Greetings!
Happy New Year, everyone! I just love making New Year's resolutions. My resolutions for 2009 include eating more dark chocolate, dancing more, living life to the fullest, making my own earth sculptures (see article below), building a greenhouse, and creating the best garden designs yet.
If you are thinking about enlisting my help this spring with your garden projects, now is the time to schedule it. My calendar for April is already beginning to get filled up with bookings, so please let me know asap what you would like to do and when you would like to do it so I can go ahead and pencil you in.
"The love of gardening is a seed once sown that never
dies." -- Gertrude Jekyll
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Earth Sculptures
I have always thought of the garden as art, and so imagine how excited I was to discover earth sculptures, such as this one of a woman in repose. "The Mudmaid," as she's known, is on display at Heligan Gardens in the UK.
I'm planning to start offering earth sculptures to clients beginning this year. Please let me know if you would be interested in something like this for your garden. I'm also very fond of the more abstract designs, such as the spiral shown here.
As far as I know, my firm will be the first to offer earth sculptures to clients here in the U.S. The possibilities are endless!
If earth sculptures interest you and you would like to learn more, I recommend checking out Heligan Gardens, The Garden of Cosmic Speculation, and Andy Goldsworthy. There are also some interesting things be done with living walls, which are a vertical form of earth sculpting, by Patrick Blanc. My firm also offers indoor and outdoor living walls design and installation.
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Profile: Garden Room with a View
We installed this co-op roof garden on top of a pre-war apartment buiding in the West Village. The challenges that needed to be addressed included weight restrictions and the need for a barrier to prevent people from getting too close to the edge of the roof.
The only thing that existed here when we started on this project was a black tar roof. There were no other existing structures in place.
A deck contractor was hired to build the deck, which was made of Trex artificial wood. This material was used to ensure better fire safety.
My firm installed a continuous 30' x 15' wooden wrap-around planter for this project. The planter was made of an attractive red cedar and was 2' deep. We wanted it to be tall enough to create a barrier that would prevent people from getting too close to the edge of the roof. At the same time, we needed the planter to be light-weight because the building's age meant that fewer structural reinforcements existed that could withhold too much additional weight on the roof.
Our solution was to create a false bottom halfway inside the planter, so that the actual soil volume was half what it appeared to be. We then mixed peat moss into our potting soil to create a lighter mix than just soil alone.
For the plantings, we used a mix of hardy evergreens and flowering annuals. The evergreens look attractive year-round and cut down on the expense of annual replacements. We used sun-loving annuals such as petunias and gazanias to create a continuous display of color in the warm months.
This roof received very little shade from nearby buildings or other structures, so an automated drip irrigation system was a necessary part of our planning. We installed the irrigation system to come on twice a day in the summer and once a day in spring and fall.
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