Re: Case Study Garden Designs

I very much enjoyed your account of the garden design.  I am familiar with
the plants and can imagine how pretty it would be.

I live near the coast in the Los Angeles area, in a hilly section.  The soil
is heavy black adobe overlying diatomaceous earth and chalky rocks.  In the
back of the house is a north-facing slope on which I have attempted to grow
plants without supplementary water.  I have loosely divided the area into
warm colors and cool colors as I have so many species that that is the only
way I can seem to avoid color clashes as bulbs pop up and things bloom at
different times.

I have become more and more interested in leaf color and texture, and
constrast in form of the whole plant. In the warm-color area, one plant I am
fond of for its color and filmy texture is the bronze fennel.  I like the
flowers, too, as they are a golden shade different from the flowers of the
green form which has naturalized all over these hills.  I am EXTREMELY
careful to cut off the flowers as they begin to form seeds, as it is a
free-seeding perennial and it is very hard to pull seedlings out of clay.

Other plants in this area are Aloes striata and plicatilis, gray Ballota and
Helichrysum angustifolia, Hypericum olympicum (small,delicate green leaves
and big yellow flowers on a dainty creeper), Hunnemannia (similar to
California poppy but with silvery gray leaves and lemon yellow flowers, and
old-fashioned yellow and white Spuria Iris. A very reliable bulbous plant is
Amaryllis 'Hathor' with gold-centered white flowers.  They don't last long,
but the sturdy, dark green strap leaves are there for a substantial part of
the year, making a good shape and color contrast to other things.

 There is also the evergreen Candytuft.  I like the low cushion form and the
very dark green leaves, but when it blooms, as it is doing now, it is a mass
of brilliant white.  It doesn't exactly clash with anything else, but it is
what one of my garden friends calls "a bulls-eye";  it doesn't blend, it
dominates.  The only native California plant is Zauschneria (Epilobium)
'Hurricane Point', very small, creeping, and fine-textured with large
flowers of the typical red-orange.  The leaves are green.  I find most
native plants will not put up with the six months of sodden winter shade
followed by six months of full sun which bakes the clay.

For color contrast there is a small, UNRUFFLED, old-fashioned purple Iris,
for Spring bloom, and Convolvulus mauritanicus for summer.

I am not talented in design, so I just have to keep shuffling them around
until it looks right.  That's part of the pleasure of gardening.

Cathy



> From: david feix <davidfeix@yahoo.com>
> Reply-To: davidfeix@yahoo.com
> Date: Wed, 12 Feb 2003 10:39:10 -0800 (PST)
> To: medit-plants@ucdavis.edu
> Subject: Case Study Garden Designs
> 
> The topic of garden design and overemphasis on use of
> color came up on the gardenweb forum on landscape
> design, and I thought it might be of interest to the
> medit-plants group as well.  One forum contributor(IB)
> was remarking how color often misleads novice garden
> designers, to the detriment of design considerations
> such as form, texture, proportions, etc., and can
> become the Achille's Heel of Novice Garden Design.  I
> took a somewhat contrary position that color isn't
> necessarily a bad starting point, particularly for
> those of us in a mediterranean climate.  As it has
> been somewhat quiet as of late, it this a topic that
> others would wish to discuss at medit-plants?
> 
> Here in California we often have the luxury, (or
> dilemma, depending on your point of view), of
> designing an entire garden around year round color
> from foliage as well as flowers. Somwhat contrary to
> IB's starting point, I often find myself thinking
> about what colors I want to emphasize, and at what
> seasons I want them to combine with others. This
> usually becomes an exercise in making sure there are
> agreeable combinations at each season, (A particularly
> jarring combination for me is  crimson azaleas and
> purple rhodendrons one usually sees in the
> southeastern or northwestern USA). The bonus here in
> our climate is that some of the most colorful plants
> also can have great form/texture of line qualities.
> 
> The following is as an example of designing a small
> neighbor's garden around the color blue as the major
> component, where I also wanted to combine rich green
> foliage textures for contrast, and spring time
> yellow/red/orange flower contrasts to warm things up,
> and perhaps blues and purples for summer to cool
> things back down. The approach might went like this,
> based on some particular accent plants that I knew I
> wanted to use, such as the Agave attentuata:
> 
> The Mexican Agave attenuata 'Nova' as a sculptural
> accent succulent with great form and even more vivid
> blue foliage could be combined with a larger area of
> low ground cover such as the South African Senecio
> mandraliscae-blue Chalk Sticks, with great finger like
> textural qualitites and year round blue color, like an
> undersea carpet.  Unfortunately in our climate, the
> Foxtail Agave never blooms its 10 foot tall arching
> foxtail flower spike, and so must be enjoyed for the
> foliage only.
> 
> The balancing green foliage could come from another
> succulent that is more hedge like, the Mexican Sedum
> dendroideum with succulent apple green foliage and
> daffodil yellow flowers in late winter, and can act as
> a taller backdrop to lower groundcovers, and retains
> the bright apple green foliage all year round. I might
> think that I would also like to have this yellow
> contrast at a taller height, and plant a Jerusalum
> Thorn/Parkinsonia aculeata from South America, which
> also has bright yellow flowers from late spring into
> summer, and combines a filmy pale green foliage and
> green trunk as a small tree to cast light summer shade
> and act as a year round lightly shading arching accent
> tree. Further green accents might come from some South
> African Aloe saponaria/Soap Aloes planted to mimic the
> form of the Agave at a smaller scale, with the
> additional bonus of early spring spikes of coral
> red/salmon or yellow flowers, take your pick. I might
> also introduce some ephemeral notes of seasonal bulbs
> by using some yellow Freesias(S. African) within the
> ground cover of Senecio, to repeat the Aloes and Sedum
> blooming at the same time, as well as being highly
> fragrant.
> 
> To balance all this yellow, I might also elect to
> choose another low growing succulent ground cover such
> as Plectranthus neochilus from South Africa, which has
> a lime green sprawling succulent and pungent foliage
> with dense masses of blue purple flowers in tight
> helmut-head like spikes. This one can be counted on to
> bloom off an on all spring and summer, as well as fall
> into winter if it stays relatively mild and gets full
> sun. A further accent to this introduced note of blues
> would be to combine a slightly taller growing
> Plectranthus, with larger more scalloped pale mint
> green fragrant foliage such as P. zuluensis, also  S.
> African. This plant will serve more as a medium soft
> shrub with larger pale lavender spikes of flowers that
> relate to the smaller groundcover Plectranthus, and
> also will bloom all year round.
> 
> Another purple accent for late winter might come from
> using the upright fine textured Mint Bush from
> Australia, Prostanthera rotundifolia, which is a mass
> of lilac bloom for 6 weeks starting in February on a
> narrowly upright herbaceous shrub. The flower color
> also falls between the deeper purple of the low ground
> cover Plectranthus and the pale lavender of the
> shrubbier P. zuluensis, and the foliage has a year
> round minty smell as well, great if planted so one
> brushes past it daily, much as the South African
> Breath of Heaven, Colonema pulchrum.
> 
> For the final notes of introduced color, I might
> consider what I want to play off the blue and green
> foliage in summer and late fall. Another succulent
> with a more sprawling habit and blue green leaves is
> Calandrinia grandiflora from Chile. This can be
> counted on to provide hot fuschia poppy like flowers
> on 3 foot tall stems all summer into fall, with the
> added benefit of providing motion by waving in the
> wind, and can be blindingly brilliant in its
> profusion, much as the Lampranthus iceplants. Line
> character is introduced in this plant, as well as
> relating to the linear quality of the foliage on of
> the Parkinsonia. A further summer/fall accent blooming
> plant might use  the Argentinian Verbena bonariensis
> as a tall linear accent for a backdrop. Again, this
> tall perennial has both brilliant purple flowers which
> also glow at dusk, as well as tall stems which give
> similar line quality as the Calandrinia stems.
> 
> The final design would have started out based on what
> colors I wanted to see at which times of year, that
> were well adapted to using in a mild, full sun small
> front garden with heavy clay loam soils on a busy
> street, for an owner who is not a gardener, and very
> casual about remembering to water in summer. The
> design also emphasizes low maintenance which can be
> limited to 3/4 times a year once things have filled
> in, (and weeds have no where to catch hold), as
> nothing needs regular cutting back or deadheading to
> keep blooming. This is always paramount in using
> flower color in the garden for long seasonal effects,
> who wants to be a slave to deadheading?
> 
> The design would then go through the process of
> balancing the various proportions of the different
> elements, playing with positions as contrasted against
> the house as seen from the street, (this garden is so
> small, (15 feet deep by 30 feet wide, that it is
> intended as a viewing garden rather than one to be
> walked through), while locating the major accent and
> screening elements where needed visually. So as
> Ironbelly says, form, texture, contrast, rhythym do
> come into play, but as a secondary concept to the
> original idea of what colors I wanted to use. This
> process would also have tended to work around some
> particular plants I wanted to use as well, rather than
> leaving that for last. As taught in landscape design
> courses, this is the reverse of what is suggested, but
> I suspect that many designers who love plants also
> design this way.
> 
> Hopefully this rather wordy design exercise helps
> illustrate how one might start designing a garden
> using any initial garden qualitly as the starting
> point. In my own case, I do generally start with color
> as the major component, perhaps equally balanced with
> degree of maintenance and drought tolerance necessary.
> I find it also helps to know your plants if you are
> going to design this way, and tend to do this in my
> head rather than using a computer to sort through
> lists by flower color/size/texture, etc. I find
> reference books extremely helpful that provide such
> lists of plants and their characteristics helpful when
> drawing a blank, but a walk in the local botanic
> garden or a visit to a good nursery can be just as
> helpful.
> 
> So I would have to say that emphasizing color first
> isn't necessarily an Achilles Heel in design.
> Unfortunatley, as often seen with the red petunias
> combined with yellow marigolds of typical summer
> bedding schemes, or the mixed colors of English
> Primrose in a winter/spring California garden, it can
> be so, as it often has no larger relationship to
> anything else in the garden.
> 
> I'd be interested to hear other case studies for how
> people design their gardens...
> 
> 
> 
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