown Live Matter graffiti. It certainly bears repeating until everyone believes it for real.
Close-up of weathered wood with BLM spray painted in red.
June is a lovely time to get out in to the garden. The freezing summer weather is just around the corner though.
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!
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.
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.
My 2019 HOOT painting has dropped! I like the deckled edges of this one. I’m thinking maybe I should have added some nice blues to the background. I can still do that, I guess.
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/
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.
Turquoise pots are just lovely aren’t they? I bought this one at Pottery and Beyond in Emeryville.
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?
I have a decent amount of books centered on play. I tend to pick them up at thrift/used bookstores. This is just a small shelf of them.
