Why not Wisteria?

As beautiful and romantic as it is...


Here's why I never recommend it, plain and simple.

Wisteria escaped from a garden climbing a very large Picea abies on my block

There are wisteria vines choking out, shading foliage and pulling down garden structures in more places in New Jersey than I care to relate.

More than Me

Ok. Let me start off by saying that what I'm about to say is going to really going to make some people angry. I suspect it will be those with a holier than thou sensibility. I also suspect that it will be those with really loud bullying voices. If not then...good...maybe I'm not battling windmills.

Even with my activist background as a young adult, several years ago I became more 'enlightened'. I read Cradle to Cradle, visited and wrote about my reaction to sustainable gardens in Southern California and of course I saw An Inconvenient Truth. I have always turned out lights when I leave the room, have recycled and reused (including a long history dumpster diving) and I plant trees and other oxygenating plants as part of how I make my living. So far so good, right?

The trouble, for me, became when I started to be involved with social media. All this talk and posturing about being green, being sustainable, helping the planet. Don't get me wrong, that's a good thing--at least the conversation is happening. What get's me though is that it often all seems so selfish. I'm green, hire me! I can help you save the planet, hire me! I'm an expert in sustainability, hire me! I write a blog about sustainability, hire me! What!!! You still buy XXX's product--shame on you, I don't, I'm green, hire me! ME, ME, ME.

What about helping each other just because we all share the same planet? Does it always have to be about me and how I can profit by this or 'make good by doing good'...why not just because it's the right thing to do?

Land Speak

At a client's holiday party at their farm, I met one of their neighbors. She asked me how I knew the host and hostess. When I told her that I was their landscape designer, she complemented me by saying how much she liked what I had done and asked if I would come and look at her place. This type of thing happens at a parties.

In further conversation, the subject came up about where I lived and worked. When I told her, she looked surprised and asked, "That's so suburban, how did you know what to do with this property?" My answer was, "I love the land. I listen to what my clients say, but I also listen to the land, it has stories to tell." She smiled and said, "I do too, I love my land. When I lived in the town next to yours for 20 years or so, I hated it, I couldn't see the sky." We made a date to meet in February.

Here are some photos of the ongoing project from the story above.

Showhouse Season V, Issue 2. The Design Process

All of the landscape design invitees for the 2009 showhouse were provided with a master plan which illustrated the homeowner's and the consulting landscape architect's very formal vision for the property.

There would be an addition to the east side of house to update the antiquated kitchen, create additional living space and add a garage. A new pool and pool house would also be added as well as a sheep barn, greenhouse and an apiary at the southwest corner. We were allowed to re-define the spaces if we chose for future approval. Below is my annotated copy of a later version of part of the master plan.


Some of the project constraints other than the two usual suspects--time and money--were and still are: the rampant deer who eat their way through the unfenced property and that some of the original garden features were to remain or be restored. I added to those caveats my own personal desire to source as much as possible from local nurseries and resources and to limit the amount of work that had to be done by machine for both logistical and sustainable reasons. Once those benchmarks were established, I decided to pursue several ideas within final conceptual design that was submitted to and ultimately accepted by the selection committee. Those ideas, as well as the conceptual plan are below.

Design Idea #1--Go with the Flow. I had the advantage of having done a previous project originally as a showhouse garden for the same owner which was kept as permanently. I knew she loved formality and the master plan clearly showed her input. If there were already 2 votes cast in the formal direction--why rock the boat, formal it would be.

Design Idea #2--Define the space the way I wanted it, excluding some of the peripheral areas. This would tighten up my ability to maximize views out of the house and would enable me to use strong axial relationships and bold geometric forms.

Design Idea #3--Design a space that would draw people into it and cause them to linger as well as creating elegant transitions to and from the adjacent spaces. One of my underlying garden philosophies has always been to make outdoor spaces for living as opposed to being just for viewing.

Design Idea #4--Limit the materials and utilize a very narrow deer resistant plant palette to simplify further. With simplicity the overarching traditional formality will look clean and modern rather than traditional and overworked.

Design Idea #5--Think about adding a water feature. People love water, the homeowner loves water, water makes people linger supporting Design Idea #3.

Design Idea #6--Try to use appropriate native plants without being a slave to that concept. Turf would be allowed since it is a large part of the master plan anyway. Offset the use of turf through of locally sourced pea gravel paths equaling (or close) the same square footage. That boat again.

Design Idea #7--Make the plan as easy as possible to implement since the participating contractors would be partially donating their time. April, the installation month, is the 2nd busiest month of the year.

Although it's a bit difficult to see. Here's the conceptual plan. The koi pond that is noted is a element from the master plan that is to be restored and not part of my garden space. Enlarge it to see the notes.

My Last Minute List--Any Gardener Would Want These

My father loved Christmas, he believed in Virginia's Santa. When I was small he created magical surprises and taught me to find joy in the holiday. Every year he would wait until Christmas Eve to do his shopping and decorate the tree.

In that spirit, I'm offering my last minute list to Santa's gardening elves. To keep the surprise tradition, you'll have to go here to find out where to get 1 through 9, you already have No. 10.

I know I've been urging everyone shop locally, but these things aren't available locally--I checked. My list isn't a donate to your favorite charity, altruistic peace on earth kind of list--we all want that. It's simply things--small (a packet of seeds) and generous (a rain barrel) in the spirit of holiday wish lists. In the spirit of American consumerism, spend some money, let's get that economy moving!


1. An organic soil test

2. Compost tea fermenting kit
3. Certified organic seeds
4. Tools from Red Pig forge
5. Certified organic fertilizer
6. Recycled pimped out whiskey rain barrel
7. Rescued paper notebook (I'm giving some of these this year)
8. Haws watering can (I've wanted a big one for years)
9. A salvaged iron gate
10. Garden help for one day from each of you!

Happy & Safe Holidays to all. Enjoy you and yours...they're the greatest gift of all.

Design with Discipline, Plant with Abandon

I have always had a fondness for the clean lines of formalism. To my eye its geo-organization looks contemporary and fresh. I know there are a many designers who would rather die than design something with a formally organized space--they think it's rigid, unnatural and outdated. Worst of all, they think it's easy--just make a geometric shape, fill it with some flowers, and presto, it's a formal garden. That way of thinking gives these highly considered garden spaces a bad rap.

Clean lines and unexpected formalism out side of the education building
at the New York Botanical Garden

Formal gardens can be current, relevant and engaging. There are two schools of thought on traditional formality. One is an adherence to a classical garden style updated with a scale suitable to today's architecture and lower maitenance requirements and the other juxtaposes the reverse formalism of today's naturalistic planting style with formal structure to create something altogether different. Parterres can be filled with blowzy perennials which soften the hard lines of these gardens.

The second idea will be demonstrated in the design plan to the left. This garden will be installed as part of the VNA showhouse at Sheep's Run in Rumson, NJ in spring 2009, and has been developed as part of a much larger formal estate plan. This small niche garden will be viewed from a screen porch on the short side, a library and an expansive terrace on the long side. The other two sides open to adjacent the landscape. The axial pathways, circular resting places and focal points are extremely formal and geometric. The four enclosed evergreen parterres will be planted with very loosely structured perennials or annuals.

This type of garden doesn't work for every site, nor does it work for every garden owner. Depending on the plants used, formal gardens can be sustainable. For example, I have used low growing native evergreen grasses and other plants with a compact growth habits as a substitute for the ubiquitous clipped hedging plant. With careful planning, the maintenance of the geometric structure becomes less cumbersome, the garden's need for water can be significantly lowered, and native plants can be incorporated.

Following the same design idea, below is a different plan for an entry to a classic residence in Short Hills, NJ. The owner wanted something that would work with the traditional lines of the home yet echo her inclination to blend contemporary ideas within the traditional framework. The garden also had to be appropriate for a very conservative neighborhood.

The resulting garden (sorry no good pix yet) is deceptively simple. Rectilinear boxwood groups are staggered to provide planting pockets for naturalistic perennials. These informal cottage style perennials are planted in complete symmetry on either side of the entrance underscoring the geometry of the design. The Pennstemon digitalis 'Husker Red', Lirope muscari 'Pee dee Ingot', Veronica spicata 'Sunny Border Blue' and Alchemilla mollis are usually associated with more informal gardens and they worked to meld the two styles together.

This isn't to say that a more controlled formal style isn't also clean and modern. The photo to the right shows an extremely classical entry. The architecture and details are remarkably similar to the residence in the project above and both gardens have different takes on formality. The photo was graciously provided by Chris Heiler at Fountainhead Gardens in Michigan.

#24--Last day to finish

We started first and are finishing last. For the past week there's been little but this crazy sprint to the end.

The almost completed rockery

There have been soooo many issues this week that it's hard to even recount them. The most major was the pond builder hurt his back the day before his installation. Our choice was to fill it in or build it ourselves--which I'd never done before. We built it ourselves yesterday and will finish today. I had to go to a pond supplier last night and get some additional supplies--there's a world I know little about!

Others include a tabletop that doesn't fit the base, a light pulled out of it's location for no apparent reason, wires which weren't buried by the lighting installation crew, etc. etc. etc. We'll finish the pool today, clean up and return for special events. It will be good to get back to regular work.

Here's the good news--What makes the rockery 'GREEN'...

Use of recycled materials:

• All of the boulders were on site and recycled from the original rock garden.
• Two architectural elements from Fro Heim’s legendary Japanese garden were found in the rock garden and recycled into the patio.
• Fill for the garden was brought from a local site where a swimming pool was being dug, eliminating the need for that fill to be dumped.
• All organic waste material from garden construction was taken to a local commercial organic waste recyclingcenter.
• Pea gravel is used as mulch and does not need to be renewed annually. It also helps to keep the plant roots cooler in the hot sun.
• Stone dust, a quarry byproduct has been used as pathway material.
• Stone used to build the reflecting pool was reclaimed from a demolished bridge in Newark.

Reduction in energy needs of a traditional garden:

• All materials have been sourced locally reducing the need to ship them over long distances decreasing the use of fossil fuels necessary to secure materials.
• 90% of the plants in the garden are New Jersey grown, the remaining 10% were grown regionally.
• Plants have been chosen that will thrive in the hot sun with low water requirements.
• A solar panel provides energy to illuminate the garden at night powering 30 LED fixtures.

Environmentally sensitive construction techniques:

• When building the garden, the area around the Rockery was left undisturbed. Areas of disturbance were limited to a narrow perimeter around the site.
• Use of machinery was kept to a minimum and machines were not left running when not in use.

#11 Sites & soil

This morning, on another project, they started digging for a pool. Before development 30-40 years ago the area was a known for its rose growing industry so when the excavator dug his first hole we found a layer of ash (from wood burning greenhouse heaters) and wonderful clean soil. It's a problem for the pool, but wonderful for filling in deep interior areas that will be augmented with a custom planting mix and will ultimately become the planting pockets in the rockery. Off I went with a full dump of this brown gold, 10 miles away to the Mansion in May site. This saved the soil from being dumped in some land fill and my pockets from having to buy and truck soil in later.

Notice how grey the soil is--its the ash from the greenhouse stoves.

#7--Ready, Set, Go...Rain

We were ready to deliver the excavator earlier this week and get rocking (pun intended) and the rains came. All of us were scrambling to get other (read paying) work done outside so that the forced time inside could be productive (read billable).

I've been having multiple conversations with Mike Deo the designer from NatureScape Lighting over how to best use the lighting that we're powering up with a solar panel. He ordered some cool bulbs from Taiwan to test and I'm hopeful they'll do the trick. We're trying to decide on some path lights that will work with those same bulbs as the more traditional path lights won't do the trick. I've been looking at some of the stone path lights from Earthstone Studio that might work. I don't want things to look to jumbled up so I'm trying to limit the materials. I'm not 100% sold yet.

#4--Plants and Problems

I've done a quick CAD color rendering to try and approximate the quantities of plants that I will need to order in the next few weeks. It's difficult since I really have no idea what lies beneath the surface stones, how many stones there are, or how many plants I'll be able to squeeze in between the finished placements. Below is one thing I'm sure of--some long dead tree trunks. If you look closely at the base you'll see that a lame attempt was made at one time to cut that baby down.
I'm sure we'll find other under the debris. I also don't really know how far down the boulders go, this thing's been around for 100+ years at least and the area is known for the unusual large boulders that bygone masons used throughout the property. So, long story short, I can only guess at what I'll need plant wise. Below is an image of how I'm figuring it out.
The area is deer ridden, chipmunk infested and sunbaked. Add to that the May bloom time, the wow factor and my commitment to sustainability and you get the picture.

• Here's a short list of contenders so far. The trees are decided and I'm going out to a tree farm in Stockton (about an hour from here) to tag them as soon as it thaws abit.
• These are high up on the list--Euphorbia polychroma, Dianths g. either 'Bath's Pink' or 'Firewitch', Sedum reflexum 'Angelina' and 'Blue Spruce', Phlox subulata 'Emerald Cushion Blue', Teucrium hyranicom 'Purple Tails', Eregrostis spectabilis, Carex morowii 'Ice Dance', Thymus praecox, Salvia nemerosa 'May Night', Sempervivum sp.
• A little lower down on the list--Santolina sp., Yucca filamentosa (not sure which one), some kind of low growing conifer, some of the other sedums.

As you can see I still have some work to do. I don't want to use any annuals because they won't be able to be re-used after the show is over, so I guess that's another qualification for plants--I have to be able to find new homes for them later in the season.

#3--Why Green? An Opinionated Viewpoint

This time last year I was getting ready to attend the 2007 Association of Professional Landscape Designers annual conference. Held in Southern California, the 10 day visit began a transformation about the way I think about landscape design--although it has been difficult to put that burgeoning philosophy into practice all of the time.

Even though in my twenties I had lived for several years in Los Angeles, coming from my Z6 mid-Atlantic base, the conference's garden visits were a trip to an exuberant, exotic locale. Gardens and landscapes in the subtropical climate that is 21^st century Southern California have a completely different point of view than those ‘back east’. The ‘New American Garden’ aside, east coast gardening is rooted in the English traditions of lawn and border. Most of the gardens in Los Angeles challenged my idea of what a garden is and can be.
From what I saw, designers in California are taking a leadership position in environmental restoration and preservation. Sustainability was the focus of the conference and many of the gardens we visited incorporated that concept by utilizing recycled materials, native plants and xeriscaping. The idea of sustainable landscape practices through the use of creative design solutions was evident. The gardens presented a paradigm of design trends that respond to California’s climate of long dry summers and mild wet winters, outdoor lifestyle and a clear commitment to the restoration of indigenous plant communities.

I was initially shocked by what I saw through eyes used to lush summer landscapes green with irrigation—whether natural or man made. Early in the conference, I realized I couldn’t identify but a handful of plants, many were native to California or other Mediterranean climates and not suited to the climatic swings in other areas of the country. This lack of plant knowledge allowed me to focus on the big picture rather than the plant groupings. At first I thought, where is the GREEN, where is the lush, where is something familiar? From my perspective, agaves, echiverias, and aeoniums exist in the greenhouse or in pots on a patio—not in a front yard, yet there they were and they looked right. They looked as if they belonged. It was my viewpoint as a designer that didn’t belong.

After several days of garden visits, we went to a beautiful and imaginative garden that looked, with some exceptions made for plants, as if it had been transplanted from the East coast. This garden was heavily irrigated, lush and green. It was not sustainable, it didn’t have that sense of place that many of the other gardens had. When I thought about many of the other more ‘alien’ gardens I had seen, this verdant Anglo-Mediterranean space seemed out of touch with the California design sensibility I had been seeing elsewhere. I realized I was beginning to see the point.

The California designers’ mindset of celebrating their geography, climate and native plant communities hasn’t really take hold here. New Jersey, where I practice, despite its moniker as ‘The Garden State’ is the most densely populated state with a long history of industrial and environmental transgressions. Like many other areas in the country, we are just beginning to safeguard open space, protect what used to be old growth forest and save and restore native wetlands and riparian buffers.

Garden visits can challenge and delight. They can also expand the possibilities of design to the open minded viewer. After the initial shock, my visits in California did exactly that. I came away from the conference wondering how I could translate and put to use what I had seen and heard. There were some impractical ideas—I can’t imagine listing plants slated for removal on Craig’s List and having strangers come to any of my very private client’s properties as one left coast speaker suggested—they’d be appalled at the suggestion. It would be next to impossible to convince my conservative and traditional clientel to have a wall built of repurposed concrete—what was cheerfully nicknamed ‘urbanite’ in California. In the east, we have an abundance of beautiful and relatively inexpensive local stone. I can also promote the use of recycled brick, which locally is in abundance and costs about one third of the cost of new brick.

I can investigate and use more native and locally grown plants that will require less water and use fewer fossil fuels needed for long distance shipping. I can make sure stormwater is kept on the property and used as passive irrigation. I can make sure that the organic materials we remove from a site go to the proper recyclers to be composted for future use. I can also make sure that inorganic debris is sorted and recycled instead of dumped.

I also realized that in other ways, I have already started. I try as often as possible to reduce areas of turf grass in a design, just on the basis of water useage, chemical fertilization practices and air and noise pollution created by the mow/blow/go crews. We also offer organic garden maintenance without the use of power tools to our clients, promoting it as Estate Gardening and charge accordingly for it. My show house garden is an opportunity to demonstrate these ideas to a large group of people looking for inspiration.

So I figure if I design with sensitivity to the genus loci and keep sustainable practices in mind, the gardens I build will be to their time and place, what many of the new California gardens we saw are to theirs.