GardenDesignOnline

A New Take on Outdoor Heating

What is it? Well .... it's a new take on lighting when the garden is cool and you want to stay outside and read.  Or if fireplaces are not your style, maybe you'd want to consider one of these.

From Kindle Living in Los Angeles, California, it's an outdoor heater (a propane tank is concealed in the base) ... and it's also a lamp, powered by batteries.

It comes in several different colors, and there's also a version with a lighted base, which positively glows in different colors at night.

And if  you don't like this traditional style, check out the website for other options.

(image: Kindle Living)

Ash Borer Spreads to NY

The deadly emerald ash borer, which has killed millions of ash trees in the American Midwest, has now spread to New York State.

Researchers at Cornell University discovered the beetle in ash trees in southwestern New York, near Randolph in Cattaraugus County.  Specimens were sent to the USDA in Washington DC for confirmation -- and the results came back positive.

E. Richard Hoebke, a senior associate in entomology at Cornell, said the threat to the state's ash trees is extreme.  "There is the potential," he said, "for ash as we know it to be extirpated from the landscape ... and there's not a whole lot we'll be able to do about it." 

New York state has an estimated 900 million ash trees, about seven percent of the state's total number of trees.  If the beetle spreads, all of the ash trees are at risk.

It is believed that the ash borer has spread from the Midwest by the transport of infested firewood, although most states prohibit the movement of untreated firewood.  Officials plant to survey ash trees throughout New York state and begin to trap the beetles in an effort to assess the problem and come up with a strategy to combat the infestation.

(photo Kent Loeffler/ Cornell)

Winning 2010 Rose

Easy Does It Rose

Weeks Roses has just announced that it's new Easy does It Rose (cv. HARpageant), has just been selected by All America Rose Selections (AARS) as the winning rose for 2010.

It's a floribunda, medium height and bushy, with colors that range from mango to peach to apricot.  It has a mild fruity fragrance and its blossoms, with a petal count of 25 to 30, are medium-large, double and ruffled.

Weeks sent me one of these roses earlier this year, and so far, I can report that it lives up to its disease-resistant promise, too.  No sign of black spot in our hot and humid DC climate, at least not yet, and the dark green foliage contrasts beautifully with the blooms.

And the flower color is simply gorgeous.  The parentage of this rose is (Queen Charlotte x Della Balfour) x Baby Love.  Hybridizer is Harkness New Roses, 2010.

It's the only AARS winner for next year, and definitely a winner in my own garden.

(photos: click to enlarge; top ©Gene Sasse, Weeks Roses; bottom ©Jane Berger)

In the Magazines July - Aug 09

Garden Design July Aug

• Landscape designer Julie Bargmann (the "Queen of Slag") of D.I.R.T. Studio turns blighted and abandoned sites into parks, gardens, and other innovative landscapes.
• Rooftop Miami magic 30 stories in the sky by landscape architect Raymond Jungles
• A contemporary and very different Atlanta landscape by designer Matthew Klyn 
• A mini stroll garden in California wine country by Vancouver designer Thomas Hobbs

Fine Gardening July Aug

• 100 skills to make you a better gardener: design, watering, wildlife, tools & more
• Plants to try:  Cape fuschia 'Peach Trombone,'  Hosta 'Stitch in Time'
• New Plant combos to try
• Mycorrhiza:  What they can do for your garden

(More to Come)

E. Village Roof Garden

East Village Roof Garden - NYC

This roof garden features almost everything ... including an outdoor shower and a fountain fashioned from a block of white oak.

It's got views, its' got seating galore,  not TOO many plants to take care of ...

It's by Pulltab Design of NYC ... and you can read the entire story about it in the June issue of Metropolis Magazine here.  And there are lots more photos ©Bilyana Dimitrova  / Pulltab

Urban Gardens: A Tiny Jewel

Oehme Van Sweden - Sullivan Garden

This tiny paradise looks far more spacious than it actually is (only about 28 x 32 feet) ... but the size is typical for a back yard garden in Washington DC's Georgetown area.

The old three-bay garage, at rear, was turned into a storage area, but another owner could just as easily decide to turn it into an office, a studio, or even a small guest house.

The plantings are typical of an Oehme van Sweden  garden... ornamental grasses, magnolias (Southern and sweetbay), crape myrtles, perovskia and coreopsis,  oakleaf hydrangeas, hypericum and hostas, and much, much more.

The garden is actually a showcase for Haitian art, which the owner collects, and the plantings lend the back yard a tropical island air.

A lily pond with the seated sculpture of a woman by Mary Brownstein is set at an angle to the residence, on the terrace outside the kitchen doors. It's just the first of many works of art that are featured in this small garden, some even built into niches in brick walls.

In winter, when a lot of the plantings disappear, the garden's design is carried by the artworks, the distinctive paving patterns, and the broadleaf evergreen textures of holly, magnolia, and groundcover hellebores.

A small dining / seating patio is at the rear of the garden, shown here just outside the old garage, and the vine-covered pergola provides shade from steamy summer DC temperatures.

The lead designer of this garden was OVS's Lisa Delplace, now the firm's CEO.  The careful details in paving, in design, in special features and plantings are typical of the firm's work, particularly in small urban gardens like this one.

The Sullivan garden is frequently on the annual Georgetown Garden Tour sponsored by the Georgetown Garden Club -- and it was on this year's Garden Conservancy Tour.  Don't miss it the next time it comes around...you won't ever see many others like it. 

(click on photos to enlarge - images ©Jane Berger)

 

NYC - Park in the Sky

If you haven't read about NYC's new elevated west side park -- built on top of an old railway line ... there is a GREAT article (and photos) on Inhabitat.

Here's the link.

Garden Tours & Design

This garden that I toured a couple of weeks ago, near the New Jersey shore, is a great example of what unexperienced designers can do if they pay careful attention to design and plantings when touring other gardens.

The homeowners spent summers touring gardens in Europe, took lots of notes and photos, and then tried to duplicate aspects of what they saw when they returned back home.

The result is a garden with a lot of separate "rooms" or seating areas, divided by plantings and/or arbors that signal an "entry" into another space.  The pond-like swimming pool is the main element in the back yard, but I particularly liked the contrasting colors of the plants around the swimming pool.  Too many conifers for my own particular taste, but nevertheless the site has an open, spacious feeling and the evergreens also provide a lot of privacy when you're in the pool itself.

The day I visited, the roses were in full bloom, along with lavender, peonies, and many other perennials.  And it was obvious from the azaleas, viburnums, lilacs, hydrangeas and rhododendrons that this garden has something that's pleasant to look at almost any time of year.

The homeowner, Mrs. Furman, employs a team of gardeners to help her keep things in shape, but there are some lovely touches that she obviously noted during her travels.

There's an ivy-covered garden house that contains all the tools for gardening; a pergola that you discover around back of the pool, perfect for secluded dining; an espaliered fruit tree in the front of the house; long and beautiful borders; a rose that climbs up a corner of the house and cascades down over the windows.

This garden in Rumson, NJ, owned by Beliza Ann Furman,  is frequently opened to visitors, so watch the garden tour listings in your area.

(click on photos to enlarge)

(images ©jane berger)

Green Roof Awards 09

Annual Awards, Green Roofs for Healthy Cities

Big Sur, CA

This guest house and garage complex is just 200 yards from the Pacific, and the challenge was to disturb the site as little as possible.  The buildings are set into the landscape, and they feature a number of "green" materials as well as an extensive green roof, ie, a roof with low lying plants that provide maximum water retention and ground cover, as well as resistance to erosion.  Extensive green roof plants are usually no more than six inches high and are supported in soil two to four inches deep.

This particular green roof and its surrounding area were designed and installed by Fred Ballerini, and the plant palette was selected from the surrounding habitat prior to construction.  Several endangered butterfly host and nectar plants were chosen for the rooftop location, as well as other species that provide habitat for birds, reptiles, and insects.

The judges noted that the most exciting part of the project was the effort to reduce the building impact by re-using native plant communities and taking care to recreate local flora and fauna habitats.  They also said the Big Sur project is a "superior example of a green roof that can minimize the impact of building by attempting to heal the ecological disruption that its construction caused."

Boston, MA

The 12-story Macallen Building residential condominiums are located between South Boston and an expansive industrial area. Landworks Studio Inc designed two separate green roofs for the complex, including an upper sloping roof with shallow-rooted plants, and a recreational terrace with planting medium of six inches to five feet.  This is an "intensive" green roof, or one that supports a more natural landscape with trees and shrubs and many other types of plants.

The recreational terrace includes a lap pool, and the design team also wanted to make the roof attractive for those in surrounding buildings.  The judges cited the project for different environments at different tiers of the building, and noted that there was an educational component to it during construction ... a class offered in green roof development at the Harvard Graduate School of Design.

Brooklyn Botanic - Saving Plants in Georgia

BBG President Scot Medbury recently attended an international conference in Tbilisi, Georgia aimed at helping the Tbilisi Botanical Garden develop a conservation strategy to save some of the country's most threatened plants.  One of the conference sponsors was the London-based Botanic Gardens Conservation International (BGCI), an alliance of 500 gardens around the world that works to establish conservation measures in countries where native plant life is disappearing. BGCI secretary general Sara Oldfield noted that "The flora of the Caucasus is phenomenally diverse and incredibly beautiful, but is increasingly endangered for a variety of reasons." 

In an interview with Garden Design Online, BBG's Medbury said some threats to plant diversity in Georgia include the following:

• Timber harvesting below the timber-line zones in the Caucasus.  "A lot of trees are being cut legally or otherwise and being exported to Turkey," he said, "and as with timber harvesting in other parts of the temperate world ... there are severe impacts on not widely distributed rare herbacious plants."
• Road building in timber regions is threatening meadow environments and plant species like peonies and orchids.  He said scientists at the conference reported that "in one region of the Caucasus, 40 percent of the ecosystems above timber line have been vulnerable to degradation and 40 percent have been lost with a consequent loss of species diversity."
• Over-grazing due to timing.  Mebury explained that if sheep are grazed in early spring, some of the earliest spring ephemeral plants are lost due to root compaction, or the animals eat the tiny seedlings, and over time, it means a severe loss of plant population.
• The spread of invasive plants (like the North American Black Locust) that choke out native species.

Medbury said the Caucasus is "one of the bio-diversity hot spots in the world" that has an amazing number of species that are worth preserving, both in the mountains and also in western Georgia, which he said is a refuge of plants from earlier geological periods.

Medbury hopes to establish a permanent partnership between the Brooklyn Botanic Garden and the Tbilisi Botantical Garden, which was a royal garden as early as 1630, known for its plant introductions, and which was established officially as a botanical garden in 1845.  It has a herbarium with one million plant specimens, an enormous library, and a sizeable staff.  He said the garden needs help with things like information technology, sharing plant databases, and field work, and he hopes that's where BBG, BGCI, and perhaps even the US government can be of help.