Order in the Courtyard

What Would Eve Do, Part Three

No matter how many books you read of the GARDEN DESIGN MADE SIMPLE! variety, no matter how many measurements you take or design principles you follow, there is nothing and I mean nothing easy about designing a space, let alone one that will be constantly changing every month of the year.

Perhaps I should clarify: there is nothing easy about designing an outdoor space alone. If How-To books work for you (they make me rigid and stupid), so much the better, you don't need to rope a lot of people into your process. But ask what Eve would do, and she'd answer, Brainstorm.

Legions escorted me along the design road: thank you designer friends Michael Schultz, John Forsgren and shvester Susan Levine). Above, the folks that helped me nail it: meet Nani Waddoups (left) and Roy Oudinot. Roy is a landscape contractor who gave me quotes and graciously handed me over to another contractor who specialized in what I finally chose. Nani (she picked my house colors two years ago) is an all-around, class-act designer with great taste who I happily paid by the hour. In the middle of the picture is a trompe l'oeil by an artist named Simple. This piece has lived everywhere I have for the last 14 years.

photo credit: Ketzel Levine, NPR

 

You don't have to brainstorm with experts. All it takes is a few imaginative and generous friends. But if what you want seems beyond the scope of casual converstaion, scout around for a local garden that wows you and contact either its contractor or designer.

I don't suggest you lure a whole lot of professionals over to your house and pick their brains without paying them for their time; what goes around comes around and you'll end up on the Avoid This Client list (word travels fast in the trade).

But I do think it's perfectly kosher to tell a designer you're soliciting different ideas and would like to buy an hour's consultation. (You could even ask if your payment might be deducted when you finally commit to that designer.)

After 90 minutes with Nani and Roy (pictured above), a lot of great ideas were proposed and rejected. Among the many things I have come away with are three questions worth answering when you take on a re-design:

1. What's your budget? Mine was $5K. And it was unrealistic.

2. What's driving your design? Could be the budget, could be a fantasy. Mine was the fountain and the narrow lot; it said to me, courtyard. You may need a playground for both kids and adults ... a formal vegetable garden instead of lawn ... a way to make a small space look larger, or a large space feel more intimate.

3. What do you want/don't want? I wanted tidy, easy to walk on, and dog-resistant. I didn't want to weed between pavers, I didn't want anything tracked into the house, and I wanted more hardscape than plants (my plant playground is the front yard). Also, I wanted the color of the hardscape to wed the house and fountain. Not much, right? But it helped me focus. Keep in mind that knowing what you don't want is an excellent place to begin.

And so begins Eve -- with grids, rebar and the ever-present beagle, curled into a construction frame that will soon be home to a tree. Can you see where I'm going here? At least what my hardscape choice turned out to be?

photo credit: Ketzel Levine, NPR

 

After meeting with Nani and Roy and getting Roy's flagstone estimate ($8K-9K, too pricey and conservative for me), I began leafing through courtyard/small garden books and exploring the online work of well-known landscape designers. Let me say loud and clear I owe a great deal to a woman whose work I've never actually seen but have heard about, Bay Area designer Shirley Alexandra.

A few weeks later, I had finally envisioned my courtyard. The question now, did I have the guts to trust what I saw?

In our next installment of What Would Eve Do: tackling the "C" word. Commitment.

12:54 PM ET | 06-15-2008 | permalink | comments (4) | e-mail post

The Fountain: Hear Me Roar

What Would Eve Do, Part II

Creating ambient sound is a terrific solution to environmental noise. In my case, the noise was so loud -- 40 young human beings embibing at picnic tables on the other side of my fence -- I didn't know what to do. So I called the City of Portland's Noise Noise Control Dept and got the name of its Go-To guy Paul Van Orden, then arranged for him to vist my garden one balmy, noisy night. The results were as follows:

Idea #1: Build a wall. in this case, one that would have to be at least half the width of the lot, @25'. That seemed like a lot of money for a very un-aesthetic result.

Idea #2: Outdoor speakers. To be effective, my own music would have to be uncomfortably loud. Of course I could point the speakers towards the revelers, but that seemed, shall we say, hostile. (Note: that was not Paul's idea, it belonged to my trouble-making friend Mar who didn't understand why I wouldn't just aim my hose at the fence and play Douse the Diners).

#3: Water features. How many, how big, what kind? Paul Van Orden's opinion was that in order for my ambient sound to have an impact, I'd need to make the loudest noise possible, meaning a BIG fountain with HIGH downspouts falling into a DEEP basin. Never mind that the entire space in question is barely 360 sq ft. The only kind of fountain that would make a difference would have to dominate -- audibly and visibly.

Meet co-collaborators Kelly Adams and David Leach of Shadow Land, who built a lovely concrete/stucco wall for friends of mine and seemed to have a nice, soft touch. I'd never seen any of their fountains, but I liked the guys immediately (David turned out to be passionate about plants) and we shared a definite aesthetic: simple and bold.

photo credit: Ketzel Levine, NPR

 

I'll tell you right up front that the cost of a fountain seemed a pittance compared with the trauma and expense of moving, the only other solution I could think of to mitigate living cheek by jowel with an outdoor cafe. I committed $5K to the project, Shadow Land accepted the challenge, and we let the budget and the desired effect (big and noisy) drive the fountain design.

The easiest decision was that the fountain be made of cinder block. We then decided that the scuppers (a.k.a., downspouts) would be recessed, an easy enough thing to do by arranging the blocks. We took our fountain size measurements off of the house, from the window I'd be looking at the fountain from. That immediately dictated a height of 8' and a width of 11'. Let me tell you, that was one scary commitment.

photo credit: Ketzel Levine, NPR

 

Somewhere along the line, I decided I wanted the scuppers to be both at different heights and separated from one another by setting them in long rectangles of ceramic glass tiles. I found the brand and colors I wanted locally, then had to special order two of the colors online. It wasn't cheap but the payoff has been enormous, particularly at night when the lights on the fountain's bottom shine up through concentric cirles of raindrops and cast their shadows on the sparkling tiles.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. We're still in the building process. The guys showed me some scupper choices, I chose very basic ones in a powdered rust finish, and after looking at concrete color samples, we all decided that the fountain should be dark charcoal (knowing it would ultimately fade. That's the deal with sun-bleached concrete).

As for the basin, well, I knew that water had to fall a long way and into a deep receptacle. So that's what I've got: at 9.5' long and 2' deep, it's a watery tomb. And oh baby, does she sound.

Turns out my documentation of the process last year is missing a number of perspectives, but you can get a closer look at the scuppers and tiles if not the basin. At the far end is a banana; if you don't wrap their trunks here in Z8, they die back to the ground each year. But with enough heat, they're back up to 10' by end of August.

photo credit: Ketzel Levine, NPR

 

As this mother of all blog items comes down the home stretch, I have just a few things left for you to consider if you want to try this at home.

In order to be able to turn the fountain on and off from the house -- a wonderful convenience, particularly with so much NW rain -- I had to cough up another $1K for the electrical work. What a shocker, not to mention an unbudgeted expense. Secondly, the surrounding garden was trashed in the process, and no one I mean no one was to blame. Creating a fountain like this turns the garden into a construction site. So in answer to the burning question, What Would Eve Do? She'd do the soundblaster first.

And so we have come to the present, and the reason why this garden now needs reviving. Behind all the greenery at the far end is the fence, on the other side of which is dining. You can also see the depth of my watery tomb.

photo credit: Ketzel Levine, NPR

 

Was it worth it? Did it do the trick? The answer: YES! I am nuts about my fountain, it makes a massive yet evocative sound, and this year I'll put in aquatic plants to fill up its considerable bulk. It doesn't drown out the really high-pitched laughter nor the occasional screeching and screaming, but it fills in all the middle sound and erases at least 85% of the hubbub.

Tomorrow's installment of What Would Eve Do: taking an awkward narrow space dominated by a giant fountain and an orange house and figuring out how to pull it together into a garden.

1:26 PM ET | 06-11-2008 | permalink | comments (11) | e-mail post

What Would Eve Do: Reviving A Neglected Garden

Tidy. How's that for a design principle? Not what you'd call imaginative or inspired. But after seven years of delicious chaos in my cramscaped (vs landscaped) front garden -- a 25'x50' space where spikey, fragrant, towering and flowering species continue to duke it out -- all I wanted from the side yard was an absence, not a presence. I wanted as few plants in the ground as possible and a hardscape the dogs could neither upset nor track into the house.

A brief June moment in a corner of my front garden, a bonafide sanctuary yards away from a boisterous, energetic and commercially "complicated" street (drugs, prostitution and a wholesome family-style brew pub). I know it's all out there on the other side of the fence, but in here, the only reality is color, texture and movement. Plus occasional energetic bouts of whacking it all back.

photo credit: Ketzel Levine, NPR

 

Every piece of property has its challenges, whether it's the soil, the neighbor's barking beagle or water-sucking, shallow-rooted trees. Mine is urban density, which has only gotten more intense since I moved in. A few years ago, my peace of mind went right out the window when a cafe opened round the block, its big draw a lot of outdoor seating which instantly put drinking, smoking strangers inches away from my back door.

Come 5pm weekdays and all day Sat & Sun, as many as 40 people with endlessly cloying good cheer would drive me to distraction. (In truth, to tears). I found myself becoming a disgruntled old biddy who scowled, unobserved on the other side of a 10' fence, wishing misery on their good time. Gardening out there was limited to weekend mornings before noon; once the Young People arrived, the noise was such I could no longer keep the windows open in the house.

By last spring, I had to do something: move, or throw money at a solution. I decided to stay put and create thundering, ambient sound.

Proving, yet again, that necessity really is the mother of invention, behold a whole lotta "taking back my space" nearly deafening noise.

photo credit: Ketzel Levine, NPR

 

Tomorrow's installment of What Would Eve Do: creating a 12' wide, 7' tall fountain without even a sketch of a plan...AND...the leftover ruined yard.

9:48 PM ET | 06-10-2008 | permalink | comments (1) | e-mail post

A Plant Nerd Worthy of the Name

Ever so slowly here at TP, strangers are becoming regulars, and regulars are becoming friends. So as I continue dodging your most-asked question, What Would Eve Do? (she'd chew her nails to the bone worrying about how much angst to reveal; I promise an update, soon...) I thought I'd introduce you to one of the many sensational photographers in the TP Flickr pool, an anything but garden variety acolyte of the Goddess Flora.

His name is Rob Illingworth, he says the "real"gardener in the family is his wife Sharon (I guess that makes him, what, chopped liver?), and the couple lives 7 miles north of the MN border in Oh! Canada. Judging by their Flickr page, her passion is woodland and rock garden plants and his is everything she grows.

If it takes a family to create a portrait like the one below -- the plant is Hepatica -- consider this union blessed.

Hepatica clearly thrives in Ontario, at least in the Illingsworth garden, where the couple grow -- and he photographs -- a variety of colors and forms, mostly from seed. The Mr.'s photographs blew me away. In answer to my sheepish question, Um, you didn't color-correct this, did you Rob?, he answered quite earnestly, "I went out and picked two flowers from the plants. I have always intended to do this just to satisfy myself as to colour accuracy. I am pleased to say that the flower colours are very close to what I see on my monitor, which is colour balanced."

photo credit: Rob Illingworth

 

A self-described "plant nerd with a bias to growing rather than plant classification" (aha! he does garden!), this serious amateur recently visited one of the country's more imaginative and certainly better-endowed public gardens, Chanticleer in Wayne, PA. Its website does not do it justice, but Rob's photographs do.

Surprisingly, it wasn't his destination. He had, shall we say, less romantic plans. Rob was visiting the mid-Atlantic region because of a trillum symposium he'd signed up for at a nearby native plant mecca, Mt Cuba. Now that is one serious plantfest of a place. "I went to the symposium not as an expert, but as a keen grower," Rob wrote, "feeling that we could grow many more trilliums here despite our climate."

I can only imagine the notes he took; something tells me this is the guy who'd you'd most want to cheat off during a final. Anyway, among the many pix he's posted from Chanticleer, this one is Rob's favorite:

"Here's a low circular mound of fine gravel very carefully raked into an artful pattern," writes Rob. "The fallen flower petals from the adjacent trees had collected in the ridges making for me a perfect garden memory. While I was there the light was right and I was very happy even though I only had three hours for my visit. Not nearly enough time to see all the garden, but leaving me reason to return".

photo credit: Rob Illingworth

 

So many Illingworth pix, so little time. Be sure to take your own tour through his photos.

And who, might I ask, are you?

2:46 PM ET | 05-22-2008 | permalink | comments (3) | e-mail post

Behold, Sumptuous Snapshots

A recent walk through the Talking Plants photo garden reveals that your eyes are keen and your imaginations fired. How I treasure you roving troubadours of spring.

Guillermo Meraz, aka Guissimo, went for a recent hike near the Merced River in Mariposa County, CA., home to the Sierra National Forest. So you've got to be wondering about those blue wildflowers, huh? Guillermo has the answer:Nemophila menziesii var. menziesii, or baby blue-eyes.

photo credit: Guillermo Meraz

 

Another TP regular didn't have to go very far to find stunning spring ephemerals. The prolific and talented Aleth11 just had to wander into the woods behind her house to behold the sparkle of the truly wondrous Sanguinaria canadensis (that link will take you to the bloodroot profile from my book).

I have this note from our photographer: "These flowers ooze an orange/red color when a leaf or stem is "damaged" so I imagine that's where they got the name. Sounds like a horrible name for such a pretty flower, no? The sap is apparently toxic and has been used in salves and such on warts and skin cancer.

photo credit: Aleth11

 

Finally, though there's not a whole lot new to be said about tulips (after moving to the NW, I'm pretty much ready to give them up, except for the unimproved smallest species), TP friend Troye captured a few lovely shots that pretty much tell the story of why they'll always be a market for tulips.

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Troye's shown us his, time for you to show us yours. The Talking Plants Flickr Group has more than 300 members who've posted almost a year's worth of gorgeous, memorable and classy pix. To join, all you need is a camera and a love of the natural world. We want you!

photo credit: troye

 

2:17 PM ET | 04-25-2008 | permalink | comments (4) | e-mail post

Tips from an Amazon Gardener

As heard on radio, as seen in the Amazon, and now, on the TP blog, here are Dona Raimunda's chives protected against jealousy and evil by sentinel eggs.

photo credit: Ketzel Levine, NPR

Dona Raimunda is a rock star. A meteor shower. A force of nature. It's amazing to me how that much personality can be contained in such a diminutive body.

She is the mother of farmer Rosario Costa Cabral, the Amazon farmer featured in these pages a few months back. Rosario has made a name for herself growing crops never before tried in her region of the Amazon flood plain, where she's encouraged other farmers to branch out.

However...
Whereas Rosario relies on observation and experimentation, her mother channels ancestral know-how.

Dona Raimunda regularly wanders past her seedlings in the course of the day and blows a bit of her tobacco smoke from her pipe to keep away the crickets and discourage butterflies from depositing their eggs.

photo credit: Ketzel Levine, NPR

 

Dona Raimunda is who-knows-what-generation caboclo, the Brazilian word for the ethnically mixed people who live in the Amazon. In my Weekend Edition Sunda radio piece about Dona Raimunda, I listed six tongue-in-cheek gardening tips I'd observed watching this caboclo gardener at work. My hunch is they'll make a whole lot more sense if you care to join me in her Amazon garden but in any case, here they are:

#1 Mind how you talk to your plants
#2 Cucumbers and cabbage are sworn enemies and cannot be grown together
#3 Chili peppers are stubbornly reluctantly to let go of their fruit
#4 Plants are no co-dependent; they don't care if you garden in a bad mood
#5 Ugly chives save lives (a reference to putting anti-evil eggs in the vegetable garden)
#6 Smokers are welcome in the garden

She is a rare beauty, the dona, but this isn't a very typical pose. She's usually up to something: telling stories, making acai, and of course, talking to her plants.

photo credit: Ketzel Levine

 

3:31 PM ET | 03-22-2008 | permalink | comments (8) | e-mail post

Fetid Adder's Tongue, Yum!

It is with some guilt that I will continue to celebrate spring-flowering shrubs and bulbs, knowing that your ground may be not even be close to thawing. But during my stay in DC, I've been corresponding with colleagues in Portland, and was sent a pix of this intriguing native plant by Ed Guerrant, Conservation Director for the Berry Botanic Garden.

Meet Scoliopus bigelovii, an early-flowering member of the lily family that makes its home in northern California, where -- I'm happy to report -- it's too widespread to be classified as rare, sensitive or threatened. Yippee! For that, we might thank native slugs, who are reported to play a role in seed dispersal by eating pod walls.

photo credit: Ed Guerrant, Berry Botanic Garden

 

Ed, a terrific native plantsman, was featured in a seed bank story for NPR's Climate Connections series. I asked him to pen a few words on this cool California native.

A plant with flowers like these would be noticeable any time of year, but to find the flowers of this reportedly fungus gnat pollinated plant, it is necessary to wander either into its native habitat in Northern California, or make our February homage to a little patch that has been growing at the Berry Botanic Garden for as long as I can remember here at the Garden (1989). It is sort of our Punxsutawney Phil, but without the predictive powers. Nevertheless, Scoliopus in flower it is a harbinger of the spring to come.

So what's popping your wild or cultivated woods? Got winter aconites, snowdrops, crocus, daffs? How about some bold, blueaceous Chionodoxa? I saw one shimmering blue note of this Glory-in-the-Snow at Dumbarton Oaks yesterday, where the chionodoxa are naturalized in the lawn. If you're in or around DC, check back in two weeks for peak bloom.

10:25 AM ET | 02-24-2008 | permalink | comments (1) | e-mail post

Gloom Or Bloom?

You may think you know what this is, but I wouldn't jump to any easy conclusions. Wanna guess again?

photo credit: Coburn Dukehart, NPR

Rumor has it the bulbs are poppin' in Portland, OR. after a glorious weekend. And there are thousands of little blossoms like the one on the left now blooming at Dumbarton Oaks. So much for the Z7 and Z8 edges of the country what's up in your front yard?

Seedheads of sweet autumn clematis are about it these days for the floral fantasies of some TP members. If you are in need of chlorophyllic support, join the Talking Plants Flickr Group and let us ooow and aaah over your small triumphs.

photo credit: Blathanna

 

10:38 AM ET | 02-19-2008 | permalink | comments (7) | e-mail post

It's a Jungle Out There

I'm just back from the Amazon and I'll never be the same.

True!

I had the best of intentions of sending dispatches while there, but man was that presumptuous. The phone connection was dodgy enough, and after one storm, we lost electricity for a blissful night and day.

It may look like a toy in a bathtub full of houseplants, but I assure you, this is the true scale of foliage and fact in the Brazilian Amazon.

photo credit: Ketzel Levine, NPR

 

So I've got pictures for the WOW factor and a story I can't wait to tell. It's about an indomitable farmer who experiments with crops people others say can't grow there: fruit trees and palms that must survive under water twice a day. Words can't describe her accomplishments; that's why there's radio! The piece will air on Morning Edition this month.

6:02 PM ET | 01-17-2008 | permalink | comments (3) | e-mail post

The World According to Elspeth Bobbs

Introducing one of the country's most enchanting -- and disarming -- gardeners.

After a few hours in Elspeth Bobb's company, amidst so many accounts of the joys and bores in her garden ("Wretched catmint." You don't like it? "I'm not a cat!"), I keep coming back to something her husband once said to her who knows how many decades ago.

"If you weren't deaf, you'd be a menace!"

Indeed, this is a woman who likes to take things on and stir them up. And yes, she's pretty darn deaf.

Even if you listened to NPR's Morning Edition story today featuring Mrs. Bobbs, you'd know nothing of her hearing loss. Somehow, it just didn't seem relevant, given her penchant for turning adversity to advantage. But the fact is, she hasn't heard a human sentence for the last 49 years.

"I can hear birds now, and dogs barking, and people talking," she says, one year after having a cochlear implant, "but I can't hear what they say". Instead, she uses her high tech lip-reading skills for conversation, and draws from memory the colors and nuance of sound.

Not unlike the woman herself, there's more in this photo than first meets the eye. Elspeth Bobb's is only one of two faces shown here. Can you find the other, say, George Washington's?

photo credit: Ketzel Levine, NPR

 

One of Mrs. Bobbs' greatest gifts as a gardener is her perspective: Aim high and enjoy whatever happens. It's a set-up of the cleverest kind; she simply cannot fail.

"Exactly, exactly!" she says. "I don't feel disappointed. For instance, this was all lawn," she says, pointing out a huge area now dominated by art installations, islands of plants and mulch. "After the drought in the 70's, the lawn was an absolute disaster. So we just covered it with plastic and put bark on top. Then I said, well we can't have this, so I thought up something that didn't need water and put in a labyrinth. I like to have a project."

Once the labyrinth was in -- an inviting construction made of wood and lined with fine gravel -- Mrs. Bobbs was persuaded to dabble in the altogether unfamiliar. She now has a vibrant and colorful undulating sculpture created by Santa Fe artist Hillary Riggs, in the shape of a logarithmic spiral.

"It's all done by mathematical principles," says Mrs. Bobbs. "It's all about patterns. I've had a lovely time with it ".

"To be perfectly candid, I simply loathe geometry," says the gardener, "but it is very fascinating." This installation, as well as a labyrinth, have taken the place of lawn.

photo credit: Eloise Colocho

 

A quick word about Elspeth Bobb's water use: All her planting beds are under drip irrigation, and she draws from her own well. Several xeric experiments are underway at the garden; working with her gardener and her daughter, she's currently evaluating plants that need no water. Hands down winner to date? Sunflowers.

One last anecdote from my time with Elspeth Bobbs...

While I was taking her picture, she wondered if she should put on her favorite button. Something told me she didn't mean a nice old lady decorative broach. Before I left, she brought it out, a small round campaign-like button. It featured a large scissor cutting through the slogan, "If You Cut Off My Reproductive Choice, Can I Cut Off Yours?"

"I'm sorry to say," this 87-year old spitfire says anyway, "I'd prefer less people, and more gardens".

While you're not likely to spot them coast to coast, a few of these bumper stickers are currently riding around the country. Not the most likely cult figure, our Mrs. Bobbs, the politically active xeric gardener.

photo credit: Ketzel Levine, NPR

 

Check out the slideshow from Mrs. Bobb's garden, La Querencia, courtesy of Scott Varner at the Xeriscape Council of New Mexico.

3:00 AM ET | 09- 3-2007 | permalink | comments (8) | e-mail post

A Jewel in Dublin's Crown

If you're headed to Ireland anytime soon (weather be damned!), might as well indulge yourself in some seriously luscious flora. In which case, do I know a place for you: the Dublin haunt of one of the world's most celebrated gardeners, Helen Dillon.

If you time your visit right, you may get a chance to sample some of the irrepressible Dillon charm and wit.

photo credit: Ketzel Levine, NPR

 

The Dillon Garden is just a bus ride from downtown Dublin, one brief block and a world away from the teeming masses on Sandford Road. The summer I was there (two, three four years ago? who can remember?), one of my favorite plant combinations was this percussive arrangement of masculine plants (yes, I jest).

Euphorbia, allium and two forms of eryngium at peak perfection in Helen Dillon's front garden.

photo credit: Ketzel Levine, NPR

 

So how do you get in? Simple! All you gotta do is pay. The Dillon Garden is open Mon-Sat, 2-6pm during the summer, with more limited hours on Sunday. No guarantees you'll see what I did, she's too restless a gardener to just leave things alone, but I would imagine no matter how soggy the weather, you'll find yourself awash in color.

The ultimate use of a see-through Stipa gigantea dripping over a perennial jungle

photo credit: Ketzel Levine, NPR

 

And if it makes you feel any more comfortable about going, by all means tell Helen I sent you.

4:52 PM ET | 07-30-2007 | permalink | comments (6) | e-mail post