Posted: Tuesday, August 6, 2013 3:25 pm
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Updated: 7:39 pm, Tue Aug 6, 2013.

Natural landscaping works within limits

Southernminn

Posted on
August 6, 2013

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  Jerry Smith
  

Is there anything more lovely than landscape untouched by man?

It represents serenity, peace and a sense of “getting away from it all.”

Would that all our land looked like that.

Except it’s not really feasible.

An increasing number of Northfielders are moving away from typical grass lawns and incorporating rain gardens, food and herb gardens or natural landscaping instead.

The benefits to such a move are clear: Growing food is a cheap and healthier alternative to the grocery store and a great use of land. Rain gardens reduce the amount of runoff going into our sewer systems and eventually our waterways. Natural landscaping allows for less groundskeeping overall, which reduces the use of herbicides and other chemicals that may pollute the land and water.

But because we live in a city, there has to be limits. We cannot all dig up our grass, drop prairie roots instead and let it go. With that come the less pleasant side of nature: Pests such as field mice, possum and other animals that don’t mix well with humans.

And because we live in the land of free choice, it is neither fair nor acceptable for one neighbor to let their property go wild — literally — while others lose possible value because not everyone views prairie landscape in front of a home as a positive thing.

That’s why the city has developed what are fair guidelines. No weeds nor anything pushing 3 feet (that’s not a flower or bush). Fire hydrants must remain clear — that’s a public safety issue.

We should all feel free to cultivate on our property a yard that we can be proud of and that is enjoyable to use. But as residents of a community, we don’t live on an island. Our actions have an impact on our neighbors.

We have an obligation to not impose upon them anything that would reduce the value of their homes or their enjoyment of it.

© 2013 Southernminn.com. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

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Tuesday, August 6, 2013 3:25 pm.

Updated: 7:39 pm.

BOSTON, MA — (Marketwired) — 08/06/13 — When people hear the word garden, many are likely to conjure up images of flowers, fruits and vegetables. Others may think of gardens as a personal hobby, while some may imagine public gardens such as Central Park or Versailles in France. The travel experts at Cheapflights.com, the online leader in finding and publishing travel deals, have discovered another dimension in the world of gardens and invite you to take stroll through their Top 10 Unusual Gardens from around the world.

We kick off the garden tour below with five breathtaking yet quirky gardens from Cheapflights.com’s Top 10 Unusual Gardens:

• Las Pozas, Xilitla, Mexico – A “Surrealist Xanadu” in the heart of the Mexican jungle, Las Pozas (the Pools) combines man-made structures with exotic flowers, native plants, waterfalls and pools to create a strangely harmonious and peaceful garden. The gardens are the creation of eccentric English poet and artist Edward James, who bought the 80-acre former coffee plantation in the mid-1940s in an attempt to create his own Garden of Eden. Between 1949 and 1984, James built a total of 36 surreal concrete sculptures and structures on the site with names such as the House with a Roof like a Whale and the Staircase to Heaven. As of 2007, the gardens are maintained by the Fondo Xilitla foundation.

• The Garden of Cosmic Speculation, Dumfries, Scotland – Science and mathematics plus sculptures and landscaping equal one fascinating garden of cosmic proportions. The Garden of Cosmic Speculation is a 30-acre garden created by landscape architect and architectural theorist Charles Jencks at his home, Portrack House in Southwest Scotland. Inspired by science and mathematics, the garden’s sculptures and landscaping are suitably based on everything from black holes to fractals. There is also a distinct oriental influence thanks to Jencks’ late wife Maggie Keswick, an expert on Asian garden design. While the garden is private, it does open up to the public one day a year as part of Scotland’s Gardens Scheme and raises money for Maggie’s Centres, a cancer care charity.

• Rock Garden of Chandigarh, India – The saying goes that one man’s junk is another man’s treasure, but in the case of the Rock Garden, a city’s junk was transformed into everyone’s treasure. Public servant Nek Chand began creating his masterpiece in 1957 from cast-off industrial and home waste he collected from demolition sites across Chandigarh. However, his chosen site was actually conservation land with a building restriction. He managed to keep his construction secret for 18 years and, when the authorities finally uncovered the garden, it had grown into 12 acres of courtyards filled with hundreds of sculptures. Thanks to public support, the garden was saved from demolition, and Chand was awarded a salary and a workforce of 50 so he could complete his vision. Today, Nek Chand’s Rock Garden is spread over a massive 40 acres.

• A French Kiss in Akaroa, Christchurch, New Zealand – Held every year late in the New Zealand summer, the Ellerslie International Flower Show attracts a global audience of garden designers and garden lovers who come to see the best of garden design, gardening trends and new products. Founded in Auckland in 1994, the show moved to its current (and fitting) home in Hagley Park, Christchurch, New Zealand’s Garden City, in 2008. In 2013, landscape designer Ben Hoyle picked up his sixth Gold Medal for his sunken oasis called “A French Kiss in Akaroa” that featured a lounge pit filled with pillows where visitors could take in a unique view from below the waterline. The inspiration for the garden came from the history of the French settlement in the South Island town of Akaroa. Kate Hillier, exhibition manager at the Ellerslie International Flower Show said the garden, along with several others, had been donated to New Brighton — a coastal suburb in Christchurch that was badly damaged in the 2011 Christchurch earthquake. “We look forward to seeing the garden live on, brightening the days of people living in such a seriously damaged area,” Hillier said.

• Forestiere Underground Gardens, Fresno, California, United States – Forestiere Underground Gardens are the creation of Sicilian immigrant Baldasare Forestiere, who built the garden over 40 years from 1906 until his death in 1946. Inspired by a childhood fascination with the catacombs in Rome, Forestiere built the Underground Garden as an escape from the scorching Fresno summer. Today a listed California Historical Landmark, the three-level underground structure is a network of rooms and passageways and features a summer and winter bedroom, kitchen, fish pond, a parlor complete with fireplace, and several subterranean gardens. Many of the garden’s plants are more than 100 years old and, thanks to the underground construction, are protected from frost over the winter months. The garden is home to a variety of fruit-bearing trees and vines from citrus to berries that were planted at different times, so the trees bloom one after the other giving a lengthened growing season.

Rounding out our list of bizarre gardens around the world are: Arctic-alpine Botanic Garden, Tromsø, Norway; Bookworm Garden, Sheboygan, WI, USA; Tarot Garden (Giardino dei Tarocchi), Tuscany, Italy; Jardin Majorelle, Marrakech, Morocco; and Poison Gardens, Northumberland, England. To read the complete details and view stunning images of Cheapflights.com’s Top 10 Unusual Gardens, visit www.cheapflights.com/news/top-10-unusual-gardens/.

About Momondo Group
Momondo Group is an online travel media and technology company that is driven by the belief that an open world is a better world. The group now serves travel search and inspiration to over 13 million visitors a month — plus 6 million travel newsletter subscribers — via its Cheapflights (www.cheapflights.com) and momondo (www.momondo.com) brands.

Skygate began the sourcing of complex air-travel data in 1992, while Cheapflights pioneered the online comparison of flight deals for users in 1996 and momondo launched meta-search in the Nordic countries in 2006.

The Group has offices in London, Copenhagen, Boston and Toronto, with a consumer base across more than 20 core international markets but users all over the world.

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One of the topiaries on the Oklahoma State University campus. (Photo by Helen Ford Wallace).

You don’t have to ask Ann Hargis how her gardens grow.

You can look around the Oklahoma State University campus to see that the gardens are alive and well and growing just fine.

OSU is where her husband, Burns Hargis, is president, and she is the “first cowgirl,” as she describes herself. It is also the place where the Department of Horticulture and Landscape Architecture is set up for teaching and research.

Ann Hargis, Steve Dobbs, OSU’s manager of grounds and landscape services, and I checked out a few of the gardens on a short, rainy-day tour in Stillwater recently (the heavens decided the gardens needed a summer drink). We didn’t even get to the headquarters’ garden, the Oklahoma Botanical Garden Arboretum, saving that for another day.

There are many growing venues for students, alumni and guests to view, and all are filled with beautiful and well-planned areas. They include the Central Garden, the new Price Garden, the Formal Garden and plazas where creative topiaries are featured during the growing months. The gardens are filled with thousands of varieties of flowers, plants and herbs. Some you might recognize; some you might have to ask their botanical names.

In each garden we visited, Ann Hargis had knowledge about the flowers and plants, or a curiosity to learn. She and Dobbs have a similar vision in their desire to beautify the campus. Ann Hargis, OSU first lady for the past five years, has “bloomed where she was planted.” And there are thousands of flowers blooming there with her.

We got to see orange flowers (OSU’s favorite color), along with many other colors and varieties. These viewings included Ann Hargis’s favorites, orange canna lilies, at her campus home, Wilham House.

We saw large blooming magnolia trees planted by the late Henry Bennett, an early OSU president. “He loved magnolias,” Dobbs said. “He had a master plan for the campus.”

Dobbs also pointed out new plant material, the sweet gum slender silhouette trees, planted around buildings.

“We want the campus to be beautiful and inviting and also educational,” Dobbs said.

Most of the gardens have bar code technology (QR, or Quick Response, codes) so the students, alumni and guests can interact with the displays and get information about plants and how to grow them.

Topiary boot

The topiary cowboy boot display, in the southwest corner of Theta Pond, is made of eight different plants that create the texture of the boot, including the OSU orange “O” made by using bronze-color hens and chicks flowers. It weighs 2,300 pounds and is almost 8 feet tall. Among the plants that are always used are Joseph’s coat, miniature sweet flag, basketgrass, dwarf mondo grass, variegated creeping fig and creeping fig, dwarf sweet flag and dichondra. Other flowers are added for color.

An intricate frame was created for the boot that involves a way to transport it back to the greenhouse for the winter months. William Hilson, landscape technology specialist, built the boot, and he and Steve Dobbs designed it.

Price Family Garden

New on the campus is the Price Family Garden, dedicated in April by Linda and Stuart Price. Hargis noted the garden was given in honor of mothers. “Mothers have a great influence on students,” she said.

The plaque on the wall in front of the Atherton Hotel has a quote from Edwin Hubbell Chapin: “No language can express the power, and beauty, and heroism, and majesty of a mother’s love. …”

This garden is a cutting garden for flowers for the hotel and the Ranchers Club Restaurant. There also are edible foods and herbs the restaurant’s chef, Ben Coffin, uses in cooking. Growing are different flavors of mint, basil, fennel, rosemary, lavender and Swiss chard. There are zinnias, hibiscus, mums and pansies in season; also growing in the garden is one of the historic OSU magnolia trees. There are peach trees and raspberries. There is squash, pinto beans, okra, soybeans, lettuce, asparagus, peppers and several types of tomatoes.

Also of note

Another topiary located just south of the football stadium is the Garth Brooks topiary hat. This hat is a replica of Brooks’ favorite straw cowboy hat that he wore for the Oklahoma Centennial Celebration. It is created using creeping fig plants. The words “Go Pokes,” planted in Joseph’s coat, are by the hat. A nearby QR code tells the story. Many of the QR codes, used as teaching aspects for horticulture, are linked to the OSU website.

The Old Central Native Garden is by OSU’s oldest building and features plants native to Oklahoma, such as big bluestem, black-eyed Susan, coneflower, ox-eye daisy, evening primrose, gaillardia and horseherb. The Formal Gardens by the Student Union features outstanding, organized landscaping and placement of plant material.

Wilham House has its own gardens and beautiful trees. Ann and Burns Hargis grow vegetables such as tomatoes, squash, okra and various herbs. One of their patios has a fireworks-looking topiary and pots filled with gorgeous summer flowers and plants.

Orange power on display

If you tour many of Oklahoma State University’s gardens, you’ll see orange flowers. Steve Dobbs, OSU’s manager of grounds and landscape services, offers a list of the names of the varieties of orange flowering, fruited or foliaged plants on campus for OSU fans of the color:

The summer and spring orange plants in the Price Garden: sweet pepper, ‘Tangerine Dream’; sweet pepper ‘Good as Gold’; cauliflower ‘Cheddar’; Swiss chard ‘Oriole Orange’; cuphea ‘Big Cigar’; canna ‘Intrigue’, and pyracantha ‘Mohave’.

Orange flowering or foliage plants in formal gardens or seasonal beds on campus include: celosia ‘Fresh Look Orange’; celosia ‘Ice Cream Orange’; zinnia ‘Double Zahara Fire’; lantana ‘Bright Orange’; cuphea ignea; Esperanza ‘Bells of Fire’; coleus ‘Rustic Orange’; canna ‘Orange Punch’ and canna ‘Robert Kent’.

The Hargis patio with blooming plants. (Photo by Ann Hargis).

 

 

Ann Hargis and Steve Dobbs with one of the topiaries on campus. (Photo by Helen Ford Wallace).

 

 

Plaque at the Price Garden. (Photo by Helen Ford Wallace).

 

EAST HARWICH — Some people walk dogs for a living. Tom Strangfeld
walks yards.

Strangfeld, 66, is a respected landscape designer — “a big shot,” according to Chuck Baker, a former colleague at Weston Nurseries of Hopkinton, who has known him for 40 years.

He has planted trees in Boston’s Public Garden, and appeared on the PBS series “This Old House.” He installed a landscape, complete with a cave, for Aerosmith’s Steven Tyler. He designed and built the garden at the Concord grave site of gardening guru and TV star James Crockett. He has lectured at the Arnold Arboretum and Radcliffe Seminars, and is a former president of the Massachusetts Nursery and Landscape Association, an industry trade group. He has taken top prize — five times — for his exhibits at the New England Spring Flower Show.

“Tom is one of the top five landscapers and horticulturalists in the state, absolutely,” according to Jim McManus a manager of that event, now the Boston Flower Garden Show.

Continue reading below

Yet for as long as he can remember, Strangfeld has wanted to reach out to people directly in their homes, to avoid what he sees as the “repetitious and soulless and boring” landscaping he believes is common in many suburban yards.

‘Too often the public perceives good landscaping as 10 thousand dollars’ worth of ecologically unrelated evergreens set off by an annual application of fresh bark mulch.’

He has an encyclopedic knowledge of plants. He’s a natural teacher who sees lessons in every bud and blossom, enjoys telling stories, and has very strong opinions, not all of them about flowers.

About a year ago, his wife, Marian, came up with a job title for him — “Yardwalker ”— and Strangfeld has now become one, offering one-hour “walking” lessons to introduce people to their own gardens.

“There’s a very limited number of people who get excited about gardening versus cooking and decorating,” said Strangfeld, a burly, bearded man who comes off as gruff at first, but isn’t. “A lot of people need a little help.”

Jonathan Wiggs/Globe Staff

Tom Strangfeld’s garden in East Harwich is 20 by 30 feet, framed by a white picket fence, and purposely low maintenance.

Some are looking for big-picture advice on their yard’s potential. Others have technical questions — how to rescue a sagging arborvitae hedge, or plant a perennial without killing it. Many people are pruning-phobic.

Don Buchholtz of Dover has walked his yard with Strangfeld. “Usually I can figure things out pretty well,” Buchholtz said, ‘but pruning is something I’ve tried to figure out and read about and basically it sounds ridiculous but I could never get it.”

One walking lesson later, and he got the hang of it. “I haven’t done anything complicated at all, but what I have done is fine,” he said. “It grows back and you do it again.”

It doesn’t surprise Strangfeld that so many people feel disconnected from their gardens and yards. “I don’t think people think a whole lot about the fact that they have choices,” he said. This is a prelude to Strangfeld’s major pet peeve, namely that in his view suburban landscaping “went off the track” a few decades ago, and has never recovered: People choose their shrubs and plants less because they are pretty than because they’re purposeful.

He blames this on the construction industry, specifically on the advent of the poured concrete foundations which gained popularity in the 1940s with mass-produced housing for returning war veterans.

“My theory is that this post-World War II construction change led to a change in the horticulture industry,” said Strangfeld. “The foundations got higher and higher [and] that’s when the landscaper was supposed to come in and hide the ugly concrete.” Old standards such as lilacs, spirea, and roses weren’t up to the task of camouflaging foundations, so the new standard became what Strangfeld calls “SFBs” — short, fat, bushy shrubs like yews, rhododendrons, junipers, and boxwoods.

“Too often the public perceives good landscaping as 10 thousand dollars’ worth of ecologically unrelated evergreens set off by an annual application of fresh bark mulch,” said Strangfeld, who worked for nearly 30 years at Weston Nurseries where he was manager of sales and marketing, and director of development.

Over the years he’s amassed other pet peeves, many of them related to what he sees as earnest but misguided efforts to make homes appear well cared for. These include “mulch mounds,” or “mulch muffins,” which are tall piles of mulch around the base of a tree that get added to every spring until they’re a foot or two high. There’s what he calls “the wrapping of the evergreen” — the superfluous shrouding of trees in burlap in the winter, ostensibly to protect them from the elements. He also has a beef with big box stores which sell plants yet neglect them: He refers to these as “bush pushers.”

As is often the case, he’s reminded of a story. It’s about the time a man came into Weston Nurseries one day complaining that the birch tree he’d bought was in bad shape. Strangfeld asked him for the order number. “I didn’t buy it from you people,” the man huffed. “I bought it from Home Depot.”

(Stephen Holmes, a spokesman for Home Depot responded, saying: “We work diligently to exceed our customers’ expectations every day by providing high quality, healthy plants, as well as the care they need to remain that way.”)

Strangfeld is sitting on a small deck — more like a platform, actually, just big enough for two chairs — in the small entry courtyard in front of his East Harwich house. The garden has been featured in Better Homes and Gardens magazine, yet it’s unexpectedly unassuming, only 20 by 30 feet and framed by a white picket fence.

It started out as a shade garden but after the flowering cherry tree fell down two years ago, it became a very sunny garden. No matter: Strangfeld plans to completely redo it over the next few years for his grandchildren. Plans include a playhouse, maybe a treehouse, a space ship, and some sort of secret hideaway.

The garden is subtle without strong contrasts, and intentionally low-maintenance. (He’s a strong believer in low-maintenance gardens. Also, that the landscaping of a house should function the way the inside does, as “a series of intimate little areas in a range of sizes.”)

In his own garden, every plant seems to have a story behind it. The enkianthus is his current favorite because of its shape, flower form, red stems and the lovely lime green leaves when they first appear. He points out the alchemilla with its velvet green leaves and explains it got its name because sparkling water droplets collect in them that look like silver, and alchemists thought they had special properties.

He loves the contorted shape of his Japanese white pine. Other favorites are witch hazel, fennel, heuchera, and astilbe. There are not many SFBs in the garden, except for three Vardar Valley boxwoods, and by the way, “just because a species is overused as an SFB doesn’t make it a bad plant.”

He built the deck and fence himself, and he also made his distinctive “killer tool” which he refers to as a “cultinator.” It’s a menacing-looking object that does everything from slice weeds to clean ledge and he made it by grafting the broken blade of a roto-tiller onto a piece of Chinese chestnut he picked off a collapsed bridge in an old Japanese garden at Elm Bank.

“As it came together, it started to resemble ancient war clubs I’d seen at the MFA,” he said. “So I went in that direction.”

Baker, the longtime Weston Nurseries colleague, describes Strangfeld as “an old-fashioned renaissance kind of guy. He is very creative and hates the mundane things in life. He sees every day as an opportunity to create something. People in the industry were always elated he never had an interest in having his own company because no one would want to compete against him.”

Strangfeld is at an age now when other landscapers might be contemplating hanging up their spades, or in this case, cultinator. Not Strangfeld, though, who is both delighted and astonished that he’s still in good enough shape to do landscape work. He said the “biggest kick” he gets is driving bulldozers, excavators, and backhoes.

Plus, there are all the stories he gets to tell. Gardening gives him great material. There’s the one about his father who pruned everything in the yard till they resembled bright light bulbs. “The forsythia lit up.” The one about his old neighbor Snuffy, “the human mulch machine” who would decompress from a stressful day at work by shredding branches with a hand pruner into tiny pieces.

There’s his all-time favorite story, the one he calls the Public Garden Artist Caper. In the mid-1980s he planted four flowering cherries in the Public Garden, one by each corner of the bridge. A month later, he got a call that they’d disappeared. Eventually he found them, one planted in each remote corner of the park, perfectly planted, staked, mulched, and watered.

It turned out the culprit was an artist who did oils of the bridge. Apparently the trees got in the way of his vision, so he hired a crew to transplant them.

“I’ll tell you another quick one,” said Strangfeld, now on a roll. It’s about the time he was working on a job with a contractor named Big John and a ground manager named Russell.

“I was on a bulldozer and I see John waving at me to stop, stop, stop. “ Behind him was Russell, flat on the ground. Convinced he’d run over him Strangfeld leaped from the bulldozer and leaned over him. Russell looked at him and grinned. Drunk. So they dragged him over to a tree, leaned him against it, then wrapped a rope around him so he wouldn’t flop over.

Shortly thereafter, the boss drove up. “Big John said, ‘Go away. You don’t want to know about this.’

Evidently he didn’t. He got back in his truck and drove away.

Elizabeth Wheale spends winters on the ski hill and summers working outside in other people’s yards.

The 28-year-old recently finished a landscape gardener apprenticeship and started her own business, Fair Haven Landscaping. The Red Deer-based company services central Alberta, including rural areas, completing projects ranging from building retaining walls to starting flower gardens from scratch.

Landscape gardening is a red seal trade that requires a four-year apprenticeship, including a minimum of 1,200 hours of on-the-job training and eight weeks of technical training each year.

Wheale grew up on a farm and enjoyed working outside, including a winter job as a ski instructor. But she hadn’t considered a career in the landscaping trade until she started working for a local company.

“Originally I was actually planning to go to the United Kingdom and do a bachelor’s degree in theology and youth work,” Wheale remembers.

However the program she had her eye on didn’t start until June and Wheale’s ski instructor job had finished for the season, leaving her looking for work for a few months. She ended up at a Red Deer landscaping company, where the owner encouraged Wheale to consider an apprenticeship. “He saw the potential there and told me about the apprenticeship and said I’ll hire you for the summer, but I want you to do an apprenticeship. I hadn’t been totally sure about moving to the United Kingdom, and once

I started working it made sense to stay,” she said.

She finished her apprenticeship with top marks and earned the Top Apprentice Award in 2011 for landscape gardener.

Landscape gardeners can work for a variety of employers, including landscape architects, contractors, nurseries, tree farms, greenhouses, cemeteries, governments, garden centres and landscape supply outlets.

Others, such as Wheale, are self-employed.

“I enjoy the challenges that come from different people and their different preferences. I get bored easily so it’s nice to have variety,”

she said. Still, Wheale points out that starting a business comes with challenges.

“It’s thinking through the estimates and cost evaluations and valuing your own time and deciding what hours you’re willing to work and what type of work you’re willing to do. There’s lots of logistics you have to work through and you’ve just got to do it, and any entrepreneur is like that,” she said.

Wheale said one of the biggest challenges she’s encountered so far is getting customers to understand they get what they pay for.

“Cheap is out there, it’s just not skilled,” Wheale said.

Educating customers about the finer points of landscape gardening is something that Wheale enjoys.

“I think education is a huge thing. As the world moves more to organics and ecologically friendly practices, it’s even more important to have skilled, trained people,” Wheale said.

Laura Caddy has also made a career out of working with plants. The red seal landscape horticulturist works year-round at the Devonian Botanic Garden, southwest of Edmonton.

“I’ve been gardening since I could walk,” said Caddy, who worked in greenhouses in Red Deer after finishing high school.

“I was more interested in a hands-on approach than the university route, so I found a horticulture trade program at a school in Ontario,” Caddy said. “Our classroom was a botanical garden just outside Niagara Falls.”

After graduating from the Niagara Parks School of Horticulture, Caddy challenged the red seal exam for landscape horticulturist and worked at the Royal Botanical Gardens in Hamilton, Ont.

She has worked at the Devonian Botanic Garden for just over a year, as a horticulturist and curator in charge of the Patrick Seymour Alpine Garden. “As a horticulturist, I’m doing the hands-on, physical taking care of the plant, while as a curator I decide the direction of the garden and what goes where,” she said.

“I love being outside, I love working with my hands. I’ve always loved plants and taking care of them, and with my position it’s more than that. It’s a scientific collection. There’s a purpose to the gardens, a reason why we have plants above and beyond display.”

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Saturday, August 03, 2013

Frank Crandall, GoLocalProv Landscaping Expert

How are you supposed to maintain your garden and lawn without water? It can be done! Check out these tips to find out how.

Keeping your gardens and landscapes living and healthy during extended periods of drought during the summer months can be challenging…but not impossible! From proper watering, mulching, choosing drought tolerant plants and using many other techniques you can ensure your vegetable and perennial gardens, trees and shrubs and your lawn can make it through dry periods and maintain their health and vigor. I will share with you ten techniques, steps, and suggestions to prepare and maintain your gardens when Mother Nature creates a summer drought.

Ten Ways to Manage Your Gardens, Landscape, and Lawns

Although there are many methods to keep your landscape healthy with minimal rainfall, I will discuss ten ways that will help in Southern New England.

Watering

In many communities, the summer months bring water restrictions; total water bans, odd/even watering and voluntary conservation methods. In those areas where limited watering is allowed doing infrequent, deep watering of those plants that need water…vegetable gardens, newly planted trees and shrubs and drought affected plants like dogwoods, birches, hydrangeas and annuals will be the preferred technique. If a lawn is an established one (and not a newly sodded one) it can go dormant, turn brown and recover when cooler temperatures and rain returns in September. Unfortunately, a newly sodded lawn will not survive more than a few days without water during a drought.

Plant selection

Choosing plants that are tolerant of droughts and limited waterings during the summer will be a design option, especially if your community experiences water bans on a regular basis. Sample drought tolerant plants are: oaks, crabapples, bearberry, butterfly bush, bayberry, potentilla, junipers, inkberry, spruce, coreopsis, purple cone flower, sage, Black-Eyed Susan, calendula, cleome and dusty miller.

Lawn Care

During periods of drought stress mow your lawn 3” or higher to help shade the roots, water infrequently (or when you are allowed to) and deeply to encourage the roots to penetrate deeply into the soil. Refrain from fertilizing your lawn during the summer months (it’s natural cycle is to slow down during the summer) and begin to actively grow again in the fall.

Applications of compost teas

An organic technique is to apply compost tea (a liquid, brewed tea from a high quality compost) that adds living microbes to the gardens, planting beds and lawn while also adding moisture to the landscape. Typically, an application would be made in the morning or later in the day on an overcast day to help keep the microbes, bacteria, and fungal organisms alive as they are distributed to landscape.

Mulching

Applying mulches to your gardens, beds and plantings will help to maintain the moisture in the ground, moderate soil temperatures and prevent weeds from growing. A good quality shredded pine bark mulch, clean cut straw, newspapers, pine needles and other natural and organic mulches will help to significantly reduce the amount of water that escapes due to evaporation…reducing the need for frequent watering.

Repairing leaky hoses and faucets

You would be amazed how many gallons of precious water can be lost through leaks in the hose or a faucet that does not shut off completely. Have a supply of washers on hand for faucets and hoses to make them water tight!

Drip irrigation

One of the most efficient ways to water plants in gardens, planters and window boxes is to install a drip irrigation system. Through emitters, drip irrigation lets small amounts of water drip onto the base of plants (where it penetrates into the roots) with minimal evaporation and under low pressure. Once the area around the plant is moist the drip system will be able to easily maintain the water needs of the plants…without wasting water by above ground irrigation.

Collect roof runoff

By installing rain barrels, you can catch water running off your home and shed roofs and using the collected water during drought periods. Be sure to have a top for the barrel so as not to create a mosquito breeding area. Screens on the end of the downspout will also help keep roof shingle particles out of the container.

Prepare your landscape before the summer droughts appear

Taking steps to prepare your garden beds and lawn before summer will help it survive the drought. Water your lawn infrequently but deeply during the late spring and early summer to allow the roots to grow deep into the soil…giving them a better chance to deal with summer heat and lack of water. Fertilize and topdress with compost to help keep the grass plant healthy and the soil capable of holding water…preparing it for summer stresses. Mulch the beds, fix hoses and faucets before summer arrives. Choose drought tolerant plants for new gardens or replacements.

Think and Practice Water Conservation

In all your actions, in the landscape and your home, keep in mind conserving your precious water resource. Take shorter showers, do not wash cars, fix all leaks, water your landscape as needed…not every day and apply water directly to the roots, minimizing evaporation and water runoff.

With these ten simple steps, you can help maintain your gardens, trees, and shrubs and lawn without wasting water and ensuring your landscape will survive and thrive!

In the next article I will discuss bring illumination to your landscape through the planned use of outdoor landscape lighting!

“All the water that will ever be is, right now.” National Geographic, October, 1993.

 

Frank Crandall, Horticultural Solutions. Frank is a R.I. resident specializing in coastal landscaping, organic land care, small business consulting, writing, speaking photography and will be submitting biweekly articles about Landscape Solutions. Frank just published his third book, Creating a More Peaceful, Happy and Successful Life! You can read more about his book on his website, www.FrankCrandall3.com. Comments about Frank’s articles are welcome by contacting him at FrankCrandall3@gmail.com.

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Kristi Koeller Magnani kicks back in an old claw-foot tub that is among the many repurposed items in her back yard. It’s one of two that serve as beverage coolers during parties. (BETH SCHLANKER / The Press Democrat)

By DIANNE REBER HART / Sonoma Valley Correspondent

Things aren’t always what they seem – or even what they used to be.

The colorful flowers blooming in MaryJane Welch’s field on south Broadway aren’t flowers at all.

MaryJane Welch crafted flowers by warping old record albums in the sun.

And across town in Golly McGinty’s yard on rural Gehricke Road, wispy asparagus ferns and spider plants are spilling over where water once splashed in a three-tier fountain.

Landscaping isn’t just for professional designers – those with a creative eye and even without a green thumb are finding unique ways to create fanciful gardens with repurposed items.

Welch, an artist and preschool administrator, tosses old vinyl record albums into the hot sunshine to warp before she crafts them into flowers hardier than any time-tested perennial. Yesterday’s “Thriller” is today’s acrylic poppy.

McGinty, a real estate agent, repurposes just about everything into yard art – from her broken water fountain to the old Wedgewood stove once used by her late grandparents Lud and Pauline Ghiggioli.

A succulent called hen and chicks is thriving in an old tea kettle.

At Kristi Koeller Magnani’s home on Grove Street in El Verano, her lush and spacious back yard is a tribute to her heritage. Rusted items from the family chicken ranch of generations ago now artfully surround the swimming pool, volleyball court, pool house and multiple seating areas.

“I’m a real sentimental person and I just love the family’s old stuff,” says Magnani, 54, a retired telephone company service representative. “I love knowing that people who are not with us anymore that the things in their life are with us here.”

During the summer, deep lavender and blue morning glory flowers and vines nearly hide the wrought-iron headboard anchored above a planter box in Magnani’s yard. Once part of her late grandmother Thelma Pellandini’s childhood bed, it’s now a garden trellis. The curlicues of the vintage headboard become yard art when the morning glory dies for the season.

Kristi Koeller Magnani and her father Paul Koeller made this cart using repurposed items, including the axle from a Model T.

The headboard is just one of many repurposed items tucked into Magnani’s landscape.

A rusted old hand pump is now part of a filtering system for a small two-level pond housing tiny fish and a pair of turtles. A set of claw-foot bathtubs from her grandparents’ house was twice repurposed; first as watering troughs for the family horses then moved into the landscaping as soda and beer coolers for parties and get-togethers.

Like Magnani, McGinty, 51, knows the history of every item within her landscape. Feeding troughs, antiquated tools and a rusty scraper bucket are among many pieces given to her by family friend Ben Pedranzini from his family’s old chicken ranch on Broadway.

Weathered by time, a milk bucket and wine barrel now add interest to Golly McGinty’s garden.

An old cast iron tea pot is now planted with hen and chicks, a succulent that’s thriving in the rusty container. Across the driveway on McGinty’s terraced one-acre site, an old-fashioned milk can rests near a wine barrel, both weathered by time and topped with plants.

“I always get, ‘What a beautiful yard. Your place is beautiful,’ ” McGinty says of guests’ response to her landscaping.

Even passersby can’t resist McGinty’s yard. A 1910 tractor by her driveway is especially popular with tourists heading to the nearby Ravenswood Winery.  They stop for photos, often with their kids or their wine bottles posed on the old tractor.

From trash to treasure: flowers made from aluminum cans.

“I just sit here (in the house) and I just laugh,” McGinty says. “I swear to god, it gets a picture taken at least once a day. It’s just a piece of junk drug up here on a flatbed trailer.”

Welch, 59, also draws in fans.  Not only does she decorate her yard with flowers made from old albums and beverage cans, she also sells them online and at the Tuesday night farmers market in the Sonoma Plaza.

Bright and whimsical, the flowers guarantee a colorful garden even in the dreariest of winter months.

A cornice turned upside-down is now a planter box filled with live and handcrafted flowers.

“My dream is to see them, especially my record flowers, out all over Sonoma,” says Welch.

She credits her son Adam with unwittingly giving her flower power. At 20-something, he hosted a party while housesitting for his parents and went to bed before cleaning up the beer cans, only for his parents to arrive home earlier than expected.

Welch was furious at both the mess and the waste of the aluminum cans when she sparked an idea to create something beautiful from the castoffs.

“An hour later I was making flowers,” she recalls. “It just delights me to turn trash into a treasure.”

Welch repurposes other items as well. A scalloped window box planted with both live blooms and her handcrafted aluminum-can flowers was once a window cornice.

Headboards add humor and whimsy to a pair of garden beds. (Dianne Reber Hart)

Out in her vegetable garden, two raised beds have been transformed into conversation pieces. Welch attached old metal headboards and footboards to each of the raised wooden boxes, adding a bit of whimsy and a place for vines to grow.Welch, Magnani and McGinty see old things in new ways, adding interest to their outdoor spaces by redefining “junk.”

For more information about MaryJane Welch’s designs, visit MaryJanesArtFarm.com or stop by the Tuesday night farmers market in the Sonoma Plaza.

(Landscape photos by Dianne Reber Hart)

Once used on the Kiser Ranch, this 1910 tractor greets visitors to Golly McGinty’s house on Gehricke Road. She spots people taking photos of it every day.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Altrusa International Inc.

Pictured is Curt Jaynes, owner of GardenSource Nursery Landscaping, presented a program on growing an herb garden for the Altrusa Club of Portales.

The Altrusa International. Inc. club of Portales met noon July 29 at GardenSource Nursery and Landscaping for the Fifth Monday meeting, which was also guest day. The Sunshine/Courtesy committee prepared the meal. Lori Ribble and Jennifer Hardin presented flower pens in clay pots to the officers in recognition of their leadership and service. The new club yearbooks were distributed. Curt Jaynes, owner of GardenSource, welcomed members and guests and talked about growing an herb garden. Sheryl Borden won the door prize given by Jaynes. After the program, members toured the herb and flower gardens outside. The next meeting will be on Aug. 12, and Debra Villanueva, AAUW, will present the program.

Get your veggie garden on!

Get your veggie garden on! By Tyler F. ThigpeN
PHOTOS BY TRACIE FONTENOT

Friday, Aug. 2, 2013

In South Louisiana vegetable gardens are as much of a household staple as a well-seasoned black iron pot. Gardening, like canning and preserving, is a Southern tradition that not only fulfills the need for food, but many outlets, including social, recreational and health.

“For my family, it’s important to me that my daughter knows where food comes from. In today’s pre-packaged, processed culture, I want to instill in her the values of hard work,” says Valerie Broussard Boston, a mother and a Ph.D. student at UL Lafayette. “When I was a kid, we always had a garden, and watching food grow and harvesting it was a wondrous thing. I want my daughter to know that feeling. Also, it’s cost-effective and it’s your own edible science project.”

For some, peace of mind is an important reason for buying locally produced foods and growing edibles. Factory scandals and food-borne illnesses resulting in recalls and sickness have become more frequent throughout the world, causing an increase in the number of people consuming locally grown and raised foods.

Regardless of the reasons for gardening, urban garden plots now provide 15 percent of the world’s food. The rapidly growing slow foods movement, including initiatives like Michelle Obama’s White House garden and the Grow Food, Not Lawns campaign, is contributing to the popularity of backyard gardening. And like consumers, even restaurants such as The Saint Street Inn and Social Southern Table Bar are planting and harvesting and purchasing herbs, peppers, and more for use in their kitchens.

“Having local produce on our menus means that items are fresh, usually picked the afternoon before or the morning of delivery,” says Ashley Locklear, forager for the Link Restaurant Group and longtime local foods supporter. “It is also about flavor. Not only does local arugula have a spicier, more peppery bite than its conventionally shipped counterpart, it also means the product was harvested at its peak. The quality of product being picked at its peak will hold up better to all the different stages of preparation before reaching [the] plate.”

But growing produce can be time-consuming and sometimes difficult and frustrating, so new options have become available for those without the know-how, time or drive to nurture a garden. In the past few years, several locally owned businesses specializing in sustainable gardening resources been established in Acadiana.

“There is plenty of space in our own yards and properties to grow food,“ says Justin Price, owner of Backyard Harvest, a sustainable gardening and landscaping company in Lafayette. “We need to get over the idea that food comes from somewhere else and realize we can and should do it ourselves and support local producers.”

Backyard Harvest, established in January 2011, is the perfect service for those lacking a green thumb by providing guidance for every stage of the gardening process from concept and establishment to harvest and cleanup.

“We offer raised bed vegetable garden installation with irrigation, garden consulting, rework/renovate existing beds for ornamental or edible, planting and consulting for edible landscapes and wildlife habitats, along with complete landscape installation and maintenance for residential or small commercial,” says Price.

Price is passionate about growing food, a trait common among the other sustainable gardening services in the community, including Arcadius Acres, Mark Hernandez Gardens, Sankofa Earth Farms and The Urban Naturalist.

“Growing our own food gives us the most nutritious vegetables and fruits,” says Price. “It reduces dependency on the industrialized food system that is harming human health and the environment. It brings us back in touch with some essential things in life — where food comes from, the mini ecosystems that support our food supply and generally being outside and getting in touch with nature. Not to mention it is a healthier pastime than watching TV.”

Tyler F. Thigpen is a wetland ecologist and president of Acadiana Food Circle (www.AcadianaFoodCircle.org), a community-based nonprofit that connects local food producers to consumers.

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