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IDEASpage 26
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contentsnovember/december 2010
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Features34 italy inspired To create this Palm Beach landscape, the
design team of Sanchez & Maddux drew on their love for tropi-cal plants and classic European gardens. By cara greenBerg
44 JacK FrOst: Master gardener Frost is the beautiful bane of the late-fall garden. It stops plants in their tracks, turns the backyard into a sparkling wonderland, and gives gardeners a welcome respite from their labors. By Valerie eastOn
52 pOwer FlOwers The editors asked top-flight floral design-ers to craft arrangements especially for Garden Design. Here are the ravishing results. By williaM l. haMiltOn
departMents6 editOr’s letter/cOntriButOrs
8 Fresh A new park in Brooklyn; the James Rose Center re-thinks suburban gardens; floral art by Bella Meyer.
16 plant palette The poinsettia is the quintessential holiday plant. But these varieties—in pink, orange, white, and marbled—will make you think beyond traditional red.
22 liVing green A lush low-maintenance meadow and a very sustainable house in Pennsylvania are proof that an energy-conscious state representative knows how to walk the walk.
26 style Our editors have picked a collection of holiday gift ideas that are perfect for any gardener.
64 grOundBreaKer Author, gardener, artist Amy Goldman is the champion of heirloom edibles.
70 sOurceBOOK A listing of products and services mentioned and shown in our pages.
76 One shOt Landscape architect Randy Thueme creates a stunning wall of copper in a small San Francisco garden.
on the cover Designed by Sanchez & Maddux, this Palm Beach land-scape was inspired by Old-World gardens. phOtOgraphy By rOBin hill
2 gardendesign.com nov/dec 2010
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More than almost anything else in our lives, gardens teach us the great, reassuring value of change.
I’m always reminded of this as the holi-day season approaches. With the arrival of the short, chilly days of winter, I take a lot of pleasure in looking back at the fl eeting progression of our gardens: the promise of spring in a seed; the beauty of summer in the soft warmth of the air; the bounty of fall and its last fruits; the festivals of harvest and thanks; and, in December, the blackness of winter nights, which always gets me to pon-dering life on earth in all its cosmic variety. Can winter be upon us already?
Well, it is. And, stealthy though its arrival may have been, I welcome this season with open arms. In fact, the joys of winter are what this issue of Garden Design is all about. The haunting beauty of the year’s fi rst frosts, those harbingers of harder weather to come, is the subject of Valerie Easton’s evocative essay on page 44, “Jack Frost.” In “Power Flowers” on page 52, William L. Hamilton describes the fl oral arrangement techniques that bring color and beauty indoors, shar-ing inspired holiday ideas from some of the best fl oral designers around. And on page 34, writer Cara Greenberg gives us a health-ful wintertime dose of warm Mediterranean beauty, by way of South Florida, with her arti-cle on a remarkable garden designed by the
Palm Beach–based fi rm Sanchez & Maddux, “Italy Inspired.” And that’s just a taste.
So, raise a glass of something fi zzy and join me in toasting the season. Because it won’t be long before the year will have faded into history. And the season will be over, just in time for us to begin again, with even more wisdom and eagerness. We can’t wait to see you again in January. We’ll have some new beginnings of our own to celebrate at Garden Design, and there are plenty of sur-prises in store.
—James Oseland, Editorial Director
SEASON OF CHANGE
Robin Hill, who pho-tographed the Sanchez & Maddux–designed garden featured on pages 34–43 (“Italy Inspired”), welcomes the arrival of winter in Miami, where he has lived since 1992. “The winter season in South Florida brings clear blue skies and excep-
tional light,” says the British-born photographer. “The cooler temperatures mean the air condi-tioner gets turned off , the windows are open, and we can enjoy longer bike rides, mosquito-free eve-nings, and comfortable walks.” Hill’s images have appeared in numerous publications, and from 2005 to 2008 he was the host for the Suncoast Regional Emmy-winning public television series Art 360˚. robinhillphotography.com
Valerie Easton, whose musings on frost (“Jack Frost: Master Gardener”) appear on pages 44–51, tends a beautiful home garden on Whidbey Island in Puget Sound, about 25 miles from Seattle. In this part of the Pacifi c Northwest, frosts don’t typically herald the end of the gardening
season, but she lets her garden slumber during winter regardless of the weather. “Even though we can garden year-round in the Northwest, we don’t have to,” she says. “In the winter I love to catch up on novels and go to yoga class.” Easton is a regular garden writer/columnist for Pacifi c Northwest Maga-zine of the Seattle Sun Times. Her latest project is her recently released book, The New Low-Maintenance Garden (Timber Press). valeaston.com
Arrangement by David Stark
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fresh
Nowhere has this been truer than in Brooklyn Heights, a stately old neighborhood, which is bordered by the East River and has two mon-
umental bridges and Manhattan’s glittering skyline for a backdrop. Until recently, along this prime stretch of riverfront abandoned
warehouses sat forlornly on piers in varying states of disrepair, sep-arated from the neighborhood by a roaring expressway and a chain-link fence.
But last spring, after two decades of wrangling among community members, real estate developers, city officials, and environmental activists, the first phase of the long-awaited Brooklyn Bridge Park, with
a landscape design masterminded by Brooklyn/Cambridge–based Michael Van Valkenburgh Asso-ciates, opened to the public, giving new life to the old industrial waterfront. The New York Times heralded it as “one of the most pos-itive statements about our culture we’ve seen in years.”
Regina Myer, the president of Brooklyn Bridge Park, the
The remains of a pile field from the original
structure of Pier 1, left in place for its arresting
play of pattern, harks back to the history of
the site.
A new pArk in brooklyn suburbAn gArdens trAnsformed florAl Artist bellA meyer
Down by the RiversideBy CaRa GReenBeRG
For a city with 578 miles of coastline, New York in the post-steamship era has had a remarkably inaccessible waterfront.
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Someday, Brooklyn Bridge Park will stretch for 1.3 miles along the East River and beyond, with a six-acre marina, fishing piers, paddling waters, jogging trails, and much more. About 10 percent of the site will be revenue-generating housing, including a 30-story tower, a hotel, retail stores, restaurants, and parking—none of it on the piers themselves but on the uplands or mainland portion of the site. The piers will be devoted to recreation. Piers 1 and 6 are already nearly complete; here’s a preview of what’s in store for Piers 2 through 5: Pier 2 The original steel frame of an existing shed building, with a new translucent roof designed by architect Maryann Thompson, will house six basketball courts and 10 handball courts, plus in-line skating tracks, bocce courts, and other game areas. Construction is not yet scheduled. Pier 3 The most remote spot in the park—that is, farthest from the two entrances—will be a setting for large-scale civic and cul-tural events on informal lawns connected by wild plantings. Construction is not yet scheduled. Pier 4 A collapsed gantry (bridge system) will be cut free of the shore and transformed into a bird habitat. Construction is to begin in 2011. Pier 5 Three soccer fields with artificial turf and night lighting are expected to get heavy use, along with a picnic peninsula. They are scheduled to open in 2012.
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nonprofit entity responsible for the planning, construction, maintenance, and operations of the new public space—which will eventually comprise six piers and a strip of mainland connecting them and extending north to the Manhattan Bridge—is even more effusive: “This is the most significant park development in Brooklyn since the building of Prospect Park in 1873,” she says. “It’s a symbol of New York’s optimism, reconciling its industrial past with a genius design that uses the latest sustainability practices, all while providing spectacular views and activities.”
The park’s narrow, curving shape is dictated by the existing industrial footprint. So far, only Piers 1 and 6, at opposite ends of the park, have opened, and both immedi-ately began drawing crowds. Some 8,000 people showed up on an open-air movie night last summer on Pier 1’s expansive lawns, while others came to picnic, launch kay-aks, bird-watch, even do Pilates. Pier 6, where innovative
playgrounds are linked by meandering paths, quickly became a destination for young families. “It’s been extraor-dinarily gratifying, after 25 years of work and dreams, to see the light in people’s eyes when they enter the park and see the magnificent harbor views and amazing playgrounds,” says Nancy Webster, executive director of the Brooklyn Bridge Park Conservancy, the nonprofit citizens’ advocacy group, founded in 1988, that was instrumental in fundrais-ing and coordinating the complex efforts needed to bring the park into being.
Pier 1 is the heart of the project so far, a majestic reimagin-ing of six flat, exposed acres, which have been transformed into a topographically and ecologically varied space. “The big move was building a 30-foot hill in the middle of the pier,” says Matthew Urbanski, a principal with Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates. “In one act, we got a horseshoe-shaped lawn facing the harbor and the Statue of Liberty,
➊ A path through Pier 1’s uplands wends past a re-created salt marsh on the right and a water garden on the left. Riprap forms a stone edge where once there was a bulkhead. The Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, at left, kept the waterfront separated from the neighborhood for decades. ➋ Sedges grow in a canal-like segment of Pier 1’s water garden.
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another lawn oriented to the bridge view, a valley in between that we call the Vale, and the granite prospect”—a flight of wide stone steps overlooking the river that doubles as stadium seating for the towering city view. The man-made hill also serves to redirect storm water into underground cisterns, which provide 75 percent of the park’s irrigation needs.
Giving visitors a “dynamic relationship with the water,” as Urbanski puts it, has been a major goal. Pier 1 includes a boat ramp for non-motorized craft and a section of nat-uralistic shoreline where a bulkhead wall was replaced with riprap and plantings of Spartina (smooth cordgrass) in order to create a salt marsh—an attempted return to the days when the East River estuary was an importantecosystem for birds and fish.
Hundreds of trees have been planted on Pier 1, most in atypical ways. “Instead of making a lawn and scatter-ing trees on it, we made stylized hedgerows that parallel
the main paths through the park,” says Urbanski, who chose multi-stemmed specimens of Kentucky coffee tree, London plane tree, and honey locust. “In a short time, they will make shaded tubes of space.” At the top of the granite prospect, a grove of tough Catalpa bignonioides (southern catalpa) and Paulownia tomentosa (princess tree) provide a place to pause and take in the view, while the Vale is filled with deciduous conifers like dawn red-wood and bald cypress, which give additional shade. Rifts of sumac, bayberry, and sassafras will also run through-out the park.
All this is just the beginning. Two-thirds of the park, eventually to total 85 acres, will be completed by 2013. When the final third will be done, no one is saying. “The park was designed as an ensemble, a col-lection of different experiences,” Urbanski says. “There’s much more to come, and it’s not more of the same.” see soUrcebook for more informAtion, pAge 70
➊ A 1.6-acre “desti-nation playground” on Pier 6 includes such attractions as a two-story-high “slide mountain” that emp-ties into a sandbox filled with stone animals, a “swing valley,” innovative climbing structures, and water play areas.
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➊ Artist Bella Meyer, seen here hold-ing an abundant arrangement of roses, peonies and calla lilies, has been enthralled by flowers since childhood.➋ Memories of Meyer’s grandfather, artist Marc Chagall, continue to influ-ence her work and she has inherited his love of color and storytelling. ➌ Earlier this year, Meyer opened her new floral shop, Fleurs Bella, near Union Square.
Today, Chagall’s granddaugh-ter—the New York City–based artist and floral designer Bella Meyer—has turned her grandfa-ther’s custom on its head, using objects of nature to create repre-sentations of the world around her. Asked recently to create a flo-ral display for a benefit honoring one of the owners of the Empire State Building (proceeds went to the Natural Resources Defense Council), Meyer chose art deco–style centerpieces to echo that iconic landmark’s motifs; arrange-ments included purple calla lilies and tulips, and silvery-gray dusty miller, with each design rising from shiny, architectural pots set on metal trays—“a little skyline,” as she calls it. For a concert at the Brooklyn Academy of Music featuring Shaker spirituals, she created a display of burlap linens and plain white planters filled with herbs. The 55-year-old Meyer, who was born in Paris and stud-ied art history at the Université Paris-Sorbonne, says her love of flowers was inspired by trips to Chagall’s home near Nice in the South of France when she was a child. “We’d never visit with-out stopping at the local market and getting a big bouquet of flow-ers. It was a gesture of love and respect.” Earlier this year, Meyer opened a shop called Fleurs Bella in New York City’s Union Square area; the arrangements on display demonstrate that the designer has inherited her grandfather’s ability to tell stories through color and natural beauty. fleursbella.com
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An Artistic Legacy in FlowersBy LisA CregAn
On completing a painting, the great early-20th-century artist Marc Chagall would allegedly hold up an object of nature—a rock, a branch, a flower—and compare it to its counterpart on the canvas to see whether his work evoked the essence of the thing. l
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■ Modern Revival (Sausalito, CA), Ive Haugeland/Shades of Green Landscape Architecture,
shadesofgreenla.com (shown far left) ■ Midcentury Revival (Sarasota, FL), Dane Spencer
Landscape Architecture, danespencer-landscapearchitect .com (shown, left) ■ Water
Treatment Facility as Neigh-borhood Asset (New Haven,
CT), Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates, mvvainc.com
(below) ■ The Carriage House Garden (Amherst, MA),
Joseph S. R. Volpe Associates, umass.edu/larp/faculty/jvolpe
■ Remembering Their Effort (Dallas, TX), Lisa L. Jenkins
■ Latitude: 41° 24’ 39” Longi-tude: -73° 20’ 32” (Newtown,
CT), Billie Cohen, Ltd. Landscape Design Studio,
billiecohenltd.com ■ Pamet Valley (Truro, MA), Keith
LeBlanc Landscape Archi-tecture, kl-la.com ■ Schain
Residence: Applied Sustain-ability (Brooklyn, NY), Dinorah
M Melendez Architecture & Landscape Design/Todd
Haiman Landscape Design, dinorahm-melendez.com,
toddhaiman.com ■ A Subdivision in the Sand
(Amagansett, NY), Dirtworks, PC Landscape Architecture,
dirtworks.us ■ Front Ridge Res-idence (Penobscot, ME),
Matthew Cunningham Land-scape Design, matthew
cunningham.com
A competition changes the status quo in residential landscapes
In the sea of cul-de-sacs and cookie-cutter develop-ments that has come to characterize North America’s suburbs, there is a cultural shift under way, one that is making conservation and sustainability an integral part of the everyday suburban residential environ-ment. That shift is precisely what inspired Suburbia Transformed, a provocative competition and exhibi-tion mounted this year by the James Rose Center for Landscape Architectural Research and Design in Ridgewood, New Jersey. The competition, according to the call for entries, aims to recognize “solutions to the ubiquitous small-lot, detached single-family, residential condition in the hope that we may better understand how to transform suburbia.”
The 10 residential landscapes honored in the com-petition—and showcased in a companion exhibition at the Rose Center this past fall—were chosen by jury from among a variety of submissions by garden design-ers, landscape architects, architects, and homeowners from around the country, and internationally.
The guiding spirit of Suburbia Transformed—and the research center’s namesake—is the iconoclastic landscape architect and theorist James Rose (1913–1991), most often remembered as one of the three Harvard students who rebelled against their Beaux Arts training in the 1930s and who helped to usher the profession of landscape architecture into the modern era. “Rose incorporated a conservation ethic into a modern design aesthetic for the residen-tial garden,” says Dean Cardasis, the director of the James Rose Center, which is housed in Rose’s 1953 residence and has been open to the public since 1993. In Rose’s view, successful residential environments are “neither landscape nor architecture, but both; nei-ther indoors, nor outdoors, but both.”
Cardasis adds, “the winning projects represent all kinds of different environmental problems.” He is also the head of the new graduate program in land-scape architecture at Rutgers, the State University
of New Jersey. The designs addressed issues such as shoreline erosion control, storm-water retention, and habitat restoration, and utilized in their solutions recycled and sustainably produced materials and low-water-use plantings.
Among the projects recognized was landscape architect Dane Spencer’s exterior revival of a mid-century cinder-block ranch house in Sarasota, Florida. The renovations added solar roof panels, a 3,000- gallon rainwater cistern (disguised as a planter), native plantings, and permeable surfaces. “I wanted to show that all these sustainable solutions are great in and of themselves,” Spencer says, “but if they blend in with the surroundings and work with the site, it’s more successful.”
For his clients in Penobscot, Maine, landscape designer Matthew Cunningham replaced a vast expanse of intensively fertilized lawn with a meadow of native grasses, wildflowers, and clover to achieve greater biodiversity and reduce maintenance and water use. In Sausalito, California, Ive Haugeland of Shades of Green Landscape Architecture removed a dead lawn and replaced it with an attractive pattern of gravel and cast-in-place linear pavers—a modern and permeable surfacing solution that dovetails with both the home’s modern architecture and the site’s coastal setting.
The success of the first competition has prompted a second one, with the call for entries in spring 2010. “We will continue with the theme Suburbia Transformed,” says Cardasis, “because this subject hasn’t been fully exploited yet. While many people are doing ‘green design,’ we feel it is also important to recognize inspir-ing, sculptural, and artistic experiences in the suburban landscape.” For more information visit jamesrose center.org. see sourcebook for more information, page 70
suburban revolution
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Winner’s Circle
nov/dec 2010 gardendesign.com 15
plant palette
Poinsettias have become as entwined with our Christmastime traditions as carols and mistle-toe. Last year, 100 million of them were sold in North America. And it’s no wonder. There’s something magical about poinsettias. Sparked by shortening days, they burst forth with daz-zling color just as the world outside turns gray and cold. Right on cue, tiny topknots of flowers jut from colorful yellow pockets (called cyathia) while the bracts—actually modified leaves—take on colors that sing to you from across the room.
Poinsettias have come a long way from their Mexico-native species, Euphorbia pulcherrima. Decades ago, poinsettias (named for the 19th-century ambassador to Mexico Joel Poinsett) were bred to have broader and brighter leaves. But that was only the beginning. Now there are many more forms to seduce us, with bracts embellished by streaks, marbling, zigzags, speckles, and creamy hems; others with dramatically curled bracts; and still others that impress with their size, from huge specimens to itty-bitty pocket-size ones. And then there are the colors: deep crimson, flaming orange, peach, and many other hues. There’s nothing blah-humbug about poinsettias these days—they’ve entered a new age.
Poinsettias That PopBy Tovah MarTin ■ PhoToGraPhy By roB CarDiLLo
1 ‘ICE PUNCH’ Marbling is all the rage in poinsettias. On this version from Ecke Ranch, lightning streaks of white embla-zon the heart of red, holly leaf–shaped bracts. “What is cool,” says Jack Williams of Ecke, “is that ‘Ice Punch’ looks like frost has landed on the bracts.” And this poinsettia keeps getting better; week to week the central streak is joined by more white.
The Ecke family is credited with brokering the poin-settia’s Cinderella transformation from a tall, lanky species into the beautiful plant we know and love. In1911 their California nursery, begun by Albert Ecke in 1906, turned its full attention to poinsettias. Later the discovery of a chance seedling in 1963 transformed the poinsettia from holiday cut flower to lush, compact superstar. To mark the centennial of its focus on poin-settias, Ecke Ranch is introducing the rich-red cultivar ‘Red Jubilee’ this December.
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16 gardendesign.com nov/dec 2010
Life’s best moments. furnished.
Visit our website at www.SummerClassics.com to find a dealer in your area and view our seven new collections for 2011.
rustic coLLection
2 ‘CAROUSEL PINK’
Who would have thought we’d be describing poinsettia bracts as wavy, frilly, or frothy? All are apt descrip-tors for the salmon-pink bracts of this cultivar, from Syngenta Flowers. As with its sister ‘Carousel Dark Red’, this poinsettia begins showing color in late November. Given their curliness, the bracts are a tad smaller than your average wide-winged poinsettia. But the Carousel types branch beautifully to form a broad, strong plant that can be transported easily from the garden center without fear of damage.
4 ‘CINNAMON STAR’
Although red is still king for poinsettias, holiday revel-ers are also excited by other hues, especially around Thanksgiving. In fact, 20 to 30 percent of poinset-tias sold throughout the early holiday season sport alternative shades rather than the traditional red. Syngenta Flowers is the mastermind behind this luminous coral colored version. Given the season, cinnamon seemed like the perfect name. ‘Cinna-mon Star’ boasts a rounded shape with expansive, almost winged bracts, and the younger central bractsbegin with a darker sizzle before fading paler with the countdown to the winter holidays.
5 ‘WINTER ROSE EARLY RED’
No less than 30 years in the making, this novelty started the “nontraditional” streak at Ecke. For poin-settia breeders, the holy grail has been a flat-bracted, big red poinsettia. So it came as a welcome shock 14 years ago when a funky little version with a pageboy hairdo was the talk of the trials. Four years ago, the Early Series hit the scene and, quoting Jack Williams from Ecke, “something good got better.” Not only has ‘Winter Rose Early Red’ revolutionized the holiday con-tainer-plant market, it also made a splash with florists looking for a new spin on holiday décor.
3 ‘WINTER BLUSh’
One of the most recent bombshells to land on the poinsettia market and the latest example of the marble trend is ‘Winter Blush’, introduced two years ago. This Ecke variety was chosen for both its pat-terned foliage (peach and yellow twilight colors dance around the veins) and for the pronounced contrast between the pink centers and the cream etching on the margins of its bracts. Bring it to friends and fam-ily as a holiday gift without fear—the strong stems withstand breakage. It’s also prone to linger long in average home conditions.
plant palette
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53
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P U L S E MiamiDec 2 – 5, 2010The Ice Palace1400 N. Miami Avenue(Corner of NW 14th Street)Miami, FL 33136
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C O N T E M P O R A R Y A RT FA I R
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plant palette
Nature, NurtureZones: Poinsettias will not
withstand a frost and can
be killed if temperatures
go below 50 degrees for
an extended period. That
means getting a poinsettia
home during the holidays
can be dicey if you live in
colder zones. Avoid leaving
your new purchase in an
unheated car, and protect it
with a light covering when
transporting it from store
to car or car to home. The
ideal temperature for grow-
ing poinsettias is between
65 and 70 degrees.
Exposure: Poinsettias need
short days to form their
bracts. When you purchase
a poinsettia for the holi-
days, it’s primed and ready
to perform and will keep
on looking good for sev-
eral weeks no matter where
it’s displayed. To make your
poinsettia last even longer,
give it as much natural light
as you can in midwinter,
except in hot south-facing
windows. Soil: Average pot-
ting soil is fine if you’re
repotting your poinsettia.
Overwatering is a com-
mon killer. Remove any
foil around the container
that might inhibit drain-
age. Generally, watering
once a week will suffice if
you moisten the soil thor-
oughly. Avoid wetting the
foliage. Care: Since poinset-
tias are blooming but not
growing when purchased
for the holidays, fertil-
izer isn’t necessary. Proper
light, water, and warmth
will help plants resist pests.
The latex in poinsettias
can cause a dermatological
reaction in some people—
play it safe and wear gloves
when grooming. All parts
of the poinsettia plant are
mildly toxic, so keep the
plants away from children
and pets.
6 ‘ORANGE SPICE’
Originally, orange poinsettias were only imagined and wished for. Early attempts were actually just a yellowish shade of red rather than their own spin on the spectrum. All that changed with the chance discovery of an orange-colored seedling at Ecke Ranch. The bracts of ‘Orange Spice’ are long, sleek, and graceful, highlighted against dark foliage. But the biggest news is the color. A true, burn-ing sunset orange like never before, it can even be used for Halloween decoration. Better yet, it holds for Thanks-giving and is still going strong at Christmas.
8 ‘WHITESTAR’
Pink was the first non-red poinsettia color to become popu-lar, in the late 1960s, but white was not far behind; the first white poinsettias were introduced in 1970. Nearly 30 years later, Syngenta Flowers came out with ‘Whitestar’, with its huge, smooth, flat bracts flaring out like doves from the central topknot of flowers. ‘Whitestar’ has a rounded habit, is generously branched, and will show color in time for Thanksgiving.
9 ‘PREMIUM PICASSO’
“Jingling” is the term breeders use to denote white speckling on poinsettia bracts. ‘Premium Picasso’, by the German plant breeder Dümmen, delivers an especially diffuse, seemingly airbrushed look. Against a pinkish white background, cheery cherry red flecks spangle the bracts immediately encircling the yellow and red central cyathia, which are the plant’s true flowers. Meanwhile, the outer bracts range from pure white to palest pink. The effect is a two-toned fantasia.
7 ‘MARS MARBLE’
The earliest marbled poinsettias, pioneered in the 1970s, were almost all based on red. Now other colors have joined the party, notably Syngenta Flowers’ ‘Mars Marble’, with its soft, delicate pink and equally demure milky cream colors on open-faced, smooth-edged bracts. This poin-settia starts to show color early, and the plant maintains a sturdy, upright posture.
6 8
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20 gardendesign.com nov/dec 2010
The Cultural Landscape Foundation is pleased to announce the 2010 Landslide selections
Photo ExhibitThis year, for the fi rst
time, TCLF has partnered
with American Photo to
create an original traveling
exhibition about these seminal trees. The images, by
prize-winning and renowned photographers, capture
the magnifi cence, grandeur, and uniqueness of these
extraordinary specimens and help reveal their stories.
See more images in the November 2010
issue of American Photo.
Since its inception in 2003, the Landslide initiative has spotlighted more than 150
signifi cant at-risk parks, gardens, horticultural features, and working landscapes.
� ese horticultural specimens, many under threat, stand as living reminders of our country’s past and have the potential to witness future generations.
Every Tree Tells a Story
Photo by Bob H
ower
Landslide 2011 > Call for Nominations
www.tclf.org/landslide Deadline: March 31, 2011
Aoyama Tree
Los Angeles, CA
Arborland Old Growth Tree Farm
Milliken, CO
Tulip Poplar
Tudor Place, Washington, D.C.
Cummer Oak
Cummer Museum of Art, Jacksonville, FL
Sycamore Row
Ames, IA
Olmsted Parks and Parkways
Louisville, KY (Pictured)
Boxed Pines
Weymouth Heights, Weymouth, NC
Japanese Flowering Cherry Trees
Branch Brook Park, Newark, NJ
Elms of East Hampton
East Hampton, NY
Black Oak Tree
Katewood, Bratenahl, OH
Río Piedras Ficuses
San Juan, PR
Commonwealth Avenue Mall
Boston, MA
The Cultural Landscape Foundation
P R E S E N T I N G S P O N S O R
A D D I T I O N A L S U P P O R T
living green
The dining terrace at the Ross home affords
an ideal view of the meadow garden.
22 gardendesign.com nov/dec 2010
She didn’t want a geodesic dome, a manicured landscape, or wild-life out of sight across the fields. Chris Ross had another, perhaps loftier, goal: he saw the project as an opportunity to demonstrate to constituents and colleagues the potential for sustainable living. A longtime proponent of responsible energy use, Ross has a record of sponsoring legislation to that effect, including the Alternative Energy Portfolio Standards Act of 2004, as well as efforts to establish mini-mum requirements for electricity conservation; he recently helped usher a bill through the House on recycling electronic waste. Of his own house and garden he says, “This place enables me to see how green issues work on the ground.”
Beyond those basic imperatives, the Rosses gave local architect Matthew Moger—then with Lyman Perry Architects but now a princi-pal of Moger Mehrhof Architects—and landscape architect Jonathan Alderson freedom to work their own nature-meets-art magic. As Alderson explains, “I consider the Ross garden a sensitive marriage between sustainability and aesthetics.” In order to achieve a synchro-nistic end result, Moger and Alderson collaborated in tight tandem. What was initially a blank-slate property in the midst of urban fields and farms, 15 miles from Wilmington, Delaware, was ultimately trans-formed into an earthy, sleek home with all the sustainable amenities, surrounded by a low-maintenance meadow.
The Rosses had been eyeing the three-acre property, adjacent to their previous house, for several years, and bought it in 1997. After their two children moved out, the Rosses decided it was time to create their dream home next door. So in 2003 they tore down the existing 1970s house, demolished the concrete swimming pool, and started from scratch, clearing everything essentially down to bare dirt.
Though the new house incorporates all manner of modern green technology (a green roof, a storm-water collection system, solar panels—the Rosses even sell excess energy back to the grid), Moger
Proving GroundA homestead in rural Pennsylvania becomes a standard-bearer for sustainable stylesToRy by JENNy ANDREWs PhoToGRAPhy by Rob CARDILLo
At the entrance, grasses and sedges create a soft, green
backdrop for the orange-tinged,
rough-textured trunks of river birch
trees.
When Cecilia Ross, the wife of Pennsylvania state representative Chris Ross, laid out her require-ments for a new house and garden in the horse country of southeastern Pennsylvania, the guide-lines were simple: to get off the electrical grid, put the garden close at hand, and keep mainte-nance idiotproof.
nov/dec 2010 gardendesign.com 23
living green
and Alderson also heeded old principles of good sit-ing to achieve energy-conservation goals. The Ross home employs such smart construction concepts as channeling natural breezes (the Rosses rarely use air conditioning), taking advantage of shifting sunlight patterns through the seasons, and creating an earthen ramp for insulation and wind protection during cold weather. As forward-thinking as the house’s design is, its architectural style is a snug fit for the locale. It incorporates local Avondale stone, and it bears a strong resemblance to traditional “bank barns,” which are partly embedded in the side of a hill.
As for the garden, it serves as the connective tis-sue for the site, relating the newly built elements to the neighboring agricultural and wild proper-ties. Alderson, along with landscape designer Chris Pugliese, who acted as the project manager, accom-plished this by creating a meadow that is, in his words, “blended at the edges” with the surrounding terrain. The result, says Cecilia Ross, is a home-stead that has “not only a sense of place, but also its own identity. The house and garden stretch the
imagination and make you think about the materials in more expansive and imaginative ways.”
In building the landscape, Alderson didn’t truck away any materials accumulated during construc-tion; he sculpted excess soil into an earthen ramp andrecycled the concrete from the old swimming pool into a base for the driveway. Throughout the process he also remained sensitive to the garden’s relation-ship to the house, making sure he created views from all the windows. On the north side, outside the living room, the grade was built up as a ramp to provide winter insulation, but it also puts the landscape at eye level so that the Rosses can see the garden even when they’re sitting down.
Given Chris Ross’s role in the public sector, the Rosses entertain often and host numerous events at their home, but they also want areas that are all their own. Accordingly, both the house and the garden comprise subtly delineated private and pub-lic spaces. Though the couple wanted to limit the amount of lawn on the property, one was included in the project to accommodate larger gatherings. For more-intimate family get-togethers, the Rosses
1
3
➊ Before the project began, the property was a barren land-
scape that included a 1970s ranch house, lawn areas, and
a swimming pool. ➋ Even the container plantings reflect the meadow theme. ➌ In a scene
that exemplifies the horse-coun-try nature of the area, one of
the Rosses’ horses grazes near the meadow garden, which
smoothly segues to fields and pastureland beyond. Echinacea purpurea is in full bloom, while
Amsonia hubrichtii (at right) adds a feathery texture. ➍ At the entrance to the terrace, a plant-
ing of Sedum ‘Autumn Fire’ softens the edges and coral hon-
eysuckle (Lonicera sempervirens ‘Cedar Lane’) climbs the stucco
columns. Much of the stone used for the project is local
Avondale stone. Beneath the gravel drive lies a base partly
made up of concrete from the old swimming pool.
TO
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24 gardendesign.com nov/dec 2010
favor their cozy dining terrace. A stone wall, a raised landform, and screening plants create the line of demarcation between the two areas but not in a way that obviously interrupts the landscape. And the plantings smoothly transition from bold gestures in the “public” spaces to complex, subtle patterns in the “private” spaces.
To make the half-acre meadow, Alderson chose native species and their cultivars, and stuck to suppliers within a 50-mile radius of the location, par-ticularly North Creek Nurseries, a wholesale grower based in nearby Landenberg. Not only did North Creek offer the material Alderson was seeking, but they grew plants as plugs, which are smaller than plants sold in quart or gallon containers but have big, healthy root systems. North Creek founders Steve Castorani and Dale Hendricks even developed a guide for contractors and designers, showing them how to plant the plugs for optimum success. Says Alderson, “It’s amazing what you can do with plugs if you prepare the site and time the planting right. You need a client who’s willing to wait just a little longer, but the plugs are half the cost of larger plants per square foot and in 15 months’ time you have a phenomenal garden.”
The Rosses are indeed clients who appreciate the process. Even though the first two years were chal-lenging, especially when it came to staying ahead of the weeds (like invasive, nonnative thistle, which
blows in from nearby fields), Cecilia says the trans-formation of the property was instantly captivating. “In the first summer,” she says, “I thought, ‘This is so cool.’ And I love how it changes all the time. A thunderstorm is so much fun; we go from window to window to get different views.” Adds Chris, “It’s like watching the curtain come up.” Even in what most would consider a garden’s downtime, the Rosses are enthralled, and they have called Alderson in midwin-ter to tell him how much they’re enjoying the garden. “It’s a dynamic, changing thing,” says Alderson, “not a series of rigid blocks.”
Planted in early May 2006, the garden is now a flourishing meadow alive with birds and insects. On the green roof, where initial plantings of grasses
died, seeds of native switch grass drifted in and took hold, visually taking the meadow up with it. Joe-Pye weed and sedges have found new spots for them-selves. Birch trees shade the house in summer but allow warming sunlight through bare branches in winter. “I’ll be really interested to see what happens in the next 10 years,” says Alderson. “Will the garden still resemble the planting plan? We as designers can think about a space and make an intervention, but it’s temporary. It humbles you.” see sourcebook for more information, page 70
the meadow garden is resplendent in its
late-summer glory, with black-eyed susan, Joe-pye
weed and Eupatorium hyssopifolium in full bloom.
Making a MeadowOnce established, a meadow garden requires only basic maintenance and little water. But it takes time and money to get it under way—no one believes anymore that you can just throw a can of seeds on the ground and stand back. There are several approaches, depend-ing on your budget and space. Remember to choose species appropriate for your area. Seeds If you have a big space and a small budget, seeds can be the best choice. They are cheaper,
there is a good selection of spe-cies, and they are available year-round. But it is difficult to control placement, the germina-tion rate won’t be 100 percent, weed control will be labor inten-sive, and the meadow will take longer to mature. Plants If you have a smaller space and/or more money, installing plants can speed the maturing process and provide better placement control. They are available in a variety of sizes, but at the Ross garden, small plants called “plugs” were the top choice. Plugs are cheaper than larger plants, and quicker to establish than seeds. Combination You can also employ a mix of plants and seeds. Some species are more readily available in one form or the other, so a com-bination can lend diversity. Installing plants of “backbone” species can establish structure and bring instant gratification. Then seeds can be sowed among the plants.
To see more of this garden, go togARDENDESIgN.COm/ROSSgARDEN
nov/dec 2010 gardendesign.com 25
26 26
STORY BY DAMARIS COLHOUN ■ PHOTOGRAPHY BY TODD COLEMAN
GARDENER’S GIFT GUIDE
Luxury Digs Hermès, the
French fashion
house known for
its handbags and
scarves, also sup-
plies the gardener
with a bit of style:
hand-forged
stainless steel,
cherrywood-han-
dled tools (set of
pitchfork, dibble,
and trowel, $345),
and cotton canvas
Demeter garden-
ing gloves. $310.
Available at all
Hermès stores;
for locations, visit
usa.hermes.com
The Constant Gardener
Avid gardeners
can never have
too many hats to
protect themselves
from the sun. With
black stitching
detail, this braided
raffi a hat travels
nicely and has a
UPF of 50+. $48.
shopterrain.com
28
Terrariums are the perfect way to grow a miniature col-lection of plants indoors. We especially like this classic version called Lantern. $88. shopterrain.com
Artful Botany Help out an urban-dwelling, blossom-loving
friend. These brassy, modern fl owers brighten darkened corners
and bring pizzazz to empty walls. $45 to $85.
jaysonhomeandgarden.com
The Collector
Lesley Hansard and Rebecca Welsh design these folksy and bright handmade felt slippers, crafted with the help of artisans in Nepal. $48. hwd-felt.com
Northern Zones
With its sleek design, Riccardo Paolino and Matteo Fusi’s Cucuruku White Tree Clock turns traditional cuckoos on their heads. In a nod to its funkier ancestors, a little bird pops out on the hour, except at night, when a light sensor keeps him quiet. $490. conranusa.com
Early Riser
�
�
�
�
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A Gardening Legend Austin-based artist
Leah Duncan has deco-
rated trays, coasters, note
cards, and runners for
Teroforma. Named Wild-
flowers + Powerlines, the
collection was inspired
by Lady Bird Johnson’s
campaign for national
beautification, which, in
the 1960s, saw sweep-
ing banks of wildflowers
planted alongside U.S.
highways. Six coasters,
$45. teroforma.com
Magical Thinking Mixing various
colors of stone-
ware clay, Berke-
ley-based sculptor
Marcia Donahue
shapes, fires,
and carves lively
clusters of acorns.
$27.50 to $37.50.
415-864-2251.
livinggreen
.com
Impressive Greetings Yee-Haw Industries in Knoxville, TN,
sells a variety of hand-printed note cards
with a “Farmer’s Market” theme, pro-
duced with its collection of antique letter-
presses. All cards and their envelopes are
printed on recycled paper. A miscella-
neous set of five is $20. Several diffierent
selections are available.
yeehawindustries.com
32
Gardeners are readers and recorders, always on the lookout for new ideas and advice on gardening, and ready to take notes on what they’ve seen. Below is a selection of recent works on a variety of subjects.
All-Weather Birder’s Journal (Rite in the Rain), $12, shopterrain.comThe Dirt Cheap Green Thumb Book (Sto-rey Publishing), $10.95, sprouthome .com For the Birds (Stewart, Tabori & Chang), $19.95, shopterrain.com What’s Wrong With My Plant (and How Do I Fix It)? (Timber Press), $24.95, amazon.com From Seed to Skillet: A Guide to Growing, Tending, Harvesting, and Cooking Up Fresh, Healthy Food to Share with People You Love (Chronicle Books), $30, chroniclebooks .com The New Encyclopedia of Gar-dening Techniques (Mitchel Beazley/Octopus Books), $30, amazon.com
DIY Heirloom D. Landreth Seed Company is the oldest seed
company in the U.S. It offiers 12 types of heirloom seeds, which
arrive with a guide in a vintage-look burlap sack; these include
Christmas Pole lima beans, Calabrese broccoli, Viroflay spin-
ach, and Chervena Chujski peppers. $24. shopterrain.com
Winter Reading
33
History Buff
When Carl
Friedrich Philipp
von Martius,
a professor of
botany, and
Johann Baptist
von Spix, a zoolo-
gist, returned in
1820 from the
Amazon Basin,
where they’d
spent three years
collecting and
sketching every
species of palm
they encountered,
the men were
knighted by the
King of Bavaria.
The Book of Palms
does justice to the
pair’s landmark
achievement,
an exquisitely
drawn history of
palm trees. $150.
taschen.com
Italy InspIred
stOry By Cara GreenBerG phOtOGraphy By rOBIn hIll
A South FloridA lAndScApe by SAnchez & MAddux
iS reSplendent with old-world chArM
Arches cut out of massive Cuban laurel hedges are a deco-
rative and functional leitmotif throughout the property.
36
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Terry Rakolta has no trou-ble reeling off words to describe what she desired
for her South Florida waterfront property, a wedge-shaped half-acre mostly swallowed up by a Mediterranean-style villa. “I wanted charming, romantic, mys-terious, Old World,” she says. “I just didn’t know how to get there from a big house sitting on a lot.”
Achieving this sublime vision fell to the Palm Beach–based landscape architecture firm of Sanchez & Maddux, known for their synthesis of classical Euro-pean garden design elements with exotic tropical plants. The term they use to describe their signature style—“the civilized jungle”—is also the title of a book about their work published last year by Grayson Publishing.
Some initial landscaping had been done in the mid-1990s, when the house was built, but Rakolta was never completely satisfied with it. A few years ago, she contacted principals Jorge Sanchez and Phil Maddux, her head filled with images of north-ern Italy’s lake district. The
eventual result was an exten-sive redo of hardscaping and plantings. “We removed all of the walkways and some of the plants,” says Sanchez. “We left the swimming pool and a little terrace, but that’s about it.”
The most difficult challenge was the water view. The house faces the Lake Worth lagoon, which is lovely, but the buildings on the opposite bank less so. “The view could have been either beautiful or common, depend-ing on how it was handled,” says Sanchez. A clever workaround was needed.
Rakolta and her husband, John, who use the property as a winter getaway (they also have homes in New York, Harbor Springs and Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, and are building a home in Aspen), often joined by their four children and four—soon to be five—grandchildren, also wanted more privacy. “Boats would anchor and look in at us,” she says, a prob-lem since the early days, when the new house was surrounded by a “moonscape,” with not a sin-gle tree.
1.Vaux-le-Vicomte, Maincy, France A few years before
creating Louis XIV’s
park at Versailles,
landscape archi-
tect André Le Nôtre
participated in the
design of this mile-and-a-half-long 17th-
century garden, which was the dominant
structure of a great complex of water basins
and canals, fountains, gravel walks, and pat-
terned parterres. Sanchez describes the
garden succinctly: “Grandeur—completely
over the top.” vaux-le-vicomte.com
TOP 4 INSPIRATIONAL GARDENS
37
The distinctive arched hedges hug the sides of the swimming pool, rendering it
private and a bit mysterious.
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On a trip to Italy’s Lake Como, Rakolta had noticed hedges with arches cut out of them. She pro-posed a similar approach to taming the too-open view of the waterway. “Everyone fought me on it, saying, ‘You paid so much for the water view, why hide it?’ Only Jorge said, ‘Good idea.’” The sculpted hedge, comprising Ficus
retusa (Cuban laurel) formed into arches, runs about one-third the length of the property’s 200-foot waterfront, between the lawn and a newly built sea wall, and also encloses the swimming pool on two sides. “You get views to the water without it being shown completely, while the eye tends to skip over the buildings across the way,” says Sanchez. “There’s a little bit of mystery.”
The irregularly shaped spaces around the sprawling house were organized as a series of outdoor rooms, each with a strong charac-ter of its own. The most dramatic of these is defined by an allée of eight towering date palms, which create a long view to the water
from the house’s front entrance. “It feels to me like a cathedral,” says Rakolta, who plans to put a long harvest table in that serene space.
Moving counterclockwise from there, on the more for-mally designed waterfront side of the house, there’s the rectangular-shaped swimming pool “hugged by hedges, which makes it very private,” Sanchez says. A recessed open-air dining loggia, overlooking the lawn, is “a gathering place,” used for enter-taining, says Rakolta: “I like to set tables on the grass.” Paved with coquina, a locally quarried, pale-colored stone, and topped by a bougainvillea-clad pergola, the loggia could very well be some-where in the hills of Italy.
A tiny waterside terrace with footed urns brings in still more of what Rakolta loves about Italian gardens. There’s a change in ele-vation here, says Maddux, an expert on rain forest plants who has worked with Sanchez since 1980. “The terrace drops from
2.Chatsworth, Derbyshire, England Sanchez loves the
“broad sweep and
scope” of the work
of Capability Brown,
the landscape archi-
tect commissioned
by the fourth Duke of Devonshire to trans-
form his baroque estate in the fashionable
naturalistic style of the 18th century. Brown
converted most of the existing ponds and
parterres to lawn, but important earlier fea-
tures, including the Cascade, in which water
flows over 24 stone steps, and the Seahorse
and Willow Tree Fountains, as well as a clas-
sical temple, were spared. chatsworth.org
39
Clad in bougainvillea, a per-gola tops the dining loggia.
The homeowner also likes to set tables on the lawn.
40
The dining loggia, a covered open-air patio modeled closely on classical European architecture, overlooks a lawn used for entertaining.
41
Peace lilies surround a stone rill and fountain designed by Terry Rakolta,
the homeowner, in collaboration with Jorge Sanchez, in a “jungly” area ap-
propriated from a former driveway.
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mirrors set within lattice arch-es create an illusion of great depth, making the property appear more expansive than it is. Opposite top: Bougainvillea ‘New River’.
43
3.Dumbarton Oaks, Washington, D.C.Pioneering land-
scape architect Beatrix
Farrand’s most nota-
ble work, accomplished
between 1922 and 1940,
was closely modeled on
Italian Renaissance gardens. Formal terraces step
down a steep slope, dissolving into more natural-
istic effects toward the creek that runs along the
bottom of the estate. “Farrand had an incredible
eye for detail,” notes Sanchez. doaks.org
4.Generalife, Granada, Spain “Placid pools and
private spaces” are
among the features
Sanchez admires
at the 14th-century
palace of Spain’s
onetime Muslim rulers. Reorganized in the
1920s and ’30s by landscape designer Torres
Balvas in classical French style, the Generalife
is famous for its crenellated hedges, pool court,
and bay laurel–draped staircase. alhambra.org
the level of the house to the sea wall. The drop is only a couple of feet, but the illusion is that it’s a lot more than that,” he explains. “You look out the windows of the den and you’re right on the water,” Rakolta says. “It’s very Venetian in feeling.”
Bougainvillea ‘New River’ climbs the walls of a brick-paved interior courtyard with a circular wall fountain, next to which, in space reclaimed from an oversized driveway, Sanchez & Maddux created an informal, intensively planted area, referred to as “the jungle.” Here the classical sym-metry and careful balance of the more formal waterfront areas give way to a naturalistic style.
Closing off part of the origi-nal driveway with a decorative iron gate to create the space was a “stroke of genius,” Rakolta says. Centered around a big banyan tree, with curved brick walkways and plantings inspired by the rain forests of South America, this hidden garden is redolent with the seductive fragrance of Cananga odorata (ylang-ylang) and Michelia champaca, a mag-nolia relative (think Joy perfume). “It’s wonderful in the evening,” Sanchez says. “Usually one or the other is in bloom, and it makes the space very romantic.”
Clusters of sky-blue blooms of Thunbergia grandiflora hang from above, while different varieties of palms, Heliconia (the “rhododen-dron of Florida,” Sanchez calls it, for its ubiquity), gingers, orchids in pots, bananas, chalice vine, and confederate jasmine, fill this part of the property with tropical scent and splendor.
Not all of the antecedents for the landscape are Italian. Sanchez counts the Generalife gardens next to Spain’s Alhambra pal-ace (whose origins date to the 9th century), with its “placid pools, squirts of water, and little private spaces,” among his inspi-rations for the Rakolta property. Andalusian gardens are histori-cally designed to “draw the eye,” as Sanchez says, offering tanta-lizing glimpses from one discrete space into the next as you move through them. So it is at the Rakoltas’ home. “You can take a short walk and find different views,” Maddux says. “You don’t see everything all at once.”
Terry Rakolta knew she was asking for a lot, but she got it. “I’m more than happy,” she says. “Until we redid the garden, I really wasn’t too excited about the house. Now I feel the love.” SEE SOuRCEBOOk FOR mORE INFORmATION,
PAGE 70
An early frost coats each blade of grass and every twig in this silvery landscape.
Jack Frost: Master GardenerSTORY BY VALERIE EASTON
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It also works constructive magic. Without a period of serious cold, tulips won’t bloom in the spring, and lilacs and peonies won’t set flower buds. Instead of killing parsnips and collards, frost sweetens them and is said to boost their overall quality. Frost also gives the garden a break from slugs, snails, aphids, Japanese beetles, and many weeds.
Although winter can be like a slap in the face after a warm, lingering autumn, there’s usually plenty of warning. Chill fall mornings find roofs and evergreens delicately coated with sparkling white; then, as the day warms up, the garden rebounds, fluffs out, and continues to bloom and fruit as if never nipped. These light, teasing frosts can go on for weeks, but the time will come—in September, October, or even November, depending on your lati-tude and altitude—when the temperature dips into the mid-20s and a hard, killing frost will have its way with your garden. After weeks of frosty flirta-tion, this time most plants without a stout woody stem will be reduced to compost. Winter has arrived in the garden, no matter what the calendar says.
As soon as I’ve started to pull on warm gloves and a wooly hat before going outdoors, I’m on the lookout for hints of that first seri-ous frost. In anticipation of its inevitable arrival, I dig the dahl-ias and cart pots of aeoniums and fragrant-leaved geraniums indoors. I rush out to pick the last raspberries and the ‘Sungold’ tomatoes, turned sweeter by their brush with the impending freeze. I pull pots close to the house for protection and spread a blanket of insu-lating mulch over beds and borders. When the frost still sits lightly on the pumpkin, it’s time to pick the last of the zucchinis, tender lettuces and herbs, grapes, and green tomatoes.
Still, no matter how much I’ve prepared myself and my garden for that first killing frost, it’s a shock to wake up and find the entire scale and density of it all changed overnight by startling destruction. It’s as if frost turns the garden transparent, paring away
the massings of summer to reveal the underlying structure. New and unexpected sights are exposed, and light penetrates the garden, the sunrays weak and slanting but welcome all the same. In most climates, frost comes and goes through the winter months, but its effect on the garden lasts until foli-age returns in spring.
There are few more dismal sights than a lovely clump of coleus taken down overnight, but the arrival of frost brings plenty of pleasures, too. It turns conifers and ornamental grasses to tawny shades of bronze and russet. Hydrangea heads take on soul-stirring hues of burgundy, mauve, and mossy green. The subtle splendors of tree bark, dangling berries, pods, and cones come into their own once frost has done its work to expose them. Finally I see the birds I’ve only heard rustling through the tree branches all summer. My terrier runs around the garden barking wildly at foraging squirrels she’s suspected were there but hadn’t been able to get a bead on before the garden died down.
Before modern meteorological forecasts, people predicted weather by careful observation and mem-ories of seasons past, much as gardeners tend to do even today. My mother, who taught me to gar-den, believed that her naked ladies, a k a Belladonna lilies, foretold frost dates. She swore by an old wives’ tale that first frost hits six weeks
from the date these pink lilies drop their blooms. As far as I’m concerned, feeling the weather “in
your bones” is as good a way to anticipate frost as any chart or map of averages. So is stepping outside on an autumn evening to sniff the air—in many parts of the country, a cold, clear night, with glitter-ing stars and a brilliant moon, is a sign that frost is on its way. Will tomorrow be the day?
There are myriad types of frost, their quality and appearance dependent on temperature and the amount of moisture in the air. When the air is dry and the temperature barely freezing, frost can look as ephemeral as the lightest dusting of pow- a
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Degrees of FrostMaybe we should think of frost not as a great destroyer, but as something more akin to, say, rain or shade. We moni-tor drizzle and downpours for how deeply they penetrate the soil. We pay close attention to whether shade is partial, light, or deep, knowing it makes all the difference as to what can grow in it. Frost has its own variables and can be catego-rized by its effect on plants: In a light freeze the tempera-ture dips just below freezing, to 29 degrees, killing only the tenderest of plants, including tomatoes. A moderate freeze, between 25 and 28 degrees, causes destruction of blos-soms, fruit, and semi-hardy plants. A heavy or killing frost means the temperature has dropped to 24 degrees and below, bringing an end to herbaceous plants and the gardening season. If you’re a precise type of gardener who counts backward from the firstkilling frost to determine veg-etable planting dates, check out the average frost-date map in the Farmer’s Alma-nac (farmersalmanac.com/weather/2007/02/14/average-frost-dates), which chronicles the normal averages for the first and last frosts around the country. Be aware, however, that there’s a 50 percent possi-bility of frost occurring earlier or later than these dates. Frostdates, though based on harddata, are really just a conve-nient way to look at seasonalweather changes.
Many plants hold up quite well to a light frost, rebounding as the sun melts it away. Left: Heuchera ‘Chocolate Ruffles’. Opposite: The last roses of the season.
Frost is a beautiful assassin. One wintry morning, we wake to a gar-den silvered with ice, the product of simple chemistry: water vapor
forms frost when surface temperatures it comes in contact with are below freezing. Crystalline white replaces autumnal browns and greens. Tree branches glisten. Conifers look as if flocked for Christmas. The swaying inflorescences on ornamental grasses sparkle and shine like diamonds. My children used to vie to be first out the door to crunch their boots across the newly frosted lawn, leaving a trail of footprints. Frost transforms the world, then melts away as quickly as chocolate on the tongue.
“Frost is the greatest artist in our clime—He paints in nature and describes in rime.” —Thomas Hood
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One reason to refrain from cutting back perennials at season’s end is to enjoy the architectural quality of their seedheads in winter, especially when rimmed with frost. Shown here are purple coneflower and sea holly (opposite).
51
“All that is gold does not glitter, not all those
who wander are lost; the old that is strong
does not wither, deep roots are not
reached by the frost.”—J.R.R. Tolkien
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dered sugar. At the other extreme is hoarfrost, which on cold, clear nights encrusts surfaces with a thick, white fuzz of feathery ice crystals.
In my part of the Pacific Northwest, we don’t often get hoarfrost. But one morning late last November my garden was coated in what looked like a dense albino pelt—could it be frozen fog? Each ice crystal was so long and thick that the frost looked pettable. A little urn holding sedum became an object of strange beauty when touched with hoarfrost, and I was sorry to look out at noon and see it gone, my garden now plain by comparison.
Then there is black frost, glazed frost, ground frost, and air frost. The rapscallion Jack Frost, an elfish creature of English and Scandinavian folktales, was held responsible for fern frost, the patterns etched across windowpanes on cold mornings. When I was little, it was a treat to help my dad scrape the intricate frost patterns off the car windshield. Sometimes the ice lay in fine swirls on the glass; other mornings it was as thick as fur.
Beware especially the frost pocket, which can damage even hardy plants. Because cold air sinks, it
tends to pool in low-lying areas, creating spots where frost hits earlier and lingers longer. When a frostis brief, plants can bounce back, but if it lasts sev-eral hours or more, it ruptures cell membranes by freezing the moisture inside the leaves and stems. Plants then blacken and seem to melt, or in the case of perennials, die down and go dormant until the warmth of spring coaxes them out of the ground again.
But isn’t the first hard frost something of a relief?
It signals an end to dragging hoses about, pulling weeds, and deadheading flowers. In fact, what I most appreciate about frost isn’t its fleeting beauty or its transformative effect on my garden. What I love best is how frost clears my calendar of routine garden chores as surely as it winnows out the plants in my garden. Only after a killing frost puts the gar-den decidedly to bed do I have guilt-free time to read a novel or go to the movies. The garden is at rest, and we are too, for a few months, anyway.
Opposite: Spent blossoms of Hydrangea paniculata. Above:
A blanket of frost can highlight the “good bones” of a formal
garden, delineating every edge and curve of clipped hedges
and garden ornaments.
For more on frost in the garden, go to gardendesign.Com/Frost
53
Our “A-list” pArty experts shOw yOu hOw tO mAke
yOur hOlidAy tAble the tAlk Of the tOwn
sTORy By WIllIam l. HamIlTOn ■ PHOTOGRaPHy By mICHaEl KRaUs
pOwer flOwers
When Nicholas Apps, direc-
tor of special programming
and events at the Museum
of Modern Art in New York,
throws a party, he knows
who to call to make it
superb. So, too, the directors
at the Metropolitan Museum
of Art, the Frick Collection,
and other well-known insti-
tutions. We asked for their
favorite floral designers and
made our own calls. They
created six arrangements for
the home, exclusively for
Garden Design.
54
➎
➌
➋
➊
➏
➍
Stark, whose clients include Rachael Ray, Tiff any &
Co., and the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, cre-
ated two arrangements for us. An assembly of beautiful
bottles (below) deconstructs a formal spray and makes
it easy to arrange; a dressy silver palette of whites and
steel-blues (right) is set in a glass container with a clip-
art collar, giving the vase an inexpensive antique look
that you can change at will.
David Stark Design & Production
55
Materials include: ➊Ranunculus ➋ rex begonia ➌ drumstick allium blossoms ➍ minia-
ture pomegranate branches ➎ blue Viburnum berries ➏ dusty miller ➐ Echinops
➑ French anemones ➒ silver Brunia ➓ white tulips
SUBSTITUTIONS: Use your favorite vases or bottles (as seen far left) to create your own
still life; with a clever clip-art vase as its base (above), any tumble of whites and blues—
hydrangeas, lavender, paperwhites, rosemary—would work.
➐
➓
➑
➒
56
➊
➌
➋
➊
57
Materials include: ➊ an Anthurium clarinervium leaf ➋ red ‘Indian Summer’ calla lilies ➌ green
Cymbidium orchids ➍ Mokara Red Azacoff orchids ➎ white Dutch hydrangea ➏ aspidistra leaves
SUBSTITUTIONS: The arrangement is based on making a big statement, not intricacy. Banchet
suggests alternates of ‘Green Goddess’ calla lilies for the green orchids, white roses or tulips for
the hydrangea, red roses for the red callas, red hypericum berries for the Mokara orchids, Monstera
for the Anthurium clarinervium leaf.
Banchet Jaigla, whose clients include Diane von
Furstenberg and HBO, created an unexpected,
exotic holiday arrangement that would work in a
guest bedroom as well as in a hallway or on a din-
ing table or sideboard. Inspired by her childhood
in Thailand, it features a simple, tightly edited
grouping of bold, colorful, graphic elements. The
inside of the glass vase is wallpapered with foliage
to hide the arrangement’s stems.
Banchet Flowers
➏
➎
➍
58
A. Choose a vase, and cut a piece of chicken wire wide enough to form into a ball that can sit in the opening of the vase. Push the ball halfway into the vase: this will secure your branches.
B. Using your largest branches first, build a form and sil-houette that you like. Thompson favors asymmet-rical shapes, with some branches hanging down toward the table and some reach-ing up, for a more naturalistic effect.
C. Wire the stems of fruit onto wire skewers that can be inserted into the arrangement and secured to the branches, leaving enough length of wire skewer so that the fruit will either be at the sur-face of the leaves or dangle below the arrange-ment. Then add the most delicate elements, like grasses and flow-ers, filling in and extending beyond the leaves in a spray.
➊
Materials include: ➊ ‘Purple Majesty’ millet ➋ bittersweet ➌ magnolia leaves
➍ purple clematis flowers ➎ pinecones
SUBSTITUTIONS: Shape, height, and form dramatize an arrangement of rel-
atively ordinary elements. Oak and magnolia leaves could be replaced with
chestnut, sweet gum, pear, or plum leaves. Any type of grain, such as wheat or
broomcorn, would do the expressionistic, skyrocketing work of the millet. Fall
fruits look perfect for a Thanksgiving table; orchids would make the piece par-
ticularly elegant for New Year’s Eve.
59
➋
➎
➌
➍
Emily Thompson, whose clients include the
Horticultural Society of New York, based her
arrangement on a belief that humble materi-
als can have as strong an impact as hothouse
flowers. She chose oak and magnolia branches
for shape, and millet for texture. Pears,
grapes, and plums add color and cue the eye
for a banquet feast.
Emily Thompson Flowers
60
➌
➋
➊
6161
Materials include: ➊ lotus seed pods ➋ ‘Schwarzwalder’ calla lilies
➌ chocolate cosmos ➍ Scabiosa seed pods ➎ fern fiddleheads ➏ ‘Amnesia’ roses
➐ Cymbidium orchids ➑ purple artichokes
SUBSTITUTIONS: Other seed pods, berries, or succulents would work to bring
texture and shape to the arrangement. Van Vliet recommends dark-colored dahl-
ias or miniature dark sunflowers for the orchids, any other blush- or sand-colored
roses such as ‘Sahara’ or ‘Silverstone’ for the ‘Amnesia’ roses, miniature eggplants
or plums for the artichokes, field flowers or grasses for the fern fiddleheads.➑
➐
➏
➍
➎
Remco van Vliet, whose clients include
Ralph Lauren and the Metropolitan
Museum of Art, created an arrange-
ment largely based on texture: the use of
many textures in the same family of col-
ors lends peace to the eye, rather than
the chaos typical of grander arrange-
ments, a strategy that van Vliet equates
with a painter’s technique. As a fi nish-
ing touch, he let go the vase in favor of a
twig bowl, which becomes a part of the
design. He calls it a “Dutch still life” —
not surprising since van Vliet is Dutch.
Van Vliet & Trap
➋
Lewis Miller, whose clients include Gucci and the New York Public
Library, created an arrangement based on the winter-forest associa-
tions of wood and bark, and red, the season’s signature color. Pillar
candles, the quintessential holiday lighting, complete the look. The
pillars are wrapped like gifts at the bottom like gifts and set on ped-
estals of tree-branch sections. Most of the elements can be found
easily at local fl ower shops, garden centers, and craft stores.
LMD New York Lewis Miller Design
➊
➌
63
A. Staple the bark to a plain pine
box: in addition to craft stores, there
are good online resources for
birch bark, such as birchbarkstore.com, which also
sells fi replace logs to create the can-
dle pedestals.
B. Cut the candle pedestals to the desired heights.
Line the pine box with plastic—a heavy-duty gar-bage bag cut to fi t is fi ne—and
fi ll with Oasis fl o-ral foam, which will support the
arrangement. It is available at craft
stores or from online sources.
Start by arranging around the perim-
eter of the box, to conceal the
edges of the con-tainer. Continue to fi ll in the cen-
ter, varying height to create depth
and movement.
C. Wrap the pillar candles with gros-
grain ribbon and fasten with pins. Wrap the ribbon
with natural rope, such as linen
twine or raff a, for a textural, organic
contrast.
➍
Materials include: ➊ ‘Black Magic’ roses ➋ ‘Piano’ cabbage roses
➌ silver Brunia ➍ Protea nana
SUBSTITUTIONS: Miller says the flowers were chosen for their rich
color and contrast against the white tones of the birch bark. Red-on-
red flowers are complemented by the silver Brunia, which also relates
to the silver in the bark. Another color palette different from red would
also work, if it’s uniform. Miller suggests natural cork or green sheet
moss as an alternative to the birch bark.
When it comes to preserving traditional varieties of fruits and vegetables, Amy Goldman is a force of nature
StorY BY BiLL mArken
A barnful of squash, har-vested from Amy goldman’s
garden, waiting to be sorted, weighed and graded,
then photographed for her book in an improvised studio
in a corner of the barn.
groundbreaker
HEIRLOOM ACTIVIST
64 gardendesign.com nov/dec 2010
She says this year she’ll probably decorate with cheese pumpkins, which resemble a wheel of cheese with an exterior that looks likes terra-cotta—too fibrous and coarse for eating but beautiful to stack. For a side dish, she may cook a favorite winter squash such as ‘Musquée de Provence’, a variety that was introduced to American gardeners 111 years ago and, as one of her books describes it, the “color of milk chocolate and just as addictive.” Goldman says she thinks of Thanksgiving as a harvest festival, and the holi-day reflects much of what she has been doing in the ground, in print, and in public for three decades.
While scientists and agricul-tural experts continue to press the case for genetic diversity, and organizations such as Seed Savers Exchange and a few mail-order companies (including Burpee) do their part
to collect, store, and disseminate seeds of heirloom plants, Goldman has a more direct approach to promoting precious varieties from the past. She makes us want to grow them and eat them. Cultivating edibles and cooking the harvest have been passions for Goldman since she was a teenager growing up on the NorthShore of Long Island. With both parents (her mother a gardener herself) offering encour-
agement, she sprouted seeds in a greenhouse, grew tomatoes, corn, melons, squash, and other vegeta-bles, and planted an orchard and grape vines. Later, while work-ing as a clinical psychologist in upstate New York, she always man-aged to have a plot in Rhinebeck bursting with good things to eat. In 1990, after her leeks and red onions won blue ribbons at the Dutchess County Fair, there was
no stopping her. Five years later, her pro-duce hauled in 38 blue ribbons, making her the fair’s grand-champion winner, thanks in large part, she says, to “mastering the growing
Above: The bump-encrusted rind of the turban squash ‘Marina di Chiogga’ masks highly edible golden insides. Author Amy Goldman (below) describes this Italian heirloom as an oddball, “born to be gnocci and ravioli.”
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s If you’ve looked at any of Amy Goldman’s beautiful, authorita-tive books on heirloom produce, you have a mental picture of what her Thanksgiving table will look like.
nov/dec 2010 gardendesign.com 65
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of squash,” the competition’s largest category of vegetables.
Then she fell in love with heirlooms, those often curiously named open-pollinated vari-eties of fruits and vegetables passed down by generations of farmers and gardeners which have typically been shoved aside in the stampede toward produce developed for commercially appealing looks and durabil-ity in shipping. She credits her conversion to the seminal 1990 book on preserving genetic diversity, Shattering: Food, Politics, and the Loss of Genetic Diversity, by Cary Fowler and Pat Mooney. Reading it, Goldman says, turned her into a “card-carrying seed saver, collec-tor, and advocate” of heirloom edibles. As Goldman says, “Fowler’s and Mooney’s warn-ings about the dangers of genetic uniformity and seed monopoly were prescient. To create a more bountiful future, we need to preserve the vast genetic reservoir of food crops that is our heritage. Extinction happens when seeds are not passed along to the next generation, when the new replaces the old, and the old is
not conserved.” In 1997, Goldman won a Golden Trowel
award from Garden Design magazine for her vegetable garden, and soon the avid gardener went from being the subject of articles to being a contributor, writing articles on mel-ons, peppers, and cabbages. A few years later, Goldman asked New York City–based fine-arts photographer Victor Schrager to collaborate on a book about heirloom melons based on what she had learned growing them in her 1¼ acres of gardens in Rhinebeck. Schrager improvised a studio in Goldman’s barn, where she would cut the melons, taste them, and, says Schrager, “pronounce them fabulous or fit only for the local pigs.” Schrager would arrange the winners on sawhorses and shoot them with a large-format wooden Deardorff view camera.
groundbreaker
Above: named for Amy Goldman’s father’s gro-cery store in Brooklyn, this is ‘Goldman’s Italian American’ tomato—blood red, deeply ribbed, and considered multipurpose though it’s recommend-ed for sauce.
66 gardendesign.com nov/dec 2010
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fountains in cast stone, lead and bronze, weathervanes,
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www.klynchandsons.com
8 | summEr cLassIcs A manufacturer of fine
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www.summerclassics.com
9 | tELEscopEs oF VErmontThe Garden
Telescope is a permanent sculptural garden installation and
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10 | tuscan Imports, Inc. Importer of
handmade Italian terra-cotta and lightweight poly planters.
www.tuscanimports.com
11 | WaLpoLE WoodWorKErs Since 1933,
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12 | WooLLy pocKEt GardEn company Meet Woolly Pockets. The ideal way to
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For evidence of just how highly esteemed heirloom fruits and vegetables have become these days, you need look no further than Sotheby’s in New York City. There, on a late September afternoon, an auctioneer stepped to the podium to sell just that: prized ‘Ozette’ potatoes, ‘Lady Godiva’ squash, ‘Isis Candy Cherry’ tomatoes, packets of open-pollinated heirloom seeds, and other rare treasures. A single crate of heirloom vegetables sold for $1,000. The auction event, “The Art of Farming,” was a day of seminars and a recep-tion and dinner—organized with the help of advocates like Amy Goldman, and farm-to-table movement visionaries—to raise money for GrowNYC’s New Farmer Development
Project, which supports and educates immi-grants with agricultural experience to become local farmers, and for the Sylvia Center at Katchkie Farm, a New York–based nonprofit that strives to teach children good nutritionthrough hands-on experience with gardening and farming. Given Sotheby’s involvement, much was made of the heirloom vegetables’ artistic, sculptural appeal. Not everything on the block that day was edible. Among the lots was a limited-edition set of Amy Goldman’s bronzed squashes.
Heirlooms on the Block
Above: Sotheby’s auctioneer Jamie niven takes bids for crates of heirloom vegetables and produce-related art, including a squash painting by P. Allen Smith.
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nov/dec 2010 gardendesign.com 67
Free Catalog 800- 469-0118 www.CharlestonGardens.com
groundbreaker
Melons for the Passionate Grower came out in 2002 to instant acclaim, garnering such recog-nition as the American Horticultural Society’s Annual Garden Book Award.
The melon book also staked out Goldman’s strong advocacy for heirlooms. She disparaged many modern hybrids as “the green bowling balls that pass for watermelons or the melons posing as cantaloupes in grocery stores across America.” And she makes the point that sub-lime taste and fascinating histories are only part of the reason to grow heirloom varieties: “We need their germplasm,” she writes. “With-out their genetic diversity, we will be prey to ever more virulent pests and diseases.”
Goldman’s second book, The Compleat Squash: A Passionate Grower’s Guide to Pump-kins, Squashes and Gourds, published in 2004, had an equally earnest mission: “to catalog these marvels before they disappear.”
But Goldman’s most ambitious work, six years in the making, is The Heirloom Tomato: From Garden to Table: Recipes, Portraits, and History of the World’s Most Beautiful Fruit, pub-lished in 2008. Of nearly 6,000 estimated cultivated tomato varieties, she grew over 1,000 different types, 200 of which made it into the book. The work reflects Goldman’s nearly lifelong aversion to standard supermar-ket hybrid tomatoes, which she describes as “a tool of industry and the market economy.” Heirloom tomatoes, on the other hand, are “designed to be homegrown…living legacies…valued by generations of gardeners.” As the book amply attests, heirloom varieties are as impressive to look at as they are to taste: the yellow and green stripes of ‘Green Zebra’, or the stunning orange, yellow, and pink flesh of ‘Gold Medal’. Often their names offer tan-talizing hints of the cultivars’ rich histories: ‘Nebraska Wedding’, for example.
Cary Fowler, Goldman’s early role model and executive director of the Global Crop Diversity Trust, wrote the preface for The Heir-loom Tomato. “How, then, can we ensure that these wonderful varieties do not go the way of the dinosaurs and the dodo?” he writes. “We are in the midst of a mass extinction event in agriculture at precisely a moment in his-tory when diversity for further adaptation is most needed.”
Over the years, Goldman’s activism has extended beyond gardening and writing. In 1991, she became a member of the Seed Savers Exchange, a nonprofit formed in 1975 to save and share heirloom seeds—and a major source of her seeds when she first started growing heirlooms. She’s been
68 gardendesign.com nov/dec 2010
J E N S E N L E I S U R E
F U R N I T U R E
The Ruby Rocker by Jensen Leisure
Furniture is a true heirloom treasure that
will be passed down through generations.
Handcrafted using 100% FSC pure ipe wood
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joinery, the enduring Ruby Rocker is the
quintessential accent to any veranda,
porch or outdoor deck.
www.jensenleisurefurniture.com
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a Seed Savers board member since 2001, and in 2007 she became chairperson of the board. Since Goldman came on as board chair, membership in the organization has significantly increased. She says she is espe-cially proud of Seed Savers’ contribution of hundreds of heirlooms to the Svalbard Global Seed Vault in Norway. Chiseled into a mountain, the Doomsday Vault, as it is col-loquially known, stores seed collections from around the world as a safeguard against the extinction of the genes of plants that may be valuable in the future.
This fall and winter, Goldman is continu-ing to support the work of Seed Savers and doing book tours as she develops ideas for another book. Last spring and summer, while researching, she filled her garden
with some 400 varieties of eggplant: round, oval, bat-shaped, purple, green, white, from ‘Antigua’ to ‘Zebrina’. But by August, she realized, “My heart wasn’t in eggplant.” She scrapped that idea. She’s now firming up her planting plan for next year, which will include the usual melons, squash, and tomatoes plus, we can hope, other heir-looms that can form the basis of a next book based on her heart and hands. See Sourcebook for more information, page 70
above: Using plain backgrounds and dramatic lighting, photographer victor schrager posedmelons to reveal their distinctive exteriors and luscious flesh. this is ‘Jenny Lind’, named after the celebrated soprano and introduced around 1846. goldman’s book points out its characteris-tic “outie belly button at its blossom end.”
This November and December, Garden Design
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sourcebook
Emily ThompsonEmily Thompson Flowers323-896-1494emilythompsonflowers.com
Remco van VlietVan Vliet & Trap212-352-3385 vanvlietandtrap.com
groundbreaker / p. 64Amy Goldman rareforms.com
The Heirloom Tomato: From Garden to Table: Recipes, Portraits, and History of the World’s Most Beautiful FruitBloomsbury, 2008
The Compleat Squash:A Passionate Grower’s Guide to Pumpkins, Squashes and GourdsArtisan, 2004
Melons for the Passionate GrowerArtisan, 2002
Seed Savers Exchangeseedsavers.org
one shot / p. 76GARdEn dESiGnERRandy Thueme designSan Francisco, CA415-495-1178 randythuemedesign.com
FuRniTuRETerrain at Styer’sGlen Mills, PA610-459-2400styers.shopterrain.com or shopterrain.com
features• p. 34“iTAly inSpiREd”GARdEn dESiGnERSJorge Sanchez and phil MadduxSanchez & Maddux, inc.Palm Beach, FL561-655-9006sanchezandmaddux.net
• p. 52“powER FlowERS”FloRAl dESiGnERSBanchet JaiglaBanchet Flowers212-989-1088 banchetflowers.com
lewis MillerlMd new york lewis Miller design212-614-2734lmdfloral.com
david Starkdavid Stark design and production718-534-6777davidstarkdesign.com
plant palette / p. 16“poinSETTiAS ThAT pop”plAnTSEcke RanchTo the tradeinfo@pauleckepoinsettias .com
Syngenta FlowersTo the trade800-344-7862syngentaflowersinc.com
living green / p. 22GARdEn dESiGnERJonathan AldersonJonathan Alderson landscape ArchitectsWayne, PA610-341-9925jonathanalderson.com
ARchiTEcTMatthew MogerMoger Mehrhof ArchitectsWayne, PA484-343-2099mmarch.net
plAnTSnorth creek nurseriesWholesale onlyLandenberg, PA877-326-7584northcreeknurseries.com
fresh / p. 8 “down By ThE RiVERSidE”GARdEn dESiGnERMichael Van Valkenburgh AssociatesCambridge, MA617-864-2076Brooklyn, NY718-243-2044mvvainc.com
pARK inFoRMATionbrooklynbridgepark.orgbrooklynbridgeparknyc.org
“An ARTiSTic lEGAcy in FlowERS”BouTiQuEFleurs Bella55 East 11th StreetNew York, NY 10003646-602-7037fleursbella.com
“SuBuRBAn REVoluTion”conTEST inFoRMATionJames Rose center for landscape Architectural Research and designRidgewood, NJ201-446-6017jamesrosecenter.org
postal information Garden Design, Number 169 (ISSN 0733-4923). Published 7 times per year (January/February, March, April, May/June, July/August, September/Octo-
ber, November/December) by Bonnier Corporation, P.O. Box 8500, Winter Park, FL 32790. © Copyright 2010, all rights reserved. The contents of this publication may not be repro-
duced in whole or in part without consent of the copyright owner. Periodicals postage paid at Winter Park, FL, and additional mailing offices. SuBScRipTionS: U.S.: $23.95 for one
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We welcome all editorial submissions, but assume no responsibility for the loss or damage of unsolicited material. AdVERTiSinG: Send advertising materials to Attn: Garden Design Ad Man-
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Foxgloves
Classic design, superior performance,
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From the Studio of George Carruth
The work of George Carruth has been enjoyed by collectors for more than 25
years and we thank you for helping to support this little company in Waterville,
Ohio. Visit our studio or shop online to see more than 250 original sculptures
cast in stone for years of pleasure indoors or out. George’s desire has always
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800-225-1178
www.carruthstudio.com
2010 Gift Catalog Is Now Available
Our annual gift catalog provides unique gift ideas for gardeners, woodworkers,
culinary and outdoor enthusiasts, as well as toys for children. In addition to
traditional items, we offer unusual gifts you can’t find just anywhere.
View the digital edition of our annual gift catalog online or call to have a print
copy mailed to you free. When you’re ready to order, shopping is just a call or
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800-683-8170
www.leevalley.com
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David Austin Roses
David Austin’s English roses combine the wonderful forms and fragrances of old
roses with the repeat flowering of modern roses. Our new collection for 2011
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Call toll-free to request your free copy of David Austin’s 120-page Handbook of
Roses, featuring six new English roses. Please quote code GD22.
800-328-8893
www.davidaustinroses.com
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Calico Juno Designs
Beautifully crafted original gemstone
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718-392-4823
www.calicojunodesigns.com
Eco-Friendly Lightweight Concrete Planters
Concrete R&D LLC is offering its Delaware Coast Planters, the first in a planned
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Perennials, Grasses & Succulents Direct to You
How does your garden grow? With plants you won’t normally find at your garden
center or superstore. And they’re shipped right to you from Santa Rosa Gardens.
We’re the family-owned mail-order nursery with the industry’s largest availability
of ornamental grasses, as well as perennial plants, ferns, hostas, daylilies,
flowering bulbs, tropical palms, aquatic plants and gifts for gardeners. Browse
our online catalog and sign up to receive our monthly gardeners’ newsletter.
866-681-0856
www.santarosagardens.com
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White Flower Farm
Superb gifts with service to match!
Celebrate the holidays with the
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800-503-9624
www.whiteflowerfarm.com/gifts
Nature by Design’s Red Collection
Featured: Elegantly decorated 28"
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Other wreath sizes and styles,
garlands and swags available. To
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888-552-3747
www.naturebydesign.com
Fabulous Stationery
Looking for unique gift ideas for the
avid gardeners in your life? Create
beautiful personalized notes from
our wide selection of modernist-
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make perfect hostess gifts, holiday
cards or party invites. And be sure
to visit our One Dollar Greeting Card
Shop for even more inspiration!
www.fabulousstationery.com
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Gorgeous Garden Gazebos
Create outdoor retreats with our
stunning selection of cedar, vinyl
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garden structure. We offer worldwide
shipping and design consultations.
888-293-2339
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Brent & Becky’s Bulbs
Shop our extensive selection of
unique bulbs and enjoy easy year-
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our website or send for our lavishly
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877-661-2852
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Authentic Handmade Clay Pottery
Since 1992, Ceramica Renacimiento has been exporting quality products that
bring the artisanal look of traditional stoneware to garden enthusiasts in the
U.S. Our original designs include terra-cotta and glazed vases, bowls, pots, décor
items and planters.
U.S.: 512-940-7600
México: +52 477-267-1616
www.ceramicarenacimiento.com.mx
Raw Urth Designs
Our recycled steel fire features
add the perfect blend of ambience
and style to outdoor living and
entertaining. Propane and natural
gas models available. Handcrafted in
our Colorado studio.
866-932-7510
www.rawurth.com
LatticeStix
LatticeStix Standard Lattice Panels
are an intriguing addition for gardens
and landscapes. Available in seven
sizes and 100 patterns, the panels can
be inserted into site-built framing to
create fence toppers, screens, gates,
trellises and more. Visit our website
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www.latticestix.com
Archie’s Island Furniture
Our premium Adirondack furniture
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Known for our 28 stunning custom
colors, our furniture is now available
unfinished and in a standard color
palette as well. Enjoy affordable
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800-486-1183
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BambooFencer.com Fences · Poles · Edging · Wall Coverings
Bamboo Fencer has over twenty
years of experience in the provision
of bamboo fences. We’re happy to be
your source for sustainable bamboo
fencing materials. Build yourself that
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Bamboo Fencing & More
Established in 1880, Bamboo &
Rattan Works has been family-
owned and -operated for five
generations. We offer stock,
custom, tropical or oriental fencing,
as well as bamboo poles, roof
thatching and much more. Call us for
a free catalog or visit us on the web.
800-4-BAMBOO
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Trellis Structures
Trellis Structures designs and
manufactures innovative solutions
for pergolas, arbors, trellises and
gates. Made of the finest quality
western red cedar and mahogany
in multiple styles and sizes. Custom
pergolas also available. Shown here:
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800-649-6920
www.trellisstructures.com
Imagine Your Home’s Potential
Homeowners are looking at their yards and seeing an opportunity to expand
their home’s living space. Landscape architects agree that renovating outdoor
spaces enhances leisure time and adds value to a home —and water features
are among the most requested landscape designs. At the heart of thousands
of decorative water features are Firestone PondGard™ Rubber Liners. PondGard
liners offer the utmost in design flexibility, resulting in water features that
complement the style of the home owner, as well as the natural surroundings.
With the combination of conformability, ease of installation and durability
inherent in PondGard liners, the only limit is your imagination.
800-428-4442
www.firestonesp.com/gd2
Rainwater Harvesting
Our RainBox system filters and stores
rainwater for irrigating gardens, filling
ponds and washing automobiles.
Interconnecting 75-gallon tanks
made of super-thick, sunlight-stable
plastic offer high-volume storage. We
also offer surface and underground
systems capable of recycling all of
the rainwater from a home or
commercial building.
800-477-7724
www.rainwatertechnology.com
Vixen Hill Cedar Products
Vixen Hill has developed an
extraordinary selection of pre-
engineered cedar products.
Modular gazebos, screened garden
houses, shutters and porch systems
designed for simple one-day
installation. Visit our interactive
website or call us toll-free for more
information.
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www.vixenhill.com
Drivable Grass®
Make your neighbors green with envy. Effortless to install and aesthetically
pleasing, Drivable Grass® provides you with an environmentally friendly
alternative to poured concrete while offering the same strength and durability.
Permeable, flexible and plantable, Drivable Grass® is the solution for driveways,
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one shot COPPER TONEIn a San Francisco garden, a wall of woven metallic strips doubles as screening and sculpture
Think your tiny backyard is too small for big drama? Then take a peek at this private garden, designed by San Francisco–based landscape architect Randy Thueme, only
550 feet square and tucked behind a classic Victorian house in Pacific Heights. What really makes the space sing is a stunning 10-foot-tall, 32-foot-long fence of 12-inch-wide bands of perforated copper, clad over a supportive structure of cedar slats and steel. Undulating like an oversize detail of basket weaving, the fence was sculpted to allow three whitebarked Himalayan birch trees to inter-lace through the copper strips. Up-lit at night by low-voltage bulbs, the fence fairly glitters. As the homeowner says of the space at night, “Sheltered from the wind, with a soft glow illuminating the garden, I feel as if San Francisco has retreated and I am at peace.”
Before the new garden was installed the space was dank and dark, with unsightly views of neighboring fences, decks, railings, and walls. Thueme’s goal was to block out the surroundings and create an invit-ing spot that extends the homeowners’ living space out of doors, both physically and visually (the patio can be seen from multiple rooms through French doors and floor-to-ceiling windows).
The warm tones of the cedar slats on other outdoor walls now coordinate with the copper, but Thueme anticipates that over time the materials will change and continue to harmonize, as the copper turns verdigris and the cedar mellows to gray. In expectation of this metamorphosis, the Chinese-limestone patio flooring incorporates bands of pale green, which is continued in a row of succulents at the base of the fence. sEE sOuRCEbOOk fOR mORE iNfORmaTiON, PagE 70
sTORy by JENNy aNDREWs
76 gardendesign.com nov/dec 2010
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