The Red Bluff Garden Club invites the community to its Oct. 12 Garden Party held at Rolling Hills Casino’s Carlino’s Event Center.

Festivies, which include a floral design program and luncheon, begin at 9:30 a.m. and participants will be personally greeted by the one and only Supertunia.

Kate Gleim, a renowned floral artist, design teacher and a member of the American Institute of Floral Designers, is back by popular demand and will be presenting displays of floral designs for elegant occasions. She will explain how to decorate for that special event such as a wedding or a New Year’s Eve party.

Gleim, the owner of the House of Design in the Kraft Library building on Jefferson Street in Red Bluff, loves sharing her ideas for beautifying people’s environments and inspires people to experience the joy of working with floral materials, through classes at her store and design seminars.

Through teaching, Gleim’s work has taken her to most states and many countries to share design concepts. She says meeting people, exchanging cultures and experiencing new, natural environments is wonderful.

Included in the day’s activities are vendors from around the north valley, silent auction items and centerpieces created by the Red Bluff Garden members to be raffled off, and a beautiful floral design to be given as a door prize.

Reserve tickets are $28. Lunch choices are New York steak, chicken with dungeness crab and spinach strudel. Tickets can be purchased at the House of Design or call Kathy at 527-9403 or Cathy at 384-1913. The event sold out early last year.

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Members of the Farmington Beautification Commission did what they do every year — picked the winners of its annual awards that recognize excellent landscaping and design.

The theme, chosen by Larry Kilner, commission chair, for the annual awards program was driven by an Abraham Lincoln quote: “I like to see a man proud of the place in which he lives and I like to see a man live so that his place is proud of him.”

This year’s awards ceremony was held at the Gov. Warner Mansion on Sept. 19. Each year the Farmington Beautification Committee hands out the coveted bronze award plaque to one household for each voter precinct.

First and second place awards are given out also. The awards are judged on street curb appeal only. Backyards cannot be considered as that is the role of the Farmington Garden Club. They also give an award for one business and the Greater Farmington Chamber of Commerce, represented by Mary Engleman, gave an award to one business which meets its qualifications.

Mayor Tom Buck opened the ceremony and noted that CNN Money Magazine recently placed Farmington as number 27 on their “best city to live in” roster. He added that residents who were in attendance to receive beautification awards played a role in Farmington achieving that honor.

This year’s recipients were surprised and grateful to receive the awards. After receiving their award, each gardener was asked to give a brief description of what inspired them to attain such an honor. Some of the winners’ comments were truly poignant, Kilner said.

One recipient gave an emotional response that her landscape design was in memory of her grandmother. Another contestant, who used bowling balls in her landscape, said that her first bowling ball was her father’s and then her friends donated the rest of them after they tired of the game.

In another instance it was a family member who motivated them to take an interest in landscaping. Kilner commented that when he received the award, it was his personal goal to win the award, and it took it 10 years to achieve it.

Art and dreams make something of a shamefaced couple nowadays. I blame Dallas. In order to resurrect the soap’s only buff cast member, Bobby Ewing, Pam wakes up to the convenient fiction that the entire seventh series was a dream. Emerging from the shower, dripping masculine assurance all over the lino, Bobby listens to her bonkers summary of the past year and replies: “None of that happened. I’m here now.”

But it wasn’t always so. Dreams and art have had a long, fertile relationship, as I discovered while researching the history of dreams for a new Radio 4 series. Take the extraordinary work of the 15th-century Dutch painter Hieronymus Bosch, who used the fantastical and the grotesque to explore morality and mortality. His Garden of Earthly Delights teems with fecund, fearful dream imagery: a copulating couple are held aloft in a closing mussel shell; a steely grey figure climbs into a man’s carcass, a large arrow extruding from his backside. Images of slippery sin and fleeting pleasures, of enduring pain and terrifying pointlessness lurk everywhere in the triptych. Our sweetest dreams, Bosch seems to say, prefigure heaven; our most terrifying nightmares hell. But the central panel, which depicts the here and now, is also discomfortingly dream-riddled. Life, Bosch implies, is as fleeting and ephemeral as a dream.

Like a dream, art both is and isn’t true. Both offer a challenge to the tyranny of realism, replacing what is with what might be. Both generate an altered state of consciousness removed from the humdrum – and both lend themselves to interpretation. That’s where the fun starts. To dream of faeces, a modern dream key drearily explains, means that “some part of your life needs cleaning up”. An Egyptian papyrus from the second millennium BC is more upbeat on the subject: it goes as far as to say that eating your own excrement equates to “generating possessions in one’s own house”. Intercourse with a cow is “good – passing a happy day”, while sex with your mother means “your clansmen will support you”.

In Homer‘s Iliad, from the eighth century BC, Zeus sends “Wicked Dream” to Agamemnon urging him to attack Troy. It is almost like a character. Dreams here have an existence independent of, and external to, the dreamer. They arrive as visitations, potentially bearing messages from the gods. In the lexicon of Homer, dreams are entities that sleepers “see”. Over the centuries, though, we have come to take possession of them: dreams today are things we “have”.

In times of upheaval, dreams can offer radical alternatives, giving artists a way to speak dangerous truths. Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream contains what could have been, for the author, fatal allusions to the sexual life of Queen Elizabeth I. Contemporaries would immediately have recognised Titania, the fairy queen, as a fictional rendering of their ageing, virgin monarch, whose continued refusal to provide the nation with an heir threatened anarchy. Titania, like Elizabeth, also refuses to share her bed, which throws the entire natural world into chaos. In punishment, she is subjugated to masculine rule, and forced to bed an ass. In light of all this, Shakespeare wisely structures his play as a dream vision, ending: “If we shadows have offended,/ Think but this, and all is mended,/ That you have but slumber’d here,/ While these visions did appear.” Bobby Ewing couldn’t have put it better.

Shakespeare’s Dallas disclaimer is undone, though, by the fact that Puck – a sprite, an imaginary creature – delivers it. The Puck of Shakespeare’s 1590s play, gadding about sprinkling love juice on the eyes of sleepers, has little truck with divine truth. But he’s related to a vibrant pagan belief, in which erotic dreams were thought to be the work of nocturnal spirits. Succubi explained wet dreams. They were female spirits who seduced sleeping men to steal their semen. These succubi would then transform into incubi, male spirits, who would impregnate witches. Such ideas had surprisingly widespread currency. In the Pendle witch trials of 1612, a dream was admitted as evidence that its dreamer, Elizabeth Southerns, was bewitched. Her dream? A little brown dog had tried to bite her armpit, and thereby suckle her blood.

In the wake of the great examples of the Bible, including the enduringly popular, sartorially splendid dream analyst Joseph, dreams characterise the poetry of the medieval era more than any other. In William Langland’s epochal poem Piers Plowman, written between 1360 and 1387, a quest for true, Christian self-knowledge begins with our narrator Will falling asleep in the Malvern hills. Decades of Will’s waking life are passed over without comment; it is only in his dreams that his search for truth can be conducted. This tells us that to the medieval mind, corporeality is erroneous and flawed. Dreams – freed from the gross, sin-stained body and potentially emanating from the divine – might be more real than waking reality. Senses lie, dreams speak the truth.

With the dawn of the Enlightenment, and its insistence on knowledge demonstrable to the senses, the idea that dreams might originate from outside the sleeper faded. But, as the Romantics were to discover, this did nothing to lessen their power – particularly frightening ones. Nightmare imagery stalks gothic fiction and ignites the art of the time, as the 1781 painting The Nightmare by Henry Fuseli shows: a swarthy goblin squats on an erotically supine sleeper as a mad-eyed mare looms out of the darkness behind.

Coleridge was plagued by nightmares so powerful he would routinely wake his entire household with his screaming. Why, he asks, in his 1803 poem The Pains of Sleep, were his dreams poisoned with “desire and loathing” and visions of an “unfathomable hell within”? Men whose lives were “stained with sin” might expect as much. But, he demands, bewildered and palpably afraid, “wherefore, wherefore fall on me?”

In a sense, it was in answer to this question that Sigmund Freud, a century later, began his investigations into dreams. Freud’s radical claim was that all our dreams – even the most terrifying – are wishes. The more difficult or dangerous our desires seem to our conscious selves, the more peculiar or  terrifying their nocturnal expression will be. Dreams, Freud concluded, are “the royal road to the unconscious”.

The idea that dreams reveal aspects of ourselves that we are unable to grasp in daylight underpins most contemporary discussions of dreams, even among those who (like my iPhone autocorrect) read Freud as nothing but a well-read fraud. His sexually charged theories propelled dreams to the centre of 20th-century culture. The wildly expressive art of Dalí, Miró and Magritte, and the writings of the surrealists, used dream imagery in a bid to access and unleash authentic human experience.

Freud didn’t silence a centuries-old debate, then. He reignited it. What our dreams mean is one of the oldest and most persistent questions in human history. And, despite their tawdry coupling in Dallas, it’s extremely unlikely this ancient fascination has ended. What the history of dreams ultimately illustrates is the measure of our closeness to, as well as our distance from, the long-dead dreamers of the past – since, as Jack Kerouac said, “All human beings are also dream beings. Dreaming ties all mankind together.”

• Lucy Powell presents Our Dreams: Our Selves on Radio 4 at 1.45pm, daily until Friday.

Pass the opium: five of the most influential dreams in art

Penelope’s dream of Odysseus

In The Odyssey, Penelope sees Odysseus’s return in a highly symbolic dream, but is unsure whether to trust it. Dreams that issue from gates of horn, she says, are true, while those from the gates of ivory are deceptive, an image that would echo down the centuries. One explanation could be that when horn is polished it becomes translucent, whereas ivory remains opaque.

Jacob’s ladder

In the Bible, Jacob, father of Joseph, dreams of a ladder bridging heaven and earth that angels traverse. This dream was hugely influential in the middle ages, when dreams were thought to link the temporal and the eternal, the human and the divine.

The House of Fame

This early poem by Chaucer, over 2,158 lines long and thought to have been written in 1379, is one of the most sophisticated literary dreams. The narrator begins with a summary of all the possible causes of dreams, before recounting one in which he was transported by an eagle to a glass-roofed temple adorned with images of the famous and their deeds. Chaucer comically establishes a connection between dreaming and creativity, while holding fame to be as fickle and illogical as a dream.

Kubla Khan

In September 1797, Coleridge took laudanum, a tincture of opium, after reading about Xanadu, the summer home of the titular 13th-century Chinese emperor. He fell asleep and experienced a long poetic vision. On waking, he began transcribing it when a young man from Porlock interrupted him. After which, Coleridge could remember nothing more. The fragments he did set down have become one of Romanticism’s most enduring poems.

Irma’s injection

In 1895, Sigmund Freud was treating a patient he called Irma. The treatment ended prematurely and was only partially successful. He then had a dream about Irma, in which she opened her mouth to reveal alarming white patches on her throat. A colleague then gave her an injection with what Freud feared was a dirty needle. Freud eventually interpreted this dream as an expression of his desire not be held accountable for Irma’s continued illness, and his wish to be seen as a capable, conscientious physician. From this point on, Freud would argue that all our dreams, however odd or terrifying, are wishes.

By Marianne Lipanovich, Houzz Contributor and Garden Writer

For most people, a French landscape is also a formal landscape, and therein lies its appeal.

Think Versailles, probably the most well-known French garden space. It has a distinct look and feel that set it apart from its Italian neighbors to the south and its British neighbors to the north. Still, there are elements of both. What we think of as traditional French style does have its roots in Italian landscape design. The resulting French adaptation was in turn adopted by British gardeners, and their adaptations made their way back across the Channel and in turn influenced later developments.

Symmetry and order are the heart of French landscape design. The gardens are also meant to be viewed from a distance, so form and design play a major role. They’re meant to highlight the centerpiece of the entire space, which would be the house (or, in most cases, the chateau). They’re known for their cool color palette, with an emphasis on whites, greens, blues and purples. Think boxwood hedges, intricately clipped shrubs, neatly planted garden beds and planters, and fields of lavender. You’ll also find a great use of stone, whether for pavings, edgings, a terrace or decorative elements, and places where you can enjoy the view.

Versions for Country and Courtyard

French country gardens are more informal, with a mix of softer plantings and bolder colors, but generally follow the same basic design principles. Planting beds may be more loosely planted and less structured, but they’ll still be contained by an edging or a border of some sort. The same gravel beds that work in a formal space fit in just as well in a small home’s front entryway. Rather than an overwhelming riot of color and plantings, there’s always a sense of order, even in the most natural of settings.

Although we often think of French landscaping in terms of large spaces, the overall style translates remarkably well into smaller courtyards (imagine an interior garden in a Paris building) and even the practical vegetable garden, where a mix of small raised beds is not only popular but practical. So while you might not want an entire landscape done in this style, you might find it ideal for a smaller area of your garden.

Warning: A formal design requires far more maintenance than, say, a natural garden. When something is out of place, it’s immediately obvious. If you don’t want to spend a lot of time keeping your garden in shape, a formal French-style estate may not be for you.

This small courtyard epitomizes the essence of French design, especially when viewed from above. All of the basics are here: striaght-lined geometric shapes, neatly trimmed hedges and shrubs, gravel for paving and a monochromatic color scheme.Design tip: In even the most formal of gardens, it’s great to include one thing that doesn’t quite fit the mold. In this landscape, the bench provides a one-of-a-kind element in the otherwise repetitive (in the best gardening sense) space, keeping it from seeming too sterile.

2. Stone surfaces provide the underpinnings. Gravel paths and stone terraces are hallmarks of French garden design. A gravel path is one of the easiest ways to start your landscape. In this case, the gravel defines the path area, while the inset stepping-stones make for a more stable walking surface.Design tip: With any loose stone, be prepared for some maintenance. While landscape and weed-barrier cloths will keep weed growth down, nothing is foolproof. You will need to periodically remove unwanted plant material. The secret is to do it before things get out of control.

For a more durable surface, consider flagstone or cobblestone. Edge the space with planting beds and add pots and climbers to soften the hardscape.Design tip: Using low stone walls to form planting beds not only elevates the plants and provides more growing space, but it’s also a great way to add extra seating. Choose a stone that complements the pavers on the patio so the entire space is cohesive.

Feel free to mix and match when it comes to shapes. The diamonds on the right are offset by the semicircle on the left. Using the same plant material to form the shapes ties the two sides together.Design tip: Be sure to look at the space from all levels. It should be pleasant when you’re in the midst of the garden, but it should also be visually interesting to look into the garden from outside or to view it from above.

Researchers have long struggled to design surveys that collect
detailed and informative data without introducing bias through the use
of loaded, confusing, or restrictive wording. A team of French
researchers has come up with a novel solution to this problem: Toss out
the surveys altogether, and replace them with a virtual computer program
that allows respondents to express their thoughts and preferences in
actions rather than in words.

This is the idea behind
Virtual Garden, a program that allows users to select from 95 different
features in order to create their ideal garden. The features fall within
seven different categories: animals, flowers, lawn and cover, sport and
playing, trees and bushes, water, and other. The program keeps track of
each item that is added and adjusted, and calculates biodiversity as
biotic features are introduced into the virtual habitat. Users are able
to view the garden from multiple angles and even take a virtual stroll
through the area in order to evaluate their progress and determine
whether further manipulations need to be made to the environment.

Far
from being merely a nerdy new version of The Sims, the program was
designed to assess which features people most want to experience when
they visit public gardens. Further, an analysis of the virtual habitats
could help clarify the role that biodiversity has in driving humans’
overwhelmingly positive responses to green spaces–particularly those
located in otherwise urban areas. Finally, by collecting basic social,
economic, and demographic information about each program user, the
program’s developers can also assess whether habitat preferences are
influenced by age, education, income, and general interest in the
natural environment.

The research team responsible for
Virtual Garden trialled the program among 732 Parisian hospital
patients. Each individual was given a 30-minute time limit for designing
the garden, though the average length of time required was only 19.2
minutes. Gardens typically contained approximately 24 different
features–9 “objects” (such as ponds), 5 animals, 8 flowers, and 5 woody
species (trees or bushes). Overall, users included fewer biotic
features than were expected by chance. Animals were particularly
underrepresented, with nearly a third of gardens containing no animals
at all, and almost another third containing fewer than 5 animal species.
Larger animals–especially mammals and herptiles–were not very
popular; the least preferred species overall were foxes and chimpanzees.
Ladybugs, peacocks, and great tits, on the other hand, were the most
preferred. The most popular species were generally those that are common
in Parisian gardens, suggesting that patients tended to populate their
virtual gardens with species that are most familiar to them.

 Several
demographic and socioeconomic factors influenced garden design. For
example, men included fewer animals and flowers than women; younger
patients included more non-native species; and people who showed a
greater interest in conservation and nature activities tended to create
gardens with higher biodiveristy. Interestingly, plant richness was
higher in gardens created by people who grew up in more rural areas,
again suggesting that familiarity with species is an important driver of
habitat preferences.

The Virtual Garden trial produced
two main results. First, it suggests that computer programs may be a
useful way to collect data from people without accidentally introducing
bias into a study. Such programs are likely to be particularly useful in
situations where researchers need to address or describe situations
that are highly visual in nature–such as habitat structure, the
aesthetics of which can greatly influence respondents’ attitudes and
opinions. Second, the patterns reported here get us one step closer to
understanding city-dwellers’ complex and often contradictory responses
to green spaces. There is particularly strong evidence of an
“extinction-of-experience” process, whereby people judge biodiversity
and aesthetics according to what they have previously experienced,
rather than what may be natural, healthy, and/or desirable in a given
environment. 

The
creators of the Virtual Garden hope that conservationists and managers
can use their program to collect and compare data from across a wide
geographic range, and, therefore, to improve our “understanding of the
role culture and living context…play in people’s relations with
biodiversity.” This could not only help save threatened species, but
also improve the well-being of people by increasing and improving
human-nature interactions even in the most urban of environments.

—

Shwartz, A., Cheval, H., Simon, L., and Julliard, R. 2013. Virtual Garden computer program for use in exploring the elements of biodiversity people want in cities. Conservation Biology 27(4):876-886.

By Sarah Cosgrove
22 September 2013

PHOTO: A hummingbird hovers near hummingbird sage (Salvia spathacea).

As I write, the first rain of the fall season (which coincidentally begins according to the calednar on Sunday the 22nd with the Autumnal Equinox) is cheering up the forecast. The whole North State seems to breathe a sigh of relief. The color green will begin to slowly return (naturally) to our fields and hills. For gardeners, the longed for fall planting season is finally here.

PHOTO: A yellow-faced bumble bee gather pollen on late-summer blooming asters.

While there are a whole handful of things to keep in mind when considering planting a new garden, or overhauling or adding to an existing garden, an upcoming day-long class offered by the Friends of the Chico State Herbarium encourages us and more importantly will provide in-depth knowledge to attendees on how to take our region’s native pollinators – butterflies, bees, hummingbirds, moths, flies, beetles and more – into consideration when planting – this fall or anytime. Instructors for the course Adrienne Edwards and John Whittlesey, assure us that creating a garden is about beauty, about a place of refuge and wonder, about flowers and fruit and shade and walkways, and that by gaining that extra bit of knowledge and taking that extra bit of time to understand a little more about the plants that you choose and about the needs of beneficial pollinators, your garden will be all that you want it to be, simply with more life, and more health.

PHOTO: Mirror image of nectaring wasps on silver mint. Photo courtesy of John Whittlesey.

Adrienne refers to the many beautiful and colorful pollinating creatures as the “flying flowers” around us.

PHOTO: A bright yellow pollinator (wasp or fly?) stands out cheerfully against the saturated purple of verbena bonariensis. Photo courtesy of John Whittlesey.

CLASS DESCRIPTION:

Pollinators are essential for reproduction in a majority of plants worldwide – plants provide food, fiber, medicines, and beauty. Yet pollinators quite often are rare in our modern urban and suburban landscapes.

PHOTO: A tiny green bee covered in the pollen of native hibiscus.

Learn how to design a garden to encourage native pollinators by a) using plants that provide overlapping nectar, pollen, and larval food resources, b) providing pollinator nesting habitat, and c) eliminating the use of pesticides that kill non-target pollinators.

We will discuss the various pollinators (and associates) that can be encouraged in our gardens through thoughtful planning. We will also visit some pollinator-friendly gardens to discuss plant selection, placement and care of a garden that cultivates a thriving habitat for a wide range of pollinators and insect life, enriching the color, diversity, and health of your garden!

PHOTO: A yellow swallowtail hangs from the mellow mauve of a joe-pye weed (Eupatorium purpureum) flower head. Photo courtesy of John Whittlesey.

The instructors for this workshop are John Whittlesey, founder and owner of Canyon Creek Nursery, outside of Oroville, until recently Horticulture Chair of the Mount Lassen Chapter of the California Native Plant Society, and part-time instructor for the California School of Landscape Design, outside of Auburn, and Adrienne Edwards, Adjunct Faculty at Chico State, botanist, ecologist, and arborist. Both are board members of Friends of the Chico State Herbarium.

The workshop will meet Saturday, September 28, 2013, from 9:00 a.m. to around 3:00 p.m., starting in Holt Hall room 129 at CSU Chico, and later car-pooling to garden sites. Registration is $100.00 personal, $90.00 for members of Friends of the Herbarium, $40.00 student (only 2 seats available at the student price). Please register in advance; class size is limited to 25 participants, class cancelled without a minimum of 8 participants. For more information about workshop content please contact John Whittlesey at johnccnd@gmail.com or Adrienne Edwards at aledwards@csuchico.edu. For information about workshop registration please contact the Biology office at (530) 898-5356 or jbraden@csuchico.edu.

Adrienne and John are both native plant experts, active members of the Mt. Lassen Chapter of the California Native Plant Society, and both involved in the design and construction of several regional public gardens, including a Native Plant Pollinator Garden at Gateway Science Museum in Chico.

PHOTO: Squash bee gathering pollen. Squash bees are important specialist native solitary bees of two genera, Peponapis and Xenoglossa. Females forage at the flowers of squashes, pumpkins and gourds, their sole pollen hosts. Photo courtesy of John Whittlesey.

Adrienne is an ongoing advocate for educating children about the fun and wonder of native plants and healthy eco-system based gardens and landscapes. John is the co-creator of a traveling exhibit on the native pollinators, “Pollinators: Keeping Company with Flowers”, which was on display at Gateway Science Museum from April to December of 2012. Between them, Adrienne and John have years of experience and more passion for this subject than you’re likely to find in any one room.

PHOTO: A healthy vibrant home-garden designed by Bernadette Balics of Ecological Landscape Design in Davis. This garden is outfitted with plenty of food, water and shelter for visiting pollinators.

A few keys things to keep in mind, they both emphasize, when working to welcome pollinators into your garden, include:

1. Pollinators have the same needs that we have: food, clean-fresh water, shelter.
2. Pollinators have these needs at all stages of their lives, when they are eggs, whey they are caterpillars (if this is one of their life stages), when they are dormant and/or not eating, and when they are at their maturity and reproducing. They eat different things at each stage of their life and so knowing what some of your favorite pollinators eat at each stage of their lives will support them that much more.
3. Pollinators have these needs year-round. With this in mind, if you can provide 1 – 3 different pollen/nectar sources in your garden in bloom from January – November, not only will you have a full-season garden, you will also be more fully supportive of our pollinator populations.
Photo: Photo courtesy of John Whittlesey.
4. Not all flowers provide the same level or quality of pollen and nectar. When choosing among the flowering plants you love, choose ones that provide a good amount of both. Some plant families, and some individual plant species are just better at supporting a wide range of pollinators.
Photo: Photo courtesy of John Whittlesey.
5. A wide range of flower color and form will bring a wider range of pollinator types.
6. A consistent source of clean fresh water is essential. This can be an elaborate pond or fountain or as easy an element as a drip-rock or bird bath that is flushed regularly with an irrigation hose attached to it.
7. If you want to welcome pollinators, pesticides have no place in your garden. If you feel you must use one, choose carefully, read the instructions carefully and apply carefully so as not to harm more than you intend to.

8. Don’t be too tidy – a garden that welcomes pollinators will have sites for nesting and resting – small debris piles, some dead branches or twigs, good duff on some of the ground, some bare soil in other areas.
9. Have fun with it. You want your garden to be an oasis for you – it will be that much more lively and lovely if it is also an oasis for birds, bees, butterflies, flies, moths and more.

Follow Jewellgarden.com/In a North State Garden on Facebook – Like us today!

To submit plant/gardening related events/classes to the Jewellgarden.com on-line Calendar of Regional Gardening Events, send the pertinent information to me at: Jennifer@jewellgarden.com
Did you know I send out a weekly email with information about upcoming topics and gardening related events? If you would like to be added to the mailing list, send an email to Jennifer@jewellgarden.com.

In a North State Garden is a weekly Northstate Public Radio and web-based program celebrating the art, craft and science of home gardening in Northern California. It is made possible in part by the Gateway Science Museum – Exploring the Natural History of the North State and on the campus of CSU, Chico. In a North State Garden is conceived, written, photographed and hosted by Jennifer Jewell – all rights reserved jewellgarden.com. In a North State Garden airs on Northstate Public Radio Saturday mornings at 7:34 AM Pacific time and Sunday morning at 8:34 AM Pacific time.

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Dior’s garden at the Villa Les Rhumbs in Granville in Normandy, France.

Musee Christain Dior Collection, Granville

An afternoon dress in pale blue organdie, embroidered with pink and blue forget-me-nots, was part of Dior’s spring-summer 1953 haute couture collection, Tulipe line.

Musee Christian Dior Collection, Granville

When it was time to create a new collection, Christian Dior had a ritual: He went to his garden and sat down among the flowers.

Fashion historian Florence Muller gathered drawings, photographs and paintings by Manet, Monet, Renoir and others for an exhibition on Dior and Impressionism, at the Dior Museum in Granville, the designer’s hometown. Granville is a dreary little seaside town in Normandy, France, which these days is festooned with photos of roses in celebration of its native son.

Muller says the garden ritual served Dior from 1947, when he famously invented what was dubbed the New Look, until he died 10 years later, at age 52. An old photograph shows Dior, pudgy and bald (one wag said he “looked as if he were made of pink marzipan”), in his garden, finding inspiration. You can see him in real concentration, sitting at a little table, with a pond behind him — he’s thinking and drawing, and creating.

“Each season he had to invent so many dresses, perhaps that’s why he’s holding his head,” says Muller. “It’s not so easy, you know, the work of a grand couturier.”

As a teenager, Dior helped his mother design the garden at their pink house, up a winding seaside road in Granville.

Susan Stamberg/NPR

When he was 15, Christian Dior helped his mother design their pretty garden in Granville. Up a winding seaside road, the Diors’ pink house is a modest one.

“It’s not a very important house,” says Brigitte Richard, chief curator of the Dior Museum. “In fact, it’s a house of a bourgeois family settled in Granville.”

Dior’s bourgeois father was a fertilizer manufacturer. (Handy, for gardening!)

Like the designer, the artists of Impressionism were also inspired by flowers. Muller picked two photos to make the point.

“You have here the idea of painters in their garden,” she explains. “Like Monet, of course, [a famous example of a] garden created by an artist. And on the left side, Christian Dior with his gardens that were also creations designed by him.”

Dior stands in his gardens, in a suit and tie. Monet, in suspenders and soft hat, looks more relaxed. But both were flower lovers: Monet put gardens on his canvases; Dior put them on women. Dress collections named for flowers; fabrics patterned with roses, lily of the valley (his lucky flower, he said), embroidered bouquets; full, full, skirts that swirl like petals.

Christian Dior (left) poses in the garden at La Colle Noire, his home in Montauroux, in a photograph taken by Lord Snowdon. Claude Monet (right) stands beside his pond of water lilies in a 1905 photograph by Jacques-Ernest Bulloz.

Camera Press/Gamma/RMN-Grand Palais

“Ha!” said Chanel, just a bit competitively. “Dior doesn’t dress women. He upholsters them.”

Berthe Morisot’s 1890 watercolor Tulips.

Musee Marmottan Monet

A strapless gown with a gauzy white skirt, once worn by Sarah Jessica Parker, is placed near a Degas ballet class. John Galliano designed the dress — he did the Dior line from the late 1990s to 2011. Other Dior designers include Yves St. Laurent, and these days Raf Simons.

Linking the clothes to Impressionism, a dreary landscape by the young Monet hangs near a dowdy 1956 Dior. Tulips — a watercolor by Berthe Morisot — echoes a brighter Dior, from 1956.

The New Look that put Dior on the fashion map in 1947 — tiny waists, huge skirts, rounded shoulders — made a powerful statement, after all the deprivations of World War II. With his New Look, Dior was saying a new day had dawned.

“It was very important because it was a symbol of a return to prosperity — the beauty of life, you know,” Muller says. It was the “return to luxurious things. … It was like a fairy tale again.”

“Dior and Impressionism” continues the fairy tale, with paintings and clothes, at the Dior Museum in Granville. The show ends Sunday.

The driveway that came with the 1921 Craftsman-style house that David Ulick bought five years ago was the original concrete one, marred by cracks and with tree roots starting to break through.

“I didn’t like the driveway,” said Ulick, of Pasadena, Calif. “I wanted something a little bit nicer.”

He looked through books and drove through the Craftsman-rich neighborhoods of Pasadena to get ideas before deciding on a concrete drive with an antique finish, accented with reclaimed red bricks from the 1920s.

“I wanted this to look like the original driveway, an original, nice driveway, and using used bricks gives it a nice old-fashioned look,” Ulick said.

“It really makes it a grand entrance for the house,” he added, noting the brick walkway up one side. “I figured I’d treat the Craftsman the way it deserves to be treated, and maintain its design style and heritage.”

While a driveway may still be a utilitarian afterthought for many homeowners, others like Ulick are adding some serious curb appeal to their homes by moving beyond basic options like grass or gravel, asphalt or concrete.

“The driveway is commonly overlooked,” conceded Michael Keenan, an adjunct assistant professor of landscape architecture at the University of Minnesota. “Driveways are not cheap necessarily, but they are completely functional and necessary if you have a car and a garage.”

Doing up the driveway, Keenan said, is a chance to “celebrate the function because it is a piece of the property you do use every day.”

The design options have grown in the last decade or so, he said, as pavers — made from precast concrete, clay and natural stone like granite — are being turned out in a range of colors and sizes. Some have rounded edges for an older look; others are mottled to add color variation to the driveway.

Installing a customized driveway is a way to put your own stamp on the hardscape and set your house apart from the rest. Depending on the neighborhood, the materials and the quality of the craftsmanship, Keenan said, a driveway also could increase a home’s resale value.

“It does become a point of distinction,” he said. “It is something people notice. It is elegant.”

The least expensive paved driveways are made of asphalt, which cost about $12 to $15 a square foot, and concrete, costing about $14 to $18 a square foot, Keenan said. Though concrete is more resilient and lasts longer, both materials will crack over time, he said.

Pavers, which start at about $20 to $25 a square foot, should last a lifetime, Keenan said. “The key is the fact that the pavement acts as flexible fabric and it can move with the earth, and isn’t a rigid system and isn’t prone to cracking,” he said.

Pavers can be used to make traditional patterns like basket-weave or herringbone, or be fashioned into a custom look.

For a less traditional look, use a paver that comes in three or four sizes and lay them out at random, Keenan said. Or get a custom design without breaking the bank by using concrete pavers accented with more expensive natural stone pavers.

Keenan is also the co-founder and design director of reGEN Land Design in Minneapolis. He works with homeowners to find the best driveway for their home. People are most concerned with the color, which might be chosen by looking at the home’s roof, siding or trim color.

“I don’t think you can make a value judgment on which one is the best,” Keenan said of driveway designs. “It’s got to fit the building that you’re paving next to.”

He might recommend, for example, a traditional red-brick driveway to go with a light blue Colonial home. For a contemporary, environmentally “green” home, he might choose light-colored, permeable pavers — a more environmentally sound choice because they let water back through to the earth under the driveway, rather than forcing it to run off and collect debris on the way to bodies of water.

In Naples, Fla., landscape architect W. Christian Busk installs “living driveways” that feature real grass interspersed among pavers. That reduces heat and glare and provides some drainage.

“We blur the lines between where driveway ends and where landscape begins,” says Busk, president of Busk Associates. “It always looks beautiful.”

Back in Pasadena, the concrete-and-brick option that Ulick chose is popular among the many Craftsman and other historical homes in the area, said Mark Peters, the chief estimator for Boston Brick Stone, which helped create Ulick’s driveway.

“It’s a very rich feel and it’s understated,” Peters said.

Since he got his driveway in 2009, Ulick said, he has received many compliments, and people sometimes stop to ask if his driveway is the original.

“That’s a bigger compliment,” he said, “that it looks like it’s been done years and years and years ago.”

Jay Sifford, Houzz Contributor and Garden Designer

Many of our gardens seem to be compartmentalized, mimicking our lives. We wake up, go to work, go to lunch, drive home from work, pick up the kids, prepare dinner, watch TV and head to bed, only to repeat the process the next day. The garden spaces with which we surround ourselves are much the same. We have our front yards, our side yards, our backyards, our children’s play areas and our vegetable beds. We have unconsciously convinced ourselves that this is the way it has to be. What if our garden spaces flowed together seamlessly, creating one homogenous space? Are you saying to yourself that this could never happen? Let’s see how it’s done. Let’s learn the art of mastering garden transitions.

1. Reimagine your hardscape and bed lines. Serpentine lines both invoke the imagination and have a relaxing effect upon the mind. In art theory this shape is referred to as the line of beauty. It infuses a composition with vitality, as opposed to straight lines, which signify death or inanimate objects.

This bluestone walkway seems to be endless, disappearing around the bend. Don’t you wonder what lies beyond?

Discover landscaping ideas and find a top local landscape contractor to plan your garden landscape

Perhaps your hardscape is firmly established and not easily changed. No worries. Redesigning your bed lines to create more graceful curves will give your space that flow and intrigue you’ve been missing, allowing for a pleasing transition from space to space.

2. Repeat key elements. The use of a key element repeated throughout a garden gives it peaceful continuity. This technique is especially effective when the key element crosses over a pathway into the parallel bed, moving the eye back and forth throughout the space.

Notice how this shady mixed border carries the eye through the space. Even though this garden relies heavily upon hostas for interest, it is the large-leafed hostas (Hosta cvs,USDA zones 3 to 8) that punctuate the space from side to side and move the eye down the pathway.

The repetition of the large-leafed hostas allows for the peaceful transition to pockets of different plants.

3. Interject an element to induce transition. Boulders can be used to provide interest and contrast. This gives the designer a natural opportunity to begin something new. In this photograph a boulder has been cut into the metal edging along the pathway to provide unexpected interest and a natural transition point between a moss garden and a mass planting of autumn ferns (Dryopteris erythrosora, zones 5 to 9).

4. Become reacquainted with color flow. Think back to middle school science class. Do you remember learning about Roy G. Biv? This initialism was an easy way to remember natural color flow, the colors of the rainbow: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet. This same color flow can create a natural and peaceful transition in the garden.

Notice the vibrant yet tranquil progression of color in this well-designed prairie-style garden. Red flows effortlessly into orange, which in turn flows into yellow. Wouldn’t the introduction of a pink or violet flower be an unwelcome intrusion?

Become reacquainted with Roy G. Biv. Your garden will be a better place because of it.

5. Mix up your materials. Perhaps you have an existing patio, or are considering adding one but are unsure how to make it feel like a natural part of your garden.Take a cue from this backyard. The gravel covering the path leading to the patio is the same color as the bluestone patio. Bands of bluestone have been placed within the pathway, creating continuity and a peaceful transition.

In addition, by laying out the pathway in a yatsuhasi, or Japanese zigzag, pattern, the designer has created a unique and dramatic space.

6. Create different levels. Terracing a space can result in both logical and dramatic transitions. The added third dimension allows for more diversity in themes and activities within a confined space.You will notice a surprising number of substrates in this yard, from the gray concrete pads to the tan gravel to the turf. What keeps all of this from being overpowering? The answer lies in the varying heights, masterfully woven together with bands of Cor-Ten steel that mimic the color of the house siding.

7. Add a gate. Bold transitions are desirable to make dramatic statements in some cases. Gates can be aesthetically useful when a garden is too predictable and needs to be injected with interest, or when two distinctly different garden spaces adjoin.

In either case why settle for an ordinary, mundane gate when, with just a bit more effort, you could add something unexpected and unique? Scouring antique shops, import stores and architectural salvage warehouses can yield a treasure trove of possibilities.

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