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By: Terry Ettinger

YNN’s Terry Ettinger explains the benefits that a rooftop garden can provide.

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This is what many roof gardens look like, doing the job of insulating the building to reduce energy usage but the minimal substrate depth, generally less than six inches, limits the type of plants that can be used and can lead to a lack of variety in the planting design.

The substrate for the roof garden being constructed on this building will range from 6 to 18 inches and that opens for the door for some innovation use native New York plant species.

“The plant species are from two very rare, natural communities in New York State that are north of here. The alvars are found northwest of Watertown, and in the dune community, along eastern Lake Ontario. We picked the draught-tolerant species that we could find from those really draught-prone natural communities,” explained Dr. Donald Leopold, Environment and Forest Biology, SUNY ESF.

The selected plants were set up in test plots on this roof for two years to see which thrived the best.

“These plants have been growing on Illick Hall roof for two years with pretty different conditions. Heavy snow one year, and than no snow this past year with extreme cold on occasion and extreme draught. They’ve been through the usual things that you might expect over two or three years. We’ve lost only a few species, we’ve actually been surprised at how well some of the species have done,” said Dr. Leopold.

Here’s one that’s obviously done well. The dune willow is a tall growing plant, something you don’t often see in roof gardens.

“From an ecological standpoint, and from a structural standpoint, in terms of how you design a garden, how you design a garden space on a rooftop, you want to have some variability in things like that, so we’re getting a larger plant which can tolerate the difficult growing conditions,” explained Timothy Toland, Landscape Architecture, SUNY ESF.

Some 50 plant varieties are being used, so it will be a dynamic landscape with something happening pretty much year round.

“It’s a novel application. It’ll be a novel design and the fact that people can come out and engage it, and look at it, and experience it directly is good. One of the important aspects of that will be that the design community will have a new pallet of plants to increase the options for their designs when they work with green roofs,” said Toland.

The Irish Times – Saturday, July 14, 2012

GREEN PEOPLE: If you take seed catalogues to bed, dream of mulch, and plant bulbs by the hundreds rather than the dozen, then these pages are dedicated to you. Our own gardening expert Fionnuala Fallon has rounded up some of the country’s most enthusiastic amateur gardeners and finds that, often, the roots of a gardening habit are to be found buried deep in childhood

Prickly business

 
Michael Harrington’s love affair with cacti began with a spiky gift

SCULPTURAL, SPINY or bristled, with exotic, brilliantly colourful flowers that are often (but not always) sweetly scented – it’s not hard to understand the fascination cacti and succulents hold for some gardeners.

Michael Harrington’s 30-year-long love affair with these plants began quite innocently, when his then-five-year-old son Niall gave him a birthday present of a Lace aloe, or Aloe aristata. “I decided I’d have to look after this little plant properly, so I went to my local library to do a bit of research. Very soon I was hooked.”

Harringon is a founding member of the Cactus and Succulent Society, and his collection of cacti and succulents now numbers in the thousands, most of it housed in a large polytunnel and a couple of glasshouses in his garden in Saggart, Co Dublin.

The rarest and strangest of them all is probably Hoodia gordonii, a leafless, spiny succulent native to South Africa whose flesh-coloured flowers smell strongly of rotting meat.

“The flowers are quite remarkable,” says Harrington admiringly, impressively indifferent to the fact that the evil stench of the blooms attracts bluebottles in their dozens into the glasshouse. “Yes, the flowers stink, but that’s the way that the plant attracts pollinators. It’s very clever.”

Does his now-adult son share Harrington’s passion for these strange plants? “Niall has a few but, no, not really. In fact he often blames himself for starting me off. But he’s a professional horticulturist with South Dublin County Council, so we definitely share a love of gardening.”

See
irelandcactus.comor call 087 2308330, Harrington sells his plants at ISNA fairs, isna.ie

Drawn outdoors

 
Artist Wendy Walsh found her calling relatively late in life

ENGLISH-BORN, 97-year-old Wendy Walsh is probably best known as Ireland’s most admired botanical artist, whose long-standing professional collaboration with the taxonomist and horticulturist Dr Charles Nelson has led to the publication of at least a dozen highly regarded books on the various flora and garden plants of Ireland. Asked what she particularly likes about gardening, she says simply that “I like growing things. Growing them and painting them.”

Walsh came to her calling relatively late in life, when her children were reared and she finally had ample time to apply to her craft. Intellectually curious, keenly sighted and physically robust, friends say that even up to her late 70s/early 80s, Walsh was still “hopping about the Burren like a mountain goat”. Old age has slowed her down somewhat since then but she still paints occasionally.

Although she created her own lovely garden in Glebe House in Lusk, north Co Dublin, 12 years ago Walsh moved to Burtown House in Co Kildare, home of her daughter, the artist and gardener Lesley Fennell.

With her came the many rare or unusual plants that she had collected and painted over the years. Recipient of numerous RHS awards, Walsh was also awarded an honorary doctorate by Trinity College in 1997, while in 1998 she was made a life member of the Royal Dublin Society (RDS). She is the only living artist represented in the Chester Beatty collection.

Earlier this summer, the Fennell family opened a gallery, café and shop at Burtown House, where Walsh’s work is on permanent display.

Plenty of air time

 
Gardening began as an escape for broadcaster Áine Lawlor

WHEN MORNING IRELAND’s Áine Lawlor was diagnosed with breast cancer last September and then told that she’d start chemotherapy the next month, one of the things she was determined do before beginning treatment was to plant the tulip bulbs she’d ordered.

“I get thousands of bulbs every year from Holland – they’re my little luxury. I knew I’d be too sick once chemo started so it was a case of planting them before it began. I so looked forward to seeing them flowering this spring.”

Although already enthusiastic as a teenager (her grandmother was a great gardener), Lawlor’s interest in gardening was properly awakened about 10 years ago.

“My family circumstances changed and I found myself much more tied to the house. Gardening gradually became my escape and then my passion. Now I think about it all the time, particularly if I find myself in a bit of a mental rut. It really refreshes me.”

Her work as an RTÉ presenter aside, these days Lawlor balances her time between her small-town garden in Rathgar where she’s managed to squeeze in a miniature glasshouse, roses, perennials, apple trees and topiary specimens, and her large allotment in Enniskerry in Co Wicklow, the latter which she tries to visit “one, maybe two times a week, maximum”. She has maintenance of both down to a fine art.

“I’m a great fan of Charles Dowding and his no-dig method. Get the timing right and then it’s usually a simple case of ‘weed, plant, harvest . . . weed, plant, harvest’. Except that this year’s tsunami conditions have resulted in these monstrously huge, fat slugs that seem to be copulating like nobody’s business.

“I’ve tried everything to stop them but they’ve still taken my French beans, my lettuces, my dahlias, even my hemerocallis. Now I’m completely slug-obsessed. Even when I’m on air, I’m half-wondering what they’re up to.”

Best in show

 
Grower John Warren has a string of awards to his name

JOHN WARREN IS THE proud holder of not one but two large Dublin allotments.

The winner of last year’s RDS Allotment Awards’ Experienced Gardener category, he has lovingly tended one of them, on Turvey Avenue in Donabate, for the past 25 years. The other (the award-winning one, 20 minutes’ drive away) is part of the Fingal Allotments complex near the Naul in north Co Dublin, which Warren took on in 2009. And that’s not to mention his town garden in Malahide.

So what does he grow? “Lots of stuff. Potatoes like British Queen, Kerr’s Pink and Golden Wonder, cabbages, beetroot, French beans, runner beans, broad beans, sweetcorn, parsnips and cauliflower as well as apples, strawberries, gooseberries and loganberries and plenty of sweet pea.”

Warren is a seasoned expert at growing vegetables and flowers for the show-benches, exhibiting his produce at the numerous North County Dublin Horticultural Association summer shows, as well as at the annual Tullamore and Virginia shows every August.

He’s won plenty of prizes, too. “I exhibit the full range of vegetables every year, but sweet pea are probably the most difficult to grow to exhibition standard. There are about six to seven competitive growers in the Dublin area and we all take it very seriously. It demands a lot of commitment.”

Any tips for novice growers? “The best way to learn is by talking to other competitive growers. And by your own mistakes; I can tell you that I made plenty of them in the early years.”

School of rock

 
The garden at Grouse Lodge recording studios is something of a refuge from a noisy world

CLAIRE GUNNING, the owner of Grouse Lodge recording studios in Co Westmeath, is hooked on gardening. It’s because she’s a masochist, she says.

“Something strange happens when you hit 30; the pubs seem too noisy, the music too loud. You start noticing plants in a way that you didn’t before. It’s like a disease that takes root, and next thing you’re scrabbling around in the mud with a packet of seeds.”

When Gunning and her husband bought the lodge in 1999, the centuries-old house was in need of renovation so the builders were called in. Whenever the noise and the dust got too much to bear, Gunning would escape to the garden.

“I’d dig a hole. Or, better still, dig up a leylandii; there were loads when we first came here, but not any more. The previous owners weren’t into gardening, so the grounds had been maintained in ‘slash and burn’ kind of way, with lots of strimming and spraying of weed-killer. We stopped all that and, with the help of friends and fellow gardeners, bit by bit we’ve brought it back to life.”

These days the walled garden is filled with flowers and vegetables. Last autumn Gunning discovered a dozen ceps (the much coveted “penny bun” mushroom) growing in another part of its five-acre grounds. A visit by Aubrey Fennel of the Tree Council confirmed that it’s also home to rare and unusual trees, as is the arboretum of neighbouring Coolatore House, which the couple also own.

“The minute I find someone with half a clue about gardening, I attach myself like a limpet. And it’s astonishing how many famous rock stars are into gardening. I send them out into the garden to pick tomatoes and they love it.”

Artistic expression

 
Artist Jane O’Malley created this country garden in Kilkenny with her late husband, Tony

ALTHOUGH THE CANADIAN-BORN artist Jane O’Malley and her late husband, Irish artist Tony O’Malley, first bought their property in Kilkenny in 1978, it was the late 1980s before the couple began renovating the tiny labourer’s cottage, and another few years before they started work on the one-acre grounds around it. “I grew up in Montreal where, being an Englishman, my father had this very beautiful, English-style country garden, filled with neatly divided vegetable beds, rose bushes . . . I was influenced a lot by that when it came to creating our garden in Kilkenny,” says Jane. “I loved the idea of a dovecote, a garden pond, herbaceous borders. Then someone sent me a postcard of the famous laburnum arch in the Bodnant gardens in Wales and I wanted one of those too.”

Over the two decades since it was first laid out, the garden at Physicianstown has gently matured, its lines softened by time, its edges slightly wilder. The pond that once featured in a series of Tony’s paintings is more secret, the fountain long gone. But the dovecote is still there (if no longer the doves), as is Jane’s studio (once shared with Tony), which is hidden in a quiet corner. “I love the fact that parts of the garden are now quite untamed, that sheets of snowdrops are followed by daffodils and wild grasses. Other parts are deliberately more formal – I enjoy that contrast.”

Helped by Sean Greene of Kilkenny Landscapes, O’Malley has continued to develop other areas of the garden. “I’ve had a bad back on-and-off for years, so while I work in the garden a couple of days a week, I just couldn’t do it all myself. Instead, I do most of the lighter work while Sean’s a great help with what I call the man’s work – things like cutting the the hedges, the lawns, or helping me fit a new filter on the pond.” A few years ago, O’Malley treated herself to a new glasshouse that she’s filled with tomatoes, plumbago and bougainvillea. “That’s my little baby, a place where I love to spend time. I have lots of other secret, hidden spots in the garden where I also love to sit. I’ll never leave this place. It’s my private paradise, my secret little world, the garden that I made with Tony.”

Plot plants

 
Mark Radix’s designs combine his love of art, gardening and film

GARDEN DESIGNER Mark Radix had planned a career in fine art but after a degree at the Chelsea College of Art Design found himself drawn to the earth instead. “I started tending this almost derelict garden in King’s Cross, and I experienced that extraordinary thrill that comes with discovering something that you truly love doing.”

His early childhood years were spent exploring the large gardens of his paternal grandmother on the Caribbean island of Grenada. “She had this astonishing garden where she grew mangoes, pineapples, giant Caribbean cherries, anthurium lilies underneath a huge avocado tree and huge baskets of ferns. In fact one of my earliest memories is of her asking me to pee into a bottle, so that she could dilute it down and use it as a plant feed!”

Once Radix rediscovered his love of plants, he quickly found himself working for the noted Irish-born landscape designer, Declan Buckley, building and planting gardens all around London. In 2005, he moved to Dublin (his mother’s hometown) after being offered a job with Irish garden designer Bernard Hickey. He now divides his time between Dublin and Cork, putting his creative talents to use on a diverse range of garden design projects as well as doing the “greens” for film sets. Recent projects include a Dublin garden for the award-winning, young IT company Eightytwenty4D and work on the sets of both Asterix and Obelix and the BBC production Loving Miss Hatto.

Radix has just begun work on his own new garden in Bishopstown in Cork, which he acquired just two months ago “I’m fine when it comes to making pragmatic design decisions about other people’s gardens but I’ve found that it’s one of the hardest things to with my own, particularly when I have to take my partner’s likes and dislikes into account. I know that I want to make a garden that’s sustainable, that encourages wildlife, that uses native plants and natural materials … It’s about taking inspiration from the landscape around me in a way that’s creative, inventive, contemporary and original. For example, one idea I’m tinkering with is a wall planted up with Irish carnivorous plants. That’d be fun.”

Simple pleasures

 
When Helen Murphy began to lose her sight, her garden became her saviour

THE FIRST time Helen Murphy suffered retinal detachment, she was in her 20s with two children under the age of two. “Suddenly I was blind in one eye.”

Surgery was briefly successful, but three weeks later the retina detached again, followed by the retina in her other eye. Further surgery restored her sight, but gradually she developed cataracts. After yet more surgery, artificial lenses were inserted into both her eyes. “That was great for a long while, but then gradually my sight started deteriorating again. When I eventually went back to Dr Hayes, he discovered that I was developing a condition known as tunnel vision, as well as glaucoma and macular degeneration. I was told that as I got older, my eyesight would gradually deteriorate.”

Murphy continued to raise her family (she now has three adult children whom she calls “my absolute life”) while renovating the family home – a cottage in Tallow, Co Waterford – with her husband. Another more recent blow to her health was the diagnosis of polymyalgia rheumatica, from which she is still recovering. Despite it all, her half-acre country garden is now filled with a curving lawn, specimen trees, a pergola and shrubs, and cottage garden favourites such as lupins and alliums.

“I’ve been through some very, very tough times, but the garden has always been my therapy, my saviour. Even when you have very little money, you can always find a few quid for a plant, or raise [a plant] from a slip. And although I’m registered blind for the last 10 years, I can still see the plants well enough to enjoy them,” she says. “Just simple things, like the sight of a bud opening or a leaf unfurling, always bring me great joy.”

Walled paradise

 
Benedictine monk Fr Brian Murphy got his first taste of gardening as child of the war

AS A CHILD EVACUEE during the second World War, London-born Fr Brian Murphy spent several years living in the rural village of Moreton Pinkney in Northamptonshire, where he enjoyed helping out in the tightly knit community at busy times of the farming year.

That first taste of farm life stood him in good stead when he joined the Benedictine community of Douai Abbey in Berkshire in 1954, where he worked in the large gardens every day, looking after the animals or tending the vegetable allotment.

When he later joined the Benedictine community of Glenstal Abbey in Co Limerick, Fr Murphy brought with him that can-do attitude. Aware of their great historical value, he set about restoring several of the abbey’s walled gardens, as well as its orchard, helped by fellow monks, novices, students and “men of the roads” staying in the abbey’s hostel (now closed).

In one, a 300-year-old Italianate-style walled garden, Fr Murphy created a Bible garden with steep terraces filled with a vast collection of shrubs, flowering perennials, grains, herbs and vegetables, all selected because of their religious significance.

Another, known as the Lady’s Garden, has gradually been brought back from the wilderness it had become. In a third, he planted native trees that represent the Celtic tree calendar, as based on the Ogham alphabet.

When he isn’t writing (he’s currently working on a history of Glenstal Abbey’s gardens for Columba Press), Fr Murphy is gardening.

“Every afternoon, after song mass and a spot of lunch, I’ll work in the gardens until six o’clock evening prayer. Manual work is part of the Benedictine tradition. To quote St Benedict himself, ‘Then are they truly monks when they work with the labour of their hands.’ ”

Small is beautiful

 
Andrew Murray’s collection of 200 bonsai tree keeps him busy

A FORMER market gardener and cabinet-maker, Andy Murray’s passion for bonsai – the Japanese art of growing miniaturised trees in containers – began in his teenage years – he bought his first bonsai tree, a Chinese elm, in 1970 for £20. He still has that tree, which is one of hundreds he keeps in his garden in Lusk in Co Dublin.

Many of the others he’s grown from seed, painstakingly training and repeatedly pruning each tiny specimen with a nail scissors or sharp secateurs to achieve the desired shape.

Murray goes to great lengths to ensure the health of his trees, sieving the soil with a very fine flour sieve and discarding the fine dust to ensure a free-draining granular mix. Tender specimens go indoors into the conservatory or the utility room during the winter months.

Now that he’s no longer working (the downturn put paid to his cabinet-making business), he has even more time to devote to his hobby.

“Bonsai is the perfect combination of my interest in things oriental, horticultural and artistic,” he says. “With a collection of this size , there’s always something that needs doing, but the best part of the job is trimming. I might spend a couple of hours on one specimen. It’s ecstasy.”

In the last couple of years he’s exhibited at the National Botanic Gardens in Glasnevin, much to the interest of the visiting public as well as other bonsai enthusiasts (one collector offered him €1000 for a specimen – an offer he politely declined).

Murray, however, modestly downplays his skills. “The Japanese are the masters of the art. They go to extraordinary lengths and have a list of rules you wouldn’t believe. But I’m an Irishman. If it looks alright, I’m happy.”

Second nature

 
HE’S BEST KNOWN as a member of the Irish contemporary folk music band, Kíla, and was once described as “the Jimi Hendrix of the bodhrán”, but for a long time the musician Rónán Ó Snodaigh has also been a passionate garden maker. He credits his mother, who used to bring him along to her Dublin allotment as a young child, with first giving him his love of plants.

“Not that I’m one of those blackbelts in gardening types who knows the soil types and all the Latin names,” he hastens to add.

Later, he worked with the landscaper Gerry Lehane, and then with another landscaper, Pat Kevil, which is how and when he learnt how to read a scaled drawing, build paths, steps, retaining walls, and even construct complicated water features.

His garden is in Carraig in Co Kerry. “I like creating strong structures and changes of levels in a garden, and then seeing what happens next. I enjoy that ongoing debate with Mother Nature, where I plant things that I like, and then she decides whether or not it’s going to be allowed to stay.” It’s a debate that inspired Ó Snodaigh’s first published collection of poetry, Garden Wars, published in 2008.

“A lot of my poems are about the garden, observing plants and creatures fight it out. Myself, I don’t even try to kill the slugs and snails anymore. I pulled one off a stone earlier this summer and I swear it made this weird sound, as if it was screaming. It sounds so pathetic even as I say it, but it gave me such a fright. I thought ‘I can’t go round butchering these little creatures anymore. They play, they make love, they have kids. It’s just not right. So now I leave them alone.”

Nature first

 
Actress and Nama to Nature activist Serena Brabazon has ‘always loved planting things’

ACTRESS SERENA BRABAZON made headlines earlier this year as one of the five core members of Nama to Nature, the activist group that planted thousands of native trees in half-finished ghost estates around the country as a protest at the damage wrought on Ireland’s landscape by poor planning decisions. The group’s actions quickly touched a nerve.

“People call us guerrilla gardeners, although for me that term has slightly different connotations,” says Brabazon, who is the daughter of the Earl of Meath from Kilruddery in Co Wicklow. “Nama to Nature is our way of trying to heal some of the ugly scars left on the landscape by the building boom, by helping it to return to the wild, and perhaps inspiring communities around the country to do likewise. It’s a way of saying, ‘Hey, this is what might have been, if the diggers hadn’t arrived.’ We didn’t expect the reaction that followed, which was a complete surprise.”

During the ensuing media frenzy, the group was accompanied on its tree-planting trips by many curious journalists. One, a woman in her 20s, was invited to plant a tree herself. “You won’t believe this but she planted it upside down,” says Brabazon, still shocked by the memory.

With a forester for a father, there was never any risk Brabazon would do the same.

“I do have a small Dublin garden of my own where I grow fruit and vegetables, and while I don’t know if I’d call myself a proper gardener, I’ve always loved planting things.

“With the Nama to Nature projects, we put an awful lot of thought into choosing native trees that would flourish in the local growing conditions. We got them from a great nursery called None-So-Hardy or, in the case of the willow, planted them as cuttings. “Later this month we’ll be revisiting all of the estates to check how the trees are getting on. I’m looking forward to that.”

For more details, see
facebook.com/namatonature

Dates for your diary 
 
Galway Garden Festival, Claregalway Castle, today and tomorrow; Specialist nurseries, botanical art exhibition and speakers including Joy Larkcom, Helen Dillon, Dr Matthew Jebb, Tom Moggach, Diarmuid Gavin Erwan Tymen. Details at
galwaygardenfestival.com

Fruitlawn Gardens in Abbeyleix, Co Laois are holding their open day today and tomorrow (10am-5pm, €5 admission, children under-12 free) in aid of the local Alzheimers Association. Lunch on lawn by Gallic Kitchen, rare plants for sale. See
arthurshackleton.comfor details

Green-fingered artists can try their hand at a spot of botanical illustration at Lismore Castle Gardens Gallery on August 7th. Running from 10am to 4pm, the workshop, led by renowned botanical artist Patrick O’Hara, teaches participants how to indentify, categorise and draw flowers in the wild. Tickets €50; with early booking essential. Contact Paul McAree on 058-54061 for details

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Designing small gardens on a budget

It’s pocket-size, affordable and a pleasure all year

How much does it cost to create a great small garden from scratch? You can do a terrific job for £7,000, as landscape architect Nilufer Danis, for Landform, proved last week at the RHS Hampton Court Flower Show.

Her stylish retreat, Our First Home, Our First Garden, which included seating, raised beds, the prettiest planting and an original sculpture, was awarded a prestigious Gold Medal as well as “best” in the category of low cost, high impact garden.

‘When creating a new garden, always settle on a budget first. With a little forward planning it is possible to create an aesthetic space without spending a lot of money’

“The point is to show how a young couple in a new home can make a great outdoor space on a small budget,” says Danis. “In this small space of 15ft by 25ft, there’s space for them to relax as well as entertain their friends. The planting is simple and easy to maintain, with evergreen shrubs and grasses among the flowers so the garden looks good all year round.”

A wood-burning chimenea on a central platform, with a stash of cut logs beneath, makes a strong central focus and extends the time the owners can spend in their garden; it also doubles as a small barbecue. The walls of the surrounding raised beds are wide enough to provide seating, with aromatic herbs planted nearby so that the scents can be savoured and the foliage snipped to flavour alfresco cooking.

The hardscape materials cost just £600, and comprise recycled scaffold planks which were used for decking, the raised beds, seating and boundary fence, as well as a sunken central floor of inexpensive gravel, all giving the garden a low-carbon footprint. What gives the walls of the raised beds a contemporary edge is the way the boards are put together: laid horizontally, and spaced apart with vertical supports.

For longer life, points out Danis, they could be painted with clear preservative; for more impact, they could be stained with a plant-flattering colour such as Cuprinol’s Rich Berry. Imaginatively, the planks are also cut into short lengths and positioned in vertical slats to form an impromptu perch as well as a plinth for a rusted sculpture that beautifully complements the surrounding planting. It looks rather like a giant flowerhead, but is in fact a flywheel from an old car, filched from a friend’s garage.

The planting took up £3,000, but that includes a backbone of evergreen shrubs plus four established four metre-high trees to provide instant screening, costing £200 each: a sound investment. As this is a show garden, the plants used are three years old, so they look established. “Start with plants that are small, and you will save a lot more money,” says Danis. “They’ll grow fast if you settle them into the right site and soil conditions.”

Country garden perennials such as delphiniums, daylilies, sea hollies and salvias, tempered with Alchemilla mollis and ornamental grasses, create a lively colour palette of blue, yellow and lime green in the raised beds. Golden achilleas and unusual alliums caeruleum (sky blue) and obliquum (soft lemon) will hold their flowerheads late into the year. A trio of crab apples add vertical green structure, autumn colour and a little privacy from neighbours, while the dwarf version of Pittosporum tobira — nanum — provides glossy evergreen structure and fragrant white flowers.

“Bringing big trees and large shrubs into a small space will just make it look smaller, as well as shadier,” says Danis. “Keep everything in proportion.”

Labour costs for this garden were £2,100, and with added VAT, the total comes in at around £7,000. “If you’re creating a new garden,” Danis advises, “always settle on a budget first, working out the costings. Allow for a seating area and use good materials. With a little forward planning it is possible to create an aesthetic space without spending a lot of money.”

Nilufer Danis can be contacted through landformconsultants.co.uk.

COLUMBIA — After nearly two years of planning and construction, the Missouri Department of Conservation officially opened the doors of its new regional headquarters to the public at a Friday afternoon dedication.

The $6 million building was named after former Columbia conservationist E. Sydney Stephens. As Don Johnson of the Conservation Federation of Missouri and the state Conservation Commission cut the ribbon, he dedicated the building not only to Stephens but also to the people of Missouri.

“E. Sydney Stephens played a critical role in the formation of MDC 75 years ago,” said Jeff Cockerham, MDC Outreach and Education regional supervisor. “He drafted the conservation amendment to our state constitution and directed the campaign for its adoption. Stephens also served as the first chairman of the Conservation Commission in 1936 and served for two-terms, or 10 years, on the commission.

Stephens’ ties to Columbia go back to his grandfather, who was the founder of Stephens College. Stephens was an avid waterfowl and quail hunter, a passion that initially brought him into the conservation field. In the Columbia community, Stephens helped establish Boone County Hospital, held leadership positions in the chamber of commerce and was a member of the Columbia City Council.”

The new building boasts several high-end innovations that exceeded standards set by Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design.

Planning supervisor Dan Zekor is chair of the building’s science center.

“The city of Columbia is very aware of impact and all things green,” Zekor said. “It was important that a building with the word ‘conservation’ in the title focus on that.”

Nearly every aspect, from the parking lot’s geogrid to the carefully placed rain barrels scattered around the property, has a special function in what designer and project engineer Annika Careaga of Midwest Environmental Consultants called a “Follow the Water” theme.

“(The Missouri Department of Conservation) really wanted this building to be a demonstration project,” she said, “to show people that they can incorporate rain tanks and rain gardens into their own architecture.” Careaga explains how the original design helped make that possible.

“I joke that it’s the Show-Me state and people want to come touch it and feel it and see it themselves before they do it and that’s what we’re hoping this site can do,” said Careaga. “This is totally original.”

The interior features recycled carpeting, indoor sky lighting and structurally insulated panels, which consist of two wooden panels with insulation sandwiched between to reduce air infiltration.

The office space also includes energy efficient lights that automatically turn on and off when people enter and leave spaces. The windows were made with insulated glass that allows bright light to come in without the heat. Ceilings are suspended acoustic tiles. A geothermal heating and cooling system runs throughout the facility; it contains 98 tons of coolant and taps 65 wells, each 300 feet deep.

A one-third mile trail allows the public to view exterior innovations and to learn from an interactive map that explains each step of the building’s rain water overflow system.

Careaga described the design process as working backward.

“We looked at the land and where the rain falls so that the placement of the building would flow with the rain water,” she said. “We worked backwards so that we could utilize the site and reduce the amount of impervious materials and our impact on the land.”

The new regional headquarters and research center replaces the conservation department’s previous locations at College Avenue and Stadium Boulevard and on Hillcrest Drive. 

Architecture manager for the Missouri Department of Conservation, Kenny Poore, describes the difference between the old building and the new in terms of space, which is smaller but better used.

“The square footage of that building, the old resource science building, plus our old central regional office building we had less square footage here for the same amount of people,” Poore said.

MU owns the building at College and Stadium. Christian Basi of the MU News Bureau said plans for that structure remain in the works.

“We’re currently evaluating it to see how it might fit based on needs, strengths and weaknesses, the condition of the building. It all depends on location as well as resources.”

Supervising editor is Scott Swafford.

Photo by Kyle Kurlick // Buy this photo

“For a small garden, you have to be selective,” said Kitty Taylor, who had large drifts of plants at her former property. Now she chooses carefully and when plants multiply, she removes them and passes them to friends.

Photo by Kyle Kurlick // Buy this photo

Kitty Taylor is a lifelong gardener whose designs have been in Better Homes in Gardens and the HGTV network.

Photo by Kyle Kurlick // Buy this photo

About two years ago, Kitty Taylor and her husband moved from a 35-acre country place with extensive gardens to a zero-lot-line home at Schilling Farms in Collierville, where Taylor’s projects include the front beds. “I was burned-out for about three months,” she said. “Then I couldn’t stand not gardening.”

Photo by Kyle Kurlick // Buy this photo

Taylor spent years studying English gardens, and makes the most of every inch of her small lot.

Kitty Taylor has been designing and installing gardens since she was a young girl working beside her mother.

“It started without my even thinking about,” she said. “I’d give my mother ideas about how we could plant more flowers, and she liked them.”

Those early years proved to be good practice for the gardens she was destined to develop on a 35-acre country property on the edge of Collierville.

Carving out about 3 acres, she created a sunny perennial border measuring 75 feet by 14 feet, a meandering shade garden, a bog garden and a rock garden — all impressive enough to be featured in a Better Homes and Gardens magazine dedicated to Southern gardens and a segment on HGTV.

Success with her hobby led to a garden design business she operated for about 15 years.

“People started asking me to help them with their gardens, so I did a lot of researching, went to seminars and learned about plants,” said Taylor, who also has a background in art. “I also traveled to England, France and Italy to see great gardens.”

But as the upkeep of the garden and demands of the business became overwhelming, she and her husband, Neil, decided to make a change.

A little more than two years ago, they sold their home and property, but not before dismantling some of the gardens because prospective buyers were wary of their ability to maintain them.

When they moved to their spacious zero-lot home in Schilling Farms, Kitty thought her gardening days were over.

“I was burned-out for about three months,” she said. “Then I couldn’t stand not gardening.”

Their corner lot has ample space for a perennial border, albeit much smaller than before.

“This little area was empty,” she said. “I felt it was looking at me to change it. I like to have a project, so I did.”

To enclose the space and deter the many dogs that walk by with owners, she had a wrought iron fence erected.

After preparing the soil along the fence with her longtime employee Ricky Tate, she began planting her favorite perennials.

She also chose a few annuals, such as cosmos, because “they go between other plants and anywhere the good Lord puts them.”

At her previous garden, she installed drifts of the same plant. But that doesn’t work in a small space — at least not for a plant lover.

“I now have one of everything I like,” she said. “No multiples.”

When the plants make their own multiples, she pulls them out and gives them to friends or neighbors.

She left a small area of turf because she finds a lawn “quiets” the excitement of the flowers.

She takes care in selecting nonaggressive plants like Miss Manners, a clumping rather than running variety of obedient plant, and Petite Delight, a dwarf bee balm that forms a low mound.

But the back of the border requires larger plants, such as a Firecracker hibiscus that blooms all summer, butterfly bush and crape myrtle.

She chose reliable, hardy varieties. “I don’t go for exotics.”

Among them are rudbeckias, liatris, hardy geraniums, geums, yarrow, Siberian iris, peonies, veronica, white balloon flower, East Friesland salvia, Brazilian verbena, baptisia, butterfly weed, Stokes aster and David, a tall phlox.

One of her favorites, Venusta, is a filipendula, or meadowsweet, that sends up tall stems with large deep pink flower heads in early summer.

It’s not common in Memphis gardens because it needs moist soil all summer. Taylor’s irrigation system provides it.

“For a small garden, you have to be selective and choose plants that bloom over a long period,” she said. “Then you need to space the plants to have something blooming here and there throughout the season.”

The peonies and irises flower early while pink chrysanthemums, sunroses or helianthemums and even coneflowers, if deadheaded, take the garden through the fall.

The border reflects the style of gardening Kitty admired and studied on several trips to England.

While once the rage, English gardens are not as popular as they once were, she said. But she thinks it’s easy to incorporate elements of them into any garden, even in the hot Mid-South.

“It’s basically an informal, colorful style with a looseness of design,” she said.

It can be accomplished with plants that tolerate our long growing season with several months of extremely hot and often dry weather.

With the backyard border completed, she took her husband’s suggestion and turned her attention to the front. She eliminated the grass and added deciduous azaleas, peonies, the tall but slender weeping cherry named White Fountain, oak leaf holly and a ground-covering dwarf juniper, Nana.

In between the shrubs and ground covers, she plants daffodils and other spring bulbs.

She no longer has an active garden design business, but she does consult with a friend who owns the Buckhorn Inn in Gatlinburg, Tenn.

The inn, which was established in 1936, has a mature landscape, but it is being updated with some new terraced areas, walkways and perennial beds. That project and her own small garden are all she needs to keep her connected to her lifelong passion.

“Except for the heavy work, I do everything,” she said. “I’m satisfied.”

<!–enpproperty 2012-07-13 07:43:14.0Zhang LeiHome grownHome grown1811066441Life2@usa/enpproperty–>

Chinese gardening reflects the epitome of Chinese wisdom that boasts of the harmony between nature and humans. Zhang Kaixin / For China Daily

Chinese gardens opening up to rest of the world

Cross-cultural exchanges between East and West are increasing on the back of a growing need to understand China’s rise in global influence, but there is at least one area that some believe remains solely in the realm of Chinese hands.

“The concept of transferring real Chinese gardening to the West is impossible, not only because the climate and environment are totally different,” says Han Zenglu, professor at Beijing University of Civil Engineering and Architecture. “Unless Westerners totally grasp the true Chinese definition of molding architecture after nature itself, these gardens are simply piled-up Chinese symbols.”

Han himself is reluctant to see the development of Chinese gardens in the West. From the layout of rock and water features to the choice of plants and angles of views, many other puritans also believe traditional Chinese gardening reflects the epitome of Chinese wisdom that boasts of the harmony between nature and humans.

Many say there are no strict rules governing the process of making a Chinese garden, as it changes over time, and even the same designer can come up with different results using the same design.

Despite this resistance to transplanting Chinese gardening thought onto Western soil, interest on the other side of the world grows.

Michigan State University is widely considered a pioneer in teaching garden design and landscape architecture.

Professor Jon Bryan Burley at the university teaches landscape history, including lecturing on many styles and types of Chinese landscape gardens and environments.

Burley and his wife recently participated in designing a Chinese-inspired garden for the popular 2012 Chaumont sur Loire Garden Festival.

The creation is a fusion garden with some feng shui principles and properties of Chinese gardens, along with ideas from French students and professors. It has been well received and is expected to be viewed by about 300,000 visitors this summer.

“It does not look exactly like a Chinese garden, but if you know the principles about Chinese garden design, you can notice the similarities and inspiration,” Burley says.

Westerners continue to be very interested in traditional Chinese gardens, he says. One recent garden he visited in Vancouver, Canada, is called the Dr Sun Yat-Sen Classical Chinese Garden.

It is primarily based upon the gardens of Suzhou and feels like a garden of the Chinese city in Jiangsu province. But the gardens in Suzhou alone are varied and can be quite different with different concepts, designs and messages about life.

Still, Burley suspects that there will be numerous Chinese-styled gardens installed at arboretums and botanical parks in the West.

“In France (near Angers), there is a new large botanical park called Terra Botanica. It includes the knowledge, history and stories about both Japanese and Chinese gardening. As the West learns more, people can also easily tell the difference between Japanese and Chinese styles, and learn how varied the Chinese style is and how much more ancient it is. The West is learning how much of the Japanese style is simply borrowed from vast Chinese accomplishments,” he says.

The interest in Chinese gardens in the West can be traced back to the late 17th century. Sir William Temple (1628-99) noted in his essay Upon the Gardens of Epicurus, or of Gardening in the Year 1685 the scorn that the Chinese held for the symmetries and regularities of the European style.

In comparison, he praised the Chinese design and wrote: “But their great reach of imagination is employed in contriving figures, where the beauty shall be great, and strike the eyes, but without any order or disposition of parts that shall be commonly or easily observed.”

Temple even came up with a word for Chinese gardening design, sharawadgi, to describe its irregularity, asymmetry and its picturesque qualities of being “surprising through graceful disorder”.

He even dissuaded Europeans against adopting the Chinese way of gardening, “not because of its lack of beauty but because of the difficulty of achieving success”.

During that time, English landscape parks covered the UK, gradually replacing classical garden designs.

The interest in Chinese gardens, which hit a peak when Scottish architect William Chambers (1723-96), after two visits to China, published Designs of Chinese Buildings, Furniture, Dresses, Machines, and Utensils (1757). He made many Britons realize their landscape parks were quite dull compared with the Chinese gardens’ maneuvering of surprising aspects from common scenes.

The advocate for Chinese gardens soon helped spread the Chinoiserie in English garden design. One of his best-known works is the pagoda at Kew Gardens in London. The 10-story octagonal tower is nearly 50 meters high and was the tallest reconstruction of a Chinese building in Europe at that time. Its prototype is believed to be the Porcelain Tower of Nanjing.

Chambers’ design was later deemed “Anglo-Chinois”, becoming arguably the first that fused Chinese and Western gardening. Jardins de Trianon and Parc d’Ermenonville in France, and the Chinese gardens in Oranienburg, Germany, are also remnants of Anglo-Chinois gardens.

Although these were deeply influenced by Chinese traditional gardens with many Oriental features, they are still exotic to Chinese eyes and are essentially the result of Westerners’ understanding of nature.

But Chinoiserie in garden design dwindled after the French Revolution in the late 18th century brought new ideology throughout Europe. With the Europeans knocking on the door of the Orient and the decline of Chinese power, such interest in garden design was put on hold for more than a century.

Burley says that in its first incarnation Chinoiserie was the subject of feverish interest, and now the interest can be seen again, but in a more measured way.

“Trends come and go,” he says. “Instead, there is now a steady and consistent interest in the ideas about the Chinese garden and environmental design.”

Contact the writer at zhanglei@chinadaily.com.cn

MANY people hate their jobs, but few are lucky enough to take the initiative and follow their dreams – Paul Richards is one.

After moving from Shropshire to Liverpool for university he worked in health promotion in Wigan.

He hated it, but it involved an element of training which made it bearable, so he left his job and set up his own management training consultancy offering assertiveness training and team building.

After eight years he hated that, too, so took the decision to follow a two-year full time college course in garden design.

Mr Richards, 45, said: “Garden design was my hobby and my interest and I wanted to make it my livelihood.”

After starting his course he visited Southport Flower Show which runs a design competition for students.

“I realised it made business sense for me to win that competition the following year. The prize was the budget to build the show garden. I knew no-one was going to give me the money to build something that was a shop window for me.”

So, in 2007 he entered his design and duly won, as he also did in 2008, just for good measure.

He said he didn’t feel any pressure, until he was told he had won and was given £5,000 to build his show garden.

His “cool, calm and contemporary” design won a gold medal and provided the launch pad for his business.

Having established his Halsall-based Paul Richards Garden Design Mr Richards entered the Southport show again last year and struck gold yet again, collecting a clutch of awards including best large garden, best outside garden, and the Brockhouse Trophy for best exhibit in the whole show.

He now boasts a broad range of clients “from a small back yard in Aigburth to the grounds of a huge country house near Kirkby Lonsdale”.

His design budget can vary from £3,000 to £200,000, depending on a client’s needs.

Mr Richards said: “There’s a misconception about garden designers. People think we try to get clients to spend as much as they can, but I work with them in their interests.

“I help guide clients through their budget, starting from how much they want to spend.

“I show people what their money can buy them. I am there to deliver the garden they want, for what they want to pay for it.

“My job is managing peoples’ expectations and helping them achieve what they want.”

Mr Richards designs, but does not build gardens, although he will manage the project up to handing clients a glass of champagne as they step into the finished garden.

Some of his more unusual designs include an outdoor kitchen as part of a patio sunk 2.5 metres below ground, and a wood-fired pizza oven.

He said the downturn has led to a shift in some peoples’ budgets: “There are a few clients where money is no object. There will always be people who can afford to have what they want and will pay it regardless, but at the lower end there has been a change over the past couple of years. People have smaller budgets and are maybe not doing as adventurous gardens as they were a few years ago.”

However, Mr Richards reports that turnover has risen every year and last year was almost double the previous year’s level.

He is now planning further expansion and will employ someone next year to manage building operations.

He is also expanding the business footprint with a move back to his native Shropshire as part of a two-centre strategy: “I have just done a garden in Reading and worked in Gloucestershire, so I will go anywhere.”

And, after becoming a registered member of the Society of Garden Designers in 2010, one of less than 200 worldwide, his credentials are even more impeccable.

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Some T-fal cookware is up to 60 percent off at Amazon.com through July 31 (the T-fal Family Cooking nonstick 12-piece cookware set, usually about $130, will be about $66); amazon.com.

Michaelian Kohlberg is taking up to 40 percent off in-stock rugs from Nepal, India and China, through Aug. 31 (a 12-by-16 foot Chinese Ushak rug, originally $20,500, is $14,750); 225 East 59th Street (Third Avenue); (212) 431-9009, michaelian.com.

All home furnishings are up to 75 percent off through Sept. 1 at Modani (the Flavia coffee table, regularly $590, is $240); 40 East 19th Street (Park Avenue South), (212) 780-1800, modani.com.

Good deals may be reported to deals@nytimes.com.