Scanner art by Craig Cramer, gardening & more
Friends’ gardens and other gardens I’ve visited.
Just a few shots from Minns Garden outside my office Saturday morning. I’m trying to get used to a new operating system on my home computer (Linux/Ubuntu) and the Gimp (I didn’t choose the name) image editor. So far, it works pretty good. But it will be awhile before I’m comfortable with it.
Blooms …
More fiddling with backlighting, which isn’t easy when it’s getting close to noon.
Some images from the weekend, which included a very short tour of Cornell Plantations with some old family friends in town for a visit. Plantations is worth a visit if only to see the container collections right off the parking lot.
Some hot hibiscus blooms at Plantations.
And some nice lilies.
Every year this border right outside the education building is a little different. And every time I marvel at the skill that goes into its design and execution.
A favorite vignette from the border, including ricinus and beets.
Another view of the containers.
Some scenes from around the home garden. Red astilbe.
The back sunny border.
Allium, artemisia and jewelweed.
Some blooms. Ligularia.
A hybrid hazelnut I got from Phil Rutter close to 20 years ago.
A bunch of filipendula closeups. Cotton candy.
Blue bottle ‘flower’ (with boat augers and lamp fixture). Blue bottle tree in background.
A couple weeks after Nan announced this round of the Garden Bloggers’ Design Workshop, Steve Orr’s New York Times Q&A column in The New York Times (Picking Accessories for the Plants) offered good advice on garden ornamentation that applies equally to whimsy. His advice:
Even in a very lushly planted yard, a visitor’s eye usually will go straight to any nonplant feature. It’s best not to have several ornaments visible at a glance, competing with each other, since the most interesting landscapes have a little mystery. Place one object half-hidden in a leafy shrub and position another around a corner, so that its discovery is a surprise.
Did I mention don’t go overboard? If I have a problem with whimsy in the garden, it’s probably that my eye gets too accustomed to whimsical elements. Before you know it, my yard will be filled with crap. Hopefully I’ll notice before the neighbors.
For those of you who aren’t in the neigborhood, here’s what I’ve got scattered around. (The camera exercise once again reveals to me I’ve got way more than I thought.) I’ll also include some shots from other gardens at the end.
Floating bowling ball on bent rebar. Long story of the midnight bowling ball accident of 2003 from a previous design workshop post.
Sugar and flower canisters make great pots. So do olive oil cans.
How could I not buy a bottle of Chilean brandy when the bottle looks like an Easter Island statue? It was all I could do to drink the brandy. But I earned a container ornament for my efforts.
Jade checks out the happy turtle. Not so visible in the pot is an ancient hand-made Chia head that I remember from childhood. It split a few years ago so now I have two profiles looking up at me from the pot.
Someday I’ll make a pilgrimage to the local pink flamingo factory and get a real one. But for now I like the one I have with its spinning wings.
Sloggers still work as hanging container for succulents. Back story and my infamous garden footwear review.
Spilled trough with hypertufa balls.
Glow-in-the-dark tree guy.
My mini-water-garden probably counts more as ornamentation than it does as whimsy.
I float blossoms in this old cattle waterer.
My friend Marcia has a pretty whimsical garden. She does it with a lot more class than I do. More pictures of her garden here.
Shirley G. has the best whimsical garden in these parts. Shirley is a member of our local Adirondack Chapter of the North American Rock Garden Society. The group toured her garden back in 2005, when I took these pictures.
A salvaged canopy bed that I picture now covered with vines.
The family.
Best shoe garden I’ve seen.
Shirley also had a cool heart-shaped water garden tub, a Wizard of Oz garden and lots of other cools stuff punctuated by some great plants.
Have at it. Just don’t overdo it.
One of my first posts (Aug. 2005) was about the garden of my friend and coworker Marcia. She needed some environmental portraits shot for a feature about her on another website, so I stopped by for a quick visit a week ago. I couldn’t help but wander around and shoot some more pix after the portraits were done.
While some trees have been removed to let in some light and many small details have changed, the bones are mostly the same. From this angle (above, from a second-story window), it’s a well-designed flower garden with a vegetable garden in back separated by a fence. The new bed on the right was inspired by an article in a recent issue of Garden Design about a Charleston, S.C., garden (see “Southern Classic,” May 2008, image on page 39) that features a lawn area ‘pinched’ by beds at the far end to create some separation between different areas.
From the opposite angle (above), you can see the second face of Marcia’s layout: A functional veggie garden with some funky ornamentation.
This small water garden also provides some separation between the flowers and the food. You need to walk around it to get to the entrance arch.
This column provides a focus in the round bed in the center of the veggie garden, as well as being the anchoring lighthouse at the far end the garden’s axis.
One thing Marcia and I share it the love of the blue bottles …
…and funky ornamentation. (I’m thinking Les Quatres Vents only smaller.)
A closer view of the left border from above.
This nearly black iris came from a small iris farm nearby that went out of business last year. The rhizomes were free for the digging, but not labeled. (I got several buckets too.) Adds to the surprises in the garden this spring, waiting to see what the new irises are going to look like when they bloom.
I don’t know the name of this iris. But it seems like it’s everywhere. I’ve got some that are identical or very similar that came with the last house that I lived in.
Rhodie flowers starting to pop.
Every year when their daffodils peak, Nina Bassuk (faculty member in our Department of Horticulture) and Peter Trowbridge (chair of Landscape Architecture) kindly hold a Sunday brunch for their students, co-workers and friends to come see their gardens.
Why time it to the daffodils? Because they’ve planted about 100,000 of them over the years.
But there’s always much more to see at Peter and Nina’s (and interesting folks to meet and greet) than just the daffodils. Here are just a few highlights.
I’ve got my blue bottle tree and decorations. Nina and Peter have a new feature with blue pots.
Also new this year is a rebuilt wall. The old wall that was here and blown out in places had a certain charm. But this new one and the new bed in front of it are spectacular.
I tried to get Mimi and Mango to pose on these steps to further accentuate the symmetry…
But they were too busy having fun to take my ham bribes.
