Assuming I passed my classes...I think I did...but today was my last day of required classes! I presented my final project in Planting Design and took my Arboriculture final exam. I am so happy!!! Completing this program was something I really wanted to accomplish, and I really did it. It was two years of full-time classes, and I completed every educational goal I originally wanted from this Landscape Horticulture program at Merritt College. It was exciting and sad today to essentially say goodbye to my Design classmates (and especially our teacher, Chris Grampp, who has been an incredible mentor and maybe the most encouraging and nurturing teacher I have ever had...wow)...and there's always a chance I could return for more...I'm so thrilled with how much I learned! I followed my heart's desire and I am 1000X better at drawing now than I was two years ago (and my first ever rough sketch of a garden design is on this site to prove it)...my mind overflows with Latin botanical names...I am good friends with hundreds of plants now...and I don't want it to stop! I must keep doing this...this is my life's work, I chose it for the long haul, and I still love it completely.
December 10, 2008
Today is Graduation Day!
September 04, 2008
Portola Valley Fieldtrip
Portola Valley is a dry, almost dusty landscape in early September: the perfect setting for taking it slow, enjoying the hot, bringing out your inner cowboy. I liked the Vitis californica, the manzanitas, the ferns and huckleberries in shade, the oaks, swarths of manzanitas, a forest of Quercus douglasii, Rhus ovata, Cornus sericea. Acer macrophylla. Acer circinatum. Eriogonum fasciculatum. Garrya elliptica 'James Roof', Quercus agrifolia. Rhamnus californica. Ribes sanguinium glutinosum.
Some of the repetition of the plants was boring and even jarring. I think the high amount of repetition we witnessed would have been more palatable if the patterns of repetition had been preserved or created. Grow huckleberries with salal and rhus ovata. Create a strand of buckeyes or oaks. The Seas of Manzanita were always a welcome sight.
Manzanitas, oaks, rhus ovata, were all doing well. Some ferns. Huckleberry. Salal. They all looked great. The Grape looked Great. I thought the Madrones suffered worst. The toyons were tangly. I haven’t yet seen a cherry that doesn’t improve with pruning, but you have to do it young.
Trees near the house = most important determiner of landscape character.
I think oaks were the predominant plant species. So, any transition from other tree (Redwood, Bay Laurel, even mid-sized trees near the house, like the Cornus sericea.) back to oak was usually too abrupt and based on geography. A consistent transition plant palette would have been welcome.
Topography and house sitting were, of course, hugely important to the shape and geography of the site. Lots of houses overhung…I found the transitions from ground level to entryway in most cases when going uphill seemed unseeable or even unwelcoming. The houses with elevated entryways and no slope from street to front door were exciting, but the feeling of precipice instability was only assuaged by thick plantings. The entire neighborhood, even with some folks around, seemed deserted. Ghost-town.
Adjectives for my reaction to the site: sylvan, dry, managed, fake “neighborhood”, gorgeous views, hilly.
Oftentimes, traditional housing developments have more consistent design. Traditional front yards are still mostly eclectic self-expressing dreams. I think the bar is raised with a Native landscape – you are actually trying to compete with Nature by emulating it…that’s a tough thing to strive for and shortcomings are less well-forgiven.
July 11, 2008
This is gratitude! Okagesamade!
My first big design project is complete! It's been 15 months since it began... These first three photos show what the front garden looked like when I first arrived on the scene.
My very first priorities were to replace the clashing orange plastic pot by the steps and remove all the Juncus growing everywhere. Trim back the Potato Vine. Kinda get the garden looking and feeling...a bit more managed.
There! Little by little over the last year, I have widdled away at this garden, taking the best of the plants and moving them to other parts of the garden. Throughout the process, I met with my client, I drew pictures, I presented photographs at Forum, I solicited feedback, I drew more pictures...and so on.
What I ultimately needed to do was move beyond my own biases and prejudices of the project. Thankfully, I learned in my Design classes that it's so much easier to create a design starting from a clean slate. I also learned that tall foundation plantings close to the house with short forms nearest the street create, essentially, a plane the eye can get caught up in; thus, the experience of the garden is complete in a first-glimpse microsecond. Even the original color palette needed to be tweaked again by the end of the design phase to accommodate fresh house paint - it gave me a turn to hear my client say after we selected preliminary focal plants that she'd be choosing a new house color based on our design ideas for the garden!
I brought in a pair of my favorite landscape contractors to help build this new garden, and to demolish the old. We re-did the irrigation, added uplights to the focal trees and copper path lights to illuminate the stairs, and arranged the stone to create a more elegant terraced look. We planted Cornus capitata 'Mountain Moon', Cercis canadensis 'Forest Pansy' both as focal trees, variegated Yellow Alstromeria for cut flowers and added interest, Loropetalum chinensis for solid form foundation (creating short walls), and finally Bacopa sutera and Geranium transversii 'Pink Spice' to cover the ground plane and to soften the lines of the stairs and driveway-adjacent retaining wall. Both these creepers should also trail nicely along some of the stonework as they grow. This was a valuable learning experience for me, and I couldn't have asked for better colleagues and mentors to help through this project.
Some of the plants are very small to start with - it's better to plant small ones for a number of reasons: 1. they're cheaper initially 2. they are cheaper to replace if they die right off (which happens to perhaps 5% of plants in these projects) 3. they are actually healthier in the long-run and more likely to survive in the short-term than larger plants. But sometimes it's the best choice to plant larger plants for the instant mature effect. It just depends on the project. But look! Only two weeks later and the Alstromeria is blooming and Bacopa has already tripled its size!
August 2009 at the very bottom.
September 15, 2007
May 12, 2007
May 01, 2007
Church Garden Design
Once a lawn on busy University Avenue in Berkeley, this garden featuring California Native plants and Mediterranean plants from the Bible is fitting for the renovation of the Lutheran Church of the Cross. The main features of this garden include: a sitting area of wooden benches in the shape of an octagon, with pruned wisteria embracing the overhead arbor, a baptismal font surrounded by roses, and a labyrinth celebrating, through sculpture, all the religions of the world.
April 29, 2007
April 22, 2007
Buttonscreen
I bought a box of buttons from my landlord yesterday for $2.
I'm not sure how many there are, but it's a lot. The sorting I've done so far yields amounts proportional to the following inspired image:
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