A Garden Gives Back showhouse project has taken on a life of its own. Originally, because it’s the way I think, I just thought it would be a good thing to donate the produce to those who most needed it. That way the garden would benefit not only its host charity, Morristown Memorial Hospital at the front end, but at the back end it would also benefit the community at large via the Interfaith Food Pantry.
I started talking it up locally as well as in the various places I post online. Like a spring tree bursting into bloom it exploded into something so much larger than what it started off to be. Now, also because it’s the way I think, that’s a great thing.
Morris County, NJ is one of the richest counties in the United States–always in the top 10 and yet there are 10,000 people who live here at food risk. I think that’s shameful.
This will be the first of a series of posts about the garden and those donating their time and products to make it a resounding success. The first order of business beyond the plan and some general meetings was to decide on the crops. Since the garden is temporary and will really only be in existence for 6-10 weeks of early spring, our choices were limited to cool weather vegetables with short times to maturity. Odd and esoteric veggies were excluded. Those selected not only had to do the work in a short time, but they had to have visual impact–this is after all a display garden. A few things will be started indoors this week and the rest sowed directly in early April in succession.
Here’s what we decided on:
Sugar Snap Peas
Ruby Red Swiss Chard
Green Curled Kale ‘Ripbor’
Lettuces: ‘Rouge D’Hiver’, ‘Red Sails’, ‘Jericho’ and a Mesculin mix
March is teasing me. I had hoped there would be some sure signs of spring beyond yellow tipped daffodil shoots pushing through the earth in the garden. Next week the Viburnum bodnantense ‘Dawn’ will be the show and then the work will start. For now, though, there are still shadows.
The Philadelphia Flower Show is a rite of spring. It is a unique blend of garden high and low, an elite event with mass appeal. Designers (both floral and landscape), schools, garden associations/clubs and individuals create gardens or vignettes or enter into many categories or plant classes ensuring that there’s something for everyone. It is always packed (making photographs difficult) and sometimes the lines waiting to see the large display gardens are long, long, long as they were on Friday when I went.
This year’s theme ‘Passport to the World’ gave garden creators a wide berth for interpretation. Some didn’t (yawn) go much past the back yard, a few were whimsical (yawn, again) interpretations of foreign places, but the really, really interesting ones juxtaposed the idea of the natural world colliding with the industrial world and challenged the idea of what is traditionally beautiful in a garden.
Gambion screen filled w/natural materials
Flowers suspended in beakers
Calla lillies in 'ice'
Two gardens in particular took the idea of rust belt industrialism juxtaposed with naturalism and made it into something new and beautiful.
Michael Petrie, of Handmade Gardens, created a garden (one of two) for show sponsor PNC out of cast off junk that was both whimsical and a road map for recycling industrial cast offs. The use of recycled materials defined the idea of a vertical ‘green’ wall–in every possible way.
One person's junk is another's garden
'Green' wall detail
Water Feature
Planting detail
Moda Botanica stacked rusted, graffiti covered shipping containers on top of one another to create an other worldly environment. The garden was incredibly crowded.
Stacked containers- each with a different theme
Planter
Graffiti
Glamour and garbage
There are those who deride flower shows as awful fakes with plants blooming completely out of sequence with no regard to how they would be in the real world. Get over it! When its good, it’s experimental theater at its best and at it’s worst it’s still pretty. For me, as someone who designs gardens for a living, it’s a place to look for ideas and inspiration–to seek possible directions that are only possible when creativity is allowed out of the bounds of design reality.
On my recent trip to the San Francisco Bay area I visited a quartet of garden shops. Having worked in the fashion industry, I understand the power of visual merchandising and have a healthy respect for the best of it as an art form–something sorely lacking in most garden retailers. More than one Bay Area resident I spoke to referred to these shops as being well ‘curated’. Since when did merchandising become the same thing as curating? Stuff for sale isn’t art–maybe it’s a California thing.
The Gardener – Fourth Street – Berkeley, CA
For over 26 years The Gardener has blurred the boundaries between inside and outside in true California fashion. Half of the store was given over to scents and other smelly things–the other to a tasteful blend of interior and exterior furniture and accessories. They are curated merchandised side by side in a way that makes it difficult to tell what the product’s original destination was–inside or out–and that’s the point–albeit a somewhat predictable one in 2010.
Inside out and outside in
Cast concrete stool -- at home inside or out
A clearly delinated 'outside' area
Artefact - Cornerstone Gardens – Sonoma, CA
Artefact Design and Salvage is a destination shop. Brilliantly merchandised curated and lit, it is high drama retail at its best. Someone else’s cast offs never looked so good. New and antique, natural and manufactured, naive and sophisticated all at the same time, this is a place to slow down and look and to be inspired. The pictures speak for themselves–yet only tell part of the story since the scale of each piece and the ones next to it are very important to the look and feel of the store. It is also, of the four destinations here, the only one that deserves to be called ‘curated’.
White and bright
Natural and artificial
Naive and sophisticated
Flora Grubb Gardens – Jerrold Avenue – San Francisco, CA
Located in an industrial part of the city, much has been written about Flora Grubb’s unique point of view. Yes, I did see the framed as if they were curated art succulent displays and the funky planted junk car and bike. I also saw the free hanging two sided Wooly Pocket (although it could have been a different brand) ‘wall’ pictured below. The rest of the gardens were, well a garden center that was really well curatedpresented merchandised. Fermob cafe tables and chairs were hung on a wall and contemporary garden accessories were freely mixed in with vintage ones. Plants were showcased in vignettes with pots and accessories. This is sophisticated shopping at its best, different from most garden centers’ approach but not unique to high end retail.
Planted Junker
Cafe tables and chairs as wall art
Free hanging and abundant
Annie’s Annuals – Market Street – Richmond, CA
In a league of its own, Annie’s Annuals was the most fun of all of the places I visited. Definitely not curated, this retail/wholesale/mail order nursery backs up an incredible, hand picked and horticulturally diverse selection of plants with a sense of humor and delight. Hand written plant descriptions and creative and funky signage (some with KidRobot ancestry) make this an oasis in the middle of industrial (and crime plagued) Richmond. Annie and Elaine–our hostesses with the mostesses, freely shared their time and stories as well as giving me a tour of the propagation areas and as Elaine described ‘the crazy science experiment’ area. Annie’s doesn’t pretend to be something that it’s not and because of that it was refreshing and original. A big Bravo!
I am visually drawn to architectural decay. To me, abandoned buildings and their remnants have a ghostly beauty. These old and rusting away bulkhead doors are in the middle of the garden. I don’t try to hide them and I’ve purposely left them just as I found them when I moved in 12 years ago. I think they are beautiful.
In the pouring rain, two garden design and writing friends and I made Bardessono our final stop on a whirlwind tour of Napa and Sonoma. I first wrote about this LEED Platinum certified resort/spa earlier this year in a post called The New Luxury. I was surprised to find that it wasn’t out in the country, but smack dab in the middle of the charming village of Yountville. The hotel/spa’s website makes it look as bucolic as the rest of Napa and Sonoma.
Olive trees, grasses and rammed earth wall in the main courtyard
Even in the downpour, Bardessono’s landscape design did not disappoint. Arranged in a series of individual spaces that flow around clean lined geometric architecture, each of the tree themed courtyards had unique yet related visual identities. Richard Hestikind designed the stone and water features that are at the heart of the each space. In his statement about the gardens, he says ‘At one time, years ago, a natural stream wound through what is now the hotel grounds. The general goal of the water feature was to re-introduce emerging water into the courtyards in unique ways.’
The three primary courtyards: Olive, Birch and Magnolia are distinct yet related via their tree themes and materials.
The Olive Courtyard fountain
The Olive courtyard fountain incorporates three stone olive grinding wheels.
The Birch Courtyard
A large circular pad leads to the bridges and winding path through the Birch courtyard.
The Magnolia Courtyard in bloom
The Magnolia courtyard was by far my favorite. Sprial stone work on the ground plane juxtaposed with rough hewn basalt verticals, water and those blooming magnolias made the rainy trek so worth it.
The central spiral in the Magnolia courtyard
Spiral leading into spiral
Both of my companions for the day also wrote about this stop..read their takes at Garden Porn and Alice’s Garden Travel Buzz. There will be some more from Miss R on this amazing day and other San Francisco Bay Area adventures next week.
I’m so happy that I have taken some time beyond the meetings I attended to do some limited exploring of the Bay Area. It will take me a while to digest all that I’ve seen and to muse on the wonderful people I’ve met. So until I do that here’s a wee wee bit of what I’ve seen so far. I know, I’m just a big tease…there will be more in future posts, but for now I’m off for my last day of adventure!
I’m away from my garden on this last February Monday. A Year of Mondays will return next week, but in the meantime, I did see these wonderful dancing trees outside of Muir Woods in Northern California this week…oh and yes there were wonderful old redwoods too!
I’m taking the show on the road again. For a spring starved landscape designer, my trip to the San Francisco Bay area for the next week couldn’t come at a better time. It is snowing outside here, but it will be spring there.
For three days I will be participating in meetings of various kinds that will help determine a bold and bright future for the Association of Professional Landscape Designers–I serve on its Board of Directors.
Adventure is planned for the rest of my trip with wonderful tour guides–a friend from high school who I haven’t seen since I was a resident artist at Peter’s Valley in the 70s–she still dances to the Grateful Dead, a new friend who I met via a project we coordinated together last year and who is hanging out in San Francisco for a bit, and two people –a landscape designer and a garden writer–who I have never met in the flesh but who have become part of my life over the past 10 years via various internet paths. A different experience is planned for each friend–a walk in Muir Woods, a day trip to wine country and an exploration of the city. I’m very excited to see the San Francisco spring and have the incredible good fortune to have great friends who are willing to show it to me.
Chiaroscuro. The shadows are the story this week. I realize that I’ve been looking down because up seems empty in winter. Today, though, the sun and a clear and brilliant blue sky gave me my subject and I’m thankful for it.
Monday 5
The garden is blanketed under a foot of snow with more expected tonight.
produce to those who most needed it. That way the garden would benefit not only its host charity, Morristown Memorial Hospital at the front end, but at the back end it would also benefit the community at large via the Interfaith Food Pantry.
