Plant Talk

The Brits' Green Crystal Ball - A 2013 Forecast for Wildflowers, Shrubs, Food and Wildlife

Food, birds, bees, wildflowers and sturdy little shrubs - English gardeners must be using the same crystal ball as we are here in the Northwest. In an article in Telegraph.co.uk, the predictions of leading Brit gardeners sound familiar...except that their garden centers are flourishing, and they remain shell-shocked after suffering through the wettest summer ever.

A golden-toned wildflower meadow at the Olympic Park in London was a spectacular focal point for the Games. And no wonder - the meadow was the size of ten football fields!  I think the designers' decision to scatter seeds of warm colored flowers, especially during a summer that turned out to be particularly wet and dreary, made the sight so astounding. Picture this in shades of pink and lavender - not nearly the same impact...

The British experts say the wildflower trend is just getting going, in part because seeds are so much less expensive than plants. They admit that the extra-wet summer helped the Olympic Park wildflower meadow to flourish. Also wildflower mixes are growing every more sophisticated and specific, including mixes for beginning gardeners, flower arrangers, pollinators, and naturalizing. 

Not everyone is convinced. “A wild, meadowy and weedy look will remain fashionable until people realise how difficult it is to make it work in a suburban garden along with the barbecue and kids’ football,” says one gardener. And how about invasiveness? Wildflowers tend to spread beyond where you plant them, and persist whether you want them to or not...

Stephen Lacey brings the discussion back to lower maintenance plants; “I would like to see a rediscovery of shrubs,” he says. “They have been booted into the shadows by the grasses and perennial movement and are now well overdue a revival.”

And I love Sarah Raven's concise focus, "“I’m only interested in three ways of gardening: productive, pollinator-friendly and trees. I want to plant more flowering shrubs and trees, low-maintenance elegant stuff that will give my garden good bones to develop and mature around.”

And despite poor harvests in the wet summer of 2012, Brits are continuing to grow-their-own food. “The turn towards self-sufficiency will continue, with more people relying on their gardens for a supply of fresh food....Gardeners will be composting, recycling and making-do. At the very least, they will grow their own herbs and salads," posits one of the experts. 

“I am excited about a resurgence in edible hedges,” says Mark Diacono, a man at the forefront of the English home-grown movement.

The Royal Horticultural Society has launched a "Plants for Bugs" project in part to convince gardeners that not only native plants attract, feed and shelter wildlife...many ornamentals do the job as well.

The article ended on a high note..Garden Centers in England are doing more than ever to entice shoppers to hang around. Sales were up by 11% last year, in part because so many nurseries feature cafes where gardeners and non-gardeners can meet their friends and hang out year-round...and maybe pick up a plant or two on the way back to their car.

 

Modern Courtyard

Modern garden design is so exciting and so unfortunately rare. We were in Portland over the weekend, and couldn't believe the very cool courtyard at the refurbished Hotel Modera on Southwest Clay Street. This freshly refurbished 1960's motor lodge is a celebration of sleek mid-century modern design. We visited for the restaurant Nel Centro, which has delicious southern Italian food, but were most impressed with the courtyard garden which features a luscious green wall, cut out squares of plantings, an inspired mix of hard and soft surfaces, and the coolest fire troughs I've ever seen.

Jane Hansen of Lango Hansen Landscape Architects was inspired by Columbia Gorge cliffs, and its true that the 64 foot long wall is rugged looking and thickly grown in with evergreen huckleberry, grasses and ferns. But the grid of rusted metal panels and the geometric design fits in beautifully with the sparely designed space. Take a look at this gorgeous wall - believe me, the courtyard at the Hotel Modera and the menu at Nel Centro are worth a jaunt south to Portland...

More Cool Gardens

How often does any kind of public show, especially in its first year, live up to its hype, let alone its potential?  The Late Show Gardens billed themselves as "the latest in design" and I'd venture a guess that no one left disappointed. Stunned, wondering, questioning, intrigued...yes, but disappointed, no.

Even the prettiest gardens had a message; this Climate Change Garden by Dr. Hala F. Nassar and Robert Hewitt explores how natural resources will become more precious as they become less plentiful.

A charming hermit's garden, including a bottle tree, designed by Kate and Ben Frey

The artist Simple suggests ways to recycle your ornamental grass clippings:

This is Conway Cheng Chang's "In the Air", with mist, air plants, a little rebounding trampoline which delighted the kids. "The experiment is laid out for us to feel, associate, analyze and understand what is in the air, and lead to exploration...... of our conscience with the greater environment."

A Truly Modern Garden Show

Happy Autumnal Equinox tomorrow....as the sun approaches the equator, for a brief moment, our days and nights are balanced at equal length......I'm not feeling so balanced myself, as I'm suffering a visual hangover from seeing so much fascinating art and design over the weekend. We flew into San Francisco Thursday morning (what recession? Not a rental car to be had in the entire city of SF), and rode the bus out to Golden Gate Park to visit the California Academy of Sciences....what an amazing green roof!!

On Friday morning we scored a car, drove to Sonoma, and spent a couple of days at The Late Show Gardens, an open-air, environmentally-inspired garden show. Believe me, this is the garden show of the future...I just hope attendance was high enough to make it financially viable.

After a lovely twilight dinner with all the speakers, artists, designers and show organizers at the home of photographer Saxon Holt on Saturday night...we drove back into the city yesterday to see the Avedon photography exhibit at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art...hence the visual over-stimulation. I'll be doing posts all week with photos of the very cool Late Show gardens created by top-notch designers.

I can't tell you how delightful it was to go to an outdoor show, where the light was natural and the gardens actually growing in the ground. Breezes blew through, the light changed, you could hear birds... And these were gardens to experience, not just to look at; many were interactive, with honey to taste, goggles to look through, even a rebounder trampoline to bounce on. You could walk into each garden and experience it in three dimensions.... the show was reasonably sized, only one speaker at a time, and the atmosphere relaxed, participatory, congenial...people sat around in the shade and talked, garden creators and vendors were on hand to chat....speaking of vendors, all were class acts, from Digging Dog and Cistus Nurseries to art by Cevan Forristt and Marcia Donoghue....

Here's Greg and me  in composer and soundscape designer Hugh Livingston's "Garden Party". Everyone walking in to the garden was given a parasol and invited to the party..  Acoustical effects like talking tomato cages and hedges emitting party conversation, as well as life-size figures emanating musical snippets added to the party atmosphere.....

Bay area designer Shirley Watts created a bee-themed garden called "A Garden of Mouthings" complete with honey tastings, bee experts on hand to answer questions, bee friendly plantings and honeycomb-like structures. The dripping honey stools weren't truly sticky....

New Low Maintenance Garden on YouTube

I'll be away from the blog until early next week, as I'm off to the Late Show Gardens in Sonoma. I'm speaking there tomorrow about my new book, going to parties thrown by Saxon Holt and Shirley Watts (yes, I'm a little intimidated by the star power down there in the Bay Area). Mostly I'm looking forward to seeing what the garden show of the future looks like - I'm expecting it'll be rich in inspired modern designs with an environmental bent. I'm counting on seeing gardens unlike any I've seen before, including the bee-themed one Shirley Watts is designing. I'll take lots of photos and notes and post them next week....tune in to see mind-blowing garden design.

In the meantime, check out Timber Press's marketing idea for my new book. You can find it on YouTube at www.youtube.com/watch?v=daVy3GvWkRA or above the New Low Maintenance Garden book cover (right).