Serenity in the Garden

The marriage between video and architecture has occurred. Now the creatives among us have figured out how to project fun graphics onto famous buildings...Here is what they did at the Branchage Film Festival on the island of Jersey ...(they also did this on the Gehry building at the Vimeo Film Festival in NYC).... I know this is not about gardens but imagine the possibilities! Blade Runner was just a glimpse of what we will have in the future... Times Square will be a vibrating mass of moving buildings. Battle of Branchage from seeper on Vimeo .

I thrill whe n I read beautiful writing about the earth and wild places. I cherish heartfelt words that speak of the deep feelings that certain outdoor settings engender within us... And so, I want to share with you a paragraph from the book, 'The Spell of the Sensuous' by David Abram. He has been called, "one of the hundred visionaries who are changing the world." I guess, for that, you should know of him. His writing is intensely lyrical, calling up another favorite writer, Loren Eisely. The book's concepts are dense but certain passages read like poetry. I've taken one of Abram's paragraphs and spaced it out as a poem: "Each place has its own mind, its own psyche. Oak, madrone, Douglas fir, red-tailed hawk, serpentine in the sandstone, a certain scale to the topography, drenching rains in the winter, fog off-shore in the summer, salmon surging in the streams - all these together make up a particular state of mind, a place-specific inte...

The UK government is planning a massive sell off of their publicly owned, ancient forests. Around two-thirds of the UK woodlands are privately owned already. The remaining 33% is publicly owned, managed by the Forestry Commission (FC) and other public agencies. National treasures like the The Forest of Dean, Sherwood Forest and The New Forest could be sold off. Once they are gone, they will be lost forever. from save our woods credit: Pablo - Woodlife The UK public is widely against this and they have started a group called 'Save Our Woods' and a petition drive to force the government to rethink its plans. If they can prove how strongly the public is against this, then maybe the gov't will back down. Since some of my readers are from the UK I thought I should publicize this...so go to this site ( click on 'save our woods') and check it out: Save Our Woods from Save Our Woods This is what they write in their site: We believe our trees, woods and forests ar...

Gardening is a kind of disease. It infects you, you cannot escape it. When you go visiting, your eyes rove about the garden; you interrupt the serious cocktail drinking because of an irresistible impulse to get up and pull a weed.  ~ Lewis Gannit

from High Country Gardens Since Honeysuckle is the color of the Year I decided to share a pink blooming native grass with you. Pink Muhly Grass!...it is a native 'fave rave' of mine (or, as I call it, a 'fave rave nave'.) Muhlenbergia capillaris ' Lenca', known as 'Regal Mist' Pink Muhly Grass, is an extraordinary ornamental grass plant for many reasons:  from Monrovia Its flower heads appear in the fall as a frothy haze of deep pink. It is low maintenance and virtually pest free. It is deer resistant. Its deep roots makes it a tough, drought tolerant plant suitable for erosion control on slopes and useful in xeriscapes (Although regular irrigation and fertilization will encourage the best bloom). It grows quickly to three feet with narrow glossy green leaf blades. from Wayside Gardens It is not hardy in my area as its native range extends from the south Atlantic Coast down into Texas and Mexico (zones 7 -10). Some people in zone 6 can grow i...

Matt asked me about examples of circles in the landscape...and I figured this is the best example of circles in the landscape there is. made with Plywood Planks and tape measures? in the hours between 2 am and 4 am?  I will let you decide. They appear overnight.

Honeysuckle is the official Pantone color of the year. You will see this color everywhere for the next 12 months... in ads, fashion, housewares, etc. So how does Pantone choose the 'Color of the Year'? Do they drink several glasses of wine and look swooningly at lush Pantone color swatches and say, 'That's it -  that's the color!"....? Or maybe they say, "We have all this pink colored inventory that we can't sell because no one wants that color...why don't we make it 'The Color of the Year'?" But I think I know the real answer - some discerning landscape designer planted a  Goldflame Honeysuckle  ( Lonicera heckrotti 'Goldflame' ) on a trellis for someone in Corporate....and the 'dye was cast'. :) They saw the magnificent 'Goldflame' Honeysuckle and wanted to share it with the world. It is a fantastic vining plant that  I use often on trellises. image courtesy of Monrovia Of course there are other pl...