It may not seem intuitive to reach for an iPad or iPhone while getting out of the city and rambling around a 40-acre park, but in the case of the Lynden Sculpture Garden, such devices may make for good walking companions.

The former home of Milwaukee’s most-known art collector, Peg Bradley, and her sculpture-filled grounds are now more easily navigated with a newly launched mobile site.

Just type lyndensculpturegarden.org into your mobile device’s browser, and the site appropriate to your specific smartphone or cellular-enabled tablet will automatically load.

Visitors will be able to page through the collection and discover more about the art and artists they encounter as they wander.

The information on each of the more than 50 monumental sculptures in the collection, as well as temporary installations and exhibits, runs from basic to truly extensive.

The verbiage, for instance, on Roy Staab’s new artwork, “Chiral Formation” (top image), which currently is on view in the “Little Lake,” is essentially a full profile of this important, 70-year-old, Milwaukee-area artist. Staab’s ephemeral work, made of reeds and branches, will disintegrate naturally back into the landscape.

With information on the sculptures mostly in place, the Lynden is planning to document the trees and plantings next, facilitating personalized tree and garden walks.

Eventually, iPads will be available for checkout at the admission desk. Interestingly enough, this emphasis on technology is in line with Lynden’s environmental mission because since it reduces the amount of printed materials needed.

I perused the updated sites, which are freshly launched, on an iPhone and iPad. The sharp, retina-display images, intelligently loaded based on bandwidth, were gorgeous.

The color-coded, touch-ready navigation is a pleasure to use and encourages a kind of exploration that is not unlike exploring Lynden on foot. While a location-based app may seem like the natural route here, the relatively contained size of the collection makes finding sculptures a fun and not cumbersome exercise.

The mobile site also functions as a simple guide to Lynden’s many doings, including Yoga in the Garden (on Sundays), the upcoming “Inside/Outside” exhibit featuring artists Will Pergl and Shona Macdonald (opening Aug. 8) and the annual “Backyard Barbecue” blowout (Aug. 16).

Like any new website, Lynden’s is not without a bug or two. Clicking the back button sometimes dumped me back to my Google search results on the iPad, for instance, but it is one of the nicest art-related sites I’ve seen in a while.

The modular and scalable site, which is HTML5 responsive, was designed and built by Craig Kroeger. The Lynden Sculpture Garden, 2145 W. Brown Deer Road?, is open Mondays, Tuesdays and Fridays from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., Wednesdays from 10 a.m. to 7:30 p.m. and Saturdays and Sundays from noon to 5 p.m. Admission is $9 for adults, $7 for students and seniors. Children younger than 6 and active military and their families are free.

SEAL HARBOR, Maine (AP) — Some of Maine’s most popular destinations are located on Mount Desert Island, including Bar Harbor and Acadia National Park. But the island is also home to several remarkable gardens, all connected to the renowned landscape architect Beatrix Farrand, whose philosophy of garden design emphasized native plants and using natural landscapes to define outdoor spaces.

One of the gardens, the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Garden in Seal Harbor, is a private garden that’s open to the public, by reservation only, just a few days a year. But the other two, Thuya Garden and Asticou Azalea Garden in Northeast Harbor, which contain plants from Farrand’s Bar Harbor home, welcome visitors daily for much of the spring, summer and fall.

All three gardens use natural settings so artfully that it’s sometimes hard to tell where the landscaping ends and nature begins.

Farrand, the sole woman among the founders of the American Society of Landscape Architects, was born in New York in 1872 and died in Bar Harbor in 1959. She designed gardens for the White House, consulted at Princeton and other institutions, and had many prominent private clients, including John D. Rockefeller Jr. and his wife Abby.

Farrand worked with Abby Rockefeller to design the private garden in Seal Harbor between 1926 and 1930. The property is still owned by the Rockefeller family. Each summer, the garden opens to the public one day a week, but reservations fill up fast. As of mid-July, only a handful of slots were left for late August and early September. And there’s no sneaking in: To be admitted, your name must be on a checklist at the entrance, which is virtually unmarked and hard to find even with directions. Photos are permitted only for personal use.

Once inside, most visitors head to the rectangular lawn, where the borders burst with colorful flowers and plants familiar to any backyard gardener, from bright purple clematis vines to gray-green dusty miller. But in some ways the Rockefeller garden is at its most stunning away from the sunny flower beds, where the landscaping melts into the woods. Forested paths are carpeted by velvety moss; giant hostas and feathery ferns offer contrasting textures and a palette of greens. A stone wall punctuated by doorways shaped like the full moon or a bottle give the feeling of stepping into a secret garden hidden in a magical forest. The property also displays centuries-old Asian art, ranging from Buddhas to tall stone figures lining the walkways.

David Bennett, a landscape architect in Washington D.C., has visited the Rockefeller garden as part of his research for restoration of Farrand’s kitchen garden at The Mount, the country estate in Lenox, Mass., created by Farrand’s aunt, writer Edith Wharton. Bennett says Farrand wanted her gardens to “fit into their natural settings. She had a strong appreciation for the natural character of the land and the appropriate way of integrating a designed landscape with its natural context.”

She used plants to create “impressionistic” effects of texture and color, and was also known for creating outdoor “garden rooms,” with “the idea of moving through a landscape in a sequence, from one space to another, where each space has its own character,” Bennett said. “One space may be very shady and enclosed, and you pass through a hedge or a row of trees or through an actual gate in a wall to enter a very sunny and open space.”

The Thuya and Asticou gardens, easily found along Route 3 in the neighboring town of Northeast Harbor, both include plants from Farrand’s Bar Harbor estate, called Reef Point, which Farrand sold in the mid-1950s.

The azaleas at Asticou are finished blooming by summer, but Asticou’s landscaped pond is a star attraction in all seasons. The garden was created in 1956 by Charles K. Savage, who owned the nearby Asticou Inn. The picture-perfect pond reflects the surrounding flowers and trees like a mirror, and the layers of greenery and contrasting shapes and textures look like a Japanese landscape painting. Savage also designed Thuya Garden, where the centerpiece consists of spectacular rows of colorful flowers, from towering blue larkspur to delicate pink and white snapdragons bordering a rectangular lawn.

Those interested in learning more about Farrand can also visit Garland Farm on Route 3 near Bar Harbor, which this summer started offering regular visiting hours for the first time, Thursday afternoons through Sept. 13. Farrand retired to Garland Farm after dismantling Reef Point, bringing plants and ornaments with her and designing her last gardens there. Garland Farm is also home to the Beatrix Farrand Society, which just completed restoration of Farrand’s terrace garden at Garland Farm and is working on restoring other areas there.

Alvion Kimball, who owns the Orland House Bed Breakfast about 40 miles from Seal Harbor and is on the board of DownEast Acadia Regional Tourism, says each of the gardens has its own charms. At the Rockefeller property, he likes the mossy garden best, while the impressive show of flowers at Thuya is like “an English cottage garden.” The garden at Garland Farm is “a more personal garden, on a smaller, intimate scale,” but Asticou with its pretty pond and walkways is his favorite, even without the azaleas in bloom. “It’s just so understated, peaceful and quiet,” he said.

Kimball notes that Farrand’s preference for indigenous plants and natural settings, rather than exotic specimens or rearranged landscapes, was ahead of her time. “You look at what’s happening today with native plants and ecology,” he said, “and to me, it’s almost an extension of what she’d be doing if she were still here.”

___

If You Go…

THUYA AND ASTICOU AZALEA GARDENS: http://www.gardenpreserve.org . Located in Northeast Harbor, Maine, on Mount Desert Island. Asticou is at the intersection of Routes 198 and 3, and Thuya is a half-mile away on Route 3. Open daylight hours, May to October, $5 suggested donation for each garden.

ABBY ALDRICH ROCKEFELLER GARDEN: http://rockgardenmaine.wordpress.com/ . Located in Seal Harbor, Maine, on Mount Desert Island. A private garden open to the public one day a week in late July, August and early September, by reservation only, with two-hour slots filling up well in advance. Check availability online.

GARLAND FARM: http://www.beatrixfarrandsociety.org . Located on Route 3 near Bar Harbor, Maine. Open Thursdays, 1 p.m.-5 p.m., June 21-Sept. 13.

NEARBY ATTRACTIONS: Opportunities for hiking, swimming, boating, nature walks and other activities on Mount Desert Island abound, along with accommodations ranging from campsites to hotels. The island is home to Acadia National Park, http://www.nps.gov/acad/ and Bar Harbor, http://www.visitmaine.com/region/downeast/bar_harbor/ or http://www.downeastacadia.com . Other area gardens include the Charlotte Rhoades Park and Butterfly Garden in Southwest Harbor and the Mount Desert Island Historical Society’s Somesville Historical Museum and Gardens.

Let’s say you’ve decided to reduce your water needs around the house by redoing your yard with lower-water use plants. You hire a landscape designer, decide on a design and plant palette, clear the space of unwanted flora, and plant your new landscape. Done, right?

Not exactly. Gardens and landscapes are not static; they are always in a state of change. Trees and shrubs grow taller and wider. Perennials bulk up. Or they falter, communicating they are not happy in their location. Annuals spring up and then die when frost arrives in the fall. Perhaps the wind or wildlife scatters seeds — both weed and ornamental seeds — around the garden. These changes are just as true for the Broomfield Xeriscape Demonstration Garden as they are for a home landscape.

After Broomfield became a county and set up the master gardener program, the first class of Broomfield master gardeners worked with Broomfield staff to design and install a garden east of the parking lot for the George Di Ciero City and County Building, 1 DesCombes Drive. The first trees were planted in fall 2003. Shrubs, ornamental grasses and perennials soon filled the garden.

Over the years the plantings have matured. As in home gardens, the Xeriscape Demonstration Garden has had its challenges — vole damage, weeds and plants that were a bit too vigorous, irrigation issues and the challenge that is universal to all gardeners, limited time for maintenance. All of these factors have shaped the garden.

This a year is one of renewal for the garden. Overgrown and damaged shrubs and trees have been removed. Weedy ornamentals have been dug out or confined. Faltering perennials are being moved and replaced with more appropriate plants. New plants are being introduced. And this year, master gardeners and Broomfield staff have additional resources to help with garden upkeep; volunteers and staff from Denver Botanic Gardens are assisting with a biweekly maintenance program.

In the ongoing effort to help homeowners save water in their landscapes, the Xeriscape Demonstration Garden will continue to offer ideas for lower-water-use landscapes. In the coming months watch for new water-smart plant ideas. Look for modifications in the turf areas and the rock garden. Plant and landscape information also will be updated.

If you haven’t visited in a while, we invite you to stop by. The trees have grown large enough to provide a bit of shade over the benches, and the hummingbirds have discovered the tubular flowers of the salvia and the hyssop.

Colorado State University Extension in the City and County of Broomfield provides unbiased, research-based information about 4-H youth development, family and consumer issues, gardening, horticulture and natural resources. As part of a nationwide system, Extension brings the research and resources of the university to the community. The Broomfield County Extension office is at 1 DesCombes Drive, Broomfield, 80020. For information, call 720-887-2286.

Skateboarders can still give input about what features they want in a skate plaza.

The Garden City Parks and Recreation Department, which hosted a special informational meeting July 30 about the plaza planned for Garden City Park at Cherry Hill, east of Merriman, said that a link will be added this week to a Facebook page found under the city’s website.

A small group turned out at the meeting about the plaza which will be located in front of the old pool parking lot.

“This is your skate plaza,” said Dan Plamondon, Garden City Parks and Recreation supervisor and ice rink manager.

Hays Hitzing, director of skate park development for Spohn Ranch Skateparks of Industry, Calif. and Ray Parker, of Henessey Engineers, also attended.

The Parks and Recreation Department solicited bids for the design and construction. This project is possible due to $110,000 in Wayne County Parks millage money. The Garden City Council accepted Spohn’s bid of $85,000.

Spohn has more than 20 years of experience in community and corporate skate park design, and more than 500 community skate parks on their resume.

“We recently did two parks for Holland, Michigan,” Hitzing said. “We do 20-30 parks a year across the country.”

The company is looking at concrete for this park

“There’s no bowl or quarter pipe in it,” Hitzing said. “It is geared toward beginning and intermediate street skaters.”

Features for the plaza include stairs, with a rail, a slight elevation change, a Pier 7 block and a curved ledge with hubbas. A curved-in sushi pad manual pad is another feature. Hitzing believes this design will serve more people with less intersecting traffic patterns.

Spohn will look at the technical aspects of the plan, the soil and drainage, in order to finalize the scope. Hitzing said that they will make sure all of the angles are correct.

Hitzing said there would be at least a three-foot deck on one side and a berm. Bikers will be able to use the plaza, too, but it is designed primarily for skateboarders.

Tina Strasser, a Garden City resident and mother, wondered if the plaza could be expanded in time. Hitzing said that it is possible.

Cory Kramer, 19, a Garden City resident and experienced skateboarder, had many questions and comments.

“I’ve skated around here, in Ohio and up north,” Kramer said. “I’ve been everywhere for six or seven years.”

He predicts that local skateboarders will be at the park daily.

He also wanted to know if the quarter pipes in the middle of the park would be backed up by anything.

“I’ve skated that and it is hard for kids to balance up there,” Kramer said.

Kramer said that he’s interested in features not usually seen at some parks and presented his suggestion using a drawing made with a Sharpie that included three camel humps.

“Your voices about what you want will shape what is in the park for years to come,” Parker told the audience.

The plaza won’t be fenced in. Plamondon said that most people who use Garden City Park take pride in the park. It won’t be monitored, so Plamondon said he will rely on what skateboarders tell him is happening there.

The preparation begins Sept. 3 with construction completion estimated about Oct. 5. For more information or to offer comments, call Plamondon at (734) 793-1882.

sbuck@hometownlife.com (313) 222-2249

Most mornings, about 3 a.m., space engineer Adam Steltzner wakes up, and before he can coax his tired body back to sleep, his mind takes over. And he starts to worry.

Eventually Steltzner gives up on sleep and heads into his garden where, just as first light reveals the sky, all that thinking can turn into doing. And finally, a little peace.

These are tense times for Steltzner as he and everyone else at NASA’s jet propulsion lab in Pasadena wait for the rover Curiosity to land on Mars early Monday morning. But Steltzner is especially tense because he led the team that designed the system that’s supposed to land the craft safely and gently on the surface. If all goes as planned, champagne corks will fly. If it fails, well, the rover could end up as a piece of expensive trash on the Red Planet.

A lot could go wrong, and it’s now out of his hands, but here in the garden, Steltzner takes charge. Surrounded by morning glory and fish peppers, Kaffir lime bushes and zinfandel grapes, he weeds and snips. Soon, instead of worrying about the rover, he’s wondering what would happen if he mixed lavender in with his apricot jam.

Welcome to Adam Steltzner’s mind – a place in which problems are but precursors to solutions. OK, that sounds like big stuff, but really I’m just talking about Steltzner’s marmalade. And, his system to bring the rover, which is hurdling through space at 13,000 mph, to a dead stop on Mars. (Now I can’t sleep at night either.)

Ever since childhood, Steltzner says he’s wanted to do things with a real and measurable outcome. He started with rock and roll, and moved on to science. “It just feels good to make, to create, to improve — to imagine the world as I think it should be and then to try and make it that way,” he says.

In his garden you can see those imaginings at work. He bought his small bungalow in Pasadena precisely because it had a mature apricot in the garden – hence the apricot and lime jam with a hint of ginger he’s now working on.

When he wanted a steel pergola out back for his zinfandel and pinot grapes to grow on, he first built a life-sized wooden model so he could study how the structure would affect the flow of light. Then he took a welding course and put the steel structure together himself.

And that bush of Meyer lemons in his front yard? They’re for one of his long lasting passions: Homemade limoncello – that refreshing lemon Italian liqueur. Like a true scientist, he’s experimenting with different kinds of lemons from his garden to see which ones taste the best.

It all sounds very boutique, doesn’t it? And yet Steltzner says he’s really just like the American pioneers who engineered their way into a new life. They imagined what they wanted and they set out to create it.

“Food still has this creating thing,” Steltzner says, “Engineering is a creating thing. That’s what I love most about it — a making of more, of better — that the world later on has got something that exists because of my effort.”

An effort which could lead to a graceful landing on Mars or a homemade limoncello – served, as he says, “in chilled shot glasses, after dinner, on a warm Indian summer night.”

Copyright 2012 National Public Radio. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

more articles like this

Keep Your Garden Out of my Face

updated: Aug 04, 2012, 10:30 AM

By Billy Goodnick

It was a dark and foggy summer night. Biff the Wonder Spaniel and I set out for our last neighborhood
stroll, green poopy bag at the ready. It’s a good thing I didn’t have my nose buried in my iPhone,
catching up on the four games of Words With Friends that Lin and I usually have going. If I had been
distracted, I’d probably be sporting stitches, or worse yet, a ripped cornea.

Through the mist, I realized I was one step away from facial lacerations from a thorny rose branch
arching across the sidewalk at eye level. That’s what can happen when someone plants a Cecile Brunner
climbing rose on a picket fence that butts up against the sidewalk.

Seems to me, you’d have to be either stupid or heartless to think you can plant a 25-foot climber a
couple of inches from your property line, then neglect pruning it. Good thing poison oak isn’t a popular
garden plant.

Thorny plants are the worst-case scenario, but it seems everywhere I look, somebody’s fuzzy bush is in
my face. I’ve got no beef with someone planting this stuff along their own walkways, but when half of a
public sidewalk is blocked by some thoughtless, lazy gardener’s weekend project, I get pissed off.

One block from my house in the opposite direction, there’s a wall of ivy climbing something (it’s so
dense I have no idea if it’s an old chain link fence or remnants of an ancient civilization) and taking up
more than half the sidewalk. Up on Los Olivos, between De la Vina and Chapala, crimson bougainvillea
sporting inch-long spiky thorns spills out from a raised wall. Pretty? Yes. Neighborly? Hardly. Legal? No
way. Arrogant and lazy? In the words of Sarah Palin, you betcha.

Assuming that the owners of these properties are aware that their plants are blocking public right of
way, I can only assume that they rationalize it by thinking “I can get past, so why ruin my weekend
doing chores?”

What about a mom with a stroller? What about someone like my dad who uses a walker and is legally
blind?

Here’s a two-for-one special: Brazilian skyflower in the parkway (some varieties reach 20-feet high and
wide) and rosemary creeping in from the garden. Great for an Olympic slalom course, but maybe a bit
much for someone with mobility problems.

Two blocks away, on De la Vina, where I’m sure curbside parking is at a premium, some numbnut who
won’t clean out their garage left their big fat tail end blocking the walk. All that’s missing is a middle-
finger decal over the wheel.

Bonnie Elliott is a friend who spends much of her waking days in a power wheel chair. She’s also been
active on the City of Santa Barbara’s Access Advisory Committee, reviewing submittals that go through
the Planning Commission and making recommendations to make new projects safer and more livable
for a wider cross-section of the community.

“That overgrown crap shouldn’t be there,” Bonnie told me, as we sipped ice teas and devoured divine
pistachio macarons on a warm afternoon at Renaud’s. “Some hedges make it impossible for drivers to
see anyone on the sidewalk when they pull out of their driveways. You can’t see them and they can’t see
you. There’s no way you can achieve ‘escape velocity’ when a car suddenly appears.”

As long as we’re talking about public sidewalks, what about those trash/recycling/green-waste cans?
This morning, I hauled one filled with brush and bamboo and a blue recycling bin off the sideway, left
there, no doubt, by the homeowner in indifferent haste. Sometimes they’re empty, meaning that an in-
a-hurry MarBorg guy dumped the load and ignored the company policy laid out for me by Tito
Escarcega, supervisor: “We hammer the guys: do not leave the cans near mailboxes, near driveways, or
on sidewalks. But I’d be lying if I said that a few of our guys don’t slip up once in a while.” I know these
guys are generally on top of it and do awesome, back-breaking work, but there are a few slouches who
need to appreciate the bigger picture.

If you’re in a wheelchair and there’s no way around an obstacle, many times the alternative is a detour
down a sloping driveway and out into the street. Bonnie recounted a recent incident near Cottage
Hospital where she was almost hit, the driver slamming on the brakes just in time.

While I’m at it, what about sprinklers that go out of whack, showering passing pedestrians (and
hydrophobic cocker spaniels)? It’s bad enough all that water is missing its target and flows to the gutter,
but no one should need a snorkel to take their exercise stroll.

Am I getting through? I love gardens. I make my living designing, teaching, writing, and ranting about
them. But your right to grow a garden ends at your property line. Any time you buy a
plant you intend to grow near public walkways or streets comes with a duty to know its potential size
and either give it plenty of room to do its thing, or be conscious and considerate enough to keep it the
hell out of everyone’s way. If that means giving up a few hours on the weekend, or increasing your
gardener’s hours, bite the bullet.

If you’re as fed up as I am with this stuff, do as I do and rat out your neighbor. I don’t start by calling
out the big guns. In the case of the errant rose bush, I left a note on their door (including my phone
number – I’m straight up about it) and the next day I got an apologetic phone call and the rose was
pruned. Encroachments into public right of way can be reported to the Zoning Division for the City of
Santa Barbara (in person at 620 Garden Street or by calling 805.897.2676), and I’m guessing that other
agencies have similar policies.

But I’m making one exception. On the 400 block of East Islay Street is a magnificent specimen of
Australian Tea Tree (Leptospermum laevigatum) slithering across the sidewalk in all its muscular glory.
There’s no way around it, so the thoughtful owners have constructed a stairway leading down to the
street so neighbors can get around. I’m cool with that.

NEWS FLASH! I’m writing a garden design book titled, “Yards: Turn Any Outdoor Space Into the Garden
of Your Dreams.” It’s the garden design book you need to read before you read all the other ones. You’ll
learn the thought process that professional designers like me use to create gardens that aren’t just drop
dead gorgeous, but also serve as an extension of your home, while treading gently on the planet.
Here’s what Amy Stewart, New York Times best-selling author of Wicked Plants has to say: “Billy
Goodnick delivers the most laid-back, user-friendly and entertaining garden advice you’ll ever read.
Invite him into your backyard – now!”

The book comes out in March 2013 (cuz I’m still writing it) but you can pre-order today at
Amazon.com
IndieBound.org
Powell.com
and listed soon at Barnesandnobel.com.

—-

Billy Goodnick is a nice guy who knows a lot about plants and garden stuff.

www.billygoodnick.com
gardenwiseguy.blogspot.com
www.flickr.com/photos/gardenwiseguy
www.sbwater.org/landscapeTv.htm
www.kingbeesb.com

Looking for design ideas and cool plants? Subscribe to Billy’s e-mail newsletter by dropping him a line at
billygoodnick@yahoo.com

 

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