A Tree Grows At Stanford

We all know Stanford University is the pinnacle of knowledge west of the Atlantic Ocean. But while we might expect binary trees, expression trees and one particularly silly mascot, did you know the University's founder also planned a great arboretum that would be a veritable "zoo for trees," taking advantage of the region's moderate climate to grow rare and notable species from every corner of the globe?

Unfortunately, what remains in the original arboretum space planned by Frederick Law Olmsted are mostly eucalyptus and oak species as well as the palms on eponymous Palm Drive and elsewhere. The oaks are native, explicitly protected by Senator Stanford; the eucalypts were planted as fast-growing "nurse trees" to offer shade to tender exotic transplants while they established, then be removed.

As the Stanford News Service reports, in the financial crisis following the Senator's untimely death "the arboretum was neglected. Most specimen trees failed, while the heartier eucalypts flourished." When backers revived plans for the arboretum, they "upheld Stanford's vision for maintaining wooded open space, but departed from his notion of trees from around the world in favor of species native to California."

Nevertheless, today Stanford hosts a remarkable diversity of not only trees but also shrubs, vines, grasses and native plants, catalogued and annotated online in a tremendous resource. Horticultural notes, leaf silhouettes, tree walk maps, and more await you. Whether or not you've seen it on campus, this is a quick and gorgeous go-to guide for identifying, or selecting, that perfect specimen.

Have You Seen This Lawn?

Our good buddies at NASA have put out this image showing how much of the U.S. is devoted to turf lawns. Says NASA's Earth Observatory:

The map shows how common lawns are across the country, despite a wide variability of climate and soils. Indeed, the scientists who produced the map estimate that more surface area is devoted to lawns than to any other single irrigated crop in the country. For example, lawns appear to cover more than three times the number of acres that irrigated corn covers.

Just take a look at, Phoenix, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, or any other "desert" town to get a sense of just how important we perceive lawn to be to our way of life. Books such as American Green explore our obsession (albeit a bit pithily, says the New York Times), and magazines such as Forbes estimate that we "Americans spent $25.9 billion on lawn-care and landscape maintenance in 2006, a figure which includes, among other things, professional services and water bills."

That article goes on to mention xeriscaping -- technically, landscaping with plants that can withstand bone-dry conditions, such as the lovely specimens offered by High Country Gardens -- but also notes that local ordinances may actually override common sense, dictating plants of a certain type or lawns of a certain size.

My clients know I believe lawn is good for children and dogs, and not much else. My neighbors despise me because I've let the gratuitous patches of lawn in our front yard die ("it's not brown, it's golden," I remind them) as I await the fall planting season. My readers know I've wrestled with the dilemma of natural vs. artificial turf for my back yard (natural won, in a split and ambiguously ethical decision involving invertebrates). But I still find that most people I talk to for the first time can't let go of their vision of a lush, green lawn. Never mind that we Americans use as much as 19 trillion gallons of water and 2.4 million metric tons of nitrogen-based fertilizer annually to care for our lawns... you've got yours, and I want mine.

Plant Personalities

"Garden design is far more than just choosing appropriate plants for the site and properly spacing them in well-prepared soil. It's about creating an energy or mood that makes the owner or visitor feel comfortable and connected to the surroundings."


So says Laura Crockett in the current issue of Fine Gardening, distinguishing plants that have "personality" -- the "demeanor portrayed through their weepy forms or jagged leaves" -- and illustrates with a truly weepy Hakenochloa and a truly jagged Agave.

I mostly agree. But we humans anthropomorphize plants (and everything else) so extensively, is it truly fair for garden designers like Ms Crockett or me to decide for our clients what plant embodies what personality? That weepy Hakone grass, for example, may be comforting to me but evoke a sadness in you.

More properly, I think it's unfair to evaluate plants on just one aspect (in this case, their form: weepy or jagged). I might find the flowing shape of the Hakenochloa relaxing, but you might find its yellow variegation and violet winter tones invigorating! And the Agave may be just plain scary to me, but oddly reassuring to someone with a more Gothic sensibility.

So I would conclude that a plant's "personality" is a fiction projected by those of us who have emotions (in the human sense). It's not an objective attribute, and should not be the basis for a design the way form, color and texture are. On the other hand, if you're designing your own garden (as Ms Crockett's readers probably are), why not fill it with plants who evoke emotion and meaning for you? Just don't take my word for what that meaning is.

Style:Smile

I'm often asked what my style of design is. It's a bit of a pat answer to say "your style," but it's not far off.

After all, no landscape designer worth their soil is so inflexible they can't work with more than one kind of client or architecture. And a really good designer will be part researcher, part psychologist and part psychic as well, so that we know our client really well -- so well that we can deliver unique ideas and solutions that may be unexpected but are never unwelcome.

So how can you know whether a given landscape designer is a good fit for your property?
1. Don't pick an "English country" designer just because you have a Tudor-style home. Even if there were designers who specialized exclusively in one genre like this, you'd probably get the same palette of plants and cookie-cutter look as their last customer. (The notable exception may be designers such as Indig Design who specialize in native plant communities... not an aesthetic style as much as an ecological one.)

2. Unless you give very clear-cut and detailed direction, don't put too much stock in the designer who, on first sight, knows "exactly how" they would design your garden. Intuition and vision are wonderful, and certainly first impressions last. But anyone who weds themselves to a single idea without doing a bit of reconaissance on your property and developing alternative designs is missing the details that will make your garden truly yours over the long term.

(2b. If you do have very clear-cut and detailed direction, you may want to simply hire a contractor and skip the design phase. You'll have more money to allocate to construction, and you'll be able to move forward with your project faster.)

3. Don't pick the designer with the biggest ad in the phone book or at the top of the search engine ads. That's only an indicator of how much advertising they need to do; it tells you nothing about the process or quality of their work.

4. Do retain the designer that your friends, neighbors, or trusted associates are raving about. Even if their home looks nothing like yours, the raves probably are for how the designer handled the project -- process, fees, attention to detail, communication -- as much as for the finished look. Websites like Yelp can be helpful here as well.

5. Do retain the designer who asks about and understands your budget -- and agrees to work with you anyway. If you have $100,000 - $250,000 to spend on your landscaping, you'll want to make sure you interview designers who are accustomed to budgets (or properties) that size. On the other hand, if you have 1/10 that amount to spend, you'll want to talk with the designer who knows how to make $25,000 look like a million bucks.


6. Do retain the designer who "feels right" to you, regardless of budget or style. You'll be working closely with this person on myriad details, and s/he will need to interpret your wishes, dislikes and personality. If their references check out, if they have creative and practical ideas to offer while respecting your own, if they know their stuff and can communicate it clearly in pictures and/or words, and most importantly if you feel comfortable talking and exchanging ideas with them, that designer will probably be a joy to work with... and your new garden will be a joy to live in.

Mid-Trend Collision

Just as the new Ballard Designs catalog arrives touting "Outdoor Living: Living without Walls (TM)", June Fletcher at the Wall Street Journal writes about the anti-trend, Giving Up on the Outdoors. "Outdoor rooms," she writes, "one of the decade's most visible symbols of excess, have been a bonanza for manufacturers of everything from $3,700 waterproof pool tables to $130 patio umbrellas that emit a cooling mist. ... But some homeowners say they're falling out of love with their expensively furnished backyards, which require hours of upkeep and costly repair. Others are abandoning the rooms altogether."

Ms. Fletcher's story drips with anecdotes of fire ants, squirrels, pollen and pigeons conspiring to deprive us of our quality of backyard life. High-end retailers such as Smith & Hawken and Restoration Hardware are slashing prices to move inventories, and pest-control and electronics-repair companies are raking in the profits as rats move into outdoor kitchens and plasma TVs bake in the sun.

It all sounds so dramatic, doesn't it?! But really, I don't have a lot of sympathy for anyone who needs to watch TV outside, or for the guy who "has to take out his blower or power washer every day to clean off his new brick fireplace, gazebo and patio set" (italics mine). I mean, hasn't he ever heard of "weathering"? Or "patina"? Or, for that matter, "dust"? These things are a fact of outdoor life, and it's just folly to design any kind of outdoor feature that can't stand up to the elements. Frontgate offers a selection of outdoor wall art; if you want a view of red tulips, why not just plant the real thing?

I don't mean to sound grouchy about all of this. Certainly, homeowners have been oversold on the concept of "outdoor rooms" -- there is, truly, only so much living one can do outdoors. But there also is no such thing as a maintenance-free yard, no matter how expensively you appoint it. Every space, indoors or out, requires some investment of effort to look, feel and function its best. I ask my clients up front how much time they have each week to spend maintaining their garden -- and "0 hours" is a perfectly acceptable answer. At some point, self-knowledge and common sense are the best accessories of all.