Serenity in the Garden

Thomas Church - Donnell Residence, Sonoma, CA 1948 Thomas Church was one of the most influential American landscape architects of the twentieth century. His ideas on the 'modern' landscape revolutionized home landscaping and changed the look of the suburban backyard.  Born in Boston in 1902, he attended college in California and came under the spell of its climate and outdoor lifestyle.  Church received his landscape architecture degree from Berkeley in 1923 and his Masters in Landscape Architecture from Harvard in 1926. Tommy Church - Plan for Donnell Church urged people to see residential property as a single living space with the house and garden directly connected.  This was a dramatic notion for its day.   His greatest influence was through his books and numerous articles. His popular book on home landscapes, 'Gardens are for People ,' was published in 1955.    Church advocated four basic landscape design principles: •...

"Serenity.  Serenity is the great and true antidote against anguish and fear,  and today, more than ever, it is the architect’s duty to make of it a permanent guest in the home, no matter how sumptuous or how humble.  Throughout my work I have always strived to achieve serenity, but one must be on guard not to destroy it by the use of an indiscriminate palette." Luis Barragan, 1980 

We all know that herbicides can harm us and the environment, so it follows that scientists are studying natural weed control methods.   A team at Michigan State University  recently studied the effectiveness of   mulched maple and oak leaves on common dandelions in bluegrass lawns. The team tested chopped up leaves of red maple, silver maple, sugar maple and red oak and looked to see how they worked to suppress dandelions in a lawn. They found that after one and two mulch applications (at a high rate of mulching)  up to 80% and 53% reduction in dandelions was achieved, respectively. This makes sense since leaves lay naturally on a meadow and are not blown off. They block light and water and suppress weed growth.. But we, lawn owners, immediately blow off all the leaves on our lawn in our early spring 'clean up' which opens up sun to all weed seeds.  We then apply pre-emergent weed ...

I planted these 'Negrita' tulips as a companion to the pink PJM Rhodies Olga Mezitt.  Purple and pink are great colors for a spring garden! Tulips make such a splash in the garden - I once planted some for a client and he liked them so much that the following fall he planted hundreds more!  Here are some photos from his tulip display: Tulips at a client's property  Jan Johnsen tulips around a Kwanzan Cherry tree that we planted Tulips along a fence - a classic pairing