If you made it to the AAUW’s 24th annual garden tour last week, the desire to do something in your own backyard or patio is probably still making your mouth water. Some advice from landscape designers is recommended before that first shovel goes in the ground.

Traditional European design dictates that an outdoor space follow the interior layout locating “room spaces” as in a home. That works beautifully, especially for Oxford style architecture or anything from Italy, Spain or even the Colonial Indian styles. But a home in the manner of the Prairie style, or in Frank Floyd Wright’s “Fallingwater” style, then other options may be better suited for that space.

I’d recommend reading about European and Japanese design principles for landscaping. It will give you some valuable ideas about new problems. It’s easy enough to dig a hole and plant a tree. Watering will keep it alive and feeding it will help it thrive — and that’s good. But having a space that is planted so the view from a door or window where you sit inside the house, or a space that draws you out of doors even in winter, is perhaps a higher calling for a garden space.

As I pore over “Tasha Tudor’s Gardens,” one of my favorite coffee table books, I see the European concept of flowers for every season working hand-in-hand with a deep love of the process of growing things. Her garden style is much more my mother’s style of “if one rose is good, then two are better.” The book’s text is by Tovah Martin and photographs by Richard W. Brown. The book is a visual masterpiece showing love for the life of growing things.

One huge difference in Western and Eastern garden styles is sheer quantity of land. Where British-based design can be done on small plots, it usually requires acres, Asian style can be found in smaller spaces, miniaturized, with more stones and water than flowers.

Any book on Gertrude Jekyll’s English garden designs will give a great foundation for Western and even cottage style plantings. Her designs are used yet today and alongside Jens Jensen’s, are considered the bible of design for the British garden.

According to Erik Borja, author of “Zen Gardens,” the Japanese concept of outdoor spaces is opposite of Western concepts of the garden as a home extension.

“In Japan” he said, “the garden is seen as another world, and one that is entirely disconnected with the living area.” He said the rationale for that it is nature (the outdoor spaces) that dominates. In the book he takes the reader through his own Japanese inspired garden, modified to use some Western exceptions, it has the aesthetics of the Far East.

“Once the threshold of the house is passed,” he wrote, “one enters a world of dreams and the imagination, and all the elements that make up the garden must contribute to this impression of unreality.” This is not a fairy garden (even though a fairy garden is fun). The Japanese space imparts permanence over prettiness.

In Jamestown, the architecture is very Western, and Craftsman style dominates the older homes. There are some magnificent buildings here, and garden space is limited, if in town. That’s why planning carefully is so important. Most garden spaces need some hardscaping, or at least paved or defined walking paths. The Jekyll book on Arts and Crafts Gardens or Frank Lloyd Wright’s book on The Gardens of FLW is well worth your investment.

Paths need careful planning and some engineering. But before actual construction, a design, a map if you will, is a good idea. Then, before the design is done, research your home’s architecture and look at some garden examples appropriate for that structure.

Websites are helpful supplements to books, as are owners/employees at area plant nurseries. Some flowers or evergreens seen in our lovely picture books cannot grow in zone 4, so a chosen plan may need a replacement plant. Research is vital in order to not make costly mistakes.

If anyone has an idea for this column, contact Sharon Cox, PO Box 1559, Jamestown, ND 58402.

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IF, as the saying goes, “my home is my castle,” then the natural extension of the home is “my garden is my sanctuary.”

Today, as it has been for thousands of years, gardens are relevant for many reasons but most importantly as a place to escape the pressures of daily life. Intellectuals will classify a garden’s design style into some category to provide context and to inform the relevance of the design in contemporary terms. On a personal level, people need to feel safe and comfortable in their gardens to find mental or spiritual sanctuary. For the many clients I work with, a key requirement of designing the garden is to find the right balance between personal expression, lifestyle compatibility and affordability.

So just exactly how do you create a backyard that will provide a place to retreat and find sanctuary? Here are some design ideas.

For some people, the productive garden provides an outlet for stress and contemplation and is usually designed around the growing of fruits and vegetables. The common rectangular raisedbox bed affords ease of access, which is good for people with physical limitations or age related issues. But the rectangular shape is not always relaxing or stimulating for the mind. Instead, consider designing round shapes that are softer and more restful for the mind and body.

Vegetables do not have to be grown in big blocks of one

species next to another. Feel free to mix and match as if you are working with ornamentals and not food crops. Use a variety of leaf and flower colours, textures and plant sizes to provide diversity for the mind and to prevent pest and disease problems.

Productive gardens require deep, fertile soil to grow the best crops, which prevents the need for chemical additives. And mulching is a must to

prevent weeding work, which is not enjoyable for the mind or body.

Concept gardens are preferred for people who want a specific form of creative expression. Concepts can be formal or informal designs but they adhere to a specific idea that can range from the mundane to the bizarre, such as designs related to superheroes, industrialization, mazes, fantasy lands and even

the Flintstones and so forth.

When designing with a specific creative expression in mind, stay true to the concept and use plants and materials that will provide visual references that reinforce concept. For example, if I want my garden to look like the Flintstone family lives there, I would use lots of large boulders, prehistoric looking

plants and crude or at least simple furnishings.

Gardens based on cultural tradition are designed using specific characteristics of any given culture. Given our multicultural society here on the West Coast it is common to find gardens designed to reflect Persian, Greek, Italian, East Indian, Chinese, Japanese, British, aboriginal and other cultures.

Each cultural garden uses specific features like water, walls, specific pathways materials, sculptures and most importantly plants that are historically relevant to each culture. It is important in the cultural garden to incorporate specific design elements that reflect the cultural symbolisms. Persian gardens, for example, often incorporate courtyards with water symbolizing protection, safety and the importance of water to life. The clichéd West Coast aboriginal garden might include sword ferns, cedar trees and a totem pole.

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This concept design for Sunapple Gardens and Education Center at Northeast School was presented by Moody-Nolan Inc.

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By

MARLA K. KUHLMAN

ThisWeek Community News

Tuesday July 23, 2013 7:33 PM

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The Franklin County Board of Developmental Disabilities is scheduled to return to Gahanna’s Planning Commission in August with plans that show the exact distance from neighboring residential properties to the planting areas of the proposed Sunapple Gardens and Education Center.

A new concept design for Sunapple Gardens, 500 N. Hamilton Road, was unveiled during a July 17 Planning Commission workshop.

Since March, the developmental disabilities board has been working on plans for the educational gardens beside the Northeast School, where adults and youth participating in agency programs would grow produce, herbs, cut flowers and fruit.

In Gahanna, the agency operates a school-age program at Northeast School and an adult program at ARC Industries East.

The initial plans for Sunapple were opposed by surrounding neighbors, who said their property values would decrease because of the gardens.

David Hodge, attorney for the Franklin County Board of Developmental Disabilities, said an informal meeting was held with neighbors in May to address concerns.

“There were lots of questions and answers,” he said. “We feel like some concerns were addressed. An architect has put together a nice and thoughtful plan for how the garden will be laid out and the education center itself.”

Jean Gordon, of Moody-Nolan Inc., said a 6-foot transparent deer fence would be installed around the gardens and a wooded buffer and hedge/wildflower plantings near neighbors. Deciduous trees would line the gardens along Hamilton Road.

“Each square is one quarter acre of planting area,” he said. “There are five gothic-frame greenhouses, and the green rectangle is an education center.”

On the west side of the education building is a proposed porch, ADA raised planting beds, a pergola, fruit trees and a sensory garden with scented and textured plants and flowers.

“We’ll have herbs,” Gordon said. “That’s important here. We’ll have budding fruit trees. When you come out of the (school) building, they will have a hard surface to get to the education building. It will be safe for them.”

Planning Commission member Joe Keehner said he likes most of the plan, but he also favors bees and composting.

“If you’re going to be educating people about planting things and sustainability, it doesn’t make sense not to have an area for composting,” he said. “I think the notion of bee hives would also make sense. Those are two significant factors in growing food.

“The state of the bees in the U.S. has been in travail. To have a holistic education system looking at growing food, I think that should be considered down the road once the neighbors feel comfortable with the aesthetics.”

Teresa Kobelt, director of the FCBDD and CEO of ARC Industries, said the intention was to have a business related to composting as part of the original plan.

“That’s what’s gone from the plan,” she said. “You’re right; composting is necessary. It’s not part of the business plan.”

Hodge agreed with Keehner.

“We want to be good neighbors,” he said. “If people are concerned about compost and bees, it needs to be taken a step at a time. Today isn’t the day. It’s not going to happen right away.”

Commission member Kristin Rosan asked if the wooded buffer would block neighbors from seeing the greenhouses, excluding winter. She also asked why hedge/wildflowers were chosen around the eastern edge rather than something more substantial in height.

Gordon said the hedge is to have something visually pleasant.

Commission chairman Donald Shepherd said he wants to see the distance between the planting areas and property lines of homeowners, on the east and north sides, detailed.

Because the new plan calls for a 6-foot fence, no variance is needed. A fence variance was requested with the previous plan. The commission will consider only design review for the proposal.

Millwood Court resident Judy Horch said she believes in the mission of Sunapple.

“I’m not anti-Sunapple,” she said. “I’m anti-plastic wind tunnels.”

Horch said the Hamilton Road corridor plan calls for high-quality materials and aesthetic landscaping.

“I don’t feel plastic gothic tunnels constitute as high-quality building material,” she said.

Her husband, Phil Horch, said the plan has been improved and the agency has listened to neighbors.

“The fence has been lowered,” he said. “I’ll be interested to see if a 6-foot fence can keep the deer out. At one time, I saw 16 deer by our house. They have the ability to jump.”

Kobelt has said a mission of FCBDD and ARC Industries is to help people to live, learn and work in their community. She said ARC Industries has been a longtime community partner of the Franklin County board.

As a nonprofit business, ARC creates jobs and training opportunities for adults who are eligible for county board services. In 2012, ARC employed more than 1,400 adults with developmental disabilities, and almost a fourth of those employment opportunities were in Gahanna, Kobelt said.

• Hudson Valley Good Stuff
• Before: Jay Levine measuring my mess of a garden:

• Hudson Valley Good Stuff
• After: Beautiful trellis ready for cucumbers and tomato plants

Every time I look outside my window to see my garden, I feel optimistic. As a gardening friend of mine says, “Looking at a garden organizes your mind.” It took me seven years of living in the Hudson Valley to begin to take my garden seriously. When we moved to Woodstock in June 2003, our garden had mostly overgrown weeds and mint in it. (I remember being really proud of that mint and having fun putting it in my iced tea.) The garden stayed that way until last year when a friend of mine helped me set up the garden and mix the compost in with the dirt, and plant vegetables that I bought from Gallo’s Nursery andAdams Fairacre Farms. My gardening friend moved to Mississippi last year so I had to either try to wing it on my own with my black thumb, or find a gardener who could work with me and my budget.

Enter Jay Levine of Hudson Valley Backyard Farm who I met at a Wellness Wednesday at Mother Earth’s Storehouse in Kingston. I invited him to my backyard to give me a consultation, an estimate, and a proposal for a gardening re-design. (He sent me the proposal by email the following week.) Jay Levine has a Masters in Sustainable Landscape Planning and Design, worked as an urban planner and science teacher before starting his own gardening business, Hudson Valley Backyard Farm Company. I can tell just by watching him in action, studying every weed and shadow in the garden, that it is his passion. You could call him a walking gardening Wikipedia. (He started gardening as a 6 year old!)

I gave him a brief history of last year’s crops: lots of tomatoes and lettuce until an animal came in and went on a binge one night. I had a bounty crop of cucumbers last year. “Oh, really? What did you use to hold the cucumbers up?” Levine asks me. “Uh, nothing. I didn’t know any better so I just grabbed them from the ground,” I told him. Aghast and mildly amused, Jay suggested building trellises to help the tomatoes grow and keep the cucumbers off the ground.

He asked me if I was attached to anything that was growing wild in my garden, for example the invasive exotic plant, a multi-flora rose shrub which I called the rose bush. He asked me if I was okay with re-organizing the layout of the garden, and removing the bricks that outlined the garden beds. Then he suggested that I remove the mint if I wasn’t attached to it. At first, my husband and I were a bit ambitious about building a sturdy 10-foot fence to keep the deer out, and I was open to an irrigation system. Jay sent us a detailed diagram, and an estimated cost of labor and equipment.

After seeing how much the fencing and irrigation system was going to cost in terms of materials and labor cost, we decided to forgo the fancy deer fence and irrigation system, and asked Jay to instead install the trellises, add the mulch, prepare the beds, and plant the seeds and vegetable plants. Jay was agreeable to that, and reduced the estimate accordingly and offered a few budget-friendly suggestions for a DIY fence (chicken wire and metal posts), and suggested we get soaker hoses in place of an irrigation system. The total labor cost (not including materials) was $700, and a good part of that was barter for sponsoring my blog. (Thank you, Jay!)

Jay Levine gave us a shopping list, which included conduit, rebar, netting, and galvanized plumbing tees for the trellises. We really didn’t know what to expect, and my husband has an aversion to shopping for hardware supplies, but this was the only challenging aspect of the garden re-design for us. (The previous year, I just bought a few tomato cages. As you can see from the before and after garden photos, the trellises look beautiful!) It took Jay Levine a few long afternoons to create and re-organize our garden. He is confident that the trellises will last a decade. I did a bit of initial weeding before he started, but my weeding was pretty minimal. I would definitely recommend Hudson Valley Backyard Farm if you are in need of a gardening expert consultation, need help starting your own garden, or just landscaping and gardening work. Jay Levine is very knowledgeable about all aspects of gardening, and is the real McCoy! “Mulch is to a garden what a fresh coat of paint is to a room,” says Jay.

Vanessa Ahern is the founder of Hudson Valley Good Stuff, a blog about where to eat, play, and recharge your spirit in the Hudson Valley.

The smaller the garden, the easier it is to design. Or so the theory goes. But sometimes it's the tiniest of spaces that pose the greatest challenge. In a back garden in Chiswick, west London, Kate Gould has made the most of a minuscule plot, by carefully selecting the hard landscaping, limiting the colour palette and restraining herself at the nursery.

When Debbie and Nigel Kellow extended the kitchen of their Victorian terrace, their dark and dingy side return was replaced by a 4m sq south-west-facing plot surrounded by other gardens and shaded by mature trees. "In tiny gardens, I usually rotate the design by 45 degrees, which can make the space feel larger," Gould says, "but Debbie and Nigel wanted the garden straight on. I wanted to make everything as simple as possible and as large as possible: big and bold."

She also needed to pin down what was possible: homeowners tend to be overambitious, pencilling in a hot tub or a veg garden as well as a patio, but when space is tight, the vagaries of the English weather tend to rein in grand plans. "You have to be realistic," Gould says. "Get in what you're going to make good use of, especially with an English summer. You may use your garden only a few times a year."

The Kellows wanted their garden to be a place where they could sit, eat and entertain, and the sandstone-paved area with its narrow borders has enough room for a table that can comfortably accommodate eight. When the weather's a letdown, the chairs slot underneath the table: the set is made from synthetic rattan, so the whole thing is waterproof and, so long as it's covered, can even be left outside all winter. "We didn't want it overdesigned," Debbie says. "I wanted it to be fairly traditional, in keeping with the house."

The Kellows also didn't want the garden to feel like a seamless extension of the kitchen, so there's a small step between the two, and french windows rather than sliding doors. But the cool colours do echo the interior: the fence and planters are painted (French Gray, by Farrow Ball) to pick up the colour of the kitchen. Adding trellis to the top of the fence gives the garden extra privacy and growing space without loss of light.

The simple colour scheme extends to the plants, too: white is the dominant colour here. As a keen plantswoman, Gould says she had to tame her urge to buy one of everything at the nursery in order to make this garden work. There are fewer than a dozen species in this space, which was planted up last summer, but the repetition and simplicity are restful to the eye. Rather than adding trellis to the surface of the fences and wall, which would have made the garden feel even more hemmed in, she strung wires between vine eyes for a long-lasting and more or less invisible way to keep climbers in place.

On the back fence, the semi-double, white, scented flowers of Rosa banksiae 'Alba Plena' are beginning to open, and on the wall to one side and the fence to the other, another white-flowered climber, the highly scented star jasmine (Trachelospermum jasminoides), will soon join in. In April and May, the nodding, sky-blue bells of Clematis 'Frances Rivis' open, followed later in the summer by the flat, white blooms of C. 'Miss Bateman'.

A low line of box (Buxus sempervirens) provides strong, clean lines when the garden is bare in winter, and shields the sparse bases of the climbers. A pair of lollipop-shaped standard bay trees (Laurus nobilis) in Versailles wooden planters made by the carpenter who built the fencing provide more architectural shape. Large lead troughs from Oxford Planters lend a solid, traditional feel and give the Kellows a place to sow herbs.

The entire project, including hard landscaping, re-fencing, planting, and design, cost around £12,000-£15,000. If such a hefty price tag is outside your price range, there are plenty of lessons here for the DIY gardener: choose a palette of only a few plants, and stick to it; invest in architectural plants to lend structure, especially in winter when everything else is bare; clothe walls with climbers held in place by a network of wires, rather than fussy trellis; and keep ornamentation to a minimum: a couple of large pots or planters makes a small garden look bigger, whereas a mass of smaller pots clutters the space.

Was it worth the money, hiring a designer to work on such a small plot? "Definitely," Debbie says of her tiny haven. "In the evenings, when it's all gone quiet, all you can hear is the trees."

Last spring, Kevan Busa imagined he would be studying Spanish gardens. A student of landscape design at State University of New York (SUNY), Busa planned to spend his final semester in Barcelona, but a sharp pain in his right leg changed everything. 

When the pain wouldn’t subside, a friend drove him to the emergency room. Blood tests showed that Busa’s platelet count was virtually depleted, and his white blood cells had risen dramatically. Further tests found that acute lymphoblastic leukemia had spread to 92 percent of his bone marrow. 

“They told me I probably had a week-and-a-half to live if I hadn’t come in,” he said. 

Despite the devastating diagnosis, Busa was determined to graduate on time. However, after four rounds of chemotherapy, three bone marrow biopsies, and several spinal taps, he was in no shape to travel. 

So Busa discussed a unique idea with SUNY advisors: his final project would examine the healing potential of landscape design from a patient’s perspective. His observations appear in the June 2013 issue of Landscape Architecture Magazine.

Anatomy of a Healing Space

The idea that gardens can benefit the sick has had a long and robust history throughout both Eastern and Western cultures. In European and American hospitals, this belief remained strong up until the 20th century.

Busa points to Roger Ulrich’s work as a sign that the idea is returning to modern medicine. Ulrich’s 1984 study “View through a Window May Influence Recovery from Surgery,” was published in the journal Science and has been repeated multiple times. The practice is now called evidence-based design.

More than an attractive luxury, according to Busa, green space is “a sound economic investment in health and productivity, based on well-researched neurological and physiological evidence.” 

“If you put somebody in a space where they will heal faster, so they get out of the hospital three days earlier than before, do you know how much money you’ll save?” he asked. “Hospital bills per night are pretty intense I would say.”

But not every garden is therapeutic, and Busa’s perspective reveals critical details that most designers overlook. 

As he recovered from his bone marrow transplant at the Roswell Park Cancer Institute (RPCI) in Buffalo, NY, Busa turned his attention to the facility’s two-and-a-half acre courtyard. While this green space promises some escape from the clinical environment, Busa discovered that it did not consider patients’ needs. In fact, many of the park’s best features directly conflicted with doctors’ orders. 

“I did a survey of 85 bone marrow transplant patients and they said that what they like the most about the courtyard space was the sun,” he said. “But guess what? That’s the absolute worst for you right now. I’m sure your doctors have told you that, but they’ve probably told you 50 things a day for two months.” 

After the surgery, drugs, and chemo, Busa’s health was more fragile than ever. Not only was he now 200 times more likely to get a skin cancer, but his weakened immune system couldn’t even handle cut flowers in his room, much less the flurry of pollen, dirt, and fungi found in the courtyard. 

“It’s aesthetically very, very nice,” Busa said. “But the question arises: is it for the patients or is it for the family and the staff?”

In his report, Busa wrote that for bone marrow transplant patients like him, “the solution may be gardens that can be experienced from indoors, through glass. This idea may not sound terribly inviting, but it is a far preferable alternative to 100 days of brick walls.”

For an example of a healing space designed with patients in mind, Busa looked to another Buffalo institution: the Richardson-Olmsted Complex, a mental asylum completed in 1890. Now a National Historic Landmark, this therapeutic design came from architect H.H. Richardson, and the father of American landscape design, Fredrick Law Olmsted. 

Details of the grand complex reveal a 19th-century belief in the curative power of environment. According to Busa, it was designed to provide “benefits that no medicines can reach.”

“They had the patients come out into these porches and they could view this green space,” Busa explained. “They could see trees, they could see the grass, the plantings; they could feel the wind, they could feel the rain, they could feel the sun, but they were still in the protection of the actual architecture itself.”

Busa says that whether designing for a children’s hospital, mental asylum, or cancer institute, in order to be effective the green space must suit patients’ needs. 

“In school they teach you to study all aspects of a site,” he said. “Well, you’re studying all the aspects of the landscape itself, but what about the culture? What about all those additional, secret, hidden factors that have massive effects?” 

“It’s simple, but until you’re faced with this consideration you don’t even think about it.”

Here are some highlights:

1) A big ass 500,000 square foot mall. (okay, fine, 500,000 square feet is not that big as far as malls go, but it certainly looks very large)
2) A 13 acre mega-yacht marina. (Finally addressing Miami’s chronic shortage of mega yacht dockage. Seriously, this is an actual issue)
3) A parking garage and heliport to the east of the Children’s Museum.
4) A large waterfront park, sculpture garden, and amphitheater on the east side of the seaplane terminal.
5) A giant fountain on the MacArthur Causeway offramp to Island Gardens. Fancy!
6) Atop the mall, and between two towers, an amenity deck to end all amenity decks, which will include pools and ballrooms galore.
7) Terraces cascading down to the waterfront with lots and lots of waterfront dining.
8) Two luxury hotel and condo towers.
9) 500 hotels room
10) 200 residential units.
11) Docks with observation decks to check out all the giant boats in the marina.
12) A budget of somewhere in excess of $1 billion. Yep.
Etc. Etc.
· Island Gardens coverage [Curbed Miami]
· First Look At Plans For $3 Million Square Feet Island Gardens [exMiami]

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by Liz Sanborn
King County Master Gardener

I have been asked several times how I became a King County Master Gardener. The short answer is that I applied to the program, completed the training and the rest was history.The long answer involves a divorce, a need for change and a renewed passion for gardening. That story would require a margarita in hand so I will only give the pertinent details here.

The King County Master Gardener Program is part of the Washington State University education system. If you click on this link it will give you instruction for applying for the 2014 classes – www.mastergardener.wasu.edu and follow the clicks to get to the right page. The 2014 classes will be twelve consecutive Saturdays beginning January 11th, 2014. The cost is $ 275.00. Some of the information that you will need to access is on the internet so hi-speed internet access and E-mail is required to take the class. The internet work can be done at home, so you do not need to bring a laptop. The final exam is open-book and there are several quizzes along the way- which are also open book. It would be extremely difficult to not succeed if you show up for the classes. I will say this – to get accepted into the program a strong volunteer background is helpful on your application. The Master Gardener Program is a volunteer organization and to keep you certification you will need to volunteer at a Master Gardener clinic and also complete continuing education credits every year.

Since I am on the subject of gardening groups I would also recommend a membership in the Northwest Horticultural Society. NHS is a community of passionate gardeners and your membership includes garden tours, classes, Newsletters, lectures, discounts and access to fabulous plant sales. The lecture series is worth the membership price alone. I had the pleasure of attending a lecture last week at the Center for Urban Horticulture that the NHS put on – the speaker was Billy Goodnick and his topic was garden design and creating the garden of your dreams. It was an inspiring lecture preceded by a thirty minute reception for snacks and an opportunity to purchase plants from a guest nursery. The website for the NHS is www.northwesthort.org. You will find all the information you need there, including how to join.

It was inspiring to listen to an expert landscape designer talk about design in a way that was not only understandable but translatable to the home garden. The first step in all design – especially for the garden, is to identify what you want your garden to feel like. Do you want a space to relax and unwind in? A place for the kids to play? Or grow vegetables? Think about your garden as a series of rooms to extend your living space – what do you want those rooms to feel like. Once you have that vision you can design with trees, shrubs and plants to create what you envision. Look through garden books and identify what you are attracted to and keep a notebook filled with pictures and ideas.

Billy talked a lot about color in the garden and what color does in terms of creating a feeling. I had always thought I wanted a cool color palette in the garden, but what I have learned from the plants I am attracted to is that I actually prefer warm colors- red, corals, oranges and yellows. I took a photo of my garden this morning and this is what I saw:

From left to right: a yellow Viburnum shrub in the background, in front of that very chartreuse smoke bush, and the tall orange spikes are orange foxtail lilies. To the right of that is bronze fennel. There is nothing cool about this area of my garden and I love it.

If you are passionate about gardening but need some inspiration I would recommend joining a group – any gardening group that works for you. There are garden clubs all over our area – even a Des Moines Garden Club. Look for them on Facebook and join. It is always inspiring to get together with other people who share your passion.

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Posted by Scott Schaefer on Monday, July 22, 2013 at 11:36 am 
Filed under Entertainment, Featured Stories, Headlines, History, Life, Science · Tagged with Des Moines, garden club, gardening, master gardener, news, plants

Sussex garden designer off to bloomin’ good start with Chelsea Flower Show win

1:40pm Monday 22nd July 2013 in News

By Ellie Thomson

Jack Dunckley

A multi-award-winning young garden designer’s Sussex business is blooming after gaining a top industry award, writes Ellie Thomson.

Jack Dunckley is encouraging all generations to root success in their gardens this summer after winning a Silver Gilt medal at this year’s RHS Chelsea Flower Show for his garden Juxtaposition.

The 20-year-old said: “I am very proud to have been awarded a silver gilt and I now aim to go for gold next year and break a record by being the youngest garden designer to achieve that level of award in the 100-year history of the Chelsea Flower Show.”

At his Birchfield Nursery in Henfield, Jack currently employs 17 members of staff, six of whom are fellow past pupils of Hurstpierpoint College.

He said: “It has been a very busy year for the business with the new landscape design studio and a coffee shop called the Cloudtree opening at the nursery.

“One of the kindest compliments I have received recently was from a customer who said that the whole place is one big, beautiful show garden.”

The nursery has more than 500,000 plants in stock with more than 3,500 different varieties to supply wholesale and retail markets.

Alongside the nursery, Jack and his team create gardens for a range of clients from family homes to businesses, new builds and developments using sophisticated 3D computer software and hand-drawnillustrations.

On Saturday Jack was hosting the opening of Birchfield’s new Cloudtree coffee shop which will be serving from 10am until 4pm.

For more information visit www.birchfieldnursery.co.uk.

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Three young garden designers compete to create the Best RHS National Young Designer of the Year Garden 2013

Three up-and-coming garden designers have made it to the finals of the RHS National Young Designer of the Year 2013 – this year, with the theme ‘Eco-Innovations’.

Florian DeGrosie (above left), Christopher James (above middle) and Tony Woods (above right) are the successful finalists who now have the opportunity to build show gardens at the RHS Flower Show Tatton Park and show off their designing prowess.

How they intrepret ‘Eco-Innovations’ is up to the designers- in their choice of plants, landscape material and design.

Meet the designers

Florian De Groise (23) from Cambrai in France harnessed horticulture from a young age from his grandmother. He completed a course at the London School of Garden Design at Kew and now runs his own landscaping company. In The Bees Garden  (above) he wants to get across that you can achieve sharp and striking designs using inexpensive and recycled material.

Tony Woods (27) runs his own garden design and build company, The Garden Club London. This year is his first time managing a show garden having had experience setting up exhibits at the RHS Hampton Court Palace Flower Show. In his garden Escape to the City (above) Tony will convey that you can achieve tranquility and escape even in an urban garden.

Christopher James (28) acquired a love of gardening from his grandparents and now manages design projects for Graduate Landscapes Ltd. He has a strong appreciation for the technical aspects of design as well as plant knowledge. His garden GreEnCO Sense is a haven for garden wildlife and brings to light ecological concerns through materials and design.