Isn’t it amazing how physical perspective can change a garden? Below are four views of the same section of the garden we built on Coos Bay.
New Photos of Watershed – The Exception That Proves the Rule June 15, 2011
The Watershed is a mixed-use commercial/residential building and a rare exception to our residential garden focus. We can’t say enough good things about the structure (green materials, local artisans, just fantastic inside and out), and we couldn’t be more grateful for the trust that the owners had in allowing us to design and plant their garden. The plantings at ground level and on each of the many terraces are diverse, super resilient, and require very little water from the rainwater catchment system. We think that the courtyard and rusting metal water feature are a strong, grounding center to an unusual, beautiful space. Buell took a few new shots of the garden yesterday, and we’d love to know what you think!
(More info on the July 9 Open Garden coming soon!)
The basin of this rusting metal fountain is about 5 feet tall
Not your normal, commercial sidewalk plantings
One of the raised courtyard beds with a rainwater catchment cistern behind
A playful street entrance planting
Japanese Maple Sale at Baltzer’s! May 15, 2011
One of our own special Baltzer maples
We’ve got so much good news for gardeners these days! Our friends Bob and Nancy Baltzer, of Baltzer’s Specialized Nursery are having a sale on their gorgeous specimen maples. All non lace leaf maples in 20 gallon or larger containers are on sale for at least $25 off and some are marked down to $75! Bob and Nancy grow a wider variety of maples than anyone we know, and they care for them beautifully. Aside from maples, the Baltzers also carry wonderful, unusual conifers and some interesting garden features. Their nursery is one of our area’s little known treasures, and well worth the short drive to Pleasant Hill.
Baltzer’s is open Friday – Monday, 10am – 5pm (closed Tuesday-Thursday)
36011 Highway 58
Pleasant Hill, OR 97455
541-747-5604
The Plant Sales Are Coming! May 5, 2011
It’s that magical time of year again, when the best specialty nurseries in Oregon flock to Eugene for a one-day plant extravaganza…. On May, 7, grab your mom for a Mother’s Day Eve outing and find your new favorite plants!
The Willamette Valley Hardy Plant Group sale is in the Auditorium Building of the Lane County Fairgrounds from 9am-2pm. More information here.
The Avid Gardeners Plant Sale is also 9am-2pm (where to go first?!?) at Alton Baker Park. More information here and on their cute poster at right.
Plant group members and potential members, take note – volunteers get first dibs on plants, so pitch in!
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!
Bancroft Teaser June 23, 2010
We’re just in the door from a whirlwind trip to California. Buell took some gorgeous photos at the Ruth Bancroft Garden, which we will post ASAP. Here’s one of our favorites to tide you over:
Agave flower at the Ruth Bancroft Garden
Back soon!
r&b
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
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.
Slowly but surely…. June 1, 2010
Summer is coming. While the wet, cool weather has many people wondering if the April showers will end by July, the plants are quietly preparing to surprise us in warmer days to come. I saw our first waterlily bud this weekend, and the heat-loving plants have pushed a surprising amount of growth in the last week or so. It’s possible that this rainy spring will bring us a summer to remember.
One of our waterlilies on a sunny summer day
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.
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.
Mosaic Gardens Journal 