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...

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!

Larry Miller Subaru Turf to Xeriscape Conversion

The folks over at the Boise Larry Miller Subaru had a problem: the two south facing areas of turf in front of their showroom looked nice enough, but demanded an obscene amount of water. Worse, over-spray from the broadcast irrigation was staining their shiny new Subarus.

As a sponsor/supporter of the Idaho Botanical Garden, naturally Larry Miller Subaru turned to IBG for turf alternative ideas. IBG horticulture director Toby Mancini, sketched up a plan that included creating berms in the two areas out of a specific soil "recipe" (25% organic compost, 25% fractured 1/4" gravel and 50% screened topsoil), especially formulated for xeric, zonally adapted plants. The plants he specified read like a list of the "who's who" list of dependable, drought tolerant and readily available specimens, perfect for the dry intermountain west. They included:

Philadelphus lewisii 'Blizzard'

Fallugia paradoxa

Agastache rupestris

Panicum virgatum "Heavy Metal'

              Nepeta racemosa 'walker's low'

Oennothera macrocarpa subsp. incan 'Silver Blade'®

Echinacea x 'Cheyenne Spirit'

Thymus pseudolanuginosus 

We jumped at the opportunity when Toby asked us if we be interested in the installation and were able to complete the project in a single day (including the conversion of the broadcast sprinkler system over to single source drip system for each plant*).

Clean up after a long day.

Fresh installation = lots of negative space. By mid-summer next year, the plants will really start filling in.

*I generally prefer broadcast irrigation because I believe it promotes good lateral root development as well as a vibrant soil ecology. This is a great example, however, where drip was the right way to go to eliminate wasteful over-spray as well as runoff from the berm. Our preferred approach is to loop a 1/4" line with 6" emitter intervals all around each plant, making sure that each 1/4" line is directly connected to a 1/2" feed line for even water volume throughout the bed and even distribution of water around each plant.

Industrial Park

While Corten is often associated with modern gardens abiding by rules of strict linearity and an emphasis on negative space, I was delighted to find panels of oxidized steel sprinkled throughout a woodland garden during a design consultation earlier this summer. The warm, earthen tones of the rusting panels leapt out of the shadows and contributed to a visceral feeling of movement throughout the garden. I took this as the starting point for the design of an  outdoor room in a woodland garden.

A concave 8' x 9' oxidized steel panel acts as the back wall and abstract focal point "painting" for the room. An arcing, andesite stone wall, green roof arbor and steel edging all add to the feeling of an open, yet delineated space within the garden.

A Yankee doodles.

In the process of developing the design, I experimented with using concentric circles as a way to bridge from the right angles of the home/patio to the fluid, curvilinear lines throughout the garden.











The vertical expression of these concentric circles (the panel, the arbor and sloping andesite wall) are all critical in defining the space.

A completed concept. No, wait- the rocks are too much.

The home is in a neighborhood nestled against the Boise river that provides a micro-climate achingly close to zone 7, with trace amounts of honest-to-gosh humidity and an actual water table; perfect for the dry, woodland, under-story plants we installed.

                                   

Just another Mendelssohn/Front 242 mashup.

The process...

Before the intervention.

Construction of the andesite wall and steel panel base.

Kevin Knickrehm attaching the green
roof arbor to its i-beam armature.

I almost like it as well unplanted. Almost.

                                       
                                                       

                                                 

As I was flying by.

          

   

So We Left the Tree Zoo for a Night…

I’ll let you in on a secret: I've been complicit in my own kidnapping every father’s day for the last seven years. Regardless of how busy the landscaping season is, we ditch the City of Trees (AKA the tree zoo) and head to the mountains to see the real thing- the “real thing’ in this instance being an actual forest that doesn’t require my help to sustain it.*   

I ran feral in an eastern hardwood forest as a young child, so I’m always a little surprised to find myself surprised to see a self-sustaining forest.  Boise is a great place to live, but by the middle of June the foothills have already lost their brief, verdant veil and begin to don an increasingly washed out, brown aspect.

What a difference 60 miles and several thousand feet of elevation can make.

The old Forest Service guard house we lovingly refer to as our “time share”,  sits next to Beaver Creek about 30 miles north of Idaho City. Hiking east along Beaver Creek will connect you to the Crooked River trail system and more wild trees than you can shake a stick at. And not just trees but shrubs, grasses and forbes with nary a drip emitter to be seen!

The very underutilized Buckwheat (Eriogonum).

Perennial geranium

Wild heuchera happily anchored in a granite outcrop.

Color. Texture. Form.

When I combined sedum & heuchera in this project, a friend remarked how odd they thought this combination was.  Ha!

First time I've seen this wild clematis. I definitely need to find out more about this plant!

Yep, that's a landscaper's hand.

Back to Boise.

*   Full disclosure/laborious backstory: When I was MUCH younger, I rappelled out of helicopters to suppress fires in an effort to “sustain” the forest. This wasn’t too long after Yellowstone had erupted into an enormous bonfire. Debate still rages on in regards to proper “forest management”, but for the sake of the story can we just forget about life in the so called Anthropocene? Please?

The Vertivore's Edible Green Wall

If I was to draw a Venn diagram showing the overlap of my gardening and landscape interests, you'd probably find edible green walls smack in the center, next to medieval Japanese stonework and my fig tree.

Oh look, I did.

Up to this point I've mostly written about green walls as an ornamental element, but vertical space is also a terrific place to grow an edible garden. My long term goal for our own property is to place an edible component within three or four steps anywhere on our acre. We're lucky to have so much room, but with the continuing trend of urbanization and smaller lots, many people don't have the room to grow greens and veggies conventionally. But if you've got a wall, there's a way.

Skyfarm: Gordan Graff

Optimistic futurists love to present us with images of a biophilic, urban paradise not too far away.  Heavy on stunning visuals and light on actual details, this hazy vision usually includes rendered images of urban agriculture on the walls and rooftops of the city skyline.

Part of a larger concept called Agriculture 2.0, this discussion of urban of food production rarely takes into consideration some of the problems that need to be solved to make this vision real.

Soil based green wall systems, for example, are very heavy, requiring serious engineering for the support armature.  GLTi's 2,380 square-foot living wall in Pittsburg has an estimated weight of 24 tons when fully saturated. Some have even described this kind of urban farming as financially nonsensical.*

Personally, I think it makes a lot of sense, if the design challenges can be addressed. To that end I started experimenting a few years back (successfully, I might add) with a lightweight mineral wool system.

So far, we've grown nasturtiums, chard, tomatoes and dozens of varieties of herbs including rosemary, thyme, sage, mint, basil and oregano.

This year I plan to try out collard greens, rainbow chard, spinach, rapini and cabbage.

Rest assured I'll be sharing pictures of our edible green wall through the season.


*But the author seems to have some internal conflict on the matter as demonstrated by this article.