Last year I did a little pruning on a River Birch planting that had been in the ground for about 4 or 5 years. They’d been planted pretty close — 5 feet or so — to a driveway, and the lower branches were waving out into the roadway. (They were also 6 or 7 feet [...]
Archive for May, 2008
They clean up nicely
Posted in Plants on May 31, 2008 | No Comments »
patience and vigor
Posted in Plants, Working Landscape on May 31, 2008 | No Comments »
I like the idea of the plants finding their place and relationships together. This also works on the level of the individual plant. The smaller the plant, the better able it is to adapt its habit to its circumstances. Any tree planted, say, in a location with a lot of light on one side and [...]
Patience
Posted in Gristmill on May 31, 2008 | No Comments »
We seem to be on a planting jag right now — not surprising, given the season…
A couple of points about planting a garden with small plant specimens: First, unless we’re talking tiny plants here, which may be overcome with cold, exposure, or rodents looking for a tender snack, small plants have the advantage of being [...]
Stars
Posted in Plants on May 30, 2008 | No Comments »
Maine, Memorial Day weekend 2008. St. Columba’s Memorial Garden, Boothbay Harbor. Interment of ashes. Sun raining through spruce and pine boughs lit up the yellow bell-like flowers of Clintonia borealis (Blue Bead), and brightened to even brighter whiteness the Trientalis borealis (Star Flower) flowers carpeting the ground. Walking around the woodland knoll felt like walking [...]
Soporifics and stimulants
Posted in Plants on May 30, 2008 | No Comments »
Not to belabor a point, but…
Today I was stuck in traffic on Route 16 in Newton (yesterday’s T crash up the street meant more buses and cars on the road), and looked across the road to the campus of a nursing home, perched on a bank maybe 20 feet above me. A stone retaining wall [...]
Savory
Posted in Plants on May 28, 2008 | 1 Comment »
Sassafras — what a great tree! Such a distinctive look, whether it’s the juvenile that still has a brown trunk, reddish limb bark, and green twigs, or the towering specimen that you identify only when you get close enough to see those mittened and gloved leaves. There’s a stand of sassafras on a walled piece [...]
mixed plantings and succession
Posted in Plants, Working Landscape on May 26, 2008 | No Comments »
I posted earlier on plantings at the Mandarin Oriental. The one that I’m enjoying the most, right now, is a dense planting of Limber Pine, Swiss Stone Pine, and Sassafras. One of my co-workers who visited the site assumed the Sassafras were volunteers (from what source they would have self-seeded I’m not sure), which both [...]
Inside out
Posted in Gristmill on May 23, 2008 | 2 Comments »
That transition between inside and out is key. When the perceptual barrier is great — that is, when there are lots of high, narrow steps, when a landing lacks depth and width, when a handrail stands too close to the door opening — people will find all sorts of reasons to minimize their ins and [...]
drift
Posted in 1 on May 23, 2008 | No Comments »
One of my favorite houses is a weekend cabin at the edge of the Rancocas Creek in the southern part of New Jersey, not far from the Pine Barrens. It’s flat land with tall trees and no rocks. When the weather is warm there’s no need to close the double doors between the [...]
In praise of patios
Posted in What we're thinking on May 21, 2008 | No Comments »
Junichiro Tanizaki, who wrote the lovely little book In Praise Of Shadows, probably never imagined his title would be co-opted by a twenty-first century landscape architect who likes to design patios. But Tanizaki and I are both interested in exploring a humble element: for him, the richness of darkness, shadows, and the patination of old [...]
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