Assistance of a Garden Designer
Question from Russ:
I ran across your website and was very impressed with your outstanding contributions to the many owners of landscape gardens. So impressed that I immediately ordered your ebook entitled Southern California Organic Gardening! One of the most practical and informative gardening books I’ve read in a long time!
I solicited the help of an excellent landscape architect about 17 years ago to design a beautiful landscape for me. Over the years, the trees have grown and provide much more shade and the shrubs have become boring. I am in the process of renewing all my irrigation systems and visualizing a new landscape with a new selection of shrubs and perennials. Something really beautiful! I’m willing to spend the money to design, plant and maintain the landscape.
Would you be kind enough to recommend a garden designer who has the talent and experience to design a beautiful composition for me. I live in Riverside but I am willing to work with someone who lives in Southern California. Would you do me this favor? There are so many designers but who lack the talent and/or experience or interest to design something special.
Hey if you would do this favor, I’ll buy another book! ha ha Seriously, I’ll buy your books with or without you recommending a qualified designer. They are outstanding!!! But I am looking forward to working with some special designer that you recommend.
Answer from Pat
I wish I could answer your question but I cannot. There are an enormous number of landscape architects and garden designers and I simply cannot know who they all are or which ones are good in each area. I would be very grateful, however, despite my failure in that regard, if you would continue buying my books and giving them to friends for Christmas, birthdays, weddings and whatever!!
I do, however, have a helpful suggestion and that is to go to any and all garden tours in your area. Also I recommend you join the Mediterranean Garden Society and attend their garden tours. Those people are very knowledgeable and you can get good recommendations from them. Perhaps even travel overseas with them. I have done that and I got many ideas and much inspiration from those travels. Also attend garden tours in Claremont, California and especially Pasadena and environs and take photos of garden features, plants and structures you like. In this way you will find a few gardens that blow you away. Find out who designed those specific gardens and you will be able to make a good choice. (Garden designers often know plants better than landscape architects.)
My ideal for gardens in Southern California and for my garden in particular, is the Mediterranean garden style. Though I was born and raised in England I don’t believe the English garden is the right ideal for here. (But many of the greatest English gardens have a structure based on Mediterranean gardening. It is the “cottage garden” that doesn’t work as well here.) I am a believer in creating a strong design, using a structure of spectacular plants and also in going up in the air with climbing plants and using patios, paths, arbors, pergolas, terraces, rocks and garden rooms. I like the idea of having at least two patios, one that is warm and sunny for winter and another for summer that is cool and shady. I believe in using color schemes and you can have more than one of them and use different color schemes in different parts of the garden if you want. I like having many places in the garden to sit, relax and entertain. Books on Mediterranean gardens can help guide you in the right direction. Photographs of gardens that appeal to you, your own photos or those you find in books and magazines, can give you something to show to a designer and say “I like this!”
Finally, a word about old, overgrown gardens: Many gardens need re-doing as time goes by but often one does not need to destroy the whole thing. Here is a recent article about the changes I have made recently in my own garden: http://www.utsandiego.com/news/2014/May/16/pat-welsh-garden-simplifed/ There was another article in the same issue of the San Diego UT newspaper. It was in a magazine section called “Coastal:San Diego Homes” but apparently there is no online copy. It told also about my in-laws (the John Lloyd Wrights) and about my house which was designed by my late husband’s stepfather, John Lloyd Wright, the son of Frank Lloyd Wright.
Pat
Hi Pat,
I’ve read this and the other garden design posts (including the inspirational “Romancing the Garden” posts) on this site, which are fantastic — they give me hope. A friend bought me a copy of Southern California Gardening years ago, after I commented once I was impressed by how well he anticipated what needed to be done. The book has been immensely helpful in keeping me on track on regular garden tasks throughout the year. As some things have become habit, I’ve acquired new skills from re-reading the tips for each month. This has given me confidence to do quite a bit in the garden with success.
I was lucky to inherit a yard that’s worked for years, about 3mi inland from Santa Monica Bay in a post-WWII neighborhood with large open yards. A few years ago, I lost my longtime gardener and a row of bottlebrush on the edge of the property (neighbors construction!). This created a few challenges I wanted to fix as soon as possible (like getting privacy & some shade back), but I started having problems with the plants that were left, too.
I can relate to Russ! I know I need to get rid of, move, or replace what doesn’t work; determine the sequence of what to address when (repaving, sprinklers, rototilling without leaving the yard a muddy mess); and figure out who to ask for help (& how to find them). I’ve looked for homes with nice yards and asked for gardener recommendations. I’ve had landscape consultations but I worry about the cost and quality of the advice (when I said I was worried about drainage problems, a well known landscape designer said “more compost!”, so I didn’t hire him). I’ve tried to sort through the licensed Landscape Architects (arborists too!) and APLD members’ sites looking for designs that feel right. I contacted the Master Gardeners in the area (a friend received some assistance a few years ago in redoing her yard), but essentially they told me to hire someone. I haven’t figured this out yet.
I know the things I want: I too want a warm spot in winter, a shady spot in summer; room for my dog to run and relax (& leave his mark); dry ground around the foundation of the house, but full flower beds and ground covers when the ground is muddy, and drought-resistant plants that survive the cracked dry clay of summer; complementary plants perfectly grouped by water needs (& sprinklers/driplines to meet them) and in the appropriate places for the wet/dry nature of the sun/shade in the yard; and a welcoming garden that blocks out the high wall & traffic noise next door. I researched the plants with the foliage and flower colors I’d like near the house, and I think I want to fade to lighter colors at the perimeter for an illusion of depth.
I got my nerve up and made some decisions. I spent a small fortune on beautiful native plants, got them in the ground in October 2012, and they were doing great! However, with 3 years of drought, I lost more than half of them — so heartbreaking (the time, the growth, the money). It’s been really tough to take next steps because as badly as I want to keep moving forward with planting, I can’t afford the disappointment. I really want a beautiful and inviting yard again, but I need some help envisioning what it could look like. I will be sending my soil out to be tested next, and hopefully that will help me understand why I’ve lost so many plants. I was trying to make it fool proof so the dry areas of the yard had plants that could take it, but it hadn’t worked out so well.
Meanwhile, I keep my eyes open as I drive down different streets, and I search for new info to read on garden design, look for gardening classes that relate to the knowledge I’m looking for, and I try to stay hopeful. I feel pretty stuck though, so I know I need help with this.
Your comment feels like a cry for help so I will try to throw you a line by writing some ideas here that you could pick up on and put into action. First, I really cannot help you find a garden consultant to help you out since i don’t know anyone and also think most landscape architects are not very good and don’t know plants. Though I still do some garden consultation myself, I only do it when the location is nearby and I live in San Diego County. I do have family members living near you and thus I come up to Hollywood occasionally, but as you may have realized I am elderly, though in excellent health, but that limits what I can do.
Also, I should tell you that I am writing another book which might help you when done. it is a compact, new edition of my latest organic month-by-month book, which my publisher stopped printing last year with no word of explanation to me. In this new edition I plan to include some basics of design.
First, I think you need to accept the fact that most soil in Southern California is poor soil. So fixing up the soil by adding organics and mulching the surface is a good thing to do. Also, most native plants are not easy to grow when planted in ground that once had exotic plants growing in it. Once a garden has been grown in the soil then pathogens are in that soil that kill natives. So cross native plants off your list of “easy plants”. They are not easy, except a few like ceonothus sometimes in some locations.
Secondly: Look around you at gardens nearby that are doing well. Talk to other gardeners. Identify and make a list of the easiest-to-grow, most spectacular, and least troublesome plants. These are the ones you want to plant. Plant and grow the easy things and yank out the trouble makers.
Thirdly: Use hardscape but make it look comfortable and warm, not cold concrete, but warm materials like wood and brick, for example. Wherever you have a patio, you don’t have to water that or struggle to keep things alive. You can always decorate a patio with large pots of succulents of various colors and textures beautifully arranged to enhance each other.
Fourth: Use plenty of seating, tables and chairs. No ugly brown stuff but perhaps things you pick up at thrift stores and paint with lovely Mediterranean colors so when you don’t want to spend water on flowers, the furniture and pillows can provide the color and charm you hope for. Work for charm. Look at garden design books in some artsty book store, photos of Provencal or Italian and Greek gardens to inspire you.
Fifth: Go up in the air. Build pergolas and arbors. Plant colorful and easy, drought-resistant vines on them. I have a 20 foot long pergola in my garden overgrown with Lady Banks Rose. (yellow). Beneath that I have a long wooden trestle table that seats 14. Nearby is a wooden table with an umbrella over it that seats 10 and a swing for 2 people. This is way down at the bottom of the garden in an area I call the lower patio (a brick patio with a high plumbago hedge protecting it from the road.) Nearby is a rose arbor with a comfortable teak bench with pillows on it and a pebble path with cloth under it. Build raised beds, a walled island bed, for example, with a path all the way around it.
Sixth: Create a garden of wandering paths and destinations to go to. These are the ways to create charm.
Good luck!