Walter Hood’s Minimalist Garden in the Sky

I can truthfully say I’ve never designed a “modernist” or “contemporary” garden. One of the things I enjoyed most about my participation in APLD’s annual conference in the Bay Area this year was the opportunity to see a number of gardens with a modern aesthetic. (Look for the upcoming post on a Bernard Trainor garden in the foothills of the Peninsula area, or the last post on the stunning Tah.Mah.Lah). So I wanted to share with you one of my early favorites from the tours we took.

Described in our e-materials (the conference organizers decided to use an iBook, a terrific idea, to provide us background information on the schedule, gardens, etc.) as “Modern Garden – Commentary on Restraint,” this garden was designed by the eminent landscape architect Walter Hood. Located in the Telegraph Hill area of San Francisco, this garden is on the upper levels of a spectacular private residence whose owner graciously allowed us to traipse up to both the “front” and “back” gardens, even though reaching the back involved walking through the house. I’ve decided to present the photos of this garden as a gallery below. Enjoy.

Access to the garden is up the stairs through the gate shown. Behind the balcony you can see a hint of what awaits.

Tucked away at the end of the shelves is a small deck chair – perfect for taking photos of your other friends on the garden tour!

The deck has simple, minimalist plantings and simple wooden deck chairs for seating.

Another view of the front garden. The pots contain ferns.

A view of the deck garden that faces the street. The large evergreen trees screening the rear wall were presumably craned in.

Textural contrasts in the planting material give the garden more visual interest.

The lithograph behind the chairs is slanted and the image changes slightly with the observer’s field of vision.

The left side of the “back garden,” with minimal seating and a glimpse of the Muir Woods lithograph.

The Muir Woods lithograph is just tall enough to block the more industrial parts of the Bay view when one is seated.

Inspiring Tah.Mah.Lah

One of the most inspiring sites we visited during this year’s annual APLD conference in the Bay Area was a home in the Portola Valley area, called Tah.Mah.Lah. I’d looked up what I could about it ahead of time and was intrigued by what I’d read – designed to be “the greenest custom home” in the United States, it is a net-zero, LEED Platinum certified project whose owners built a home and landscape designed to last 100+ years. We had more than an hour on site (a great improvement over some prior garden visits limited to 25 minutes or less, because of small sized projects and a packed itinerary), and I tried my best to capture some of the most interesting aspects of the house and landscape. (Among other things, I was delighted to see an installation by Patrick Dougherty, which the owners’ little girls have dubbed the “fairy castle.”)

Because there are so many photos, I’ve decided to present them in gallery format, to avoid endless scrolling for readers. The captions provide additional information about the project, but for more details, please visit the Tah.Mah.Lah website, which went live for the first time the day of our visit. Thanks and kudos to landscape architect Thomas Klope, for his inspired implementation of the owners’ vision, as well as to the owners and the builder – all of whom were on site when we visited, providing background, history, and answers to our many questions.

A packed-gravel bocce court greets visitors as they walk up the driveway.

50-gallon cisterns throughout the site are used to store rainwater for irrigation and other uses.

Gravity walls were built of abandoned “quarry waste” limestone boulders found in Minnesota. They are used all over the site.

The interior of the house gives seamlessly to the outdoors. The owners have opened Tah.Mah.Lah for numerous educational tours and fundraisers to promote green energy and construction.

The pool has an adjacent natural pond/bog. To the right, the “fairy castle” built by Patrick Dougherty.

A view up to the house and outbuildings from the pool area.

I loved the simplicity and softness of the native grasses contrasting with the plain wooden walls of the buildings.

Between the garage (with three electric cars) and one of the residential buildings, the owners’ dog greets visitors, and view of the hills behind Tah Mah Lah can be seen.

The owners commissioned new blends of native sod that would need less water. The final products are now available commercially as well, and require 80% less irrigation than a fescue grass lawn would.

A view from the dining room to the outdoors.

Behind the main house, hand-hewn fencing encloses an area for chicken coops and raised vegetable beds (not shown).

Only one area seemed to contain “ornamental” perennial (native) plantings. The project was planned from 2006 – 2008 and completed only in July 2011; over fifty non-native trees were removed from the site prior to the replanting process.

Boulders provide a setting for a small firepit and assist in the grade change from the pool area up to the house.

Native grasses soften the edge of the driveway and the stark simplicity of the buildings constructed from recycled and reclaimed materials.

A Visit to the Gardens of Alcatraz

In mid-September, I headed to the Bay Area to attend the annual APLD conference, which took us to an impressive number of gardens and made me wish I could grow some of the plants I saw. Before the conference began, however, I spent a couple of days visiting my son, who has just moved to San Francisco to work. One morning, I got up early and took the ferry over to Alcatraz Island. Unlike most tourists, however, I never set foot in any of the prison buildings. I was there to see the Gardens of Alcatraz.

As some of you may already know, Alcatraz served as a maximum security federal prison from 1933 to 1963, when it was closed for budgetary reasons. (Prior to 1933, it was a military prison, dating from the late 1800′s.)

Seen from the San Francisco Bay in the early morning, Alcatraz’s appearance is more than a little foreboding.

Although its nickname is “The Rock,” from early in its history, the officers’ families and later the inmates sought to soften its forbidding slopes and surfaces by planting flowers. When the Bureau of Prisons tore down two homes that had previously been occupied by these families, their foundations were converted to flower gardens tended by families and inmates.

An area of the old Officers Row gardens, open to the public only through the tours offered by the Garden Conservancy two mornings a week.

Another section of the gardens in the old Officers’ Row area.

In 1986, the prison became a National Historic Landmark, but it wasn’t until 2003 that The Garden Conservancy began partnering with the National Parks Service  and the Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy to clear away over 20 years’ worth of neglect of the garden areas. Today, Garden Conservancy volunteers, working through the NPS, lead fascinating and informative free tours ranging over much of the island on Friday and Sunday mornings. My two guides, both first-rate in terms of their knowledge of Alcatraz’s history as well as that of the gardens, met a group of us on the 9:10 a.m. ferry on Sunday morning and soon we were off.

Monica Beary (left) and Corny Foster (right) await us. Steps to climb? There were lots.

I was surprised to see plants like old roses,  fuschias and geraniums (as well as succulents) in profusion. Our volunteers explained that these were “survivor” plants that had been discovered in many locations when the GC’s restoration work began. The plants introduced by the inmates and families were exotics; the climate (Sunset Zone 17) is mild and Mediterranean in nature.

Perennial geraniums in the Officers’ Row area, near the greenhouse.

Echium candicans (Pride of Madeira), a North African native, grows in the Gardens of Alcatraz. It’s a favorite of hummingbirds.

Almost everywhere, the view out to the Bay reminds visitors how isolated and grim “The Rock” would be without these gardens to soften it.

Succulents and roses frame a view of the Bay.

An Agave americana in flower on the edge of the island.

At the end of our tour, we took in views of the west end sloped areas of the island – the only gardens that most prisoners could see.

Today these areas are planted heavily in succulents interspersed with other plants, such as Gaura, which can tolerate the rocky soil and limited rainfall of the site.

If you’re fortunate enough to visit the Bay Area over a weekend, the Garden Conservancy offers tours of the Gardens of Alcatraz on Friday and Sunday mornings at 9:30. You’ll need to book the 9:10 ferry, nothing later, if you want to get there in time. And for more information on the gardens, check out Bay Nature’s online article and the Conservancy’s own website. Highly recommended!

A Knot Garden at Filoli

When I was in the Palo Alto area in June this year, I visited Filoli again (as well as the Elizabeth Gamble Garden). It was blazingly hot, and I wasn’t sure I would get any good images because of the sun and time of day. So today’s post is sort of an ode to my B&W circular polarizing filter, as you’ll see.

I knew Filoli’s gardens were formal, for the most part. But on my prior trip I hadn’t ventured far enough to discover its Knot Garden. Located just beyond its rose garden area, this was no ordinary knot garden. All the knot gardens I had seen before were clipped boxwood shapes. The one at Broughton Castle was clipped and had roses inside the spaces.

The walled knot garden on the south side of the castle, known as the Ladies’ Garden, was established in the 1880s on the site of the sixteenth century kitchen. The fleur de lys beds are planted with Rose ‘Heritage’ and Rose ‘Gruss an Aachen’.

Oh so tidy and veddy British, don’t you think? Closer to home, I’ve seen a knot garden at the National Arboretum, with its edging plants somewhat more loosely clipped.

A knot garden in the National Arboretum in Washington, DC

So at Fioli, I was delighted to come across a knot garden composed of barberry, lavender, santolina, and little rosemary balls trimmed like lollipops – all viewed against a hedge of copper beech. Originally planted in 2007 by a local garden club or two, I’m not sure its shape is as tidy as the original plan, but I absolutely loved the sweeps of lavender, just coming into bloom.

A rosemary standard is silhouetted against a copper beech hedge and provides a formal contrast to masses of Angustifolia lavandula ‘Hidcote.’

Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to get any elevation when shooting so the shape of the knot garden isn’t that evident from my photos. And the sun glared off the barberry leaves mercilessly.

Here you can get an idea of the sweeps of barberry, santolina and other plants used in the Knot Garden at Filoli, with the copper beech hedge in the distance. The sun’s glare on the barberry leaves is very evident.

A more tightly-cropped view of the same scene, with three of the rosemary standards visible from left to right, ending at an opening in the hedge.

Finally, I brought out the polarizer for my 24-120mm lens, and used it to cut the glare on the barberry shrubs. Here’s the result.

Now the barberry leaves, while a deeper red due to the polarizer’s effect, have lost their glare. And I like the line of the plantings as they lead your eye back to that little rosemary standard.

For more information on Filoli’s Knot Garden, click here. I have to say I didn’t experience the layout as two separate shapes as shown in this description, but gardens change over time. And I loved seeing the concept updated for a California climate!

The Gamble Garden, Redux

In mid-June, I found myself back in Palo Alto for my younger son’s graduation weekend. Since my body was on East Coast time the day after I arrived, I decided to head for the Elizabeth Gamble Garden, which I’d last visited in February several years back. I’d loved the garden’s “bones” and its topiary bunny, as well as its impressive collection of succulents, which can get through Palo Alto winters easily.

This time the area was awash in unusual heat, reaching up into the mid-90′s, but the garden looked beautiful and didn’t appear to be suffering. The bunny was still there.

A sunflower admires the topiary rabbit in the Gamble Garden in June.

Even though it was only a little after 8 a.m., the sun was already very bright, so I chose my shots carefully. Verbena bonariensis, scattered throughout the garden, looked especially nice in the rim lighting.

Verbena bonariensis, acting as a see-through scrim in the Gamble Garden with pink Agastache behind it.

Moving away from the harshest light, I found some other great plant combinations. The first one was a contrast of Santolina ‘Lemon Fizz’ (my thanks to the thoughtful volunteers who had labled it) combined with a blue-purple annual verbena. I loved the pop of the colors.

Santolina ‘Lemon Fizz’ and purple annual verbena in the Gamble Garden, contrasting nicely with a broader-leaved perennial in the upper right corner.

In the “let’s do monochrome” category, I liked the way some pink alstroemaria had been planted in front of red barberries.

Pink alstroemaria (variety unknown) in the foreground of a planting of red Berberis thunbergii.

In the end, one of my favorite images ended up being this one, where all the colors, despite their differences, seemed to work together. The small path light on the left works to balance the smoke bush on the upper right, I hope.

A path through the Gamble Garden in the early morning light.

And though my son doesn’t go to college here any more, I hope my travels will bring me back to revisit this garden in the future. Do see it if you’re in the area.

Summer at Chanticleer

Summer at Chanticleer marks the point at which this garden, outstanding in any season, starts to come into its own. For years the talented horticultural staff at the garden, who are given more or less free reign in their individual areas to experiment and change plantings, have sought to push the envelope in terms of zone hardiness, mixing tropicals into more sheltered areas and using them as annuals in others. The Serpentine starts to strut its stuff. The Cutting Garden overflows with offerings for containers inside and outside the Main House as well as the visitors’ restrooms.  This weekend I’m here at the garden, taking part in the current Master Garden Photography Workshop, with Roger Foley. Here’s a sampling of some favorite photos from past summers, in no particular order.

The Serpentine, planted in cotton

Another view of the cotton plants in the Serpentine

Agave and other plantings in the Gravel Garden

Plantings in the Teacup Garden in August

Sedum and some annual seed pods in the Tennis Court Garden in July

A view to some of the garden’s spectacularly painted chairs through the ginkgo-bedecked arbor at the back of The Serpentine.

An old beech tree which had died was painted this gorgeous shade of teal for a year before it was taken down.

A dahlia bud in the Tennis Court Garden

Brilliant craftsmanship is evident everywhere, even in the gates, in this garden.

Helenium, Russian Sage, and other perennials on the hill near the Gravel Garden and The Pond Garden

Near the Main House, gorgeous container plantings of succulents are everywhere.

A view of the hill plantings and in the distance, the Pond Garden, in summer.

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Garden Shoots will be on vacation until after Labor Day. See you in September!

Containers for the Shade

As I’ve confessed before, container planting isn’t my strong suit. Occasionally I get a burst of inspiration, but more often I consult my colleague Kripa here at Landscape Projects, who is a genius when it comes to putting together gorgeous pots. Here’s a sample, for a shady garden, which she created recently primarily using annuals we already had on hand.

I could look at this all day. I wish it were in my garden.

I love the simplicity and elegance of this design, created for a client who prefers only white flowers (with a touch of blue permitted – see the next photo).  The backdrop is a Boston fern from a ten-inch hanging basket (not hardy in the garden but gorgeous for summer), accented by Caladium ‘Ghost’ in front. White Scaevola and chartreuse Ipomaea ‘Sweet Marguerite’ (sweet potato vine) round out the composition. All the plants are shade-tolerant.  In a matching container not far from this one, white begonias joined the party, but I didn’t get a good shot of that one – it was in a sunnier area and the light wasn’t good. But trust me, it was just as beautiful.

In another part of the garden, Kripa played a variation on the white and green theme, adding just a touch of blue Lobelia.

After only about two weeks, this is filling out nicely.

In addition to the Lobelia, she used Caladium ‘Candidum,’ Swedish ivy, white impatiens, some golden creeping Jenny, and Ipomaea ‘Blackie.’ Oh yes, and another Boston fern (smaller this time). The client was thrilled – instant elegance and beauty, and all she has to do is water!

Of course, you can bring color into your shady area containers or back yard with annuals like coleus. Last summer I had a container on my deck where I took that approach, which I wrote about here. Of course, these were in the sun, but they would have worked in the shade as well with maybe just a few adjustments to the coleus I used.

This year, my own containers have been mixed – I now have so much sun in the front yard that I need to re-think my front step containers. But I did manage to create one back-yard container about a month ago that is working well so far. It began with a trip to Home Depot, where I was looking for light bulbs but instead had the great good fortune to find some unusual looking caladiums. I added a self-seeded ‘Lady in Red’ fern (Athyrium felix-femina ‘Lady in Red’) from one part of the garden, stole some variegated Carex (sedge grass) from another part of the yard, and voila:

The shade planter at the foot of my deck. The white flower hanging down over it is from a Ligustrum shrub.

What’s that lovely caladium named, I’m sure many of you want to know? So do I. The plant tag just said, “Shade plant.” On my way to my car two other gardeners stopped me and wanted to know its name and where I’d gotten it, but I had bought the only two on the shelf. It’s a dog-eat-dog world out there when you’re decorating a shade garden. I may not have Kripa’s talent, but I think I made up for it in sheer luck.

Update: Jen’s comment below prompted me to do some Internet research. The full Latin name of a caladium is apparently Caladium x hortulanum, but with a little sleuthing I discovered my find is a variety called ‘Cranberry Star.’ My thanks to Jen, for spurring me to work a little harder. Now if I can only replicate my luck next year!