The Rude Garden

In the grocery store today, I overheard a mother say sternly to her young, spirited child who was enjoying the store's music as only young, spirited children can: "Spencer, stop dancing. This isn't dance class. You don't see anyone else dancing, do you?"

How often do you hear that same voice in your own head? Does it keep you from having a garden that's truly yours? Does your front yard not sing or dance because none of your neighbors' does? Or maybe you had an idea for a feature you'd really enjoy in your back yard, but abandoned the thought because you've never seen it anywhere else before?

As a living system, the garden is one big experiment, and it will evolve regardless of how much or how little we're involved. Our landscape is "ours" for a relatively fleeting moment in time. So why not make the most of our short visit? Go ahead, wield your hand — try colors, combinations, specimens, and features that truly delight you. The worst that can happen, really, is that others might think your garden dramatic, eccentric, or even downright rude. Can you imagine? You could be "that garden" of whispers and legend. The "dangerous" one. The one that says to your neighborhood, "I live here."

If the very idea thrills you a little bit, you've got some work to do. I'm no therapist but there's no question that gardens, and gardening, can be therapeutic. Wouldn't it be great to dance again, like a young, spirited child?

The Passionate Gardener

Don't you just love it when people are passionate about what they do?

Here, a love affair with strawberries: http://www.manytracks.com/Garden/Strawberries.htm

Where All the Gardens are Above Average

Lately I've been playing the Gas Mileage Game: with my car's feature that tells me my current average MPG, I see how much I can goose my fuel efficiency by, say, accelerating on downhill grades and coasting as far as I can on the uphills. It's a great trick to play on yourself to begin the game just before hopping onto the freeway, where even an SUV like mine can exceed 25 or even 28 miles per gallon. But after just one day driving around San Francisco, my average plummeted to 16; and even a week of highway driving couldn't lift my average MPG back up above 17.

It occurs to me that landscaping is subject to the same law of averages, in terms of both functionality and aesthetics. If you have, as I do, a very water thrifty yard but even a small patch of lawn, the lawn is an insurmountable drag on your irrigation efficiency. Likewise, if 90% of your yard is gorgeous, breathtaking even, but 10% looks — well, less than breathtaking — perhaps due to outdated materials or past-their-prime plants you couldn't bring yourself to remove — that minority will bring down the appeal and allure of your entire landscape.

A few of my first-time clients have been shocked when I recommend removing an established tree or shrub that, while not particularly right for their landscape, is a fixture in the yard nonetheless. But the more "average" yards I see, the less sentimental I've become: now I'll counsel that the sooner you remove an ill-fitting or underperforming plant, the sooner you can begin establishing the right plant in the right place.

Similarly, I've met with home owners who have actually told me, "well, we want to upgrade the yard, but we don't want to make it too nice or anything." Which is a little shocking for me: I mean, why wouldn't you want the best space you can afford? A space designed precisely for your tastes and lifestyle, that you love coming home to or spending time in?

A professionally designed garden, well maintained and thoughtfully updated over time, is what will lift the landscaping above average — and keep it there.

Water the Plants, Feed the Soil

My youngest assistant, seen here, hasn't quite got the concept down, but you can: the most efficient way to irrigate (especially in these hot dusty times) is to put just as much water as needed as close to the plant's root zone as possible. This is the principle behind drip irrigation, and it can work equally well with attentive hand watering (for which 4-year-olds are not known).

The other half of the equation is the nutrition your plants are getting. It's tempting to toss a handful of Osmocote or Miracle-Gro (did you know they're both made by the same company?) at the bases of your plants. But this only supports root development at the base, where the roots already are; it does nothing to encourage them to spread out into new ground, which in turn increases the plant's ability to take up water (especially in these hot dusty times).

A great way to enrich the soil on a broad scale is with consistent and generous applications of compost mulch; aim for 2-3" every 6 months. Added bonus: a healthy layer of mulch also helps prevent your precious water from evaporating, which keeps your efficient irrigation practices efficient.

(By the way, you'll notice the mulch is conspicuously lacking in my photo. Just do as I say, not as I do.)

Geez, It's Hot.

Geez, it's hot. It's been hot all week, even in San Francisco, even with overcast skies and a westerly breeze that normally chills things to a level that Kenmore should aspire to. Nope, it's been hot, 80 degrees at 5pm in The City, the same at 10pm down on the peninsula.

There's a sort of ritual among old-timers here: when it gets hot like this, open the doors and windows all night to flood the house with cool air, then shut 'em up tight and draw the blinds all day to keep the heat out. It's a pretty good system, and we used it quite effectively in the 1936 bungalow we lived in until recently. The attic trapped and isolated the hottest air, and the crawl space was a permanent reservoir of coolness. The system takes a bit of getting used to, but it works.

Then a couple of years ago we moved into a brand-new house, built to the latest standards and undoubtedly more energy efficient than last century's technology.

Except it's not.

This house is terribly inefficient. Instead of a full attic, the bedrooms have high peaked ceilings that conduct heat in from the roof and hold it in the room all night (compounded by the fact that the bedrooms are upstairs to begin with). Big skylights provide tons of light... and also transmit tons of heat, without opening to vent any of it out. The crawl space is minimal, so even the ground floor heats up relatively quickly and cools down slowly.

Why would someone build a house this way? Because they also plumbed it for air conditioning. I suppose the thinking was, "as long as we've offered a solution, there's not a problem." Heaven forbid they should have spent more time or money building a smarter house; just throw natural resources at it instead.

Unfortunately, I see this kind of short-term thinking all the time in garden-making as well. Gratuitous lawns are the classic case — fast, cheap, attractive, so what if it takes 100 gallons of water a day? Same with trees that have no business growing >100 yards from a river, yet get plunked down in the middle of town: don't change your planting scheme to include water-wise plants — just increase the irrigation! Then there's hardscaping: impermeable asphalt driveways are replaced with impermeable concrete driveways. Existing concrete paths and pads are broken up and carted off, with new concrete masonry units carted in to make new patios and retaining walls. Dining patios get sited in full sun, demanding that a shade pergola be built, rather than in the shade of existing trees.

A few decades ago pioneering landscape architect Ian McHarg wrote his seminal work "Design With Nature". He challenged land planners to analyze, understand, and work with natural systems rather than bulldozing through them. His advice still holds today — no matter what the scale of the project.

What are you doing to design with nature, or to overcome the problems created by those who didn't?