Best For Study: garden

Showing posts with label garden. Show all posts

Wednesday, March 5, 2014

Garden Featured in the Hill Rag Magazine

My most beloved garden was honored in this months Hill Rag magazine as one of "Five Great Corner Gardens: Our Annual Paen to the Hills Urban Gardeners." The garden is the parsonage for the pastor of Capitol Hill United Methodist Church. I designed the garden in collaboration with the previous pastor Ginger Gaines Cirelli and her husband Anthony. Ginger and Anthony were both avid cooks, so the idea for the garden was to combine an herb garden with an oramental flower garden.

This garden concept was popular for church gardens in Charlemagnes time. In France, they are called jardins de cure or jardins de simple in reference to the unpretentious gardens the priest cultivated in the churchyard. These gardens used both edible and medicinal plants as well as flowers for the altar. Food writer Patricia Wells described these lost medieval gardens, "Whatever is grown in a traditional jardin de cure, it should give the impression of profusion, mystery, and surprise and evoke the simple pleasures of life."

Hakonechloa macra, Chasmanthium latifolium, Hydrangea Limelight, Acanthus hungaricus, Nepeta Walkers Low, and Nasella tenuissima.

The Hill Rag writes:

This is a great example of beach garden meets Victorian herb garden. The garden is well proportioned since it sits on a raised wall and the homeowners have made sure there are not any oversized plantings. The garden skirts the home and is a melding of the best of two garden styles. The grasses and bears breeches are reminiscent of a beach side garden. The roses and annuals would be found in the best of both garden styles and the lavender and mint are perfect specimens of the formal herb garden. Large oversized field stone steppers are both functional and add the right amount of drama. The garden is full and lush, but not messy and unkempt. Urban tranquility. Derek Thomas

Perennials, grasses, and shrubs are composed on site before installation.

Mazus reptans blooms in May between large Pensylvania boulders.

Tuesday, March 4, 2014

Roof Garden That Wasnt 6 Months Later

What is it about human beings that we always expect the worst? There is always a feeling of apprehension when finishing a garden. The apprehension accompanies a few nagging questions... Will the clients like it? Will the design work? Will the plants do what Im expecting? What if this...what if that...

So it was a huge relief going back months later to a garden to find a happy client, and a garden that has far exceeded my expectations. It was a garden with a few challenges. The biggest challenge being a huge concrete slab that covered at least half of the planting area. The soil depth was at the most about 10cm. It was not at all an ideal place to plant.

I quickly popped in before going on leave and took a few pictures, but will go back in the next few weeks to get some more.

Lawn Area with flowering Plectranthus on the right

The concrete area is on the left (where the gravel path begins)

The view back towards the house

There is a fair bit of pruning and weeding that needs to be done to get everything back into shape after a very warm and wet summer, and the real test of the garden will be how it looks at the end of winter. But judging by the way things are looking now, those nagging doubts are gone.