We will be speaking on our work on irrigation-free landscapes at the annual PG&E Water Conservation Showcase in San Francisco on March 21. Specifically, we will be co-leading an interactive workshop on water conservation in residential landscape design with fellow landscape designer Kelly Marshall and Outreach Coordinator for the California Native Plant Society Kristen Wernick. All are welcome to attend. Sign up here.
Quick post today: watch and marvel at Babylonstoren. While portions of the video are a bit hokey, no big deal, as the history and scale and design and plants and animals of the place are something to behold. After watching, plan a visit your local botanical garden or arboretum. In any season, there is always something to see, discover, and learn. And getting outside never did anyone any harm.
A short clip from RHS Chatsworth 2017 featuring the Garden for a Changing Climate, designed by Andy Clayden and Dr. Ross Cameron. It’s no longer business as usual for the plants in our landscapes, but this need not be a reason to lament. In fact, with challenges and limitations placed on creative work, that work almost invariably gets better. Happy viewing.
When it comes to plants in the landscape, there are tried but true and therefore played out and boring (and should be retired), and there are tried but true and thus indispensable. Sedum spectabile ‘Autumn Joy’ falls into the latter camp, an indispensable plant for landscapes in those four-season climates that include a good dose of winter. Emerging early in spring, it provides structure and color with zero supplemental water, and its fat leaves offer a foil to smaller-leaved plants, which, packed in too closely and in too great of numbers, will resort in a landscape that suffers from what we call “small-leaf syndrome.” Then, in late summer, its flower-heads start to emerge, slowly opening in early fall to attract pollinators of all varieties, feasting on its nectar during a time of year when nectar is starting to run scarce. Finally, in winter, it retains its structure and fades to a lovely rust color, its spent flower heads offering the perfect platform for snow to sit atop. Aside from the short period of time in spring when you must chop the plant down to the ground and thus don’t see it, this plant is the very definition of year-round appeal – both for you and for the lovely pollinators that will seek it out come fall blooms.
Go forth and plant with aplomb!
In our quest to add more and denser housing along commercial corridors in California’s cities, we are thoroughly short-changing both the residents of these new developments and those who walk down the sidewalks of these evolving commercial corridors. The sidewalks are staying impossibly narrow, while the roadways are staying too wide. In short, we are creating corridors of dense housing along dry creek beds of public space and along rivers of asphalt-lined roadway. Landscape in the broader sense of the term – the spaces in between buildings, the spaces that really make or break urban space – is simply not considered.
We wrote about this situation – the missing role of landscape in the housing discussion – for the Los Angeles Chapter of the APA a few months ago, and you can find that here.
There needs to be some give and take when we are asking people to give up four walls and space and a yard to move into a building of shared walls and no yard. The sidewalk and the spaces in between buildings need to be given just as much thought and care as the buildings and units themselves. But this, alas, we are simply not seeing.