Vertical Gardening in Boise

In anticipation of my conversation with Charlie Woodruff of Building a Greener Idaho tomorrow on KRBX 89.9 FM, Radio Boise, I thought I'd post a series of pictures showing some of the vertical gardens we've built over the last few years. Enjoy!



Tropical Vertical Garden at Edward's Greenhouse in Boise, Idaho

Rosemary and Thyme Vertical Herb Garden

Vertical Garden on our Chicken Coop

Hosta and Heuchera Shade Vertical garden

"Industrial" Vertical garden for Lulu's Pizza

Our Office Vertical Garden

Vertical Garden Framed in Barn Wood

Lightweight Vertical Garden Module

On Display in Garden #6 of the Idaho Botanical Garden 2012 Garden Tour
(Thanks to Joanne Lechner and family!)

Perma-Bark

I'm certain Dante missed a circle of Hell where wicked gardeners are forced to pick detritus out of an endless bed of PERMA-BARK®.  I got a head start on this today as I attempted to remove pine needles, leaves & strands of ornamental grass mysteriously threaded into the crushed basalt. I rate the use of this awful material in garden beds right up there with installing lead pipes for potable water & staring unblinking at the sun for pleasure.

And forget about amending the soil in your beds; once the rock "mulch" is installed, you're left with a material that dramatically heats up the ground in the summer sun, offers little in the way of water retention in the growing season or insulative protection for roots in the winter and slowly chokes the life out of trees and shrubs.

Reason enough for eternal damnation.

Just leave the damn tree alone.

Balancing myself up in the canopy of a sturdy white oak earlier this week, it occurred to me how closely arbiter and arborist are in meaning as well as spelling. In addition to the inevitable landscaping disagreements between spouses that I'm often expected to resolve, my primary job as an arborist is to somehow reconcile what the homeowner wants with what the tree wants. The homeowner wants PRUNING, and the tree, well, it just wants to be let alone.

People get it in their heads that the tree is just standing there in immobilized agony wishing it could communicate it's desire for copious pruning. Not only does the tree not want to be bothered with your surgical urgings, it'll probably flip you some serious attitude. I call it "panic epicormic sprouting" and I have personal experience. I've carefully cut off branches and have been rewarded with the emergence of five or six new branches in the same spot to deal with. That's tree attitude.

Some tree "experts" have turned this into a pretty profitable business plan. They come over to your property and prune the living hell out of the interior of your tree. Nice and tidy (arborists call this kind of damaging pruning "lion tailing"- get the visual picture?). Lucky for the "experts", the tree freaks and pushes out twice as much growth to compensate the following season.

Call it job security. Beware of the tree company that charges by the branch.

Mature trees need occasional maintenance pruning. The 5 d's are often presented as reasons to prune anytime:

1. Damaged

2. Diseased

3. Deformed

4. Dangerous

5. Dying

Prune your trees when they are young to create good structure and shape (a future blog post), but leave your mature trees unmolested by your good intentions.

Rethinking water savings in landscape design

For no other reason than to make a point, I plan to submit this recently completed front yard landscape redo in a xeriscape design contest. I'm certain the distinguished panel of judges will take a quick glance at the pictures and conclude that I obviously don't know what xeriscaping is. The entry paperwork will be tossed, er, recycled- I will get a polite note of thanks for participating in the contest, and the winner will receive acolades and praise for ripping off a High Country Garden drought tolerant design.

Or maybe I'll win because they'll have read my blog.

This handsome North End Bungalo likely started life with an equally attractive landscape. And like the Arts and Crafts style of the home, the landscape probably had a slight Asian feel. Sometime in the last 100 years somebody decided to install turf instead.

My clients moved into the home in 2009 and after I reworked the back yard, they asked if I could also help with the front. I tore out the sidewalk and the turf and replaced it with a planting scheme that by all accounts looks thirstier than the old lawn but actually offers a water savings of eighty percent.

Check out this great book on period Bungalow gardens:

Outside the Bungalow America's Arts & Crafts Garden

Saint O'Doran's Day

Saint Patrick's day is a bittersweet celebration amongst the Doran clan. It's the day we light a single candle and remember Jason O'Doran, Ireland's true hero.

While it's true Patrick drove out all the snakes from the Emerald Isle, her inhabitants were faced with the overwhelming ecological disaster of being overrun with rodents. Rodents so thick in fact, graneries were depleted & hardly a drop of Stout could be found.

In this great time of crisis O'Doran, a humble farmer and community organizer, led the people to collect what little grain was left. With it they lured the filthy creatures to an enormous vat of Stout where the vile vectors drowned. The resulting green, noxious liquid proved to be a remarkable fertilizer, and within a few months the granaries were full, the children were singing and the men resumed their happy, drunken brawling.

Alas, in the insuing year long party (and through the clever marketing efforts of Patrick's supporters), knowledge of the true events were forgotten by all but the O'Dorans themselves.

Politically Correct Plant Selection

A few years back a landscaper friend of mine sold his diesel work truck and bought a Prius. Even though the truck was more practical for his day to day work routine and actually got decent mileage, he'd been castigated by friends and clients for driving the "Beast" and felt the new hybrid would put a better polish on the image he was projecting. Coming back recently from three months of vacation, by all accounts his strategy seems to have worked.

Despite all the recently publicized problems Toyota has had recently, I like hybrids and the push to create more fuel efficient cars. During a period of the 70's that was dominated by enormous V8's, I was practically raised in the back of VW's that got triple their gas mileage. Kudos to my parents and to anyone today who wishes to conserve. What bothers me is the largely symbolic gestures businesses often make to ingratiate themselves to their customers.

I've done it myself, struggling with the symbolism of plant selection.

Here's the deal: Invasive species can have devastating effects on ecology and many invasive species were actually introduced for one reason or another. In the last twenty years I've seen the green industry become more careful in the growth and selection of plant material. Locally, for example, that means fewer Russian Olives (Elaeagnus angustifolia) are being planted. This a good thing given how the now ubiquitous invader has out-competed native species in riparian areas. But I see an unintended consequence to this elevated sense of concern: tough, drought tolerant plants are getting a bad rap in Boise because in much milder areas (e.g. San Jose, Ca) they tend to jump the fence. The truth is I've stopped using some plants in my installations not because I believe there is any danger in planting these blacklisted plants in Boise, but rather out of concern for the image I'm projecting.

I'm coming to grips with the inherent silliness of that reasoning. I finished a small commercial installation this week using, among other ornamental grasses, drifts of Nasella tenuissima. Mexican Feather Grass, as it's known by it's common name, is a wispy, somewhat ethereal grass that's the plant equivalent of mood music. It also happens to be a grass that some have called on to be banned because of its potential to become invasive. An attentive gardener employee at the location brought this to the attention of the owner and sent him a link to an online Sunset Magazine article about N. tenuissima (go here to read it). The author, Sharon Cahoon, does a great job presenting the debate, concluding that the matter of invasive potential needs to be determined regionally.

Honestly, I would be reluctant to plant N. tenuissima anywhere that receives more than 16 to 20 inches of annual rainfall but in our arid, high desert I think it's a fantastic alternative to many of the thirsty plants designers seem to use over and over (hey, I'm gonna start my own blacklist). While it's true it will self seed a little within a garden, in 20 years of digging in Boise's dirt I've never seen it wander into a neighbor's bed or naturalize into a non-irrigated area. I've heard the same debate about other plants like Euphorbia myrsinites, another tough, evergreen perennial. While I believe there should be a careful vetting process for any new introduction, designers should also be careful not to eliminate tough, drought tolerant plants from their design palette simply to appear, err, correct.

Monsanto kindly asks that you rake the forest.

Everybody has days when they realize their job is a pointless absurdity. Mine came the other day when I was raking the forest. Don't get me wrong- any kind of February work for a landscaper is a good thing, but I'm used to thinking that what I do is important. I regard landscaping as a nexus of Art and Science and often imagine myself poised heroically with a shovel in a Diego Rivera mural.

Daydreaming helps pass hours of endless raking.

On this day however, I was preoccupied with the silliness of what I was doing. A friend and long term client had taken pity on me and asked if I could squeeze in some late winter work into my busy schedule (har, har). A couple hours later I was on a little island near the Boise river raking up leaves and debris that had already begun to turn into wonderful compost over the winter. The adjacent homeowners had already cleaned their little sections of the island which just seemed to make my client's area just look, well untidy.

Cutting into this self sustaining natural system does have it's business advantages though. As an add on to my expert raking services, we also provide fertilization (which I will be sure to suggest for this little piece of Poplar and red twig dogwood riparian forest). I don't feel especially bad about it as we use organically derived, low nitrogen fertilizer but it does make think that there are probably better ways to manage our landscapes.

I'm currently working on a large community common area landscape redesign which I plan to write more about in the future. An important component of this design will be on site composting of all non-woody organic debris derived from the common area landscape. The idea is simple. Instead of hauling off the biomass, we can reduce it by a factor of ten or more through accelerated composting and reintroduce it to the beds as a nutrient rich soil conditioner. In my own landscape beds at home this has precluded the need for supplemental fertilization. This is a terrific way of emulating natural systems in an effort to create sustainable landscape maintenance .

I got the idea from raking the forest.