 |
|
| This is what I wanted to say in my presentation to the design class client on Wednesday. We only had four minutes each...which isn't nearly enough time to fully explain a design! | |||||||
 | Here's the plan I did. Before clicking on any of those lovely red boxes, here's some general information about the site and design. | ||||||
|
The client is single and on sabbatical from a high-tech job. She's writing a novel. She's looking for a yard that provides places for her to read outside, an area for a vegetable garden, and some entertaining room. Her house borders a creek that goes dry in the summer. Native oaks shade the steep creekbank, and she is concerned with doing what is best for the oaks (no summer irrigation under them, no solid paving in the zone where their feeder roots are, no plants or hardscape within 10 feet of a trunk). She wants to reduce the maintenance (already low) for the site; for this reason, she does not want any lawn and prefers not to have a wood deck under the oaks (oak leaves get stuck in the cracks and she worries about the wood rotting). There are some areas in her back yard where she feels exposed to her neighbors, so she would like to block their views of her back yard. My design successfully answers all issues she has raised, and I'll explain how in the pages for each section. While designing the landscape, I kept thinking of Wayne's term for my wanderings in my garden: Surveying the Queendom. I wanted to create a site where the client could wander through her own secret Queendom to hidden destinations. I have kept my palette of materials small so that the whole site is in harmony. The main hardscape (hardscape=paving, walls, and other non-growing elements in a garden) materials I am using are: | |||||||
| |||||||
|
For most of the yard, I specify that the flagstone paving be set in sand, as this provides a way for rain to get to the oak roots. There are two places where the flagstones are mortared in: the front and the back porches. I am using the glass block as a way to provide visual screening but not screen sunlight. Split-face concrete block looks a lot like stone--it's made by pouring two blocks together, then splitting them roughly--and the colors of this particular block match those in the flagstone very well. Concrete block will also hold up to having Boston ivy or a similar vine climbing across it. I also tried to limit the kinds of plants I used. For the most part, I used Nandina domestica (Heavenly Bamboo), Dietes vegeta (Fortnight Lily), Hemerocallis hybrids (Daylily), Pacific Coast Iris hybrids, and Heuchera 'Palace Purple' (a Coral Bells relative with purple leaves and white flowers). The client had some plants she wanted to keep: roses, an evergreen pear along a fence, and the oaks (obviously!). I also kept a lovely Japanese maple in front and added a Smoke Tree (Cotinus coggygria). Okay, now click on a square in the plan, or follow me to the Front Yard! Cheryl | |||||||
 | |||||||
 |  |  |
 |  |  |  |  |  |
