Sunset Magazine Likes My Clients' Parkway!

I was curious when I checked my e-mail in-box last month and saw a message from Sharon Cohoon, senior garden writer for Sunset Magazine and their Fresh Dirt blog.

Hi, Billy. I’m coming up to Santa Barbara the weekend of March 11-12. Mostly to evaluate a hotel for a travel story. Tough assignment, huh? But I was wondering if you had a favorite garden or two you’d want to show off either day? If so, give me a call.

Guess how long it took me to pick up the phone and call Sharon back? A few weeks later I was picking Sharon up at her posh downtown hotel and ferrying her around to some of my favorite designs. When we got to the home of Nicole and Bill, Sharon was nearly breathless upon seeing this parkway erupting with brilliant, twisty, pink flowers floating over dark green foliage -- Grevillea lanigera 'Coastal Gem'.

"This is definitely blogworthy," she said as we drove away. She wasn't kidding. Read her blog post at Fresh Dirt.

Really Fine On-Line Garden Design

I'm not sure I should be sharing this with you. Besides writing, I earn some my income designing residential gardens. And here I am, about to hand you a great, free tool for doing it yourself. But I'm also a teacher and a generous kinda guy, so what the hell?

The local water agencies have shelled out some pretty serious coin to fund a goodie-filled website with lots of water conservation ideas. Follow their advice and you'll save money while helping preserve the planet's most essential natural resource - clean drinking water. You've read my rants ripping folks who let water run down the gutter, or squander it washing sidewalks. (If you want your concrete clean enough to eat off of, toss it in the dishwasher.)

Smart water use in the garden has two key components: Wise water management is important, but putting the right plant in the right placeis where sustainable landscaping begins. Growing conditions can vary widely on a small residential lot: The same plant that thrives in cool morning sun on the east side of your place turns into oven-roasted ‘tater skins when subjected to the summer scorch of afternoon sun. A mounded bed in one part of your yard might provide ideal drainage for natives, while clay deposits in the parkway usually mean the same plant's kiss of death.

With thousands of plants to choose from, how do you decide what to plant? I've got nothing against everyone's go-to garden encyclopedia, the Sunset Western Garden Book (actually, I do… check the link at the end of this article), but what if you could take an on-line tour of LOCAL gardens, click on plants that turn you on, then read everything you'd ever want to know about how to use each one flawlessly, and print out a shopping list?

Then step right up, ladies and gents, for the rip-roaringest, easy-peasy, life-changing garden design website in the whole world. (I'm holding off on giving you the link, cowgirls and stud-muffins, so hold your horses and don't scroll down just yet.)

Get the rest of the scoop at Edhat.com

Foliage Foundations and Gnasty Gnomes (the Gs are silent)

[Author's note: I'm making this first part up.]

Imagine this late night scene: You've finished flossing, folded down the quilt, fluffed the pillows, flipped open F is for Fugitive, felt it fall flat on your face, and flipped off the fluorescent.

That's their signal. I'm not condoning their behavior, mind you, but as you sail off to The Land of Nod, your garden gnomes begin their nightly escapades. Imagine a job like theirs -- standing immobile while the summer sun bakes off your paint, or winter winds whip you with sleet. And what's with the sprinkler bidet?

So when late night falls and their shift ends, the gnomes need to blow off some steam. Off to the all-night pub, they belly up to the brass foot rail and get down to serious business.

The night isn't over yet. Stumbling home, their little concrete eyes gleaming, the merry pranksters repeat their pre-dawn ritual: Picking off all the flower buds waiting to open, so the garden never blooms.

The moral of this story: Design your garden as though these mischievous, misanthropic (or is that mis-flor-opic?), buggers live in your garden. Don't use flowers as the sole visual interest in your garden. Instead, concentrate on creating year-round interest by exploiting your plants' shapes, density, leaf patterns, and foliage colors, so your garden looks great, flowers or not.

Allow me to share one of the most elegantly sophisticated little corners of landscaping I've ever seen. What knocks me out so much is the use of two key visual design principles - harmony (elements with similarities) and contrast (elements with differences). This vignette sits a few blocks from my house, adorning the Sansum Diabetes Research Center in Santa Barbara.

More photos and astute analysis at Fine Gardening

Let Mr. Spock Choose Your Plants

Close your eyes. (Bad move - now you can't read this. Change of plans...OPEN your eyes. Drat! What if you don't see that I just typed "open your eyes"?)

Sorry, let's start over. Imagine that you're looking out the breakfast nook window when an 18-wheel tractor-trailer jumps the curb, it's back-up beeper piercing the early morning calm. Air brakes hiss and the engine revs. The bed tilts skyward. As the tailgate creaks, a river of ping-pong balls floods your front yard.

"What the...?!?"

You spring from the breakfast table as the truck pulls away. Tying your robe, you and your bunny slippers shuffle outside to inspect this curious cargo. Words are printed on each shiny orb: Miscanthus 'Morning Light' reads one, Cotoneaster dammeri, Artemisia schmidtiana 'Silver Mound', on and on, each sphere bearing the name of a different plant that grows in your region.

I don't know about you, but that's what it seems like when I start a new design project for a client - the realm of all possibilities. My Sunset Western Garden Book boasts "Over 8,000 Plants".

That's a smidge too much variety for the average residential lot. So how on Earth does an adventurous but rational gardener winnow all those tempting choices down to a manageable palette?

The Logic of Logic

Simple. Pop an old episode of Star Trek into the Blu-ray and unleash your uber-logical Mr. Spock. Shut down the "oh-but-it's-so-cute-with-its-sexy-maroon-leaf-bordered-with-a-darling-crinkly-chartreuse-leaf-margin" lobe of your brain. Delay your aesthetic gratification.

There's more to read at Fine Gardening...

Garden Design - A Dog's Eye View :: Fine Gardening, June 15, 2010

Guess what? Dogs aren't actually colorblind; they just have a lot less chromatic sensitivity than humans. That's why I don't let Biff the Wonder Spaniel pick my outfits. On the other hand, he might have a leg up on me (dog pun) when it comes to designing gardens.

When I start a new design, I picture the plants the same way Biff probably sees them. I imagine they will never bloom—that I'll have to rely on something other than floral color for interest. I select and combine plants using all their other visual qualities—the silhouette of the plant, its foliage shape, leaf size, density and surface texture, for example. The flowers ice the cake.

So I got to thinking. What if Biff took after his old man and created a garden blog for dogs? How would he describe the two most fundamental design principles that dogs and their bipedal slaves should master?

Cool images, thought-provoking words follow...

I'm Sick of These Plants! :: Edhat, August 14, 2010

Landscape designers can get a little full of themselves, me included. We know so many more plants than you do and can recite polysyllabic botanical names like Parthenocissus tricuspidata without coming up for air.

Discovering a cool, new Heuchera with crinkled, copper-colored leaves and chartreuse polka dots is like a crack head's deep toke smacking the brain with a dopamine two-by-four. Then comes the roller coaster ride - cosmic sensations of euphoria and empowerment, then the inevitable crushing crash. The story endlessly repeats as we find ourselves down some sketchy alley, peering over the nursery wall, scouting our next fix.

The trouble is, some of the shiny new plants designers get all throbby about haven't been around long enough to reliably know what happens ten years down the line.

Sometimes it's safer to work with the plants we see every day. There's a reason they're so damn ubiquitous. They're everywhere because they'll grow anywhere, whether you're a Master Gardener or a nursery newbie.

Sure, I would love to design every project as an artistic and botanical adventure, but that's not realistic. For many clients, it is preferable to create a garden filled with common, but thriving plants that require minimal resources, than to create a short-lived masterpiece of exotica that demands constant life-support.

I've got more to say here...

Almost Foiled By A Cyclops

All I wanted to do was project some PowerPoint slides of planting combinations on the screen and teach my eager students to become brilliant designers. I had spent an hour picking out images that range from simple "harmony / contrast" studies to more complex garden ideas.

But instead, I was lured into a bloody battle between man and machine. Chaos erupted as I tried to get the goddamn computer to "see" the shiny cyclopean creature clinging to the ceiling, motionless, but whirring with delight. Step one, turn on computer; step two, turn on projector - zip, nothin', just 'HITACHI' in block letters on the screen. "Crap!" I muttered, barely audible to the class.

Okay, we'll just reverse the order of ops: Shut down projector, shut down computer. Step one: turn on projector; step two....... "DAMN! Come on, this is the high point of tonight's class!"

One knowledgeable student offers, "Press the F3 key!"

"No," offers another, "it's F7."

"No," thinks me, it's FU. One classmate suggests we all just gather around the 14" monitor that's connected to the computer at the lectern. So's I plugs in me trusty thumb-drive and the projector springs to life.

"What did you do?" everyone asked. Damned if I know. Here are a few of the images I showed them with a sprinkle of commentary. I'm feeling like a teacher today.

Green and Green
The pic at the top of this blog is a tight shot of dark green mondo grass (Ophiopogon japonicus) sharing the frame with golden moneywort (Lyssimachia nummularia 'Aurea'). Harmony? They're both green, one a dark conifer kinda green, the other a glowing disc of chartreuse. Very different leaf forms create the contrast. Nice marriage.

Pushing the Yellow

I love the contrast of forms--the chunky, sculptural agave with its gold slash along the edge and the vining extensions of licorice plant (Helichrysum petiolare 'Morning Light') reaching through. The gold marries the two decidedly different forms

Magic Wands

I pointed out to my students that the big event here is the rhythmic forms of blue lavandin (Lavandula 'Provence') and island alumroot (Heuchera maxima - CA native) rising above the foliage. Each has a small delicate flower, but their color and petal shapes set up a nice dynamic. The creamy alumroot seems so right with the soft lavender flowers.

One more?

Shocking, Simply Shocking!

This one got lots of oohs and aahs. I like killer combos that challenge the students. I had a few volunteers take over the lecture, point out which where contrasting characteristics and where there were harmonious connections. They did pretty well. The dark leaf shrub is Smoke Bush (Cotinus coggygria) and the delicate yellow-green critter is golden tansy (Tanicitum vulgare - not sure of the variety).

The class ended well. No shots were fired, I didn't need to be escorted from the class and everyone thought they'd learned something.

If you're in the Santa Barbara area and want a one-day intensive planting design class, join me at the Santa Barbara Botanic Garden on Saturday, April 4. More info at they're website and click on Classes.

Wanna Plant Something? Get a License!

What's new this week? Only my latest hyperbolic wanking about people putting plants where they have no business growing. Why the hell can't people look up a plant in a reliable reference before they stick it in a planting hole?

It's not a 4x4 post you're putting in the ground. The sucker's gonna grow and there's no reason you should have to beat your brains out caring for something that's genetically programmed to swallow your house and crack your foundation.

Though the plants are Santa Barbara examples, the principles apply everywhere. Well, maybe not everywhere. I've never heard of lichens getting out of hand in tundra.

Click over for a fun read...Edhat.com

Listing to Port

My on-line column at Edhat.com last week listed five plants I would never use in a client's garden. It generated about a bazillion hits and lots of requests for more lists that people could use in their own gardens.

So this week, I offered my readers the first of a series of lists, leading off with Billy's Killer Combos--a veritable cornucopia of eye-popping plant combos that anyone is free to rip off. If you live in Minnesota or one of those other places that can't grow palm trees, you might want to just look through the sumptuous pictures and swear that you'll move to California sometime before we burn up or break off into the ocean.

Here's the link

Passion in the Beds - Unleash the Red!

Need another dose of color theory as planting season progresses? How about playing around with RED! Hot, energetic, bloody, angry, sinful, passionate RED! Like a piece of raw meat thrown into the garden, I watch the energy amp up.

Many of my students and clients get a little nervous when I bring up this touchy subject.

“I don’t like red. It’s too intense. I read somewhere that it could make my kids disobedient,” says the timid gardener.

“Huh? What have you been reading in the check-out line? Really, it’s good for you. It warms things up and creates a little emotionally punch,” says the daring designer.

“What if it scares my neighbors?” she asked, plaintively.

“Okay, let’s compromise. We’ll start with a splotch of red, but we’ll bring in some tints and shades to downplay it a bit.

“Tints and shades!?! Why didn’t you say so. Boogie down witcha bad ole red!,” shouts my now-emboldened client!

Red: Add white and it’s “Hello Kitty” time. Pink, like little girls’ jammies and Easter hats. How can THAT do any harm? How about we darken it with a bit of black and take the palette toward burgundy? Seems logical – Burgundy, France, is known for its wine, wine is served at garden parties, garden parties are fun, so let’s have some fun.

Now we’ve got an array of the primary hue, the tint and the shade. Let’s see how it looks when we throw ‘em together.



The maroon bougainvillea in the back is visible from a block away. Framed in the foreground by two spectacular, intertwined varieties of roses (one is variegated from maroon through light pink and white) and the combination is a study in variations on red.



Just around the block from the bougie/rose composition is a great little object lesson repeated with Pelargoniums. The fading red turns to maroon, with a gradation from red through pink.



The Chinese Saucer Magnolia takes care of itself, gently blending from maroon through pink on the same petal. Makes my job easy.



And this Lantana camara 'Christine' takes us through ranges of pink with a touch of lemon thrown in.

If, for some reason, you want to mix it up a bit more, but still want that connecting thread that makes these colors so easy to work with, how about stepping over one notch on the color wheel to orange? Add the tint to the palette and you’ve got apricot; add the shade and you have rust. Warmth and diversity without too much heat.



A red pelargonium acts as the anchor that moves the composition from red to orange, then off to lighter tints.



It doesn't take much more than a mixed seed packet of nasturtiums to bring a bed to life. Warm colors and their close relatives.



Hat's off to lantana again for taking care of the blend all in one plant. Use this shrub as the foundation of a warm color scheme and we can venture out into yellows and back to reds effortlessly.

Gotta go. Hope this fills in some gaps for readers.

[Red grid public domain image from Wikipedia]

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.

WWZD? What Would Zappa Do?

This says it all for me! Check this shot from the Santa Barbara Mission. Dasylirion longissima with a Euphorbia resinifera. This composition was just sitting there in a grouping of large pots, minding it's own business, paying no attention to me. The perfection of the juxtaposition of the dark green needle-like leaves and the ghostly stout vertical architecture of the euphorbs say it all.

For me, it was like entering a sacred temple where a master had been, and feeling the presence of wisdom. Have you ever looked at a Japanese sumi-e scroll? A few gestural lines, seemingly unconscious, but capturing the essence of its subject in just a few strokes of the brush. That's what masterful, zen-like plant composition does for me.

I've been math phobic since 8th grade when I was put in an accelerated algebra class, so I can't say I completely get it when I hear about mathematicians who see beauty in equations. But when I look at a simple yet brilliant plant composition, for me it's all about ratios and proportions and rhythm.

In the composition above, how much dark green does it take to balance 'X' amount of pale gray-green? The central upright clump of dark green repeats the rigid vertical of the foreground, but then, to create the contrast that any fine work of art needs, gravity pulls the outer leaves into a soft arch, then lays them nearly horizontal.

If this composition were music, it would be about variations on a theme, in this case cylindrical forms in varying scales. And just to complicate things slightly, there are those tiny magenta flower buds topping the euphorb, sort of like random notes borrowed from a Frank Zappa musing.

No disrespect intended, but keep your pink and lavender and yellow and mauve Martha Stewart flower beds. Your cone flowers and roses and brown-eyed susans and glads. Gimme plants used as sculpture, as unresolved conflict, as an expression of the vast varieties of form and texture and foliage color that will keep me designing for the next century. Nuff for now.