Tuesday, August 6, 2013

Janey's Boston Garden


 This past weelend, I had a very special chance to help a good new friend, Janey, to spruce up an outdoor space behind her apartment in Boston, MA.

My brother-in-law Ruben and my sister Rachel (who had served in an Americorps Public Allies program with Janey) and I were visiting with NC-born and raised Janey in Boston, when she mentioned her garden space behind her new apartment home, and her wish to make it more usable/enjoyable. She added that her landlord (whose evidently classical eye for interior design had already greatly impressed me) had graciously offered to deduct any landscaping expenses from her rent. My ears perked up, and my sister and I looked at each other. Rachel mentioned that I happened to be a ‘professional landscaper’; Janey shrieked, and it was on!

THE SPACE
This was my first chance (in a while at least) to work with the small urban spaces. I found once agiain, as I have in the past, and I think many others have also, that this limit of space that cities demand, and the challenge that comes with it, can actually be quite a catalyst for creativity.

In any case, Janey’s spaces was of a size that seemed approachable within the time frame that we had of a Saturday to think about it, and half a day on Sunday to work on it.

Janey’s space was shaped like an L, with a narrow alley way starting at the street/sidewalk, running along the edge of her 100 year old apartment building, opening into a very small ‘courtyard’ type of space, and then hooking around the back of the building to the left.

FEATURES
The space that I encountered there already had quite a lot going for it, some of which had already been drawn from the space, as well as a little bit of untapped potential.

ON THE TAPPED SIDE
One of the more striking features of the space was a 6 foot tall ‘foundation’ of mouldering deep reddish orange brick running along bottom 6 feet of building. This added a warm and vibrant intensity to the cool and shady space that really kind of electrified it.

Building on this color, the landlord (to whom I have to tip my hat once more), had added some curving beds at the edges of this, using spare bricks as edging, and filling the beds with died red mulch.

A quick word about this red mulch… It is the bane of of many a landscaper, including my boss Janice, as it looks pretty unnatural, in many ways tacky. Janey was not crazy about it either. Initially we decided to do away with it, although in the end it had its own shot at redemption, as ye shall see….

Color matters aside, altogether, the beds in themselves were very successful in giving some hidden grace and order to the space (I say hidden because their finer points were obscured by a thin blanket of weeds, most notably an infantry of poison ivy… although also a lot of more ‘friendly’ mugwort.

There were also some weedy trees leaning over and around behind the building, against the back wooden fence. These had been somewhat carved into somewhat of a tunnel, which added great effect, under which Janey had placed a few chairs and a table, and a Bar-B-Q, even making herself an inventive table out of and old trash can, a large tile and some bricks.The shaggy canopies of these few trees really helped to define the space as a ‘room’, or the beginnings of one.

ELEMENTS
Into this environment were placed a few varied points of interest, which began to suggest a few directions for the garden to take..

One of the arching trees which helped form the tunnel was a prolific hibiscus tree, whose pink blossoms instantly added a distinctively tropical air to the space.

Also, a banana plant that was floating in a ‘bowl’ of fetid water (and doing remarkably well with it). This bowl was in fact a very elegent classical style planter, whose single small drainage hole had been clogged up.

In the back corner, Janey had assembled some odd pots around an elegent, if enigmatically wavering roman pillar, which had been supplied by the landlord.
Some of these pots, also supplied by the landlord it seemed, had classical grape vine motifs, which neciely  echoed both the classical motifs inside, and the grapevine that was stretching up the adjacent apartments wall. The grape vine  motif we later appropriated to hold some cherry tomato plants for Janey’s enjoyment.

In a neighboring corner, we tucked a quaint pair of hostas, protected ironically in this densly urban environmet from the deer who would have gobbled them up in most of more suburban spreads I work on in NC.

The space also hosted an alpine evergreen tree, though I am ashamed that I haven’t yet identified it.

UNTAPPED POTENTIAL.

Some chunks of concrete mixed with rubble.
A large chunk of granite.

Shade
Not good for the vegetal garden of Janey’s dreams.

Decided to work with color instead.

A spiral stair case leading up to a very small porch/landing connected to a derelict back door which had become unused.
This unused means of egress I immediately recongnized as a key to Janey getting more use and enjoyment out of her garden….

So, though I hadn’t yet fully articulated it, I guess that I did hear the vague murmers of some themes emerging.
There was definitely a very palpable classical touch to the place, which had been graciously supplied by the owner of the buildings, who no doubt clearly posses a superb appreciation of antiquity…
But betwixt these pillars was awafting a billowing breeze, a certain ambrosia, up from the tropics. Were we smelling on the shores, the incense burning, alight on the very same winds that were plumping the sails of Cleopatra’s fleet of trading vessels, laden with silks back from the orient, what what? I say?.... 

With this vague notion, and a sketch scribbled on the back of something, we headed off to gather supplies.

PICKING UP SUPPLIES
We would up embarking to the nearest such provision company- Home Depot. Yes, I know, not my first choice either, but a quick and easy way for Janey to get more supplies; important as part of  the goal was to help her get into a dance with her space.

There we picked up 20 - 25 bags of mulch- cedar for the paths, and hemlock for the beds.
The idea was to replace the dyed red wood chips in the beds with the hemlock.

We also found a lot of shade loving plants, many of which were on sale ½ off, due to being towards the end of the season. These included:
  • Several hydrangeas, including one tall, tree-like specimin that I had not seen..
  • Petunias
  • Tomatos for a sunny corner
  • A beautiful collia

  • We also got a Janey a few choice tools-
  • a set of loppers,
  • a new garden rake,
  • and some poison ivy gloves.

GETTTING DOWN TO WORK
It took two trips to get all of our supplies and the 3 of us back to her apartment, so when we did, we got straight to work.

Our first step was weeding the burgeoning population of ivy that was sprouting up out of every nook and cranny. Remarkably, even poison ivy looks cute as a baby…
I did leave a few selective patches of mugwort, as it has such a gentle softness, that it can lend to such a hard place as a stair landing.
Meanwhile, my sister, Rachel, went to work sweeping the sidewalk. This really made a huge difference in elevating and clearly viewing the space, the first in a series of such steps in watching the space take shape and come together…

While Janey and Rachel finished off the weeding work, I took some time to do some selective pruning.
I trimmed and shaped up the small ‘teenaged’ evergreen (with his creaky voice) a little, removing just a few more branches from its base. Over the course of the next 5 – 10 years, this tree should shape up to help  create a very nice canopy over the space.

But in the meantime, I worked at sculpting the overhanding trees into a larger/ higher cielinged room/space. This really opened it up into a nice, spacious chamber in which to enjoy hosting some parites.

I also fixed up banana plant in the classical planter with Janey’s help, draing the stagnant water, clearing its drainage channel, and filling it with a mixture of sand and potting soil. Once we had tucked the banana plant in to this cozy new home, we capped it all off with a sharp jacket of hemlock mulch, whose reddish brown tones resonated richly with the varied hues of the patinaed planter. That was one tight looking mug of a banana plant when we were through with him….he needed a place of honor.

MULCH MAGIC
As I spaced out/ layed down the many bags of mulch, something occurred to me.
And that was that the dyed red mulch that was already in place, while kinda tacky indeed, was in fact working a certain kind of visual magic with the warm reddish orange brick tones above and behind it, in the wall. In the cool shade of this canyon like space, the warm tones really kind of glowed like gentle embers in a night’s camp fire!

And so we explored our options.
  1. Keep the red mulch, and exchange the hemlock for more more red mulch.
  2. Totally do away with the red mulch, replacing it with the brown hemlock mulch

This presented a little bit of a conflict, as Janey was ready to see the red gone, and daylight was quickly draining away….

But, thinking on our toes, we sought out, and found, a 3rd path….

  1. Pull back the red mulch, which was too chunky and thin to do much functional good as mulch, slip the hemlock beneath it, and replace the red on top…

Though this might have seemed like a bit of a stretch at this progressed point in the day, we decided to try a test spot…
……and the results were… spectacular!

The hemlock, it turned out, had its own sort of warm earthy tone to it. Not the gaudy red of the dyed mulch, but a rich, earthy, hummusy, subtly tangy and warm orangy brown glow.

On top of this, we sprinkled a light dashing of the decomposing reddish orange mulch dust, peppered with glossy little black chunks of burnt building, and the result was Mulch Magic!

Now, all of a sudden, we were in the Realm Of Spice. Of tandoori chicken, or a Jamaican jerk chicken rub.
We had brought that tacky mulch out Ronald McDonald’s inane industrial  kitchen, into that of Wolfgang Puck! Of Molly Katzen!
This, I though with swelling pride, is the stuff of alchemy, transformating a lowly dispised mulch into what but a shishi designer mulch…

Echoing the name of a local fusion resteruant that I knew Janey would recognice from her UNC Chapel Hill days, I named it…. ”Spice Street”.
Now, with these warm earthy fires glowing at Janey’s garden’s edges, we, and Janey’s bergeoning garden, were really cracklin.

As the last of blueing daylight drained down the Charles river, we found our selves in a space transformed.

The tall hydrangea went against the spiral staircase.
A bright pink petunia we hung from the small porch, where it glowered and dangled marvelously, waiting to greet the ‘descendant’.

Below and beyond this, we posted the newly renovated banana plant, on a slate of marble, acting as a sort of a sentry. My reccomendation was that Janey plant a hydrangea behind it, against the brick wall, treating the soil with some Holly Tone, to get some nice purpley blue blossoms which should play wickedly and rapturously against the red brick tones. With the tropical petunia we placed at its base, and some a robust collection of other plants surrounding it, this corner should act as a timpani’s thundering crescendo, transitioning into the vaulted space beyond it, where one can find such quite pleasures, as a tomato grotto, and a cool relaxing chair in the hallowed shelter of a tree.


CONCLUSION
This project was a proud moment for me.
It is so nice to have found a skill, a place of resource, from which I am able give.
And I am grateful to all who helped me to get to this point....for these skills and knowledge, which I am  able to pass on, and share, in turn.

It reminded me of a similar project at a very early in my career, where, as a house guest visiting a friend in Austin, I was able to repair and leave a back porch in a state of heightened function. While I didn’t know as much back then, I had enough of an eye and a back to contribute something that those gals didn’t even know they needed, but were delighted none the less to have once they had it.

I suppose there are many ways to thank a friend for hosting a visitor from a distant land.
But I doubt that there are many more gratifying than to leave their living space in a heightened state of beauty and function. To add a little more flow and relaxation into their inevitably sometimes hectic lives. It is a wonderful gift to be able to give.

I know that my trip up north certainly was greatly enhanced by our visit with Janey in Boston, and I hope that our gift to her will be multiple, relaxing and long lasting.

Thursday, April 5, 2012

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..

Wednesday, March 21, 2012

Mulching More Heaven


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

Sunday, March 18, 2012

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!







Wednesday, February 15, 2012

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!