Studies in Texture at the Bancroft Garden June 24, 2010

Our trip to Northern California was brief, but we are so glad that we made time to visit one of our favorite gardens.  The Ruth Bancroft Garden in Walnut Creek, CA is a mecca for hortitexturephiles and garden lovers of all stripes.  We wrote a short post about the Bancroft Garden last year, but we may not have been emphatic enough in our praise.   It is magical.  You should visit.  Soon.

As you probably know, a sunny summer afternoon is less than ideal for photographing gardens, but Buell managed to get a number of fun shots and (we think) a few pretty darn good ones.

Enjoy!

It’s Succulent Day! June 17, 2010

This year's small container arrangement in our garden

Buell arranged our succulent and conifer containers last night.  The arrangement looks great, hunh?  Finishing that arrangement feels like the beginning of summer, our garden’s best season.

These little pots make a big feature at the center of our upper gravel terrace, and a strong focal point at the top of the stairs from the stock tank terrace.  In many cases, we advocate using large containers to anchor your potted arrangements, but enough small containers can have a real impact.  These containers range from around 6 inches to around 20 inches in height.  Most of them are hand-coiled Vietnamese pots with an ash glaze, but there are a few odds and ends that we’ve picked up over the years.

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The garden this morning

Picture Postcard Gardens June 11, 2010

Our June 2010 postcard

Greetings!

Our newest postcard features a few photos of our work (learn more below) and addresses for our website and this journal.  If you’re new to the journal – welcome!  Once you’ve learned about the photos on the card, we hope you’ll keep reading.  The newsletters are a great place to start, or you can take a quick scroll through our last fourteen months of photos, ideas and news.  We update every few days during the growing season, so we hope you’ll check back soon.

To learn about our Mosaic-designed, 100% recycled-paper postcards read more here.

But for now, on to the pictures!

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This rusting metal wisteria arbor shades our clients’ west-facing seating area.  We designed the steel frame to be sturdy enough to support a mature vine, but aesthetically light enough not to overwhelm the plant’s beauty or the view.  When the vine drops its leaves for winter or the vine is cut back hard, the arbor provides a clean and (we think) attractive structure on its own.  If you like the arbor, you might enjoy this post with photos of some of our other custom metal features.

A little courtyard makes the perfect outdoor dining room for clients who love to cook.  The garden is just outside their kitchen, where they spend much of their time, and screened from their semi-busy street by a redwood fence.  We built the redwood fence and stone patio, installed the plants, and even designed the cool metal furniture!  Learn more about this pocket garden in our  6th newsletter, Sit. Stay., where we share some ideas for designing a great seating area, and in a post about our furniture designs.

A big, hand-coiled, Vietnamese urn and rustic basalt path anchor this pretty garden.  Our client requested a cottage-style planting with as much pastel floral color as her voracious deer would allow.  We balanced the seasonal color with bold foliage for year-round impact.  This garden has some great ideas, and we’ve discussed different aspects of it in a recent post about “making a scene,” a newsletter about garden features, and a post with photos of three of our favorite deer gardens.

Thanks for reading!  We hope the card and journal provide inspiration for your garden, or at least a few minutes of fun.  If you would like to learn more about Mosaic and how we can help you create your garden, visit mosaic-gardens.com or call 541.434.6467.

For the Birds June 6, 2010

Cedar waxwings on our Kniphofia northiae flowers

Some of our favorite garden visitors are birds.  The garden moves with their hopping, fluttering and bathing and their songs and twitters are a soundtrack for our work.  Part of the fun of watching birds is that you never quite know what they’ll do next.  Yesterday, Buell saw a jay dive into our stock tank pond and paddle around, hop out for a moment and then do it again!  Kniphofias are usually a hummingbird thing, but two years ago, waxwings mobbed our Kniphofia northiae flowers.

There are a few plants that bring birds back year after year.  Many of them are well known, but here are three of our favorites that may not make the common lists.

• Sambucus – Our ‘Black Beauty’ flowers and fruits reliably, and is absolutely covered in waxwings when the berries are ripe.
• Eccremocarpus is a red-flowered vine that is a hummingbird magnet.  We can work and watch just a few feet from the vine in our veggie garden, and the hummers are too happy to mind.  If you thin the seed pods, you’ll find that the vine flowers through the entire growing season (if you don’t, you may find a few baby vines spread around your garden…)
• Salvia guaranitica ‘Black and Blue’ proves that hummingbirds aren’t complete color snobs.  Its deep blue flowers vibrate with hummingbirds throughout the summer.  Interestingly, we’ve found that while newer plants will die in a hard freeze their first winter or two, established plants survived even last year’s serious cold snap.

A last word on birds: our native bird populations are dwindling, particularly the species that forage on or near the ground.  There are many, many reasons for this, and there are many ways to help.  Planting bird-friendly gardens and using few or no pesticides (organics first, please) are a great start.  As far as the birds are concerned, the more bugs the better!  Another thing you can do is to bell your cat or find another way to minimize their bird kills.  We love cats, but a few of they are not native to our area and the native birds have not evolved the tricks to escape their efficient hunting.  We also minimize cat (and raccoon!) traffic in our garden by netting off their favorite pathways and blocking off the gaps under our fence.

ColorTextureForm – Mosaic Newsletter #8 May 19, 2010

Howdy!

We hope our last newsletter was helpful in your spring garden work.  If you haven’t checked in since then, we expanded on our spring cleaning theme with a little about gardening tools, ideas for growing food in busy lives and tough spaces, and tips for making a beautiful garden scene. Beyond those ideas, we’ve posted some neat photos, a winter post-mortem and more, so be sure to scroll through the journal when you’re done.

In this newsletter, we’ll discuss how we use color, texture and form to select and place plants in our gardens.  The terms color, texture and form are used together so often in articles, books and lectures about planting design that they are almost cliche, but what do they mean for your planting design?  Even a quick survey of online articles shows a huge variety of ideas for designing with those terms in mind.  While one designer may prioritize flower color and structure, another focuses primarily on the texture and shape of leaves.

Plant color, texture and form at play in our front garden

In our work, color, texture and form carry equal weight, and we have strong ideas about the best way to see and use each one.  We select our plants to create a cohesive palette, sometimes subtle, sometimes high-contrast, that reflects the desired style and mood of the space.  Because the possibilities are endless, and the results should reflect you and your aesthetic, we will focus on how we think about color, texture and form, leaving the nitty-gritty fun of building a palette to you.

The gentle colors of our side garden carry from foliage to flower

Color

Foliage first – While flowers are fun and part of almost every garden, foliage color is the foundation of our plant color palette.  We use foliage to create sweeps of color throughout the year, or at least the growing season.  The colors vary from bold, contrasting spots of yellow and purple to accents of silver and burgundy to shades of green.

Know when to hold ‘em – Even in a bold palette of strong, bright colors (restraint does not mean boring), restraint is key.  We intentionally leave out some colors or save them for another area.  If you love every color, or are the sort of person who can’t leave a good plant at the nursery, try using different palettes in different areas of the garden.  As you can see in the first photo, our front garden has lots of bright, hot color, while the side garden, at right, tends toward gentler pinks, blues, creams and whites.

Contrasting textures make each plant stand out

Texture

Contrast – We may put two plants of similar color together, but we rarely match texture.  There are so many interesting textures to play with – spiky, fuzzy, big and bold, tidy, grassy (thick and thin blades)- and the possible combinations are endless.  Contrast of texture engages the eye and lets the qualities of each plant shine through, rather than fading into a clump of similar-but-different foliage.

Take a step back – To our minds, texture is best considered from a distance.  While differences in leaf shape are fascinating,, we are more concerned with how the plant looks from the window, pathway or street.

Form

Nearly spherical Picea s. 'Papoose' in a planting bed

What are we talking about here? – What we mean by “form” is the overall shape of a plant – upright, round, conical, weeping, arching, and so on.  Sometimes form and texture overlap, as in spiky plants, like iris and Phormium, but for the most part, form has more to do with outline than texture.

Round, rounded, roundish – Every plant has a form, and some are stronger than others.  Not all strong forms are geometric, but those are the easiest to discuss.  For example, lots of plants have what we call a “roundish” form, where the outline more or less radiates around the center.  Other plants have a more perfectly rounded outline.  Picea sitchensis ‘Papoose,’ for instance, is almost spherical.  A stronger form makes a stronger statement in the garden, and can be used as a structural, almost sculptural element in planting.  We will shear some plants, like boxwoods and fine foliaged conifers, to tighten and perfect their form.

A Phormium dance

The dance – In many of our gardens, we select a plant with a strong form and “dance” three to seven of them through a layer of lower plantings.  The repeating, usually evergreen, forms have room to shine, while the lower plantings add seasonal contrast and interest.

Another perspective

Not all designers think alike (thank goodness), and if you are seeking a different, nuanced, and perennial-savvy take on color form and texture, we highly recommend designing with plants by Piet Oudolf with Noel Kingsbury.  Oudolf’s sensitivity to tiny differences in, say, flower shape helps him create ever-changing, intricate, romantic plantings.  What an inspiration….

That’s all for now, folks!  We’ll be back over the coming weeks with more ideas and, everyone’s favorite, new photos, so please check back soon.

More Spring Cleaning – Make a Scene May 6, 2010

The urn in this photo grounds the view from the window, the surrounding paths and front porch.

In this final follow-up to our Spring Cleaning newsletter, we  offer ideas for creating compelling scenes or views in your garden, with the goal of making the space more attractive and engaging.  In keeping with the theme of developing gardens, we’ll focus on ideas that work with smaller additions and changes here, but a taste of the larger possibilities of this concept can be found in our newsletter about features, among other places.

The most important part of creating a view or scene is to consider the viewpoint.  Whether we’re working on a new or existing garden, on a large or small area, we return over and over again to the pathways, windows, doors and other areas from which the space will be seen.  We can all get lost in our own perspective while working in the garden, looking at a planting or other element from right where we’re standing – even if we’re in the middle of a planting bed!  Take a walk around the area you’re working in, pausing at the important viewpoints, considering how changes will appear from each location, and prioritizing the most used points and pathways.  Be sure to repeat this routine often through design and layout,  as the view will change with each new element (or sometimes just a change in light).

Repeated forms, like these Juniper 'Gold Cone,' are a nice central focus

Creating or enhancing a central focus is the first tangible step in creating a view.  Whether you’re adding a hard element,  planting, or hardscape, consider that any of them will be balanced by your plantings.  Substantial, simple elements will ground your view, where smaller or fussier elements might be lost.  A few ideas for eye-catching elements for your scene are:

• Specimen tree with beautiful form (go see the Baltzers!).  You may be able to use or improve on an existing specimen in your garden
• A series of three or five striking conifers or other evergreen (sheared boxwood?)
• Bench
• Ceramic urn, planted or unplanted
• Basalt bowl
• Stone stairs or path

A simple addition to an existing bed.

Even small changes deserve a solid foundation.  Building a base of compacted gravel and leveling your hard elements will make a big difference in their effect and usefulness.  Don’t hesitate to move or remove plants or other elements that will detract from the long-term goal.

Whenever possible, we like to bring the finishing plants for a space after the primary elements are in place.  Often the best ideas for finishing the scene we’re creating comes  late in the process.  Although the urn in the photo at right was a beautiful element on its own, we didn’t think of the forehead-slappingly obvious addition of a big, blue hosta until after it was in place.  You can contrast or echo the color and form of your central elements, but be sure not to bury them in oversized plants.

We hope our ideas for spring cleaning have brought a little fun and inspiration to your garden this year.  We’re working out of town this week, but we’ll be back soon with the next newsletter and more ideas for your space.

More Spring Cleaning – Food for Thought April 24, 2010

Broccoli seedlings in our garden this morning.

In our most recent newsletter, we promised to offer ideas to make gardening more fulfilling.  For us, nothing is more fulfilling than bringing in the harvest from our orchard and veggie garden.  The size of the harvest – buckets of apples or a handful of fresh herbs – isn’t as important as the connection to our garden and our food (although the food itself ain’t bad).  We talked about designing veggie gardens in an earlier newsletter, but not everyone has the time, sunny space or inclination to devote to a full-on orchard or veggie garden.  Whether you’re a serious veggie gardener or an aspiring gardener in an apartment, here are a few ideas for incorporating food into busy lives and small spaces.

Herbs – Anyone with sun can grow culinary herbs, many of which are pretty ornamentals.  Trailing rosemary and thyme can spill over borders, walls or the edge of a container, and other herbs, like upright rosemary can be sheared into cones or other shapes.  Bay is an attractive broad-leafed “foundation” for an herb or veggie planting (ours even survived the single digit temps!).  Consider foliage texture and color in placing your herbs, and you may find that your herb garden is a year-round beautiful corner of your garden.

Alliums – One difficulty with growing vegetables and fruits is that so many are high-maintenance plants.  The little divas want to be staked, watered, thinned, and otherwise coddled more often than many busy people can handle.  Alliums, such as garlic and onions, on the other hand, are low-key, low-maintenance, and low-water.  They only require attention two or three times a year, and they rarely or never need additional water.  They can be harvested throughout the season and dried, letting all of your “hard work” last into the winter!  (Question – Has anyone planted edible alliums around deer?  We know ornamental alliums are rarely, if ever, browsed by deer, and we’ve heard that edible alliums are often ignored as well.  What’s your experience?).

Artichokes and cardoons make dramatic container plants.

Containers – Some veggies and fruits make beautiful container plantings.  The striking silver foliage of artichokes and cardoons, for instance, are beautiful with annuals (as in the photo at right) or with trailing herbs, nasturtiums and purple basil.  If your sun or space limit you to a container veggie garden, consider arranging your pots with an eye towards foliage combination, and perhaps add a few low herbs or annuals to spill over the edges.  One of our friends had a container veggie garden on the deck of her second floor apartment.  With peas climbing the railing and lettuce in hanging baskets, she packed a lot of food and beauty into a tiny space.

Thanks for reading!  We hope you’re enjoying your gardening (veggie and otherwise) and the nice weather.  We’ll be back with a post-mortem from the hard winter freeze and another spring cleaning idea.

Ron Lutsko – rainy day inspiration April 20, 2010

A drought tolerant planting by Ron Lutsko. Photo by Marion Brenner.

We often turn to our favorite designers for inspiration.  We discovered the work of Ron Lutsko in Page Dickey’s amazing book, Breaking Ground.  If you’ve ever visited the wonderful California Native Plants Garden in the San Francisco Botanical Garden, you have walked through his work.  His studio is known for creating projects that balance clean lines in hardscape with flowing, drought tolerant and native plantings.  A few minutes spent browsing their website reminds us of the importance and potential of simplicity.

Mosaic Q&A – Austin photos January 24, 2010

Buell's Austin, Texas garden

Have a question? Want more frequent updates? We’d love to hear from you! Read more here and/or write us in the comments or at mosaic@mosaic-gardens.com.

Below is a comment we received a few weeks ago, that we thought would be a fun addition to the Q&A:

I’ve admired your Oregon garden in several magazine spreads and have known about your inspirational design website for a while. But I just found your blog and am working my way through it, enjoying your beautiful garden pictures. I garden in Austin, your former hometown, and would love to see more images of Buell’s Austin garden. Have you posted any other pics of it–or do you plan to?

We’ve re-posted the photo that inspired this question request above (originally in this post). We lived in Austin before our move to Oregon in 2002. Unfortunately, we only have a couple of good photos of Buell’s garden, but they do show what you can do with low, almost no additional, water plantings in a hot climate. Good inspiration for all of us in milder regions, don’t you think? Here’s another photo of the garden, with a better look at the Goldsworthy-inspired “Beehive” sculpture Buell made from recycled limestone.

For fun, we put together a gallery of some of Buell’s work for Gardens, a landscape architecture design-build firm in Austin Texas. Obviously, we have different plant and materials palettes in the Northwest, but the threads of contrast in planting and strong, enticing hardscape carry through to our work in the PNW. Click on thumbnails for larger images.

Would you like for us to discuss a photo, design concept or plant in greater detail? Please leave a comment or write us at mosaic@mosaic-gardens.com. We very much enjoy hearing from you, and we need your help to make the Q&A a success!

Sit. Stay. Mosaic Newsletter #6 October 14, 2009

Happy fall! The weather switch has flipped, and the days are growing shorter. It’s a perfect time to consider garden goals for next year, and in this newsletter, our last for the year, we’ll share a few ideas for creating a well-used and well-loved seating area. A little time measuring and drawing now, with plenty of time to ponder, may help you build your own beautiful outdoor room by next summer.

When sketching our first concepts for a space, we often start by pondering the location and design of seating areas. Of course, each element influences the others, but outdoor rooms for entertaining, eating or just relaxing are the heart of many gardens. Below are a few rules of thumb to help you design your perfect seating area.

A courtyard dining room, just outside the kitchen, maximizes human space while maintaining a little distance from the neighbor's cedar fence.

Function is key to a successful, well-used seating area. From beginning to end of your design process, return to the questions of how you will use the space. Do you want an intimate dining room for two to four, an area to barbecue with a crowd, or a cozy nook for meditation? Have you chosen materials that will make the space easy to use and care for? Great design matches form to function, and focusing on your practical goals for a space will answer more questions than any article could.

The ipe bench on the right side of this photo is a private, shady spot to relax.

Location, location, location. Consider how the area will relate to the house and the rest of the garden. Areas for eating and entertaining are best located with easy access to the kitchen. If you think about how many trips you take to and from the table before and during a dinner party, suddenly the cozy, shady spot at the back of the property seems like a long way away. Conversely, a short journey through the garden and a little privacy can make a quiet bench seem like a world of its own. In any space, a great view of the rest of the garden (or the greater landscape, if you’re that lucky) is always an asset.

Fit the size of a seating area to its function. Even a modest dining area, for instance, needs room for table, chairs, and a comfortable flow of traffic. Likewise, a quiet spot for a couple to enjoy the sunset should be small enough to feel intimate, but with enough space to not feel overgrown or cramped. These are simple concepts, but they can be overlooked in a challenging space. In the courtyard garden pictured at the beginning of this article, we transformed a tight, rarely used space, hemmed in by the house, the neighbor’s fence and a thick laurel hedge, into an outdoor dining room. We had to be creative with other aspects of our design, from planting in narrow beds to screening for privacy, but making room for people came first. The stone patio is the perfect spot for an al fresco dinner for four, with room to serve and mingle.

The ipe deck is our most used garden room.

Think outside, around and through the box. It can take time and lots of creative thought to discover a solution beyond obvious, flawed options. When we moved into our house, there was no good location for an outdoor dining area. Every obvious place was too exposed to the street or too out of the way. We weren’t willing to settle however, and after what seemed like ages, we came up with the idea of adding a sliding glass door off of our bedroom onto a house-level ipe deck. The deck is such a success that we hardly eat indoors in the summer. Don’t give up when finding the perfect location or layout takes a little head scratching or a minor remodel!

Consider the desired “feeling” of your space. A warm, open space with a view over the garden feels very different than a cozy, shady corner. Surrounding plants and hardscape will strongly influence the ultimate feeling your seating area, but the unchangeable conditions of a space, such as exposure and elevation relative to the house and the rest of the garden color its character.

We used a rusting steel wall and plantings to separate and screen the Gregory garden's seating area from the neighbors.

Mind the edges. When possible, leave at least a narrow layer of surrounding plantings between a seating area and the nearest fence, hedge or property line. The aesthetic softness will make a seating area feel more comfortable and part of the garden. When that is not a possibility, as in the Gregory garden at right, creative selection of screening materials makes all the difference.

Materials matter. There are many options for the “floor” of a seating area, and no one option is right for every circumstance. Pea gravel can be a soft, cohesive, inexpensive solution, but it requires regular maintenance and is rarely the right choice for a dining area where chairs will displace the gravel each time they are moved. Well-laid flagstone can be a beautiful, solid surface for a dining area, but may be overkill for a simple bench.

A custom metal bench anchors one end of this simple, pea gravel terrace.

Finishing touches. When you have created your beautiful space in the perfect spot, treat yourself to some good looking furniture. Sometimes a great seating area is rarely used, just because there is is not a comfortable, attractive place to sit. We sometimes design furniture to fit one of our gardens, but there are many fun options, from retail to resale to repainting an old chair a fun new color.

Thanks for keeping up with us! We hope you enjoy all of your fall adventures in and out of the garden. We look forward to checking in on the journal and in our next (spring 2010!) newsletter.