A visit to Duke Gardens, and their plant sale

Last weekend, I made a trip to dear old Duke Gardens, to scope out what looked to be a great oppurtunity to sell my Reptire Wares. Lo, they had decided to prune the crafts from their plant sale....Such a shame!

However, the plant sale was very well attended, inspite of the rain, and afterwards I took a little stroll through the gardens to see what was new, as well as old.

One thing that is new is a beautiful structure, which seemed to be made of Redwood, as some of its curved timbers were hewn, rather than bent, so it must have been a massive tree...
I was mostly held together with pegs, a real pleasure to behold, and 'be held' in.

Another beautiful object that has been there for a while was this seed pod inspired form, called into being by the delicate and masterful hand of Durham's own Sculptor, Andrew Price. Andrew, an old Durham friend, has always opened his studio to me for occaisional visits, which I always relish, am I remember seeing this seed pod germinating in his studio. Eventually I helped him to instal it there in the gardens (I had forgotten this until I saw it! what a nice surprise!).

I saw lots of other good stuff at the gardens, but my camera ran out of juice, and I know there are lots of pictures out there of the gardens.

One other thing I did come away with from the plant sale was Duke Gardens very own cultivar of Japanese Plum Yew!

Constructing a Rain Garden at Siler City's Courtyard

Well, as usual, something very cool and unusual is happening in the courtyard of Siler City's Courtyard Cafe and the NC Arts Incubator (ground zero of cool in Siler City, so far as I know!).

What's going down? A RAIN GARDEN, that's what!

Mitch Woodward from NC State Cooperative Extension is working with  Andrew Wright to install a really impressive catchment and dispersal system, to help water the various trees and shrubs that beautify that courtyard space so nicely.

It was only five or six years ago, when that courtyard, as I remember it, was a baking sheet of a parking lot, bright in the hot sun! Now is a vibrant and lush oasis, and soon to be 'much lusher'.

As Mitch explains, the plants were struggling (and Joan to feed them), because they had been planted, along with the dirt they were growing in, ON TOP of the concrete. This made for some tough feeding.

But when I arrived on the scene,  Mr Write (on his front end loader) was nudging open deep, cool troughs in the earth, and I could see those trees are going to LOVE it!

It was fun to watch Write at work, he had a noticably delicate touch with such a large piece of machinery. Building rain gardens and putting sway back into streams is Wright's business, and he seemed very attuned to what he was doing. As he put it, an artist with "a different kind of paint brush"!

The drainage channels they had cut in the concrete I was especially impressed with.

These will lead the water from the roof's downspouts straight over to the garden beds, where it will bubble it, and soak them nice and cool and soggy in the summer.

The fella's got held up by the rain (and all of my annoying questions) but they'll be back at it tomorrow, and I hope to drop by too!

Maybe next they can help us work on the little stream out back. Indeed, thanks to Ann Bass, it is on their radar....!

Our darling, in the back 1.4-ty

This wild Louisiana Iris is about to explode!

To who do we owe this glorious garden? Well, to many, one I believe being the glorious Amanda Sands, from Soil and Water.

Janice Rieve's Oasis

This past weekend, I got to visit the garden of my good friend, and often employer, Janice Reives.
I owed Janice a little bit of labor, and so she put me to work moving her clothes line to a drier patch of yard. It was a successful operation.
And while I was there, I got to snap some pictures of her very colorful gardens, which are colorful in more ways than one!

I've got some great pics, but I'd better clear it with the boss first, you know how it is..

Mulching More Heaven

Got some more nice pics of this Heaven on earth. Will share shortly.

Mulching Heaven

Mulching Heaven

Do the gardens in Heaven have/use/need mulch?

I guess that’s a pretty rhetorical question. But I guess I’m guessing not.

But here on earth, we do, at least if we want to have any sense of control over our immediate environment, (and believe me, we do). 

And these past few weeks, I have found myself in Mulch Heaven on earth. What does that look like? Well for me, it looks like long meandering beds. And 40 cubic yards of mulch!

However, of course, as with many things here on earth, to get to Mulch heaven, you must first pass through Chickweed Hell.

And Janice and I have been hacking our way through it, a square foot at a time for several weeks now!

Add caption

The Gorgon's Head

The Gorgon's Head (detail)

The frontier, between Good and Evil 

The fruits of our labors

Iris Uprising!

Tiling A Special Space at the Durso Household

I recently had an extraordinary oppurtunity to be a very small part of a quite special project- a very creative remodeling of the master bathroom at the home of a very special family, Scott and Amy Durso, who live with their two charming sons, and a loveable cat, and a hyper dog, in a beatiful log palace down in the Moncure wood.

I mention this here in this blog, for a number of reasons. Firstly I do see the work as a part of my on going investigation into working with Earthen Materials. And this shower, happens to be very much, of the earthen elements, notably, earth and water, as you shall see...
Furthermore, I found myself on the job thanks to Janice Rieves, whom I have lately been assisting on landscape jobs. This was to be my first tile job with Janice, something that I have been begging her to teach me since we have been working together, and I thought is was worth mentioning, as Janice has long been bringing earthen elements INTO her clients homes...and very effectively, I might add.

This was in fact not my first tile job- when I was in high school, I worked for a fellow, Bob Mason, who did bathroom and kitchen remodels. He gave me enough time on the wet saw to 'master' it (in his words), which I was always proud of. Since then, in college, I persued work in the tile trade, but was not successful in landing any work. So I was thrilled to finally get my hands back in this medium, at long last.

One of the things that made this project so special, to Amy and Scott, and to all of the rest of us involved, is that it was a collaborative effort of several local craftspeople, all shuffling in and out behind one another, like jacks, queens, kings and aces in a deck of cards (I would be the Jack, if!)

Besides the venerable Janice Reives

(with I as her humble and faithful assistant), installing shower artistry,

Across the isle, we had none other than Diane Swan, installing a set of her exquisite wooden counters and cabinets (with my bandmate Scotty Young acting as her faithful assistant, as ussual).

(When I helped Diane move her table saw into her new shop space at 'the hanger',
I got a peek of what was to come!

And to get us all started in the right direction, we also head none other than local green builder Mark Marcopolis leading the remodeling/framing end of the project!


And of course we had the fine sensibilities of Scott and Amy Durso, skilled craftspeople in their own right, leading the vision of the project! They also were very involved in the designing, setting and grouting of two of the bathrooms most exciting features, a river pebble step out, and mosaic!



This was like a Chatham All Star Team! And you know, it really got me to a thinkin'.....

So cool to be working with/for awesome friends.

Janice- "I feel like I died and went to Chatham County. So true, Janice, SO TRUE.

And so we got to work!
My Station


My duty on this job, was essentially to make the various cuts in the tile that Janis needed to make everything fit together right.

Perhaps now is a good time to illuminate a little bit of what makes the tile trade a trying and tricky one...
You see, when tiles come to in a box, they are all caste in a mold, or cut by a lazer, and are quite reliably perfectly square. Much more square than you make, say a shower stall in house that was built by folks a long time ago, who were measuring each stud in picas.
And thusly, all of imperfections of a supposedly ‘square’ bathroom are hidden to the eye, UNTIL the guy comes along whose job it is to turn the place into 3D graph paper. Then, that guy, or gal, has got problems!
So, much as landscaping's challenges lie in reconciling the desires of mother nature with the desires of wo/man, tile setting is often very much about reconciling the perfectly square, with the not perfectly square, and, like landscaping, this requires a real nose for negotiating.

So anyways, Janice would do her best to negotiate these differences, and then order up the cuts to me, who would try to grind them into shape as faithfully as I could.

TRIUMPH
OK, this is a little bit of bragging here, but..
One of my major (well ok, small) triumphs of this project was the installation of the soap dish in the shower. I know this may sound petty, but due to the ideal height of the soap dish, and the chance location of edges of the tiles in that corner, this involved carving precise cups out of the corners of four different tiles, so that when all placed together in the corner, they would each together grasp a bumpout flange which sat behind the soap dish. Thus, each of these cavity's had to be cut with the utmost precision.

Well, Janice told me that we would probably need to find a stick or something, to prop the dish up on, as the glue dried, and one of these I fashioned from a strip of left-over backer board. Yet, when the time came to prop it up, lo and behold, the dish did not need such a thing...

The Immaculate Soap Dish

Standing in Awe of the Immaculate Soap Dish

The adulation of the Immaculate Soap Dish

Here am I, looking very smug.

"Alright, get back to work kid. What do think this? A fricken' nativity scene?"

PERKS
One of the many perks of working on this project, (aside from great clients, great co-workers, beautiful and comfortable settings, and a several darn good lunches), was the occaisonal, but persistant bobbing in and out of two twin boys, Cowen, and Onner, I mean Owen and Conner.
















These two guys were a steady steram of friendship, and Art!

Look what I made! Do you like it?

Future, pebbles, mosaic!

Training Center Gardening

Today I was introduced by Janice to a very special place, and that the Training Center.
Here, in a majestic swath of forest, a visionary team building technician has created a playground, a ropes course, a labratory for building teams.

As soon as you arrive, you know that this is a special place, and alot of this, it seems, can be attributed to the landscaping, which the owner has invested in judiciously.

For the past 6 years, Janice has been contributing to this vision. She has planted large hedges of mixed plantings, installed a water fountain feature. She has even become very involved in the operations of the training center, strapping in terrified office works, belaying them down from harrowing heights, and helping them overcome fears they didn't know they had, and do things that they were sure they couldn't do.

Janice must find a balance there, of the emotionally charged work that happens there, and the peaceful surroundings that she helps to create.

Today, we were doing some maintanance of these beds, namely weeding chick-weed.