Tuesday, March 17, 2015

Our 2015 Boise Flower & Garden Show Garden Pavilion: Friluftsliv

We'd like to extend an invitation to all our followers in the Boise area to come visit us at the 2015 Boise Flower and Garden show this weekend. As many of you know, we were given the honor to build one of the two lobby gardens for the show this year.

We've spent most of our winter "down time" conceptualizing and constructing a garden pavilion that we hope will inspire and challenge visitors.

Check out the link below for a taste of what you'll see.

We hope to see you this weekend!

Wednesday, March 11, 2015

Winter Injury

People have remarkably short memories, particularly in regards to the weather. While Boise and most of the West have enjoyed late spring-like temperatures since early February, we've watched (gloating a bit at times), as the east has been pummeled by an unrelenting winter.

I've heard folks describe our winter as one of the mildest they've ever seen in our area. So why do so many conifers that looked so peachy back in the fall now look this?



Or like this?



A recent post by a respected local garden blogger described it as the result of bitter cold we experienced earlier this winter. Cold? Yep. It got cold (1 F°), but only briefly and well within historical averages and certainly within the tolerance of the many conifers that were damaged this winter.

So what gives?

The short answer is it's not the cold per se, but rather the whiplash nature of the weather in November. We enjoyed a late gardening season with warm weather into November, and then we were nailed by a polar vortex that dropped temperatures from a high/low of 69 F°/46 F° on November 9th, to a high/low of 22 F°/1.2 F° less than a week later!

Some plants just have a really tough time riding these kinds of rapid transitions. One of the conifers that has struggled the most in Boise is the Hinoki cypress. I bet you can pick it out in this line up.



Here's another Hinoki cypress in my own yard.




And another Hinoki cypress in my parent's landscape. Note how green the bamboo looks (what winter?).



Another interesting aspect of this "whiplash weather" is how it impacted the same kind of tree so differently. A friend and I were puzzling this morning on why the White pine on the left fared so poorly compared to his buddy on the right. Southwest exposure? Wind protection/exposure? A difference in the water holding capacity of the beds on either side of the driveway? Go on, speak up if you think you know.




Unsurprisingly, I've had numerous calls and consultation requests during the last month. My advice? First, given our warm weather, seriously consider turning on your sprinklers early this year. Desiccation is really rough on a weakened tree. Second: be patient and wait to see if the tree pushes new growth. It may be June until you can really see the extent of the permanent damage. My prediction is that most of the pines will spring back. I'm not so sure about some of the Hinoki cypress (including my own).

Friday, February 27, 2015

An Artist's Garden

Local Boise artist, and all around classy lady, Ardith Tate, approached me last fall for ideas on how to convert a small common area into a sitting garden. Primarily turf, with a small foundation planting against her house and dominated by an adjoining parking area of concrete and asphalt, Ardith nevertheless enjoyed setting up her bright lime green garden chairs in the grass to commune with the outdoors and neighbors alike.


A stroll through her house to see her artwork and design sensibilities revealed that this was someone who’d be open to the unconventional. I didn't think a deck was a good option, I explained, because you’d feel perched above the parking lot and lose a certain degree of connection to the surrounding landscape (detached, raised pagodas and decks are often better for giving political speeches or hosting weddings).

Tossing the deck idea on its head, I suggested that we sink a patio area into the ground, taking a literal approach to being “in the garden.”  And since ruin gardens are cool again, I proposed a crumbling section of the surrounding retaining wall, à la Angkor Wat.


Concept Sketches






Measurement, excavation and construction (um, you called the utility locators, right?)






Retaining wall and patio construction (who needs laser measurement when you've got spare poly pipe?)










With the completion of the stone patio/walkway, and a little colony of Elfin thyme planted with a blessing to go forth and multiply over the garden ruin, we turned our attention to the planting scheme. Ardith had hoped that the new garden area would be a bit more waterwise; an easy task given that virtually anything (aside from domesticated rice?) would be an improvement over the turf grass we removed.

Dry woodland garden perennials aren't the obvious choice for a waterwise garden, but given their low water requirements relative to turf and the decreased footprint of the irrigation thanks to the hardscape,we were able to significantly reduce the irrigation needs of this small area. 

I dunno, Ardith, I'm kind of thinking the old lime green chairs would have been just fine...



Thursday, January 1, 2015

A Year Later

As we accelerate through the final few days of 2014, it seems fitting to revisit a project that I introduced exactly a year ago today in a blog titled Draw!. We'd completed enough of the project at that point to compare with a patio concept sketch I'd completed earlier in the year.

                 

January of 2014 didn't provide us with ideal landscaping weather, but we persevered, completing the patio fire feature in February
.





By late summer the hardscape had been in for months and the plants had really begun to fill in.


Plant tapestry, anyone?





And so we come full circle. Happy New Year everyone!