10 December 2013

Consider Eastern New Orleans. Or is it New Orleans East? Or “The East”? Or Plum Orchard, Kenilworth, Eastover and Versailles?

The lack of an agreed-upon name is emblematic of the challenges faced by this section of Orleans Parish.

Residents express frustration that they must continually make an argument for their region’s existence, let alone for political attention and private investment. Indeed, they struggle just to get on the map. Flung outwardly from the metropolitan heart like the feathers of a shuttlecock, Eastern New Orleans often gets clipped from maps of the city proper, depriving it of cartographic attention — and everything that goes with it. That which literally lies on the margins often gets figuratively marginalized.

While its geographical position works against Eastern New Orleans’ argument, so does its internal geography. It lacks an identifiable core — no central plaza, no historic quarter, no walkable business or entertainment district, no famous landscaped park.

Neighborhoods, I’ve long held, are defined more by their cores than their peripheries. When you hear the words “Lower Garden District,” for example, you probably think of its central focal point, Coliseum Square. Likewise, Jackson Square, Audubon Park, Harrison Avenue and Oretha Castle Haley Boulevard mark the psychological nuclei or axes of the French Quarter, Uptown, Lakeview and Central City, and impart to those neighborhoods iconography and character.

Eastern New Orleans, on the other hand, comes across as an undifferentiated expanse of subdivisions without a distinctive nucleus. As a result, Eastern New Orleans lacks a sense of place, and finds itself excluded from the popular perception of classic New Orleans.

It’s a geographical problem with historical roots.

Whereas historic New Orleans grew outwardly from an original core settlement starting in the 1700s, Eastern New Orleans was the exact opposite: it grew inwardly from a peripheral framework of transportation arteries, mostly in the 1900s.

Prior, this area comprised two vast basins: Bayou Bienvenue on the south side, and, on the north, an expanse of shrubby marshes (the French called them Petit Bois or Little Woods) extending to the shores of brackish Lake Pontchartrain. Separating the two basins was a narrow topographic ridge formed by a former channel of the Mississippi River and later by its Bayou Metairie-Bayou Gentilly-Bayou Sauvage distributary.

Historically, this high ground, today’s Old Gentilly Road and Chef Menteur Highway, represented the only terrestrial access to the interior. All other ingress and egress required a boat sailing around lakes Pontchartrain and St. Catherine, through the Rigolets and Chef Menteur passes, or up Bayou Bienvenue. Thus, most of the swampy, marshy interior of present-day Eastern New Orleans remained wild into the late 1800s.

Railroads began to change this. In the 1870s, tracks were laid for the Louisville and Nashville Railroad along the shoulder of the topographic ridge to connect New Orleans with Biloxi and Mobile. In the 1880s, another line was laid for the New Orleans and North Eastern Railroad along the lakeshore, to connect the city with Slidell. For the first time, New Orleanians could now conveniently access the eastern marshes. Tiny communities formed along the tracks, joining the truck farms and dairies that had long lined Old Gentilly Road.

Access brought to light the area’s economic potential, which motivated the city to install drainage canals and pumps. By the 1910s, the former marsh and swamp became “reclaimed.” Investors followed suit, chief among them the New Orleans Lake Shore Land Company, whose president, cotton merchant Frank B. Hayne, came to own 7,500 acres of the now-drained basin. He proceeded to sell hundreds of five-acre tracts, not for residential development, but for citrus groves. Americans by this time had developed a taste for tropical fruits, and Louisiana oranges grown in Eastern New Orleans could be readily shipped to regional markets via rail and ship lines.

Shell roads were established across the drained basin in the form of a “superblock” grid that would be recognizable to motorists today. Mature orange trees were sent in from Florida and planted, and thousands of acres of orange groves arose.

The company’s plans for industrial-scale orange production were frustrated by bad weather, blight and world war. What remained by the 1940s were scores of smaller individual orchards and truck farms supplying municipal markets via, on the south, the recently paved State Highway 90, which passed through enclaves named Lee, Micheaud (Michoud) and Chef Menteur (near Fort Macomb), and on the north, a lakeshore boulevard named after Hayne, which paralleled the tracks to Slidell. A ride on that railroad would have taken passengers past tiny hamlets named Seabrook, Citrus, Edge Lake, Little Woods and, the farthest out, South Point.

Residents of these coastal outposts lived in raised wooden camps and tended to groves and market gardens, fished and hunted, or maintained the railroad and tended the locomotives. Many middle-class New Orleanians owned camps built on the lake, and something of a weekend recreational economy, complete with bathing facilities and hotels, developed here and elsewhere in Eastern New Orleans.

By this time, another peripheral transportation artery came into the picture, and it was a big one: the Inner Harbor Navigation Canal, which had been excavated during 1918-1923 to connect the Mississippi River with Lake Pontchartrain. A boon to barge traffic, the waterway created so many jobs, along Downman Road and elsewhere, that it became known colloquially as the Industrial Canal. But the waterway also severed the east from the heart of the metropolis, while introducing salt water into the city even as soils began to subside below sea level because of drainage.

Then, during World War II, the Intracoastal Waterway was dug along the area’s southern tier, essentially rendering Eastern New Orleans an island. By mid-century, the area was ringed with railroads, roads and canals, each lined with limited industrial or residential development. But it was still largely undeveloped at its core.

The Eastern New Orleans we know today is largely a product of five events of the late 1960s: Hurricane Betsy, which flooded parts of the area but also served as an impetus to erect hurricane-protection levees; NASA’s Michoud Assembly Plant, which brought hundreds of well-paying jobs to the area; the movement of the white middle class out of the central city; the Mississippi River-Gulf Outlet Canal, which brought ocean-going ships into the area even as it accelerated coastal erosion and salt-water intrusion; and, last but not least, Interstate 10, which, for the first time, brought accessibility to the core of Eastern New Orleans.

Each of these transformations, particularly I-10, instigated waves of housing development, and by the 1970s, subdivisions with names like Plum Orchard, Kenilworth and Versailles were built where stood citrus groves 50 years earlier, and wilderness a century prior.

Development would have extended further eastward — ramps had been built on I-10 to anticipate it — had not the petroleum market crashed in the early 1980s. Lands belonging to New Orleans East Inc., which had been poised to urbanize more than 20,000 acres of wetlands in far eastern Orleans Parish, instead became Bayou Sauvage National Wildlife Refuge. As part of its ambitious project, the company erected along I-10 a massive concrete sign emblazoned with NEW ORLEANS EAST, branding the area with that corporate moniker despite its demise. The name stuck.

At first, New Orleans East drew mostly white middle-class populations fleeing the inner city for what was billed as a “suburb within the city.” But when African Americans gained political power in City Hall in the late 1970s, many of those white families departed New Orleans altogether and resettled in adjacent parishes.

In their stead came black families, among them substantial numbers of the upwardly mobile middle and upper classes, who later bought into posh subdivisions such as Eastover. Vietnamese refugees, meanwhile, settled in the Versailles area starting in 1975, and, their numbers later supplemented by immigrants, have since prospered and bought into surrounding subdivisions. Multi-family housing and Section 8 vouchers, meanwhile, brought in large numbers of working-class and poor households, and with them came the social challenges affiliated with poverty.

By century’s end, geophysical problems increasingly came to light. Surrounded by salt water, bowl-shaped in its elevation, detached from the metropolitan core, adjacent to eroded marshes and ungated surge-prone canals, and ill-protected by what proved to be flimsy levees, New Orleans East lay both physically and socially vulnerable to catastrophe.

It suffered terribly when Hurricane Katrina struck in 2005, and, to add insult to injury, saw relatively little media and volunteer attention as it struggled to recover, in large part for its lack of a compelling historical narrative and picturesque cityscape.

How might New Orleans East address its geography problem?

One obvious suggestion would be to establish some sort of iconic core — a walkable mixed-use district with a distinctive architectural profile, where it’s great to work, shop, recreate and live. But forcing an urban form on a suburban space may be exactly that — forced — and I am all too familiar with the propensity of such grand plans to collapse under their own weight.

Instead, I might suggest we simply accept that New Orleans East is fundamentally non-nucleated, and build upon its historical-geographical strength: peripheral assets.

New Orleans East’s gorgeous lakeshore and eastern wetlands are among the most underutilized natural resources in the region. The picturesque hamlets and fishing camps that once lined Hayne Boulevard, the citrus groves, bathhouses and recreational parks such as Lincoln Beach (an integral memory of thousands of African Americans during the last years of segregation) lay unmarked and unremembered today, yet abound with potential.

Along its western and southern flanks, New Orleans East boasts the city’s premier inventory of industrial sites, all accessible by interstate, rail and canal. Chief among them is Michoud, which has unmatched opportunities for everything from building fuel tanks to developing drones to making movies.

New Orleans East could also improve its interior infrastructure by beautifying below-grade outfall canals with trees and landscaping, as recommended by experts involved in architect David Waggonner’s “Dutch Dialogues” project.

The region’s open drainage system, with its runoff-storing lakes and lakefront pumps, is the envy of other parts of the city, and may be aestheticized into something truly distinctive.

Yes, these are costly undertakings. But they are also scalable, and may be pursued incrementally with minimal disruption to everyday life. Tens of thousands of full-canopy shade trees, meanwhile, would do wonders for giving sun-drenched streets an appealing garden-suburb character.

And that is what New Orleans East needs most — a sense of place; a distinctive character; an embrace of what it is — and an acceptance of what it is not.

*****

Richard Campanella, a geographer with the Tulane School of Architecture, is the author of “Bienville’s Dilemma,” “Geographies of New Orleans,” and other books, as well as the forthcoming “Bourbon Street: A History” (2014). He may be reached through his website, rcampane@tulane.edu or @nolacampanella on Twitter.

The Mexican firebush, Gumbo-limbo tree, and stokes aster may not seem similar but, all three plants are featured in either of two botanic gardens situated at the University of Florida/IFAS Indian River Research and Education Center near Fort Pierce. The plants are native to Florida, require a minimum amount of care and were carefully selected and strategically placed for high aesthetic value.

Only three of more than 100 plants to be studied in “Florida Native Landscaping,” an upper division environmental horticulture course, the plants may be used in a wide array of landscapes. Offered to degree-seeking and non-degree seeking students at the UF Fort Pierce campus, many industry professionals, nursery owners and state employees have completed the course.

Registration for “Florida Native Landscaping” is taking place now for spring semester 2014. Course lectures will be delivered live with laboratories will take place on Wednesdays, and will begin Jan. 8, 3 until 6 p.m., and will continue each Wednesday through mid-April. “Florida Native Landscaping” is offered as both an undergraduate course, as well as a graduate-level course. Graduate students who enroll will complete an additional project.

The course is designed to introduce students with a plant science background to a wide array of native plant species used in Florida landscapes, according to Sandy Wilson, who will instruct the course. Wilson, who has garnered multiple national teaching awards, holds a doctorate in plant physiology. She devotes equal amounts of her faculty time to teaching courses and to research projects.

Each week, students will participate in lectures and laboratory work that will cover plant nomenclature and taxonomy, native plant requirements, propagation, environmental issues and native landscape design and implementation. Portions of the course will take place in the center’s 1-acre “IRREC Teaching Gardens”, and the half-mile-long “Linear Garden,” both outdoor gardens planned and implemented by students of environmental horticulture.

“This is a very popular course every time I teach it with direct applications as we learn how to create environmentally sound, aesthetic landscapes that benefit our wildlife,” said Wilson.

Dr. Sandy Wilson is a prominent environmental horticulturalist nationally recognized for her research programs and innovative teaching skills in classroom, laboratory and distance education platforms. Her research focuses on characterizing the invasive potential of ornamental plants, and native plant physiology, propagation and production.

Recently, Dr. Wilson obtained a grant with which to produce material for newly created web-based lectures by statewide native experts specifically for this course. In addition, she is co-inventor of a new multiple-key entry online key for identifying plant families.

Prospective degree and non-degree seeking students may register for courses that will be held at the Indian River Research and Education Center, located at 2199 South Rock Road in Fort Pierce.

To enroll in “Florida Native Landscaping” or for more information about University of Florida course and degree offerings at the Fort Pierce location, contact Coordinator of Student Support Services Jackie White, at 772 468-3922, ext. 148, or by e-mail at jkwhite@ufl.edu or on the web at: www.irrec.ifas.ufl.edu.

For specific questions about the course or materials contact Dr. Sandra Wilson at: sbwilson@ufl.edu The course website provides information, including the course syllabus, plant list, review activities, plant images, and recommended native book references. The website is online at: irrecenvhort.ifas.ufl.edu

What’s a deer? To early settlers, a deerskin meant a dollar in trade for a huge export market. The word buck consequently entered our monetary vocabulary. Deer also meant a special dinner. To contemporary nonhunters, deer may mean the anthropomorphically adorable fantasy figure, Bambi. Not everyone, however, loves deer.

To the parent whose child suffers from incurable Lyme disease, tick-bearing deer are dangerous vermin to be exterminated. To farmers who lose much of their squash, pumpkin, apple and corn crops, they’re income-draining parasites. To homeowners whose gardens and landscaping are plundered, they’re property vandals. To victims of deer collisions — or insurance companies that have to pay out claims — they’re costly and sometimes fatal liabilities. To freshly emerging saplings, lilies or lady’s slippers in unmanaged, over-browsed forests, they’re a leveling devastation, no less horrific than Sherman’s army. Left unchecked, they can browse away a forest’s future.

But to us bow hunters who seek invisibility, study winds and sit in our tree stands from before dawn to after sunset, deer are a magical obsession. White-tails are the spirit of our forest, irresistibly beckoning us to study and admire them year-round.

Deer nourish us and, in turn, they consume our imaginations and benefit from our management. Their pursuit goes far beyond mere recreation as we ascetically endure cold and inevitable sleep loss. Bow hunting is our therapy and connection with the wildest and most elusive element of our natural world.

Though devoid of tooth and claw for weapons, we are as important a natural predator as the mountain lion and wolf. In devouring venison, we incorporate its atomic essence into our own.

Deer permanently become part of our body’s chemistry, as well as a major element of our thoughts, dreams and imaginations.

Like many hunters, I spend much of my life trying to completely know and understand them. The impossibility of that quest explains part of their infinite allure.

Most hunters are at a loss to define a deer. Although they can recognize the majority of the world’s deer when they see them, many are stumped by those that don’t fit the stereotypical mold of a deciduously antlered browser.

When I show pictures of long-fanged, antlerless bucks from hunts and photographic safaris around the world, it becomes apparent that it’s not easy to define a deer today — and it wasn’t easy in the past, either.

“Der” was originally an Old English Beofwulf-Period word that referred to any animal, including fish, insects, fox, as well as deer. Not until much later in the Middle English period around 1400 — the time of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales — did the word begin to acquire its specific contemporary meaning.

But even as late as the early 1600’s, when Shakespeare wrote King Lear, the great author had his pathetic character Edgar eating “mice and rats and such small deer” — meaning any lowly, small ground animal.

Most hunters define a deer by the presence of deciduous antlers. They’re only partially correct. While most deer species do sport antlers, several others, including diminutive Chinese water deer, musk deer, mouse deer, and the African water chevrotain, have no antlers at all, fighting and displaying with long, prominent fangs instead.

For biologists, the 45 or so species of deer — many very different from each other — are all artiodactyl ungulate ruminants of the Cervidaefamily, lacking upper incisors and a gall bladder.

Like all artiodactyls, including pigs, hippos, camels, cattle and antelopes, deer have hooves with an even number of toes.

Like all ruminants, including antelope, sheep and goats, deer chew their cud, a survival strategy that enables them to quickly swallow food in the midst of potential danger — and to eat it later in safety.

To do that, deer had to develop a stomach with four chambers, the top compartment being a unique rumen. Food is first partially digested there before it’s regurgitated for several subsequent chewings, enabling a deer to extract maximum nourishment with the further help of the other three chambers.

The process creates much heat, which allows them to endure severely cold temperatures.

The Cervidae family of deer is much different from the Bovidae family (think bulls and bison), which grow permanent, not deciduous, horns. At this level, we can separate our deer from Africa’s antelope.

Successful hunters don’t need to know scientific definitions. But learning all we can about our most cherished deer can be a profoundly rewarding, life-long endeavor, limited only by our physical strength and intellectual curiosity.

While we hunters may have trouble defining deer, for three challenging and exciting months, deer will effectively have no problem defining much of our lives.

Contact Mark Blazis at markblazis@charter.net.

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10 December 2013

By the age of 7, Suzanne Turley was already showing her future leanings. Walking home from school one day, she spotted a beautiful bloom hanging over a neighbour’s fence. “I loved picking flowers,” explains Turley. So she promptly snapped it off to claim as a pretty treasure of her own. “The lady owner chased me home. I was terrified,” she laughs. Luckily, the neighbour only wanted to educate Turley to snip flowers off at the base of the stem, rather than decapitate their heads.

“As a child, I wanted to be a florist,” says Turley, who has worked as one of New Zealand’s foremost landscape designers for close to 20 years now. She remembers trailing happily behind her green-fingered grandfather in one of those old-fashioned gardens that had a chook run, fruit trees, a vegetable patch and a potting shed.

The path to her current profession was not perfectly paved, however. Somehow, she side-tracked into fashion and, together with her mother, opened the Blanche Maude boutique, an icon in the industry in the 70s and 80s. With the arrival in New Zealand of big-name high-end brands, the retail arena became too fractured, and Turley wandered into the world of garden design.

This mid-career move was not a purposeful reinvention of self, but rather a gradual realisation of where her talents lay. “I had a garden in Remuera on a busy road that had featured in some lifestyle magazines. Friends and friends-of-friends started to ask me for advice about theirs.”

Self-taught, Turley set herself up initially as a garden consultant. But when those same friends began asking for her to create pools and entire landscapes, she knew she had to enlist trained help. “That stuff was beyond me. I knew what I wanted, but I couldn’t draw it.” From such organic beginnings, Suzanne Turley Landscapes, a full architectural practice, was formed.

Although there are many landscape designers around these days, few seem to accomplish the richness of experience that Turley captures in her work. Hers is not the milieu of static design. With her palette of plants, she paints an ever-evolving picture of layers and textures. She calls this ability the “choreography”of the garden. “Plants are perishable. What looks nice today is not going to stay that way. You need to tame the garden, manage it – and have the vision to know what it is going to look like in 10 to 15 years.”

She says her success comes down to an intimate knowledge of plants. “A cook has to know their ingredients, and how they’ll react, or they’ll never bake a good cake.”

Step one in her design process is to create the “bones”, those elements that will hold the garden 24/7. That’s fairly easy in an expansive, rural space, where stone walls and magnificent trees bring structure, but less readily achievable in compact suburban gardens. “That’s when you need to look at the wider landscape and see what you can borrow from the neighbours.”

Space was not an issue in what is probably Turley’s most-awarded project, the garden at Huka Lodge. That is now listed as a New Zealand Garden of National Significance, and Turley has worked closely with interior designer Virginia Fisher to develop the property over the past 15 years. “That garden has soul,” says Turley. “The moment I step into it, I am engulfed by a lovely feeling of peace.”

Combined with the power of the Waikato River that cuts through it, the Huka experience is one that international visitors indulge in just as much as a trout fishing excursion on the lake, or a trip to the nearby falls. “At Huka, I was lucky enough to inherit a garden that already featured some European deciduous trees and some redwoods that were at least 80 years old. They are its backbone.”

Weaving a tapestry of form and foliage, Turley has designed several garden rooms for entertaining and dining. These enclosed, private spaces are juxtaposed against blade-perfect manicured lawns that lend a park-like feel to the area in front of the main lodge. Another garden journey involves boardwalks, bridges and ponds. Turley worked alongside the gardener for two weeks, carefully placing pumice-like rocks into the pond so that it appears as though they have simply tumbled down the hillside to rest in its waters.

She also asked owner Alex van Heeren for the budget to extend the pond just a little further. “A boardwalk needs a good start and a good finish and the pond needed an extra bit to put an end on it,” she explains.

Van Heeren went along with Turley’s gut instinct and, on his latest visit to Huka, gave it his highest accolade.

Turley has gone on to design the gardens in van Heeren’s other lodges in Fiji and South Africa, but although the big jobs bring the glory, she also relishes the challenge of working on small domestic projects. “Mainly these days, I have to ask myself how I am going to achieve everything that is in the brief and on a site that is mostly taken up by the house.”

She believes good landscaping can really make architecture “sing”. It’s a hand-in-hand process and, she’s happy to report, landscape design seems to have taken its rightful place at the drawing board.

“I used to struggle to get clients to allow for landscaping in the budget. I’d be pulled in at the end and asked to ‘make it look good’. Now, I’m usually consulted from day one.”

When asked for her views on the much-requested “low-maintenance” garden, she laughs. “There’s no such thing. If you want that, you had better live in an apartment!” Turley also points out that smaller gardens are sometimes even harder to maintain because every leaf of every plant is right in your face. “In a wider landscape you take in the big picture and can overlook the weeds.”

Working at the mercy of the vagaries of the weather is a given but her pet hates are cute-but-destructive rabbits, and pukeko. “They’re such aggressive birds. They don’t like anything new going into their territory.” On one job in Waiheke Island, the stroppy fowls ripped up all the plants in a wetland area the team had shaped.

After two decades in the field, Turley says she’s still learning. “I’m not afraid of using common plants, but I like to see how I can use them in a different way, how I can add more drama.”

Like the seasons’ effect on a garden, she sees her career as ever changing. It’s this dynamism that fills her with excitement. “I daren’t take my landscape gardening books to bed or I won’t sleep all night dreaming about the ideas I can’t wait to create.”

– VIVA

Raised beds have cropped up in backyard gardens just about everywhere in Texas. Typically 8 feet wide by 6 inches tall, they promise a near work-free way to grow herbs, greens or a couple of tomato plants.

I’ve dabbled with raised-bed gardening since I was a teen in the ’80s. I used to see them on a PBS show called Square Foot Gardening. Host Mel Bartholomew’s method of growing vegetables in small, tidy beds separated by mud-free pathways seemed better than tilling an entire field, only to plant seed in a fraction of the prepared soil. Mulching, watering and weeding were easier in Mel’s bite-sized plots.

I’m in my sixth year of using raised beds, with a setup of more than 30 in my garden. I’ve reaped some benefits, but I’ve also come to realize that they’re not the cure-all for what ails the farmer. In fact, for every pro, there’s a corresponding con:

Pro: Raised beds warm up faster in the spring and start crops off sooner.
Con: Raised beds get hotter in the summer, raising soil temperature higher than crops can endure.

Pro: Raised beds have good drainage.
Con: Raised beds do not retain moisture well and must be watered daily, sometimes twice a day, in the hottest part of summer.

Pro: Raised beds can be filled with sterile, weed-free soil and bagged designer dirt.
Con: Raised-bed soil that has a different texture from the ground cannot efficiently wick up moisture from native soil underneath the bed.

Pro: Raised beds are small, with neither weeds nor crops beyond arm’s reach.
Con: Raised beds are small with no room to grow melons, beans, peas or any crop that vines out or needs a large area for a harvest to be worth the work.

On the plus side, the good drainage of raised beds rescued my crops in 2010, when it rained every other day from April to June. The soil became so saturated that water accumulated in some areas up to half a foot deep.

If not for the height of the soil in the raised beds, my plants would have drowned, and I’d have lost several months worth of work. Instead, they sat healthy and safe in soil that was slightly above water level.

But monsoon-like conditions are rare in Texas. More typically, we have drought — as in the summer of 2011, when we broke the record for the number of consecutive days at or above 100 degrees. That’s when the cons of raised beds wrecked my garden.

No matter how much water I poured into my beds, my plants faltered. Despite frequent waterings and inches of mulch, soil temperatures rose too high — a direct result of all the surface area that the sides of a raised bed add to the soil around plant roots. Unlike native soil that draws heat away, raised beds are cut off from the natural heat sink that occurs with soil at ground level.

That summer, my plants were cooked by mid-July. Strolling through the beds at sunset smelled like steamed veggies — it was just that hot.

They are indispensable in fall and winter, when frequent rainfall makes drainage a priority. In the winter, elevated soil temperatures boost plant growth. Also, raised beds are easier to protect from frost.

For root crops and greens, raised beds remain a sort of living produce aisle near my house right through the fall. I credit raised beds for my year-round harvest, even when the weather gets cold.

They’re neater. The pathways keep my shoes clean, no matter how muddy the soil is under the landscaping cloth. And finally, the beds offer focused spots for vegetable production.

But for summer growing, I plan to lower the soil to ground level in the majority of my raised beds. I may also replace the tall frames with simple edging.

At ground level, they’ll no longer be suitably called raised beds; perhaps they should be called framed beds. I may even find that I need to raise and lower the soil levels in each bed as the seasons change.

I’ve had to adjust the vision I had of enjoying trouble-free food production with raised-bed gardening. Raised beds are not the last word in growing food.

But they are a useful tool with advantages to exploit in specific applications. No attempt to opt out of industrialized agriculture can succeed without a little bit of effort.

.

cheerful: Painting doors or window shutters in a beach blue colour brings the garden alive. Picture: Kay Montgomery

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Johannesburg – Colour can influence the mood of a garden. Some people prefer subtle colours, while others are stimulated by bold shades. Warm colours of red, scarlet and orange are exciting, blue and green introduce a feeling of coolness and tranquillity, while yellow can be bright and bold or soft and fresh depending on the intensity.

Never think of colour in the landscape in isolation. Have a picture in your mind of the overall impression you wish to create using not only flower colour, but also in combination with hard landscaping.

One-colour gardens need a variety of textures and forms if they are to maintain interest. In shady gardens where the choice of flowering plants is limited, foliage plants of varying forms and textures in forest green, emerald, chartreuse, blue-green, grey-green and purple-green make this a restful and calming place on a hot day.

Planting in blocks of one colour, or one type of plant, are a feature in many modern-day gardens. In a large garden, the movement and texture of ornamental grasses planted in broad swathes can be very dramatic. In smaller spaces, try wide ribbon plantings of Carex “Frosty Curls”, Carex “Bronze”, black mondo grass or blue-grey Festuca glauca.

Pastel colours suit small gardens where they create an illusion of more space. Used at the entrance to a house, soft colours give a serene and gentle welcome, they appear to add greater depth to shallow borders, lighten dark corners and remain visible in the twilight long after darker shades have disappeared.

Whether you use blue in the garden in its pure form or in one of its many beautiful tints and tones, blue will cool down gardens on a hot summer’s day. Grow bright blue flowers to emphasise a flight of steps, soft blue to carpet a mini-woodland, and lavender-blue shrubs to hide a white wall.

Agapanthus in a variety of plant sizes ranging from miniature to intermediate and tall, with umbels of flowers in shades of pale blue to deep violet, are a treasure trove for summer gardens.

The hardy shrub plumbago and its cultivar “Royal Cape” has clusters of sky blue flowers. This is a versatile shrub that can be encouraged to grow over arches and walls, and tumble down banks. Cutting it back after flowering will keep it under control.

Indigenous felicia is a neat, low growing shrub with daisy flowers of light or deep blue, useful in sunny rockeries, containers and the front of a border. Plant Lobelia “Cambridge Blue” to edge borders and spill over pots and Salvia farinacea “Victoria” and Salvia “Black and Blue” to add vertical height in borders.

Yellow flowers can be bright and bold or soft and fresh. Lemon flowers are the easiest as they blend well with other colours. Clear yellow can anchor a pastel colour scheme or add richness to bold colours, be the main player in a border, play a secondary role, or be used boldly as an accent colour. Brassy yellow is not as easy to place in a garden, and is best used sparingly in all but the largest gardens.

Orange and red are the extroverts of the flower world, exciting, dramatic and stimulating. Striking plants such as red-hot-pokers attract attention, while red flowers in combination with copper and bronze foliage have a rich and opulent appearance.

Many African flowers in these shades make excellent garden subjects – aloe, watsonia, bulbinella, protea, Leonotis leonurus and Bauhinia galpinii, Tecoma capensis, crocosmia, gazania, ursinia, gerbera, clivia and nemesia.

Purple adds depth to pastel colour schemes and looks stunning when combined with red or orange, or used as accent points with cream and yellow flowers or lime-green foliage.

Hard landscaping

Colour in the landscape is not just about plants, it is also about colour on hard landscaping elements of walls, decking, garden sheds, outdoor furniture and pots. If you are uncertain about using colour on permanent fixtures, then introduce pots in colours that appeal to you into various places in the garden to see if they achieve the effect you want.

Gates and doors painted grey or green tend to merge into the background, but paint a door watermelon, or a bench periwinkle blue, and they become decorative accents. Terracotta walls and benches, a freestanding fountain and Versailles planter boxes of citrus trees add a touch of the Mediterranean to a courtyard. A grey-blue wall would show off the dusty pink bracts of Natalia bougainvillea; just as pleasing would be maroon Phormium tenax in front of a suede wall.

Paint can be used to help disguise an undesirable feature or draw attention to a pleasing aspect. A tool shed can be transformed from a utilitarian storage space into an attractive feature by painting the walls a colour of your choice and adding a small veranda framed with decorative white trimming.

Use garden furniture as a colour accent to blend or contrast with plantings. Place deckchairs painted Chinese red among tawny grasses, a hot pink or violet-blue bench near pastel flowers, or for a more sophisticated effect, paint an old patio table and chairs black and add white cushions.

 

GENERAL GARDEN TIPS

* An eco-friendly pond should have gently sloping sides, with rocks jutting out into the water to allow small creatures to climb on or hide under.

* Colour can influence the mood of a garden. Some people prefer subtle colours, while others are stimulated by bold shades.

* Create a moonlight garden. Fill pots with white and pale-coloured flowers and silver-grey foliage. Scented plants to add to this garden’s enjoyment are Mexican orange blossom, (Choisya ternata) and star jasmine (Trachelospermum jasminoides). Add a bench and a small pool to reflect moonlight.

* Roses need deep watering twice a week. To help retain moisture in the soil, spread a layer of mulch, keeping away from the stem. Leaves are the pantry of the rose, so leave as many as possible when cutting stems for the vase.

Tip pinching is the key to a full and bushy fuchsia since flowers only develop at the end of stems. Each time a tip is removed two or more branches should form, thus multiplying the bloom potential of the fuchsia. Continue pinching new tips until the plant is full of branches. – Saturday Star

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What makes a garden? Why do we seem to choose certain plants and planting patterns? Historical perspective might help.

Old-fashioned gardens have been in fashion for a long time, even in terms of our country’s short history. We had our own indigenous garden style, but it was overlooked by garden historians who saw only the influence of English high Victorian ribbon beds, the Arts and Crafts Movement, or formal Italian and French landscaping.

For American art historian and novice gardener May Brawley Hill (“Grandmother’s Garden: The Old-Fashioned American Garden 1865-1915”) here was a mystery to be solved. In American paintings of the late 19th century, with titles such as “Old Garden,” “The Old Fashioned Garden,” or “Grandmother’s Garden,” there appeared “an immensely appealing garden, small in scale but generous in its planting.”

Hill turned to garden books published after the Civil War and found her painted garden well described. Many of these books were written by women. Then followed the centennial of 1876, which encouraged a patriotic and nativist interest in America’s past, some of it imagined. By the 1890s this interest was also shared by garden writers, novelists, popular historians and civic reformers, who saw in grandmother’s garden style a refuge from the social upheavals of industrialization.

As shown in Hill’s book, filled with paintings and photographs, these gardens were usually small enough to be maintained by one person. The hardy flowers, in contrast to exotics imported for estate gardens, were usually arranged informally in rectangular beds with low borders of plants or stone. The planting scheme could be haphazardly exuberant, but often showed a painter’s eye for color and contrast. The book refers to the “modest gardens in North and South Carolina,” and mentions the box-bordered Murdock garden on Bank Street and the Boyden garden on Fisher Street, which occupied several acres. May Brawley Hill is a Boyden descendant, with memories of “overgrown boxwood, indomitable old shrub roses, giant crepe myrtles, rampant wisteria . . . and an indestructible peony hedge.”

In “Heirloom Gardening in the South,” William C. Welch and Greg Grant offer a cultural history of contributions to our Southern gardening tradition, a handbook covering a wealth of Southern heirloom plants, and narratives of the creation of two personal gardens. Emanis House is Greg Grant’s garden in Arcadia, located in East Texas. The old farmhouse belonged to his maternal grandparents, Marquette and Eloy Emanis. The landscape is full of elements of rural Southern life (dogtrot houses, home food production and storage, cisterns), but Grant has always thought of it as “the grandest place on earth.”

Welch’s country cottage garden has developed around an 1860s Texas ranch house, so termite-ridden his wife named it “Fragilee.” According to Welch, the list of plants that have failed is long, but so is the list of those that thrive.

For both Welch and Grant, examining our garden heritage will help us create distinctive and useful new gardens and landscapes the truly reflect our region and its people.

Nutcracker Story — Headquarters, Dec. 10, 6:30 p.m., Stanback Auditorium. Salisbury Symphony Orchestra presents excerpts from the Nutcracker. Hear the story that inspired the music — and maybe even meet a ballerina. This program is open to all. For more information call 704-216-8234.

Computer classes: Intermediate Excel 2007 — Dec. 9, 7 p.m., South; Dec. 10, 1 p.m., East (registration required for East only, call 704-216-8242); Dec. 12, 9:30 a.m., Headquarters. Learn how to do more with Excel and go beyond the basics of creating and formatting spreadsheets. In this class, learn how to sort, filter and summarize data. Prior attendance at the basic Excel class (or some knowledge of Excel) recommended. Class size is limited and on a first-come, first-serve basis.

Book Bites Club: South (only), Dec. 17, 6:30 p.m., “The Time Keeper” by Mitch Albom. Book discussion groups for adults and children meet the last Tuesday of each month. For more information, please call 704-216-8229.

Holiday “Tea Party” Storytime — Headquarters, Dec. 18, 10:30 a.m., for children 5 and under. A tea party, stories and crafts. Co-sponsored by Smart Start Rowan. For more information please call 704-216-8234.

Holiday library hours — Dec. 23, close at 7 p.m.; Dec. 24-26, closed for Christmas, regular hours resume Friday, Dec. 27; Dec. 30, close at 7 p.m.; Dec. 31, close at 5 p.m.; Jan. 1, closed for New Year’s Day.

Displays for December: headquarters, Waterworks; South, watercolors by Caroline Marshall; East, holiday by Mary Earnhardt.

Literacy: Call the Rowan County Literacy Council at 704-216-8266 for more information on teaching or receiving literacy tutoring for English speakers or for those for whom English is a second language.

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