Five Step Program for SMS - Help Is On The Way :: Fine Gardening, July 30, 2010

Do you suffer from SMS? Saturday Morning Syndrome is common among gardeners, but frequently goes undetected. The effects of SMS manifest as a garden filled with plants that appear to have been randomly catapulted from a speeding train, then smashed together into an undifferentiated mass of jumbled foliage and clashing colors.

Take this painless diagnostic test to learn if you are among the many gardeners who suffer from this embarrassing and expensive condition.

Do you find it impossible to resist the mysterious power that overtakes your steering wheel as you drive past a nursery?

Does your blood pressure shoot up like a bottle rocket on the 4th of July as you approach the shiny new plants cleverly arranged by the nursery's sorcerer, er, I mean merchandizing specialist?

Have you found yourself waking from a dreamlike state, driving home with dozens of strange plants lovingly strapped into the back seat of your car?
Do you find yourself stumbling around your yard, arms extended zombie-like, a plant in each hand, mumbling "Where can I put these?" as you search unsuccessfully for three square millimeters of bare space where you can squeeze in just one more plant?

Wait, there's more...

Who Needs Flowers?

I’ll admit it. I’m a freak for form and foliage (and using the letter ‘f’ many times). Flowers are great. It’s like the rush you feel from infatuation – a quickening of the pulse and flush of the cheeks, then a slow fade to normalcy. It doesn’t have the staying power of a long-term relationship based on a strong foundation. Sure, the bright colors of a Better Homes and Gardens-style perennial border stimulate they eye, but once that burst of color peaks, it’s downhill.

My highest admiration is reserved for designs that exploit the infinite range of visual combinations that come from the more permanent characteristics of plants – their overall form (or architecture), foliage color, the fineness or boldness of the leaves, their surface texture.

This is not to say that I avoid flowering plants in my designs. Far from it. The designs just don’t depend on it. I’ve realized after a few decades that when the flowers fade, the dead-heading is done, and there’s no bone structure left to provide interest, you might as well plow the whole thing under, cover the ground with mulch and wait for the next planting season. But if there’s an underlying composition that continues to contribute interest throughout the year, then you’ve really got something.

Try this comparison.


The first garden on the right has no flowers. Its composition emphasizes the contrasting elements of bright yellow-green Helichrysum ‘Limelight’ in the mid-ground, the somber Eugenia hedge and lighter Miscanthus ‘Morning Light’ grass at the back, and the dark green filaments of Juncus patens (California Rush) in the foreground. Oh yes, there’s a sandstone boulder that’s to die for! The garden looks like this pretty much every day of the year with minimal maintenance. `


This garden is what many people strive for – bright, colorful flowers (two varieties of begonia), a simple color scheme of pink and white, and a crisp edge of dwarf Agapanthus. I’ll be the first to tell you that this creates a charming entry bed that sets off the base of the statue. But what happens when the flowers subside? The foliage color and texture of both begonias are identical, and the leaf color of the Agapanthus merges with the others. The only interest comes from the textural differences between the two species.

These black and white comparisons tell it all.

Imagine we had no color vision. Which garden would hold your interest? The complexity of the first composition blows the second out of the water.

Now imagine the first garden WITH a great palette of colorful, tastefully combined flowers and you have it all. Not to take anything away from people who create stunning floral borders, but the type of design I’m endorsing takes a lot more effort and deeper knowledge of plants.

Thanks for reading. I hope this stimulates some discussion and helps you with your own garden.

A Bit of Garden Design Theory

Canna and Society Garlic
Originally uploaded by gardenwiseguy

Here's something to chew on. I was just looking over a few of my pictures and spotted this one that I use when I teach my garden design classes. It's an image from the project I designed for the Goleta Water District a few years back. I think it exemplifies a "Santa Barbara-style" composition, if there is such a thing. Perhaps it can be a starting point for a conversation about designing not only in our Mediterranean climate, but has implications anywhere. In this example, so fairly common plants are combined to create a killer combo.

One of the simplest concepts for bringing interest to a garden is the impact that can be created by working with contrast and harmony. Here's a crash course...

Starting with the pinkish canna lily (Canna eribus) in this photo, we see that its visual character is comprised of its architecture (the overall form of the plant) which in this case is as follows: a vertical "posture" and broad, upright, spearhead-shaped leaves. The stems will easily reach 5 to 6 feet high. The flowers are large and in proportion to the rest of the plant.

The colors are a greyish-green leaf and coral flowers. Coral is the "tint" of a slightly orangy red. If you were mixing paint you'd take a good amount of red, add barely a dot of yellow (moving it toward orange) then dilute the whole thing with a heapin' helpin' of white. White makes a basic "hue" become a "tint." O.K., let's keep it simple - pink is the tint of red.

Now for the Society Garlic (Tulbaghia violacea) in the back. Its architecture is fine textured and grassy, but is similar to the canna due to the predominantly vertical direction of the leaves and flower stems. The plant is small, growing only to about 12" (18" when flowering). The flowers are small and, again, in scale with the plant.

The flower color is also a tint, in this case, its as if we took a big dollop of purple and mixed in some white. The foliage is a medium green, with a little yellow.

Time to wrap up.

Contrast: The contrast is created by three features: fine texture (Tulbaghia) against coarse texture (Canna); contrasting flower color; and small plant / large plant.

Harmony: Both plants are vertical in their stance; both are within a range of green foliage (as opposed to pairing silver and purple foliage); both have flowers that are the tint of their base hue.

So what does all this mean to you?

Grab a visual concept before you begin putting a plant palette together. Look at not just the flowers, but the totality of the grouping. Better yet, when you look at a planting design you like, see if you can "reverse engineer" what's going on. It might give you a clue to what excites you and you'll have a better chance of creating something great for your own garden.

One last observation - the plants were used in distinct groups, not intermixed. That makes for a much stronger overall statement.

Later, skater...

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A thought after posting this article: I've been reading some early reactions to this post and readers seem to appreciate these design tips. I'd be glad to continue this as a series - just let me know some design topics you'd be interested in. GWG

Santa Barbara County Hort Society Tour

Plants! Where would we be without them? We’d be hungry, breathing toxic gases, sporting various sun-related skin conditions, and thoroughly perplexed with our irrational urge to visit the garden center on beautiful weekends.

I’m in a minor panic at the moment, sitting here at the keyboard putting together my thoughts before taking an enthusiastic group from the Santa Barbara County Horticultural Society (founded in 1869—who said we don’t have our stuff together?) through the Thayer’s garden. No offense to my other clients, but that’s still my fave rave of all the places I’ve done over the decades.

Who joins the Hort Society? Not to generalize too much, but it’s folks who just plain love plants—weird ones (the plants, not the people, although…) rare ones, drop-dead-gorgeous ones, odd ones, fat ones, skinny ones, plants that climb on rocks. Knowing from my own temperament, sometimes the possession of the plant overwhelms the necessity of fitting it into the overall design. “I just HAVE TO HAVE IT! I can always move it later” is the primal brain response from somewhere deep in the cortex.

I know I’ll be asked to “address” the folks before we turn them loose in the garden. So what gem can I impart that if they retain nothing else, will make this visit worthwhile? It’s my handy dandy system for taming potential chaos.

A couple of years ago I was asked to create design guidelines for the main meadow area at the Santa Barbara Botanic Garden. Honored? Stunned? Humbled? You bet. More on that another day.

The key idea was to tame the potential chaos of this grand palette by viewing the entire area as four or five major groupings of plants, each held together with a harmonizing theme.

Huh? Here’s an over simplification, but what if there were 100 varieties of plants to display. Do we combine them alphabetically by genus and species? Not likely. How about by the zip codes of the area in which they commonly occur? All the plants from downtown Santa Barbara’s 93101 would be in one group, the plants that naturally occur on the Mesa in another grouping…nah.

O.K. Back to the four or five major swaths, one with predominantly yellow and golden flowers, another made up of plants with a spiky form, another with gray and silver foliage. From a distance, there would be a sense of order due to the common visual characteristics, but if we move closer into the meadow, we’d see subtle and not so subtle contrasts between the various plants in each grouping.

Within each major block can be associations of plants of different species, but they’d all fit within the common theme. This allows a large variety of plants to be combined while simplifying the overall scale of the bed.

So what about trying this in your own garden, but scaled down to fit the spaces? I think the best example of this approach is the combination in the “Big Sur” garden at the Thayers (pictured above). Aeonium and Echevaria planted in blocks. Each has the same form and structure—flat succulent leaves held in a rosette. But the yellow-green of the slightly more robust Aeonium paired with the gray-green smaller Echevaria create a mass that from a distance, appears to be a single entity. But move in closer and there’s a subtle mix that provides another layer of complexity.

Too similar? I understand your concern, so we sparked things up by backing up that mass with Myer’s Asparagus, the common link in this grouping being the yellow-green foliage that complements the Aeonium, but with a radically different form—in this case, something like Rastafarian dreadlocks heading skyward.

Nuff for now. I can go on and on about how I visualize and compose with plants, but my hope is to give my readers a starting point for taming the one-of-each plantings I see in so many gardens owned by plant fanatics. Round up all the plants you’re thinking of using and see if you can categorize them by some common characteristics. Within those groupings, play with varying degrees of harmony and contrast.

Lemme know if this helps.

What does Harry Connick Jr. have to do with gardens?

Actually, not much--at least on the surface. But I could stretch a wee bit and talk about how I live in two worlds of creativity. Though I spend more time as a landscape architect than I do as a musician, my heart is with the music first. So last night was a solid 2 hour performance by one of the most humble, sincere, sharing jazz and funk musician's I've experienced. Harry and his immensely talented crew were all about having fun, taking chances, and sincerely receiving joy from each other's efforts.

How can I morph that spirit into my designs?

The "have fun" part is a given--I always try to explore something that excites me, or there's no reason to sit down at the drafting table.

"Taking chances" is always in the cards, but depends on the sense of daring of the client. Lately I've been blessed and lucky!

"Joy from each othere's efforts" is a stretch, but I think it has to do with the collaboration between client and designer--there's no way I would force my design intent on them, and there's the part about helping them express what they want and me giving it physical reality. I try to hear and see what truly excites them, then turn it into a garden they can love.

Let's see if I keep that in mind on the next design. Meanwhile, my band has two gigs this week and I'm SOOOOO ready to play.