Garden Rant

Help me Understand Edible Forest Gardening

Recently I've noticed a bumper crop of talks promoting something I'd never heard of before - forest gardening and the "food forests" or "edible forest gardens" that result from it.  Turns out my initial assumption - that a forest garden is a shady woodland garden of ornamental plants - is totally wrong; this is all about producing food.

And this is big-picture stuff.  Edible Forest Gardens tells us:

We can consciously apply the principles of ecology to the design of home scale gardens that mimic forest ecosystem structure and function, but grow food, fuel, fiber, fodder, fertilizer, "farmaceuticals," and fun.

And they explain that this isn't about gardening IN forests at all:

Edible forest gardening is not necessarily gardening in the forest, it is gardening like the forest.

Anyone with a patch of land can grow a forest garden. They've been created in small urban yards and large parks, on suburban lots, and in small plots of rural farms.

I attended a talk by Lincoln Smith, a teacher of forest gardening, (photo above) and learned a bit more - that unlike most edible plants, the ones in forest gardens last at least two seasons and usually many more.  Plants are in layers – at varying heights, like fruit trees underplanted with herbs.  But importantly, the plant mix is diverse, nothing like the monocultures of conventional agriculture.  And if you mix the plants correctly, as a group they feed themselves and share space efficiently – both underground and aboveground.  That’s a lot to ask but it’s how it happens in nature, so it can be done.

Plants that need lots of nitrogen, like apples, can get what they need from “Nitrogen-fixing” plants growing near them.  Prime Nitrogen-fixers (plants that turn nitrogen in the air into nitrogen in the soil that plants can use) are clover, sweet fern, groundnut, false indigo, New Jersey tea, American wisteria, and vetch…. Larger plants that produce their own Nitrogen include black locust, alder and bayberry.

Lincoln showed data from a California researcher showing that as much flour can be made from acorns as from the same space devoted to wheat.  Here’s the link (it’s a Word document) or you can Google: “Bainbridge Use of Acorns for Food in California.”  Wow.  Makes you totally rethink our assumptions about food production and understand a bit how people sustained themselves centuries ago in forested regions like ours.  Sure enough, check out this website about cooking with acorns,  and this nursery in Michigan is growing oaks for food production.

But Here's my Question:  Really?

I don't know why, but this all brings out the doubter in me.  I've asked around and found other doubters among experienced gardeners, which makes me feel a bit better.  Maybe I just need to see some results.

So readers, what's YOUR reaction to this radical notion?  Has anyone tried this?  Please help!  I want to support forest gardening but like the permaculture movement that spawned it, my honest reaction to it is:  Huh?

Beautiful—but also kind of a yawn

This might be at the other end of the spectrum from funky bottle trees and found object enclosures. Acres and acres of lawn. Although Asheville’s Biltmore estate is set inside a magnificent wooded landscape, designed by Frederick Law Olmsted, the formal gardens surrounding the house (also by FLO) have retained less of their appeal. Appeal for me, that is. I’ve toured lots of estate gardens, mainly in England, and—although with these large properties there was also plenty of lawn (you can’t do without it)—the borders, water features, touches of whimsy, topiary and other, more intimate elements rose to a level I didn’t see at Biltmore. The Biltmore gardens are magnificent in some ways, but disappointingly lacking in personality in many others.

This article talks about the lawn care and other horticultural requirements. It takes a lot of horsepower to manage 8,000 acres!

I have mixed feelings about the whole thing. The drive to the estate was a wonder to behold, with its luminous plantings of bamboo and, of course, rhododendrons. The views from the terrace are breathtaking and I am always a sucker for a nice statue or three, especially when they are lightly clothed in moss. But the formal gardens overall? Too broad stroke.

If you'd like to see more, here is my facebook album from 3+ days of Asheville gardens.

Crimes Against Horticulture, Pruning Division

I can't help but steal my post title from Billy Goodnick - the term is just too apt, in the case of these two juicy examples of bad pruning.  

On the left, the power company seems like the obvious culprit but once homeowners plant trees too close to the power lines, what's a company to do?  I shot this from my car last winter but I bet it looks just as ridiculous now, with leaves on that poor tree.

And on the right is the foundation planting in front of a gorgeous Capitol HIll townhouse, where two Euonymuses (Euonymi?) aren't just horribly shaped, but pruned to completely block the windows.  This is the garden of a new client of mine, who impressively hired me to give her landscape suggestions even before she and her fiance had moved in!  I happily reinforced their intention to get rid of these hideous blobs, as soon as possible.  It's a south exposure, so the choice of better alternatives is huge.

 

Sunset's 40 (not 41) Gorgeous Paths

Over on the Sunset website I found a fabulous display of paths, a garden feature we just don't see enough of, imho.  The collection is titled "41 Gorgeous Garden Paths" and indeed, 40 of them ARE gorgeous, like the one above.  The only exception is this next one, which looks ridiculous and would be crazy-making to maintain.

I've been a busy bee this weekend making pavers for a path through my new new front-yard garden that's all garden, no lawn.  I'm making super-cheap leaf-embossed concrete pavers - photos coming soon.

So readers, do YOU have a garden path and is it both beautiful and functional?  And back to Sunset's collection of paths - is there one you'd kill for?

Thomas Rainer on Contemporary Garden Design with Natives

Landscape architect Thomas Rainer (whose blog Grounded Design I've raved about) recently spoke to a rapt audience at the National Arboretum's Native Plant Symposium, addressing the big question - how to create a native-plant garden that looks like a garden.  You know, cared for and pretty.

So first he clarified that he's no typical landscape architect but a true plant nerd. (Does he garden after dark?  Check.  Stay awake at night thinking of plants for his garden?  Check.  Et cetera.)  He's also not a native-plant purist, but native plants DO resonate with him spiritually, answering his longing for nature, what we've lost and are rapidly losing. 

Thomas went on to complain that Americans treat nature like Victorians treated women - as either virgins or whores.  Just Google "Yard of the Month" to see the nature-free yards that are held as the ideal, visions of which drew groans from the nature-loving audience.  But with so much of our land now developed, nature is no longer something that happens elsewhere.  We need to make room for it in our very own yards.

So, what's the existing "design aesthetic" for native plants?  Thomas believes that in reaction to that "Yard of the Month" style we love to hate, native gardens overly embrace the wild look in their attempts to imitate nature.  While he loves naturalistic design as much as the next guy, he thinks the resulting gardens look weak and sloppy.

And sadly, our enthusiasm for wildness makes us our own worst enemies.  Most observers, including our neighbors, just don't think the wild aesthetic is appropriate.  Gardens designed to replicate habitats are so often on too small a scale to look good, causing viewers in the general public to see them and ask, "Where's the garden?" 

Getting feedback like that and attempting to remedy the situation, the NY Botanic Garden is totally re-doing their habitat garden with the help of Oehme van Sweden, the famous firm that employed Thomas before the recession (he's now with another well respected firm.)  To avoid design failures like this, he uses what he calls the mother-in-law test - would his mother-in-law like this, recognize it as a garden?  If so, then it'll probably be accepted by the public.

Abstract garden design by Andrea Cochran

So here's what Thomas recommends to native-plant lovers who care about design and want to win converts to native-plant gardening.  Create contemporary, abstract designs that interpret nature artfully.  Rather than using plants on a small scale, "Turn up the volume!"  Distill and amplify the plants' features.

Start by choosing an analogous plant community for the site (one with the same characteristics as your yard).  Google "DNR natural communities" and your state name for ideas. Pick the most important three or four plants from that group.  One inspiring plant community for the Mid-Atlantic might be the Dolly Sods Park in West Virginia (below), where a dominant plant would be the Little Bluestem grass.

 

Then create a short list of the patterns you see those plants making in their natural setting.  And voila - using abstraction and the dominant species with the volume on high, you have a garden that's simpler, bolder, more architectural - a garden.  "It sells itself!"

An added benefit is that large masses are easier to maintain than small groups of many different plants. 

A great example of this style of native-plant design is Gary Smith's design for Peirce's Woods at Longwood Gardens, which uses thousands of tiarellas, maidenhair ferns and Christmas ferns to glorious effect.  It's not an imitation of an Eastern forest but a bold interpretation of one.

Peirce's Woods at Longwood Gardens by W. Gary Smith

In a follow-up email I asked Thomas how this type of design could work in a small garden:

With small urban spaces with no clear reference (or adjacency) to a native plant community, you're free to "import" almost any native plant community to stylize and adapt. The important thing is that the garden evokes a moment in nature, something it wouldn't do using a traditional horticultural approach.

As to how, massing might be appropriate, but not always. In a small site, you might get legibility and spirit through repetition of species, color, or texture, not massing. The important aspect is that you've edited the community of inspiration down to the visual essence species. This is what creates the link to the larger site.  As an example, I think Tom Stuart-Smith's Laurent Perrier garden in the Chelsea Flower Show is perfect. It's not a native garden, but it accomplishes exactly what I'm advocating for. In size, it's not much bigger than a townhouse backyard. But he picked a palette of plants that FEELS like a fairy-tale woodland. A clearing in the woods. The umbel-laden forbs nodding under a grove of birches is a perfect example of distilling a palette down to a few plants with maximum emotional impact.

I'll have more from Thomas coming this afternoon in another post - his "Myths about Native Plants".

Dolly Sods photo credit.  Peirce's Wood Longwood photo credit. 

Leaf Magazine Dazzles

If you're not one of the 80,000 people already reading Leaf Magazine (after just one issue) then why the hell not?  It's a free e-magazine, available right here.  The new Spring 2012 issue, at 142 pages, is gorgeous and inspiring, full of the kind of garden design photography and writing I've been pining for all my life.  Garden Design Magazine, at $22 per year and catering to the wealthy SoCal reader, can't hold a candle to Leaf, the work of East Coast garden designers Susan Cohan and Rochelle Greayer.  They recruit contributors from across the U.S., though, and internationally.

Honestly, I've only scrolled through the new issue for its eye candy, looking for familiar names (Ken Druse, Buffalo's Jim Charlier) but I'm going back for more.   Behind the scenes at the Philly Flower Show, for example.  And I'm in the midst of planning my new garden, so I might get ideas from the featured garden in London, a tiny but inspired one, or the artist's garden in Los Angeles.

A personal favorite bit I noticed right away is that in marked contrast to the aforementioned (and no longer subscribed to by yours truly) Garden Design, Leaf's round-up of garden benches includes the super-affordable $90 version at Ikea.  Now we're talking.

Kudos and congratulations to Susan, Rochelle and their team.  And thanks from this gardener (and design aspirant/appreciator) for the most exciting gardening publication she's ever laid eyes on.

One complaint, though - I don't have an iPad, which is clearly the device for reading Leaf while in the garden.  Gotta do something about that.

Philadelphia Flower Show goes Hawaiian

The largest and oldest flower show in the U.S., the Philly Flower Show is a always grand, but especially this year (to this visitor) because it brought the lushness of Hawaii to green-deprived Easterners.  Starting with this 30-foot waterfall festooned with orchids and Anthuriums.

Below, don't try this at home.  Maybe in a hotel lobby?

I was happy to see touches of Hawaiian funky, which I love as much as the vegetation.  Surf's up and all that.

The front porch displays were my favorite reminders of real Island gardens, especially the one below on the left.  On the right, they got the spirit right but a lava rock walkway?  Not in bare feet. Not even in sandels.  Ridiculous idea!

Below, Asian-style minimalism works well, but a tiny lawn, not so much.

In fact, to my eyes, nothing Eastern worked in this year's show.  That includes the overwhelming displays of forced spring blossoms in the exhibit below.  Though local landscapers who pay a fortune for displays like this can't be faulted, I guess, for wanting to showcase plants that would grow in Pennsylvania. 

A very popular feature of the show were the amazing displays of pressed plant art, like these. 

Below, miniature gardens are always a hoot.

And a personal favorite were these tall mesh columns filled with a variety of natural materials, even clam shells. They were the created by the aspiring designers in Temple's School of Environmental Design, and their display took first prize among academic entries.

I coveted the terrarium containers.  

Green walls were everywhere, like this one covered in spring greens.  And this compost tea bin was part of a large exhibit about soil health.

Lots of food-growing going on, and not just in this wonderful display by the Pennsylvia Hort Society's City Harvest program.  Do click that link to learn about how inmates start the plants, which then go into community gardens, where crops are grown and harvested for food pantries.  I was told that many of the recipient families have expressed interest in being part of the growing process, so City Harvest is finding ways to close the loop.  Inmates are also channeled into landscaping apprenticeships.  Last year the Flower Show raised about $1 million for City Harvest and other terrific programs.

Next week I'll post photos of products that caught my eye in the Show's market.

Wolfgang Oehme's Crusade to Change the American Garden

Many in the gardening world are mourning the recent loss of Wolfgang Oehme, one of the world's most famous and influential landscape architects.  He and his design partner James van Sweden populared sweeps of ornamental grasses and easy, mostly native perennials in a naturalistic style named The New American Garden.  Oeheme has said he wanted the masses of meadow-like grasses and perennials to be both a metaphor for the great prairies of the Midwest and also to remind viewers of ocean waves and indeed they do - with any breeze at all.  They planted not in the usual groups of three or five but by the hundreds or thousands, depending on the size of the landscape.

"I like it wild", Oehme said in describing this style.  He also liked gardens that are natural - no chemicals - and gardens that are interesting in all four seasons.  He loved that his gardens, filled with low-care, sustainable plants from around the world, attracted birds, bees, butterflies, dragonflies and frogs.

The New American Garden style was a huge departure from and rebellion against the sweeps of nothing but lawn that up until then had typified American landscapes.  Rather than keeping front yards open to the street, he planted shrubs and trees in front of homes, to create privacy - also an unAmerican practice.  Even more heretical, Oehme hated the most commonly used shrub in the Mid-Atlantic region - the azalea - on the grounds that it flowers for just two weeks before becoming a boring green bush.  He championed grasses instead - they look good all year, and of course they move.

Some of his design team's more famous works include embassies, universities and private homes, including Oprah Winfrey’s.  In Washington, they designed the grounds of sevearl major federal buildings, including the Federal Reserve Building, where he covered its two acres over a parking garage with sweeps of fountain grass, 'Autumn Joy' sedum and feather reed grass.

The New American style quickly became popular with other designers and nurseries had to start growing these plants to keep up with demand.  In addition to grasses, they popularized such perennials as black-eyed Susans, coneflowers, salvias, joe-pye weed, and Russian sage.

Oehme was born in Germany and began planting things at the age of five.  As a teenager he worked in a nursery, then for a local parks department, where he became interested in landscape design. He studied landscape architecture at the University of Berlin and worked on large projects for the Frankfurt parks department and for nurseries in Germany, Sweden and England.

In 1957, he left what had become Communist East Germany to come to the United States and settle in Baltimore, which he considered a horticultural desert.  So he embarked on a crusade to do something about that desert - by designing for the Baltimore parks department and on the side, for private residences.  Those early private clients were pretty gutsy to break the mold of lawn and azalea-filled gardens in their neighborhoods, but many of their gardens still stand and continue to inspire the gardening world even decades later.

In 1964 Oehme teamed up with James van Sweden, then an urban planner, to form Oehme, van Sweden & Associates in Washington, D.C., and they worked together for 30 years.  Here's my blog post about van Sweden's garden on the Eastern Shore.

Wolfgang Oehme died at his home in Towson at the age of 81.

Here's a quick interview I did with Oehme in 2009.  He's telling me about his Federal Reserve Bank garden and the journey that the American native plant rudbeckia made - to Germany, where it first became popular, then back to the U.S. where he he made it popular.

You and the New American Garden
This "new" style of gardening was already in vogue before I got serious about gardening, so I was influenced by it without realizing it.  Those grasses!  Those masses of perennials!  Soooo unlike the prim rows of annuals and clipped evergreens that comprised the garden of my childhood.  My mother may have taught me to love gardening but her style?  Not so much.

How about your garden?  Is it New and American?

Click here to read or add to tributes to Oehme.  Photo credit:  Oehme van Sweden and Associates.

Getting it right in my next garden

Of all the mistakes I've made in my garden over its 26 years under my direction, there are two that I won't be repeating in my next garden. (Here's my recent post about selling my house and moving on.)

1.  Neglecting to take "before" photos is something I've regretted a gazillion times over the years.  It's simply impossible for visitors to imagine the jungle-like state of my back yard when I moved in - I barely remember it myself.  This sole photo from 1985, while documenting the ugliness of the rear facade, faces away from the jungle.  It didn't occur to me then to photograph the chaos.  (Also, I wish I'd taken some shots without me in them.)

But for my next garden I quickly grabbed these photos from the realtor's slide show about my new rowhouse, and I took a bunch more as soon as my offer was accepted - before all the leaves dropped. 

The perfect-size-for-me-back yard is, except for a few azaleas which will soon be offered to anyone who'll dig them up, a blank slate.  Goody!  On the right is the view from the back door, where my new screened-in porch will go.  I've coveted these bug-free oases for years now and soon I'll have my own!

Below, the front yard is all lawn with a few more azaleas (the default shrub for the Mid-Atlantic, no matter the exposure).  Like the azaleas, the lawn is doomed, to be replaced by some seating for sure, but what else?  That brings me to the next mistake I won't be repeating.

2.  Not getting design help.  Now to be fair to my 1985 self, I did enlist the free services of a nursery's designer for my back yard, and have thanked her a bazillion times for creating the bones of a great design and steering me toward great shrubs I'd never heard of (because they aren't azaleas) like Viburnums, Pieris japonica and cherry laurels.  But I had a small budget and most of my current garden has been a DIY job, design-wise and plant choice-wise, and my mistakes still show. 

Especially challenging has been my small front garden - small spaces being much harder to design than larger ones - and I hated the result until finally (after nine years) I paid all of $250 for a fabulous design that transformed not only the front garden but this gardener into the avid one I've been ever since.  (Here's my 2006 post about the transformation and the landscape architect who made it happen.)

This time around, every square inch of my manageably sized garden will be professionally designed before the first daffodil shows its face in March.  Terraces and paths will be created and the larger plants installed before I start playing with the small stuff.  Can you see the determination in those italics? 

Of course I'm still a cheapskate, hoping for great results without paying much for design help.  The good news is that garden writing, as underpaid as it is, attracts the occasional freebie and I've been offered free design services, as long as I credit the designer with a link.  (No problemo!)  Then I'll no doubt be posting the designs here and soliciting feedback from our very talented readers (and crediting them, too, if I use their suggestions.)

See, I'm already anticipating that whatever design I'm presented with, I'll be fussing with it and making it as weird and personal as the garden I'm leaving behind.    

Your mistakes, please?

So help me out here. What would YOU do differently if you were starting all over in your garden, or starting a new one? 

Japanese gardens anyone?

Bloedel

After viewing two lovely examples in Seattle last week, I found that some among our group of garden-tripping bloggers seemed jaded by the genre. Their reasons varied, but two dominated: boredom, and a feeling that the style was too often misused.

I must admit I’ve seen gardens their owners called “Japanese” that fell considerably short of the standard set in Seattle and elsewhere. In fact, I’d be the first to admit that Buffalo’s Japanese garden, despite its beautiful setting between a neoclassic museum and an ornamental lake, lacks other elements that would have completed it. There is no teahouse, though the marble terrace of the Historical Society could be considered as taking the place of an elevated place from which to view the garden. I love the setting, but the Buffalo garden lacks the quiet intimacy I’ve seen in other examples.

The Japanese garden at Seattle’s Bloedel Reserve has a nice example of raked gravel that used to be a swimming pool. The structures are pristine; the plantings are perfectly placed—lush (Seattle=lush) but controlled.

In other gardens, I’ve seen raked gravel used more as an excuse for not planting anything rather than as a viable replacement for water. I’ve also seen buddhas and lanterns pretty much plopped anywhere. And too few private attempts have a good mix of perfect specimens with the vivid foliage contrasts I saw at Bloedel.

Japanese garden at the Washington Park Arboretum

Maybe a great Japanese garden is one of those “don’t try this home” styles. I know I never would; the control and precision it would require is far beyond my capabilities. But I will always appreciate a JG done well.

Cool stuff to do with weeds

Weeds have been on my mind lately. They always are, really, but after reading the Mabey book, I've been looking at them more closely, even to the point of stopping to examine the countless specimens I see in my daily travels. (Above is a Cirsium vulgare—bull thistle—I spotted at a family event over the weekend.)

While I'm not totally sold on the beneficial properties of weeds/invasive, via a New Zealand newspaper gardening column, I came upon a different way of using them. It’s similar to composting but not quite. Regardless of how you define weeds (it doesn’t really matter), just throw the plants into a barrel with a lid, until it’s full. Add water—preferably rainwater.  Give it a few months and you have liquid fertilizer that can be diluted and used at will. According to the article, the seeds are no longer viable thanks to their lengthy soaking. Important note: a tight-fitting lid is essential.

What do you think? I like the versatility of liquid food and I'm kind of bad at composting (don't ask), so I'm intrigued. I wonder if it would smell as bad as alfalfa tea?

How not to use landscape fabric

And to be clear, this is a FRONT YARD and this planting technique continues across the entire property.  (House not shown, to protect the guilty.)

But wait, maybe this isn't landscape fabric after all, but sheets of black plastic - how creative! 

Addendum:  This is how it's looked for months now.  No lie.

Gardening apps—I'm over them. Really.

Don't laugh. You're looking at the future of garden design.

Remember when we first got our iPhones?  It was all about the apps. Mine is still loaded up with six screens worth, only 4-5 of which I use on a regular basis—a weather app, whatever will find restaurants and stores, Hootsuite, Facebook, and the Public Radio station finder/player. (I’m not counting email, pictures, music, GPS, and other basic iPhone functions.)

Back in those days, we blithely demanded more gardening iphone apps, specifically searchable perennial databases, weed finders, a Farmer’s Almanac, and some that now exist, like Dirr’s Tree and Shrub Finder.  There are now plenty of plant-list-type apps on iTunes now. I would download them, except I suspect they would sit untapped with all the rest while I use google.

The Audubon guides are great—although these would not work in the wild if you need to be connected—and if I’m home I’d as soon grab a book. There are also ID type apps like Leafsnap. Unfortunately, with Leafsnap, you have to place the leaf against a white piece of paper. Well, if you’re home doing that, you could also use a book—any good tree book will have leaf close-ups. Another fun nature app is Chirp, which helps you ID birds by their calls. (Actually I like to just play the bird sounds; it makes my garden sound way more diverse than it really is.)

Here’s what I don’t need or want, even to sit ignored on a screen along with RouteShout, PocketFlicks, and GroceryZen—any of the “design your garden” apps out there. These are silly by definition, because nobody would ever put together a garden using  templates (like the one above) and plant lists. That’s not how a gardener does it, anyway. 

There are many of these, each as ridiculous—and usually strangely awkward to navigate—as the next. We get emails about them regularly, and I usually ignore them, but I will single one out from Holland Bulb Farms called iMyGarden. This is actually supposed to get you to order bulbs through the app; the design part is—charitably put—incidental.  It gives you 3 templates—a mailbox, a tree well, and a front yard, and then a list of plants you can fill them up with. And—guess what!—all these plants are bulbs that can be ordered from Holland Bulb Farms! In fact, you can do it right then and there, through the app.

I love my iPhone, but if this is the future of gardening apps, like I said—I’m over it. 

Renegade Gardener Parts Company with GardenRant

 

We've long been admirers of Don Engebretson, the Renegade Gardener.  We love his funny and spot-on yearly awards so much, we recommend them again and again and again.  He's given this blog and especially the Manifesto a shout-out or two and we've become a mutual admiration society among ranters.  But now he's having second thoughts.

The fine and feisty women over at GardenRant.com have a manifesto on their home page that includes the statements, “In love with real, rambling, chaotic, dirty, bug-ridden gardens,” and another, “Bored with perfect magazine gardens.” When I first started visiting the site and read the manifesto I thought yeah, right on—rambling, dirty gardens are what most turn out to be, chaos is the norm, perfect magazine gardens are unachievable. I’m easy...

I now find it paradoxical that the first statement in the GardenRant manifesto is, “We are convinced that gardening matters.” You’re damn right it does. And if gardening matters, what matters most, is gardening well.

Accompanying this declaration is the photo above with the caption: "One of mine, I’m proud of it, and I can do better."

Now might be a good time to confess - I don't exactly live by that part of the Manifesto, either.  I DO love gardens that are real, dirty (what else?), and bug-ridden (especially pollinator-ridden).  And rambling is fine in a large space.  But chaos?  That's what gardeners work their butts off to fight off, right?  We bring order to what would otherwise be a big unruly mess.

 

Here's what I mean.  I may have gotten rid of all my turfgrass but I didn't exactly replace it with a tall-grass meadow.  Lord no.  This 3" tall mosaic of groundcovers criss-crossed with brick pavers is about as much chaos as I ever want to see in my little patch of heaven.  And even as I post this photo my eye goes right to the messy edge around what's supposed to be a perfect oval shape, and I want to fix it.

And am I really bored with perfect magazine gardens?  Actually, I'm more bored by the how-to articles than by the gardens.  Great, imaginative gardens - well photographed - I could look at all day, especially in winter.

So where do YOU stand on "real, rambling, chaotic, dirty, bug-ridden" versus "perfect magazine" gardens?

Are we there yet?

Gardening in the digital age—is it 2.0, 3.0, or maybe 3.5? It depends. If you count all the websites, blogs, and social media about gardening, then I suppose there has been considerable progress. If we’re talking about digital garden planning and implementation, that’s different.

Garden-related computer software and mobile apps interest me—up to a point. I have to give Amy credit for having the patience to try out the EasyBloom plant sensor; I gave mine away to a tech writer who’s just starting a garden and makes his living writing about gadgets, devices, apps, websites, and the like. He’s excited about trying it.

QR (quick response) codes on plant tags have a lot of people excited in the nursery and garden center industries. All Proven Winner plants will have QR codes in 2011, and they are only one of the big brands who are using them. QR code usefulness depends on a lot of things—first, where will the code take you? If it’s a place where there’s useful information, fine. If it’s an empty sales pitch or cutesy video, not quite as great. Context is also important; in a big garden center, these codes can lead you to a knowledge base not available in person. In a smaller, hands-on place, there might be better help available in person. I’ll be aiming my device at these tags for fun, mainly—but for a plant newbie more at home with a touchpad than a trowel, the QR codes might help make sense of it all.

At first, I was really excited about the idea of having dozens of gardening apps on my iPhone. But here’s another area where the idea of it is more exciting than actually using one. After having dropped my iphone on the flagstones several times, replaced one screen, and learned to live with the current small crack in the bottom until I move up to the 5g, I am becoming less enthusiastic about using the thing outside. It looks like I might have to encase it in something like one of those rubber balls you use if you want to throw yourself over the Falls.

But even if I did want to use an app—carefully—the how-to and what-to ones aren’t any more helpful, really, than a good book would be. And—clearly—books hold up better to the hazards of outdoor life than iphones do.

I do anxiously await a truly interactive and fully functional plant ID app. We still lack guides that will identify from your photo, but the florafolio  and Audubon wildflower apps (Audubon soon to be available), and the Dirr Tree and Shrub finder are the next best thing. And for finding gardens, anyone with time to kill in the Big Apple needs to try the Gardenspace NYC app, a portable tour of all the city’s green spaces.

It's to be hoped that the digital world holds more revelatory tools for gardeners (and plant lovers) in the future.

Bee options for all

Making honey - total involvement
Beekeeping is all the rage these days, and my friend Pam (PamJ when she comments here) is one of the many who's become "Hooked on bees in suburbia."  That's my story of her first year of beekeeping, including the highs, the lows, and the enormous worries that go along with it.  I'm calling this the "total involvement" option because that's what it seems to demand.  I say, better Pam than me!

Making honey, with help
But for people who don't have the time or cojones to deal with bees themselves, there are people who'll come and tend their hive for them, for a modest fee or for just the honey.  But why would you have bees if you don't get to keep the honey?  To pollinate your garden, and for the fun of having a hive without all the responsibility.

CSAs for the Honey
Taking beekeeping seriously on a community level are organizations like Baltimore Honey, which residents think of as a CSA for honey.  For $45 a year, members support hives that are stratetically placed throughout the city, and receive at least a pound of micro-local honey in return.  Members may or may not have a hive placed in their own yard, though - only if it's deemed appropriate and the neighbors agree. (More about Baltimore Honey in this news article.)

Honey-less native bees are easy-peasy
And then there's the option a D.C. gardener wrote to me about, after reading my article about honeybees:

If you're interested in bees and helping your garden and the planet in general, and don't want all the work of trying to raise honey bees, you can raise native  pollinator bees (orchard mason bees) - all they do is look cute, pollinate, and they don't sting! I have recently put out my cocoons and am waiting for the happy day when they peek their fuzzy little faces out from their milk carton and begin to buzz around and do their job of pollinating.

She went on to recommend Our Native Bees for supplies, and information via their  e-newsletter or by chatting with the owner.  Homemade bee houses are also an option, for the handier-than-me.

Me, I bought this orchard bee-house from Gardeners Supply and am hoping the bees find it this year (last year, no such luck).

So, what are YOU folks doing, bee-wise?

What should a spring flower show be? (continued)

Meet the Flintstones.

Sometimes it just needs to exist.

This was not my year for any of the big shows, but I did have a chance to see a different local event—in Rochester, where I did a couple talks. And this weekend, I’ll be visiting Buffalo's, mainly to support friends who have projects there.

The display gardens in small venues rarely have the wow factor of you’ll find at Canada Blooms or the Philadelphia show, but there are generally a couple elements here and there that might give you an idea. Or just raise a smile.

Salvaged garden art

The shopping is usually good. Interesting or bizarre bulbs, high-quality specialty tools, and artisan-made décor are always around. Some of it is much more fun at the show than it would be if you actually bought it, but last year there were some really distinctive welded fountains that would never see the inside of a big box or most garden centers. This year I bought a couple dragonflies made out of knives and forks. I am thinking I can use them instead of stakes.

As for the crowds, it’s hard to say. The Buffalo show had the same numbers it always did last year, but the Rochester show did seem a bit thin last Friday. It could be the recession as much as the fact that gardeners are less interested in ornamental gardening.

The gardeners I spoke to were all the same. They wanted to look at plants, gardens, and garden tools and talk about gardens. That’s all. They’re sick and tired of winter and it wouldn’t take much for a show like this to provide some kind of respite. Because it’s there.

ASLA's Award-Winning Green Roof

It was recently announced that Green Roofs for Healthy Cities has selected the green roof at the headquarters of the American Society of Landscape Architects in downtown DC to win an Award of Excellence, so congratulations are in order to everyone involved.  That includes not just ASLA but the design team and the plant supplier, Ed Snodgrass, who didn't just deliver the plants and drive back to rural Maryland and forget them.  He visits often, fussing over the plants like we all would if they were in our front yard.

Seems he's typical of everyone who visits the green roof - you just want to hang out here, maybe take a yoga class here, like ASLA's staff does in good weather.  Or socialize with cocktails on a Friday night.  I got to visit during ASLA's annual meeting and snapped some photos but before gtting to them, DO check out the extremely cool website about the roof, a screen shot of which you see below.  (Love the 360-degree tour!) And you'll see gobs of data on that link because this is a serious research project involving not just ASLA but the Chesapeake Bay Foundation and the city's water department.  

Just one question:  Can the green roof world please come up with better terms to distinguish the two types than intensive and extensive, which I can never, ever keep straight? This one, for instance, won in the "intensive"category, referring to green roofs with deep soil beds and generally taller plants, as opposed to shorter, shallower "extensive" green roofs.  But I wish they just said "shallow" or "deep" types - both of which this particular roof seems to have.

Okay, now for my shots from mid-September.

Above, a close-up of those prickly pears, and of the removable grate that makes it possible to walk on such a large area that's still vegetated.  Cool.

And here's a close-up of some gorgeous sedums.  Turns out these low-growers are my number one pick for replacing lawn in sunny locations.  I have my own little research project going about that, with the help of some green-roof experts (especially Ed Snodgrass).

For lots more photos of this fabulous aerial garden, click here.

Ranting about Dead Leaf Advice

I'm handing out advice and arguing with some experts (would you believe the revered Barbara Damrosch?) - and on a corporate blog, no less.  I know plenty of GardenRant readers (and writers?) will disagree with me but go ahead; I can take it.  After 4+ years here, we've all grown thicker skin.

Photo credit.

Lawn-Mower Pollution Truisms Fact-Checked

Thanks to Straight Dope.com, whoever that is, for investigating the "Mowing for one hour is equivalent to driving an SUV 300 miles" factoid we've all read a million times, or some version of it. Gas mowers ARE extremely inefficient, but it's nice to get the actual numbers right.

Via Kathy Jentz.  Photo by TuxStorm.