gardens and landscaping | Gardening

Garden Cameos: Winter is a good time to get a gardening education

Part of that thought process is education. You can never know it all. I have been gardening for 40 years, and I still make plans to educate myself. Reading books during the cold restful winter is one way to accomplish this. Catch up on all the reading you have meant to do, and get some new ideas from other gardens you may read about.

Spartanburg Men’s Garden Club will hold its annual 13-week Community Gardener 101 course beginning Jan. 21. Classes are held every Tuesday from 6 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. and will be located at the new SCC Evans building located in downtown Spartanburg. Gardener Joe Maple says, “We are thrilled to be invited to teach our class from this new facility. It is spectacular, and we are looking forward to a filled-up class.”

Subjects that will be taught in this course are annuals and perennials, container gardening, irrigation, basic seed starting, vegetable gardening, ornamental plants, native plants, and culture of trees. Linda McHam will teach the Art of Landscaping, and Tim Hemphill will teach 3D Landscaping. There are two new teachers this year. Robert Powell, better known as “Botany Bob,” who recently retired from teaching at Converse College, will teach basic botany. In addition, plant guru and local veterinarian Ed Davidson will teach indoor plants and herbs.

Plant propagation also will be taught on the main campus of SCC in the greenhouses by SCC instructor, Kevin Parris. Ted Petoskey from Sod Fathers will teach all there is to know about soils.

“The area in which we live is very challenging weather wise,” Maple said. “Taking this course helps you brush up on your skills to keep your plants healthy and pest free.”

The cost of this course is $175, and includes the textbook and a one-year’s membership in the Spartanburg Men’s Garden Club, which is a community garden club and meets once a month at the SCC main campus. Availability is limited and are urged to sign up as soon as possible by calling 592-4900 or toll free at 877-592-4406. You can register online at www.GoneToClass.com

Figuring out whether or not you have the time to take this class is a personal decision, but rest assured, it will be the greatest use of your time to improve yourself. After all, isn’t that what January is for? The benefit of learning the information is one thing, but hanging out with other gardeners and learning great things is the real gift. This makes a great Christmas present for someone.

While you are settling in for the cold weather, I will assume that you have forced some amaryllis bulbs and some narcissus to help get you through the winter months. This is always the perfect time to pick up some of the latest gardening books and read up. In addition, the techno savvy gardener can load up some of the Apps available at the App store like Dirr’s Trees and shrub App and also Armitage’s Greatest Perennials and Annuals. Both are available for a fair priced and they are invaluable.

Filed Under: gardens and landscaping

Guardians of the land

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The Age

LifeStyle

Date

December 14, 2013

Gardening everywhere is a personal pursuit but away from the city only more so. In the country garden everything is writ large: the scale, the views, even the weather. It can make for all manner of choices and for manifestly idiosyncratic spaces.

Victoria’s Western District is no exception. A recent visit to its southern parts uncovered four diverse gardens, each reflecting a very different approach. Gaye and Robert Wuchatsch have taken a historical perspective. Eight years ago they bought an 1863 bluestone farmhouse in the Stony Rises, between Colac and Camperdown. On volcanic plains strewn with basalt rocks, Robert says the garden has ”soil like chocolate”.

It also has one of the oldest walnut trees in Victoria (planted in the 1850s), a pear tree dating from the same time and dry stone walls from the 1880s. The property, known to locals as ”the rabbit factory” thanks to a rabbit-canning plant established in its woolshed in 1885, is on the Princes Highway. But a lengthy wall and a 128-year-old hawthorn hedge mean the garden is hidden from the street. Both Gaye and Robert are working to preserve the original trees and dry stone walls as well as some of the layers added since.

Gnarly: Robert and Gaye Wuchatsch beside their historic walnut tree, one of the oldest in the state.

They have planted an extensive orchard beside the walnut tree and established a vegetable garden beside the pear.

Around the house they have retained the cottage-style garden established by previous owners and – both having a German background – have added plants used by early German settlers in Victoria, including an assortment of roses.

But despite their attention to detail they have found that not everything is in their hands. When they arrived home from shopping in Colac one day a year ago their hawthorn hedge was in the process of being cut level with the dry stone wall. The local power provider deemed the trees a fire risk because of the overhead powerlines. The Wuchatsches, who insist the hedge would never reach the height of the lines, are now awaiting a heritage overlay to prevent any more such radical pruning.

Express yourself: Eunice Maskell, with one of her husband’s saucepan and frying pan sculptures.

Meanwhile, the oldest exotic in Bob and Eunice Maskell’s garden in Cobrico – a town between Cobden and Terang – is an oak tree, the seed of which they collected on their honeymoon in Daylesford in 1969. The pair say they ”couldn’t live without trees” and over the past 44 years have planted in their heavy clay soil whatever specimens catch their eye: a red maple, a golden ash, a gleditsia, two robinias, a ginkgo, an assortment of callistemons, a firewheel tree (Stenocarpus sinuatus), acacias, melaleucas, an array of fruit trees and much else besides.

Because Eunice is fond of flowers she has planted beds full of bulbs and perennials. Bob, meanwhile, has assumed responsibility for the garden’s sculptures – striking and sometimes brilliantly coloured pieces that he designs to suit the surrounding plants. He uses whatever is to hand – pieces of farm machinery, saucepans, reflector lights, polished rocks.

He grew up in another house on the property (which has been in the family for more than 140 years) and knows the landscape intimately. Eunice says it takes a long time for a garden to express its owners in this way.

Barbara Cowley’s nearby garden still expresses something of her late husband, Murray. He died 18 years ago but it was he who, in 1986, ensured their then new house was built well away from the street, that it overlooked Lake Cobrico and had a sizeable garden. He used to dig up peat from around the lake to feed the loam soil.

”This land was in his blood; he loved it out here,” Barbara says. ”He did all the hard landscaping and set the garden up for me.”

He also did a lot of the original planting but Barbara has since added several new areas including a native one with a mature Eucalyptus pulverulenta at its centre. Australian plants are also scattered throughout the rest of the garden, which has been laid out to direct views to the lake and to make the area around the house feel part of the wider landscape.

Barbara, who incorporates old farm tools and weathered timbers into her landscape and only waters when the plants are first establishing, says the garden is a ”wonderful occupation”.

”When I started it was a complete hotchpotch. But now I think about what I plant next to what, the different heights and textures.”

And finally there is Sue Pyke, who is not inclined to call her re-vegetation project in the Stony Rises a garden. But a cultivated landscape it most definitely is. About 15 years ago she set about planting indigenous manna gums along a stretch of land, bound on one side by road and on the other by open paddock. They have now formed a corridor through which Pyke strolls as if it were remnant bush.

Further along from the Pyke property are more expansive areas of indigenous trees – blackwoods and manna gums growing out of rock-scattered land that has never been flattened for farming. People have started building stone houses in clearings in the woodland.

Here you glimpse something of what Eugene Von Guerard painted in the warm glow of sunset in 1857. But now his Stony Rises, Lake Corangamite, owned by the Art Gallery of South Australia, tells only part of the story.

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WATER WISE – U

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Lillian Cox

Special to the U-T

John and Cathy love to travel to the Caribbean, so much so that they make of point of visiting every two years. In January, they set out for Belize where John found himself snapping photos of palm trees and plants, big and small, that they would use in planning their own tropical paradise when they returned home to Encinitas.

Late last year, they terminated a relationship with a landscape designer, who they thought was too expensive. Then John learned about Eric Breceda and his wife and business partner, Teran.

“There were a lot of big plants and trees in the first plan, but we couldn’t afford it,” John recalled. “But the Brecedas took a different approach that was more personal. Instead of a general plan, Teran developed a detailed cost estimate where we could go line-by-line and pick and choose.”

Eric has been in business for 30 years, the last several of which he has spent incorporating irrigation science and environmental science to create drought-tolerant environments. Teran is also president of the National Association of Women in Construction.

“The majority of the original landscaping in their yard was turf,” Eric said. “We reduced water consumption by 30 percent, and eventually it will be 40 percent. My projection is that it will be reduced to $100 to $200 a year in about three or four years when the canopy is filled in.”

Eric created a canopy in the front courtyard by capitalizing on an existing giant Japanese timber bamboo (Phyllostachys bambusoides) and rectilana palm (Phoenix reclinata) with multiple trunks that will shade kentia (Howea forsteriana) and other palms and tropical plants.

“It will expand and produce shade throughout the courtyard and grow 50 percent over the next few years which, in turn, will create a canopy for the rest of the plant materials,” he said. “Currently, all the plants are getting more sun then they should. We are creating optimum conditions with perfect soil that will evolve into a drought-tolerant environment.”

Eric’s approach also included creating infrastructure centered on a hardscape.

“I had boulders before and didn’t care for them, but Eric said, ‘Let’s keep an open mind,’ ” John explained. “He took us to KRC Rock where I saw this boulder that looked like a painting with colors that were spectacular!”

That boulder became the focal point in the front courtyard.

“On Valentine’s Day, Cathy and I gave a boulder to each other,” he said.

“Eric introduced me to places I didn’t know existed, such as Rancho Soledad Nursery in Rancho Santa Fe. He would offer us cost-saving alternatives such as buying a smaller tree. In addition to being less expensive, it’s actually healthier for a tree to grow in its place.”

John and Cathy’s 7,000-square-foot landscaping area has 10 self-contained micro zones that are for: giant Japanese timber bamboo; citrus and edible gardens; black bamboo and a koi pond in the backyard; turf; a courtyard; a side yard with a dog run; flower gardens; a front embankment; a side yard with recycled existing plants and maximum screening plants; and a total shade area next to the fountain mounted on the wall by the front door.

Filed Under: gardens and landscaping

Trowel & Glove: Marin gardening calendar for the week of Dec. 14, 2013

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Marin

The 27th annual St. John’s Tour de Noel house tour is from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. Dec. 14 at four homes in Ross. $30 to $45. Lunch is available for $15. Call 456-1102 or go to www.stjohnsross.org/tour.html.

West Marin Commons offers a weekly harvest exchange at 1:30 p.m. Saturdays at the Livery Stable gardens on the commons in Point Reyes Station. Go to www.westmarin commons.org.

The Novato Independent Elders Program seeks volunteers to help Novato seniors with their overgrown yards on Tuesday mornings or Thursday afternoons. Call 899-8296.

Volunteers are sought to help in Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy nurseries from 1 p.m. to 4 p.m. Tuesdays at Tennessee Valley, 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. Wednesdays at Muir Woods or 1 p.m. to 4 p.m. Wednesdays or 9 a.m. to noon Saturdays in the Marin Headlands. Call 561-3077 or go to www.parksconservancy.org/get-involved/volunteer/.

The SPAWN (Salmon Protection and Watershed Network) native plant nursery days are from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. Fridays and weekends. Call 663-8590, ext. 114, or email jonathan@tirn.net to register and for directions.

Marin Master Gardeners and the Marin Municipal Water District offer free residential Bay-Friendly Garden Walks to MMWD customers. The year-round service helps homeowners identify water-saving opportunities and soil conservation techniques for their landscaping. Call 473-4204 to request a visit to your garden.

Marin Open Garden Project (MOGP) volunteers are available to help Marin residents glean excess fruit from their trees for donations to local organizations serving people in need and to build raised beds to start vegetable gardens through the MicroGardens program. MGOP also offers a garden tool lending library. Go to www.opengardenproject.org or email contact@opengarden project.org.

The Marin Organic Glean Team seeks volunteers to harvest extras from the fields at various farms for the organic school lunch and gleaning program. Call 663-9667 or go to www.marinorganic.org.

San Francisco

The Conservatory of Flowers, at 100 John F. Kennedy Drive in Golden Gate Park, displays permanent galleries of tropical plant species as well as changing special exhibits from 10 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Tuesdays through Sundays. $2 to $7. Call 831-2090 or go to www.conservatoryofflowers.org.

The San Francisco Botanical Garden Society, at Ninth Avenue and Lincoln Way in Golden Gate Park, offers several ongoing events. $7; free to San Francisco residents, members and school groups. Call 661-1316 or go to www.sf botanicalgarden.org. Free docent tours leave from the Strybing Bookstore near the main gate at 1:30 p.m. weekdays, 10:30 a.m. and 1:30 p.m. weekends; and from the north entrance at 2 p.m. Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays. Groups of 10 or more can call ahead for special-focus tours.

Around the Bay

Cornerstone Gardens is a permanent, gallery-style garden featuring walk-through installations by international landscape designers on nine acres at 23570 Highway 121 in Sonoma. Free. Call 707-933-3010 or go to www.corner stone gardens.com.

Garden Valley Ranch rose garden is open from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Wednesdays through Sundays at 498 Pepper Road in Petaluma. Self-guided and group tours are available. $2 to $10. Call 707-795-0919 or go to www.gardenvalley.com.

The Luther Burbank Home at Santa Rosa and Sonoma avenues in Santa Rosa has docent-led tours of the greenhouse and a portion of the gardens every half hour from 10 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. Tuesdays through Sundays. $7. Call 707-524-5445.

Wednesdays are volunteer days from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. at Occidental Arts and Ecology Center at 15290 Coleman Valley Road in Occidental. Call 707-874-1557, ext. 201, or go to www.oaec.org.

Quarryhill Botanical Garden at 12841 Sonoma Highway in Glen Ellen covers 61 acres and showcases a large selection of scientifically documented wild source temperate Asian plants. The garden is open for self-guided tours from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. daily. $5 to $10. Call 707-996-3166 or go to www.quarryhillbg.org.

The Trowel Glove Calendar appears Saturdays. Send high-resolution jpg photo attachments and details about your event to calendar@marinij.com or mail to Home and Garden Calendar/Lifestyles, Marin Independent Journal, 4000 Civic Center Drive, Suite 301, San Rafael, CA 94903. Items should be sent two weeks in advance. Photos should be a minimum of 1 megabyte and include caption information. Include a daytime phone number on your release.

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Filed Under: gardens and landscaping

Cosentino: Gift ideas for the grower on your list

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It is that time of year again: gift-giving days. I always search for the newest and best for my gardening friends, and this year there seems to be no end to the selection. There is something great on nearly every topic.

My first choice this year is “Succulents Simplified” by Debra Lee Baldwin. I think that it is important because of the rapidly rising popularity of these plants. Not only are succulents very easy to grow, but the varieties are endless. Baldwin focuses on just 100 of the plants, her favorites, and shows how to grow and care for them. She offers some step-by-step projects, too: building a cake stand centerpiece, a vertical garden, and special-occasion bouquets. The book is an easy read and once you have finished it, you are sure to want to start a collection of this group of plants that is so diverse in shape, color and form.

Another area of growing interest is container gardening. Let’s face it: Wanting a home on a half-acre of land is a thing of the past. Not only are we shrinking down to smaller lots, we are concentrating on the areas right around the house and on the patio. Now we grow our flowers in large flower pots of mixed types of plants, our vegetables are growing in boxes, and we even have miniature fruit trees in containers. One of my favorite garden writers, P. Allen Smith, has just come out with “Container Gardens: 60 Container Recipes to Accent your Home Garden.” He shows how to create masterpieces in a very short time by using his innovative recipes that give lists of plants and materials and step-by-step instructions and advice on how to display the pieces.

And then there is this craze about fairy gardens. And they’re not just for children. Imagine a beautiful landscape of small plants and miniature furniture beautifully arranged in a bowl or basket or box that is only a dozen or so inches across. Each adorned with a miniature fairy fixture. My choice for this is “Gardening in Miniature” by Janit Calvo. She has made the genre more general just by taking out the fairies. Her book is a complete guide to creating lush, small-scale gardens, and it has all the information you need to start in this new hobby. She tells how to create, choose the right container and plant, with step-by-step instructions, not only the garden, but the stones, and furniture and the fences. Really a great read.

Gardening book lovers do not have to pay full price for everything. There are a couple of fantastic sources out there that sell older books, even remainders of newer ones. I look at these websites whenever I need to browse for a new topic I might be interested in. I do confess, though, that last year my children gave me a Kindle tablet and I find myself now ordering books for that and reading them there. The savings are quite good, and because I can vary the type size, the reading is very comfortable.

But back to the sources. The first one I order from is Edward R. Hamilton, bookseller. The company is located at Box 15, Falls Village, Conn. I could not find a phone number, but if you are on a computer they are easy to find and I believe that they have no less than 300 books on gardening available. As a matter of fact, they recently sent a 128-page catalog filled entirely with books on home, gardening and landscaping. I am sure they will send you a copy if you drop them a note.

A second good source is Daedalus Books at Box 6000, Columbia, Md. Once you are on their mailing list you will get a frequent mailing of their catalogs. They are online, too, at salebooks.com.

Filed Under: gardens and landscaping

A different kind of tea party for University City

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Sasanqua camellias brighten the dreary darkness of December with delightful white and soft red blossoms, at a time when not much else is blooming in the garden.

They don’t require pruning to keep an appealing shape, and their glossy evergreen leaves look good in all seasons.

What’s not to like?

The doyenne of Charlotte gardening herself, the Charlotte Observer’s Nancy Brachey, calls sasanquas “choice plants that will enhance any landscape.”

There’s nothing wrong with standard camellias, of course. With their large flowers and early spring blooms, they remain a Southern classic. But winter’s lesson is to not simply stop with the standard choice.

Sasanquas can transform December garden doldrums, and their close cousin the tea plant deserves a place in University City gardens, too.

A quick botanical note: The “standard” camellia is Camellia japonica (“Japanese camellia”). Sasanqua camellias are a different species, Camellia sasanqua, and tea is yet another camellia species, Camellia sinensis (“Chinese camellia”).

All three originated and thrive in Asia, and, like many Asian immigrants (crape myrtle, Burford holly, and, of course, kudzu), they all do just fine in the Carolina Piedmont.

Sasanqua camellias come in a wide variety of shapes and sizes, from tall, somewhat conical forms to low spreaders that can serve as ground covers. The flowers are smaller than standard camellias and don’t hold up as well as cut flowers.

Still, they are a lovely addition to any landscape, with their overall beauty and late fall flower display.

Mecklenburg Master Gardener Tom Nunnenkcamp, a camellia authority with an outstanding home collection, said sasasquas will tolerate full sun a bit better than their standard cousins, though they, too, prefer open, partial shade.

For camellias, N.C. State University recommends loose, well-drained soil that is slightly acidic, the way our soils tend to be naturally. Adding lime is not a good idea.

Camellias are shallow-rooted and need excellent drainage. Planting the plants high, in a slightly raised bed or mound, is recommended, along with adding a couple inches of pine bark mulch, compost or other organic material.

But NCSU cautions against adding peat moss. No fertilizer is required, though some gardeners – me included – like to add a modest amount of bonemeal to provide supplemental phosphorus.

In our yard, sasanquas are massed under willow oaks on the north side of the house. They have grown slowly but well, each year treating us to a flower display that is the perfect antidote to the holiday blues.

They share space with azaleas and oakleaf hydrangea, and the fall scarlet of the hydrangea leaves makes the camellia flowers look that much better.

We got our plants from The Camellia Forest Nursery, near Chapel Hill. At that nursery’s website, www.camforest.com, you can browse their vast selection of camellia varieties and hybrids. There are dozens of species beyond the most familiar ones. A visit to the nursery is a treat for gardeners.

When we were there, tea caught our eye. Tea plants (again, there are many varieties, so it is dangerous to generalize) have large, glossy leaves and inconsequential flowers, which bloom at roughly the same time as sasanquas.

The main attraction is the chance to make your own tea. You’ve heard of “edible landscaping”? Well, call this “drinkable landscaping.”

Tea prefers the same general soil and cultural conditions as sasanquas and other camellias, though when grown as a crop, tea can be managed in full sun. The large-leaf type we bought from Camellia Forest has been more successful than smaller-leaf types we purchased from other sources.

Tea can make an attractive if nondescript low hedge, sheared on an ongoing basis to harvest the leaves.

Making tea appears to be as complicated as you want to make it. An old Buddhist story relates that, one windy day, some sasanqua leaves blew into an emperor’s water cup, and he liked the taste – it’s that simple.

Other approaches are much more complex, involving fermentation and other factors. Several websites have step-by-step instructions. Following the blessedly uncomplicated one on the Camellia Forest site, I’ve made myself some cups of tea that put store-bought stuff to shame. As usual, freshness counts!

If growing your own tea seems like too much trouble, and you want to try some Carolina tea right now, you are in luck: Tea is now being grown commercially in the South Carolina Lowcountry, at the Charleston Tea Plantation, www.charlestonteaplantation.com.

Its 127 acres of tea plants on Wadmalaw Island are open to visitors, and it offers a trolley tour of the grounds and tea factory.

Owned by the Bigelow Tea Co., the plantation is unique in the continental U.S. The tea harvested at the plantation is used only for American Classic Tea, not in Bigelow’s regular tea brands.

You can purchase American Classic Tea from the plantation locally at Berrybrook Farms in Dilworth (704-334-6528) or at Tea Rex in Charlotte (704-525-3366).

I am aware that the Carolinas have a reputation for supporting tea party politics. For this gardener, brewing a fresh pot from leaves harvested in the front yard, or on Wadmalaw Island, is more my cup of tea.

Filed Under: gardens and landscaping

Inside the gated glens and glades

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The lush greenery makes cities in Kerala far more liveable than those outside, but is the fast pace of construction threatening to tarnish that reputation? As nature gets overlaid with bricks and concrete, the lushness, in many cases, becomes nothing more than a figment of imagination. Hence, in the cities in the State, green-starved households are desperately feeling the need for landscaping.

So the work of architects now starts at the gate as they try to create landscaped spaces for people looking for green and peace.

A western idea seeping into the imagination of many clients here is that of the patio, essentially a living room outside the house, cocooned in a natural space.

“Right from the aesthetics of how we make that space in relation to other elements in the garden and the specifications of the structure, all takes time to form,” Suresh Thampi of Thanal Landscapers in the city says. A patio could be just a simple sitting area with sparse furniture or be a grand “Mandapam” or an arched granite structure.

“It seems to be a reflection of a return to a more traditional sensibility in how we perceive spaces. Older structures celebrate the outdoors, and clients now are willing to spend that much extra to make the outside as striking as possible,” Mr. Thampi says. He has renovated old houses whose owners now increasingly say no to covering old wells or such elements but want to leave them more conspicuous.

While landscaping augments a natural ambience, hard structures are an integral component in achieving that end. They could be in the form of pathways, rockeries and miniature hillocks with the counterpoint of a water feature. “We convince clients to avoid using interlocking tiles and concrete paving since it contradicts the philosophy behind natural landscaping. There is no point in having ponds and wells if you pave most of the land since it would decrease the amount of rainwater that could percolate through and recharge them,” Mr. Thampi says.

Themes

K. Unnikrishnan, who runs Ullas Landscape Designers based in Kayamkulam, gives landscaping themes — Mughal, Japanese, English Season and so on.

“For instance, a Japanese garden is equated with peace. It could be informal in placement of objects in an undulating area, lending a more wild and easy coexistence of both natural and artificial elements. Symmetry defines the Mughal theme, with ponds and fountains placed to geometric perfection on level land, and a characteristic of an English garden is the smooth lawn, fringed by large trees,” he says.

It is imperative that an architect studies the land from different angles and holds long discussions with the client to reach the ideal solution even if it means going through several blueprints. Mr. Unnikrishnan does not believe that any theme unaltered would fit a particular area, as, he says, everything is in relation to the house structure, an insight of how it would fare in the future and the client’s wishes.

There is thought that goes into every single aspect right from the kind of plant and lawn. For instance, for a Baker-style or a traditional structure, bamboo, oleander (Arali) and hibiscus are the more suited vegetation.

“Setting up the garden is actually the easy part. It’s the maintenance that is demanding, but most landscaping companies, including Thanal, have a separate wing that offers such services. But this is mostly to do with lawns,” Mr. Thampi says.

There are clients who even ask for terrace lawns and here, a whole different set of techniques come into play — an internal pipeline, drainage network and more labour go into elaborate landscaping above the ground level.

From an architect’s point of view, devoting so much focus to landscaping is an extension of the “green era” that the realm of architecture has woken up to. The structure, components and design of buildings underline energy efficiency and sustainability and architects tend to define landscaping as a careful, studied science and art. One of the challenges is posed by confined spaces and how designers must be able to work from areas spanning 50-sq.ft to acres.

Filed Under: gardens and landscaping

A lavish life of luxury on Saadiyat Island – yours for Dh23m

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With three staff bedrooms, three kitchens, four living rooms and eight bathrooms, this five-bedroom villa on Abu Dhabi’s Saadiyat Island is clearly designed for someone with a large household.

Anyone who spends time wandering around the lavish new homes at TDIC’s Saadiyat Beach Villas will quickly find themselves lost amid a maze of rooms, many of which appear to have no obvious use.

“This one is another reception room … I think,” says Almer Agmyren, the managing director of Rex Real Estate which is marketing the villas. He consults his floor plan and scratches his head. “Yes, another reception room.”

Rex has started a final marketing push to shift the remaining seven of the largest and most luxurious mansions at TDIC’s 344 home Saadiyat Beach Villas – a development which first began its handover to buyers back in 2011.

The 12,500 square foot villa we snoop around also includes a 25 metre private swimming pool, a gym room, an Italian style courtyard and, with a plot size of 25,000 sq ft, plenty of space for gardens or a barbecue area.

Whoever snaps up this cavernous home will have to fork out a total of Dh23.1 million.

And that’s not even the biggest or the most expensive on the street. According to Rex, the company was planning to stage its marketing event at the six-bedroom villa next door but the 15,000 square foot mansion was sold a week before for Dh27m.

Within Saadiyat Beach Villas, the most expensive property to go on sale to date has been the 32 St Regis branded four and five bedroom villas close to the hotel. These went on the market for between Dh22m and Dh25m, making them among the most expensive properties in the capital.

And it appears there may be more luxury homes on offer soon. According to master developer TDIC’s plans, by 2020 the Dh100 billion island development is expected to provide homes for 145,000 people – that’s a population roughly the size of Dundee in Scotland.

What are the good points about the Saadiyat Beach Villas?

The fact that residents started moving into the villas nearly three years ago means the community has had a chance to bed down a bit. Driving away from the villa, you could be forgiven for thinking the quiet suburban road running through the neighbourhood was located in one of the more affluent neighbourhoods on the outskirts of a large American city. Residents are out playing tennis on the outdoor courts and in most of the large suburban porches, children’s bicycles and play equipment are carefully stashed.

And the drawbacks?

Obviously it’s a lot of money to part with. Moreover, TDIC’s ambitious development plans means that the island may remain a construction site until at least 2020. And as with many new houses in the UAE, the landscaping is left unfinished, leaving prospective buyers to design their own gardens.

What is the tenure?

Emiratis can buy the villas freehold while foreigners can purchase a 99-year freehold.

What are the development plans for Saadiyat?

When finished, Saadiyat Island, which covers 27 square kilometres and is 10 minutes from central Abu Dhabi, will eventually be home to 145,000 people and will boast Guggenheim and Louvre museums, premium hotels and a retail complex. A third phase of villas is currently underway. In July Al Jaber Building was selected by a TDIC subsidiary to build 462 new villas stretching along nearly 7 kilometres of waterfront in a project known as the Hidd Al Saadiyat villa development. It is scheduled for completion in 2016.

lbarnard@thenational.ae

Filed Under: gardens and landscaping

New Grant Associates-designed riverside park opens to the public

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By Sarah Cosgrove
11 December 2013

Filed Under: gardens and landscaping

Shock: Millennials like the suburbs

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It is a habit of haters of the suburbs to regularly predict the imminent demise of the quarter-acre tract home good life.

These predictions date to the post-World War II housing boom, from Lewis Mumford’s distaste of Levittown and places like it (“An encapsulated life spent more and more either in a motor car or within the cabin of darkness before a television set,” he wrote in 1963), or James Howard Kunstler’s 1993 book “The Geography of Nowhere” in which he calls the ’burbs “depressing, brutal, ugly, unhealthy and spiritually degrading.”

Always, the prediction is that the ’burbs will collapse within the next 20 years. The reasons for collapse vary. “Peak oil” was the most popular meme of the last 60 years, though. Suburbs rely on oil, and the world’s oil supply is finite, and is now at its “peak,” the meme went. As oil runs out, the suburbs and the car-crazy, climate-controlled lifestyles that Americans love will end.

“Peak oil” prognosticators have had the American suburbs collapsing in every decade since the 1950s. So far, nothing’s happened. Maybe the peak oil people use the same forecasting tools as the climate-change people.

A new meme has gone viral among the smart set. What will kill the suburbs is that the millennial generation (born after 1983) is leaving the uncultured suburbs for the urbane cities. Rot and ruin will come to the ’burbs, with abandoned tract houses and mosquito infested swimming pools as emblematic of epic failure as healthcare.gov.

Books such as New York journalist Leigh Gallagher’s “The End of the Suburbs” make the case why we are doomed. “Millennials hate the suburbs,” Gallagher writes, because they prefer a hip, eco-friendly, “singleton” urban lifestyle.

Other writers, like Claire Thompson at the enviro ’zine Grist, declares that millennials define the “good life” differently from their parents’ four-bedrooms-on-an-acre. Millennials desire “experiences” over materialism; they want out of the rat race that consumed their parents’ lives; they have tempered ambitions. Thompson writes that they want:

“Infrastructure that supports the kind of smaller-footprint, sustainable lifestyles we’re already creating for ourselves: compact housing in vibrant, walkable communities; functioning public transportation; streetscapes that prioritize cyclists and pedestrians over cars; urban gardens and farmers markets; regulatory room for sharing communities to thrive.”

They will be a “hero generation” that leaves the vast tract housing wasteland for nifty cities. Buh-bye, ’burbs.

Except, not really.

This week, Forbes magazine, crunching government data, reported that the oldest millennials are choosing to live in the suburbs in numbers no different than any other U.S. demographic group. True, some millennials are moving to “core cities” (which Forbes defines as having populations of 1 million or more.) But these millennials have not left the suburbs – they left rural areas that have “lower economic opportunity,” the magazine reports.

Poorer country folk moving to the big city for better opportunities. It’s as old as the Republic.

“To be sure,” the magazine states, “core urban areas do attract the young more than other age cohorts. Among people age 15 to 29 in 2007, there is clear movement to the core cities five years later in 2012 – roughly a net gain of two million. However, that’s only three percent of the 60 million people in the (millennial) age group.”

The reason the suburbs are not in danger of collapse is that the millennials, an exceptionally well-educated generation, sees what everyone else sees: it’s a good place to live and raise kids, with less crime and better schools than cities. Culture is not absent, and neither is the concern to be good stewards of the environment.

In the suburbs, you can live how you please. Want to live big? Buy a Toll Brothers McMansion in Upper Makefield. Want to live small? Buy a Levittowner in Falls. Want a “walkable” community? Bristol and New Hope beckon.

The suburbs win, again. Welcome, millennials.

Filed Under: gardens and landscaping

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