British interior designer, Heather Jenkinson, who is also a friend, asked me to design the two small gardens at either end of her new apartment near Dartmouth Park in London.

We will be working together remotely (more on the tools and trials of that in a here and in future posts) until the actual installation to bring her relaxed, contemporary style (above) outside in a way that will extend the apartment’s overall look to her front and back gardens. In May, I’ll visit to make sure everything is going smoothly and to troubleshoot anything that isn’t.

The mostly north-south facing walled courtyards face the street on two sides as the corner apartment spans a single block. Solutions for both privacy and security are paramount in the design process. Heather’s two small dogs will have access to both gardens. My first challenge has been to visualize using metric measurements! Millimeters and centimeters to inches and feet. Mind blown. What exactly does 4′ mean in metric? 1219.2 mm! The converter on my phone and in my CAD software have become close, overworked companions. We have also started using an iPhone map called appropriately Photo Measures that allows you to put a question mark or a measurement easily on an image and email or export it to another platform. I always miss something when I measure a site and there is no option here to just ‘run over there’ to get what I need.

Small spaces have to make every inch (centimeter?!) count and are in many ways more challenging than a large expansive landscape because of that. The front garden is 13.5′ long by 8′ wide and has two street facing walls that are approximately 3′ tall. There is a sliding door from the living room with a step down to the garden floor that is centered on the long side facing the street. A combination of a partial (and silly) wood fence and brick wall on remaining short boundary that separates it from the neighboring garden. Currently an overgrown, shaggy evergreen tree dominates the east wall. I’m not one to remove trees, but this one has to go to make the garden even minutely useful!

The front is adjacent the living room and will be transformed into an extension of that public area for extra seating and extending entertaining in the warmer months. In my preliminary plan I have included horizontal slat fence extensions for the brick walls, espaliered hornbeams to define a vertical green layer that will help create even more privacy from passersby but won’t take up too much room, and a small water feature to help mask street noise and that will create a focal point from the long view through the apartment to the garden. There will be a mirrored window on the west side fenced wall that will serve to make the garden look bigger, create a garden view from the living room sectional and also to reflect some sunlight. The unusable portion of the step from the slider will be removed to create an intimate seating area with a small love seat and occasional table opposite the mirrored wall. The ground surface will be gravel that is easy on dog’s feet and even easier to clean up!

The second garden is directly off the bedroom and will become a private, meditative haven for a busy designer. I haven’t started the conceptual for that although I can clearly see a soothing lounge space in my mind’s eye so watch here (on a totally random schedule) or subscribe via the email link in the sidebar to see the complete makeover as it progresses over the next several months.

For me, planting plans are about a hard to define quality that combines hints from the site, foliage, sun and shade, long lasting interest, bloom sequence, color, mood, habitat, the environment, deer and rabbits, the seasons, movement, availability, and on and on and on and not necessarily in that order all of the time. All of these are layered in my mind as I work through to a solution. I prefer to use fewer plants that are repeated in different combinations and proportions, rather than more used sporadically. The repeated elements are generally texture and color although with fewer plants, the interest happens with the proportions of each in relationship to each other and the whole. My mind is never at rest when I’m working on a planting plan. Each individual combination of plants has to layer all of the elements listed with its immediate neighbors and also convey some kind of lasting visual/visceral quality that is difficult for me to pin down. I admire the work of other designers, but what they can do is not what I can do. Planting design is intensely individual and no two designers have the same viewpoint just as no two pieces of art are the same. There can be copies and forgeries, but the real thing has the unique qualities of the designer’s hand stamped on it.

Although I would never use barberry in a plan because it is highly invasive where I live and work, this combination of an unidentified golden pygmy barberry (possibly Berberis thunbergii ‘Aurea Nana’) threaded with Drumstick Alliums (Allium sphaerocephalon) in John Gwynne and Mikel Folcarelli’s Sakonnet Garden stopped me, made me smile and consider it in a garden full of such moments.  Here’s another–Nicotiana langsdorfii and Asclepias spp. These are two plants that I would not have thought to combine yet I loved them together when I saw them.

Another planting that just made me think and has the emotive quality I often find elusive is by Deborah Silver in Michigan and is closer to what I like to do but also very different. The soft greys and purples in front of hard edged boxwood add a luminous, feminine quality to the crisp, geometric hedge. The three different foliage sizes and textures repeated throughout are highly edited yet don’t feel meager. They feel full and soft and ample. The soft grey combined with the deep violet picks up on the slate roof and is masterful in its proportions.

Although these combinations by others are beautiful in their own right and tick off some of the items in my never ending round Robin of a list, my combinations are different. I like restful, blowzy plantings with things spilling out over an underlying structure that somewhat like an overstuffed piece of furniture if that makes any sense. I want my gardens to make you exhale and everything that troubles you from that day or moment just falls away. I want the mess to be okay too which makes my viewpoint the antithesis of many formal and Japanese Zen gardens although I have employed elements of both.

In the end, my practice is to just start with the structure and then build softness and serenity with punctuation points around that. It evolves though, and often the first plant grouping laid down doesn’t make the final edit. Everything moves and shifts and changes as I make studies month by month to insure that there is equal time given to the seasons. Winter is included in that with both evergreen and the wonderful ‘mess’ left standing. The solution for both small and large gardens always reveals itself to me through the thought and the physical process of making the drawing which in turn is always driven by the site. No two are ever alike. Going back to where I started on this ramble. I’m not sleeping well, my mind is active and the park planting plan is almost done. I am editing as I go along. Then I will worry it some more and edit it again until I believe it’s well and truely finished–hopefully by my self imposed deadline in two weeks.

My approach to this project has been very different from what I normally do which is what attracted me to it. I have spent the past four months visiting, observing, cataloging existing plants (some to reuse, others not), and imagining what I would want from a garden like this if I was a casual visitor. There are few ‘sacred cows’ except the central gazebo which is, in my mind, an okay place to start. A central ADA compliant path will be added to it from the parking lot. A request was made by the head horticulturalist of the park to focus on native plants and their cultivars. As far as I can make that work, it’s what I do normally anyway. First look to the natives and then if they don’t or can’t fulfill the design goals, look elsewhere.

As it is, the current configuration doesn’t invite any kind of interaction except from the resident groundhog and deer. Brides use it as a background for their pictures yet there is little in bloom in June.

I believe that gardens should be experiential. Being able to walk and rest inside, to see plants up close adds to the experience of a garden.  This one only allows looking at it from the sidelines. That became my first goal of the redesign. I want to honor the circular history of the garden but not be strictly bound by it, I want ample space for plants while lowering the maintenance, and I want the garden to be a place for all except the groundhog and deer!

I experimented with several layouts, playing with paths and circular sections that would still allow the gazebo to be the central feature. Using a spiral based on the nautilus created by a Fibonacci sequence was one of those layouts. It clicked for me. We have a meeting to discuss it and a few other issues next week. Meanwhile, the concept is below and I will work on plant lists.

Berta and Nate Atwater have made a landscape that is sublime in its simplicity. Boundary walls of native stone and sweeps of short mowed paths are punctuated with trained and pruned plants. The wild and the cultivated exist side by side and as complements to each other. The big idea for me was the low mowed paths.  These areas of nothing much that allow the eye and mind to rest or wander are what many gardeners would consider unused space to be filled were restful and contemplative. It takes a confidence to allow void to be the thing.  A mowed path through tall meadows and grasses is nothing new and common in large country gardens.  This was different in its short and shorter stature and allowed the views and verticals to sit equally.

First a large old house is sought by the event organizers. Once found, every other year architects, interior and landscape designers are invited to submit ideas for a space that will be on public display for the month of May. Each must submit a proposal for up to three spaces to a selection committee–so being invited isn’t the end process. The 2017 house is Neo-Gothic Alnwick Hall, one of the surviving homes on Millionaire’s Row between Madison and Morristown, New Jersey.

Photograph by Wing Wong/Memories TTL

I was only interested in one of the 17 landscape spaces offered. A small enclosed courtyard at the rear of the building. Apologies for the slightly out of focus before picture I took with my phone…

Below is my proposal which was accepted by the committee.  The next time I post, will be about the coordinating of this garden with the various artists and personalities involved as well as the details of building it. Special consideration has to be given to these types of gardens since they will get more foot traffic in one month than most get in a lifetime–more than 20,000 people!

I have never been one to blindly follow a trend or an idea. My thoughts, like most people’s, spring from my own experience and individual point of view. When I was working in the fashion industry, I was always interested in designers who were doing things differently from the rest.  I admired those who translated a burst of thought into ideas that were at first strange and wonderful but would ultimately be borrowed, watered down or interpreted by others. I was also interested in those who looked back and used history as a starting point celebrating the traditional and making it contemporary. For me, there is a healthy dichotomy of design thought there with equal emphasis on the new and the old.

In my mind, gardens or landscapes are defined as spaces that are outside of nature. They cannot be truly of nature since they are conceived and made by people. These human endeavors at garden making do not include restoration of native environments or habitat although they can incorporate those elements. They can try to mimic nature, but a garden is ultimately a space made by people for human activity, introspection, observation and the appreciation of beauty within the context of what is right for its particular environment and time. The human element of a garden is important. It is also where the outlier part comes in.

The gardens being made by the New Perennialist movement that started almost thirty years ago in Germany and have been perfected by Piet Oudolf and others are in my mind are largely to look at. I have visited some of the best of them and it’s the auxiliary spaces that invite human interaction, not the plantings. The gardens themselves may have a path or two through them, they may be large or small, but they are like paintings hung on a wall. They do not invite human participation. They are broad strokes of planting design artistry that invite visual reaction, not physical interaction.

There is great value in this idea when a site’s topography or limitations don’t allow for safe passage or it is a space that will act as a visual foil something else. This concept is what makes the High Line so successful and in my mind is also its downfall. The plantings are something that are passed through while doing something else. They can be admired, but in all but a few places they cannot be entered. They are beautiful, bold, border designs. The border as a garden design concept has been around almost as long as people have been making gardens. They exist on the sidelines. True, those sidelines can be breathtaking and can be beneficial to wildlife and the planet at large, but I am talking about garden making and that, as I said before, is a human undertaking that invites interaction.

Conversely there are historic gardens (remember that dichotomy?) that make plants such background players that they become almost irrelevant. They are decoration, they could be fake. These ‘gardens’ were designed primarily for people with little regard for the natural world other than how the designer could manipulate it into abstraction. Those gardens lose the sensory, introspective and observational aspects of plantings in a garden, leaving room only for human activity.

I believe there is room in contemporary garden and landscape design to celebrate human activity combined with interactive planting design as equal partners.  I also believe that the gardens and landscapes that do that will be long term successes. There is room for structure, hard surfaces and places for people as well as plants and habitat to co-exist and intermingle. They are not static or fixed in the moment past or present. We have changed our planet too much to be able to go back to nature as it was and gardens can help define how humans appreciate and savor the outdoors. What we really need to be thinking about is what is right for a specific piece of land in a specific region that will be used regularly by a group of individuals in a meaningful and participatory way. We need to consider how we entice people outside into the garden to observe, delight, create, to spend time and do things and think about their place in the world instead of just moving through it or looking at it or worse ignoring it and paying attention to hand held technology instead?

As a landscape designer I have questions that roll around in my brain to be solved by working through my design process. How do the successful attributes of traditional gardens and the best ideals of the new perennialists combine to create something new–something that balances the being and the seeing? How do I foster understanding and appreciation of our not so natural world, the one we now live in, through the design of spaces that allow people to interact with all of its pieces? Making planting design precious unto itself relegates it to the same place as a great work of art in a museum. It’s not that, it’s a living changeable thing. What is the most valuable human experience in any garden–is it different for every individual?  I try to strike a broad balance between the traditional and the contemporary–sometimes there are no perennials or grasses at all in my gardens. If that makes me an outlier, I’m okay with that.

Edit:  I sat on this post for a month or so until a group who I had a conversation with about this feeling of being an outlier and who I would consider to be New Perennialists encouraged me to publish it. –Susan

I would have never thought to suggest this as part of my purvue prior to attending KBIS. I have my interior design sisterhood to collaborate with on the details and some beautiful features to include that I would never have known about had I not gone to Las Vegas. On the kitchen side, there were some beautiful options as well.

So let’s talk toilets.  Wouldn’t it be nice to come in from a swim and sit on a heated seat? And wouldn’t it be nice not to have to worry about constantly cleaning it? The small space allotted for the WC in the poolhouse will also benefit from a wall hung unit.  As a guest of TOTO, I learned that all of this is possible. I won’t be doing the technical design in the space, but I will be asking that their products be specified. Why? Because they are super high qualtity, elegant, and innovative. That’s a no brainer.

Those of you who know me personally usually see the gregarious and social me. I am what is called a social introvert. I need and spend lots of time alone, but when in social situations I am connected and present–even though that’s not my natural state. The prospect of meeting 24 women who were absolute strangers was daunting. Enter the sisterhood.

Rather than my usual ‘Hi I’m Susan’ with extended hand routine I started off as of an observer. I wasn’t sure if I would be the proverbial square peg in a round hole–I’m a landscape designer not an interior designer. I wasn’t. These women–all interior designers, design bloggers and project managers- not only welcomed me but were just as curious about why I was there and what I did as I was about them.  For three days we shared incredible opportunities and experiences from a private tour of the Wynn resorts with its general manager to a beautiful luncheon with incredible food and wine sponsored by Thermador at the uber midmod Las Vegas  Country Club to a fun and lively dinner hosted by Toto.  We went by bus to see the new seamless indoor/outdoor Responsive Homes designed by Bobby Berk for Pardee Homes, who, afterwards, huddled with us under a patio heater in the chilly Nevada night. We visited the upscale, sustainable 2016 New American Home, built to showcase  green technologies, techniques and products. In between all of that we attended KBIS2016 to see the best in Kitchen and Bath Products. I found plenty to like for outdoor living.

Throughout the three days these designing women questioned, shared, learned about their design discipline and about each other. There was no bitchiness or jealousy or drama. Everyone showed up ready to be and give their best. They were authentic and enthusiastic and supportive of each other in every way. They will forever be my hashtag sisterhood. #designhounds #blogtourKBIS #KBIS2016 #KBISoutdoorliving

Most people would look at this and say ‘What’s wrong with that? It’s beautiful!”.  On the surface it was, but on closer inspection there were many functional issues and I saw opportunities to open up sight lines, to create family and entertaining space as well as to make better transitions from one place to the next and technical options to correct erosion and drainage problems. I also saw a yard that when it was first designed, twenty-five years ago, had been well thought out–but was now way past its prime. The fireplace, for example, had been shored by someone up on the back end with 2 x 4’s where the footing had separated from the stone work. That was just a disaster just waiting to slide down the hill if not repaired or demolished. Boxwood hedges that defined several ‘rooms’ had been allowed to get too big and many had large dead sections or were riddled with fungus. Trees that had been smaller had now outgrown their sites, had dead wood, or were in two cases just dead. Every last bit of masonry had to be repaired…there were loose stones and steps throughout.

After our arborist completed recommended tree work and removals, the pool renovation came first. We repaired the coping, re-plastered in a new darker color, added crisp, blue glass subway style waterline tile, added two bluestone decks and a ribbon around the pool. We demolished the tumbled down pergola to gain some square footage and open up usable space.  The very crooked fence was straightened out and the hillside above the now exposed stone wall was planted. New furniture was ordered that added to the contemporary feel of the space. An attempted water feature repair did not work on the old water wall so that will be the final piece added to the puzzle later this year.

I met several times with the clients and their children to discuss what to save and what to demolish as well as what their ‘dream’ yard would entail.  The kids wanted a play space beyond the front yard swing. The adults wanted safe and usable pool space as well as a larger entertaining space. They also wanted a more contemporary feeling within the context of what was there.

An old dog run behind the garage that had a more gentle slope than the rest of the property was re-made into a children’s play area. The children hand painted curtains for their ‘stage’.

Extra fence from the pool area was used to enclose it on the lower side and the chainlink fence that had contained the dogs was removed.  A simple balance beam was made from felled tree trunks, a playhouse/stage area with a new bright blue deck was built under the existing stairs and a slide added to the top. The remaining stockade fence was stained white to brighten up the shady area and a carnival silly mirror was added to it just for fun.

The final phases of the renovation ended up being the most problematic.  Almost all of the existing bluestone had to be relaid since it was incorrectly installed the first time. Retaining walls had insufficient foundations and were failing and were replaced.  The hillside below was stabilized and planted with native Carex to aid in soil retention.  The fireplace was demolished and new walls were added to a reconfigured patio.  The enlarged patio has a firepit and contemporary furnishings. The new seatwall has built in speakers and the steps to the pool have been widened as has the walkway to the adjacent courtyard.  A garden now visually links the patio with the pool decks.

A courtyard was turfed over and the boxwood hedges and plantings in the front yard redesigned.  A small, curved path at the driveway entrance was re-configured to allow for two chairs for adults who supervise the driveway bike and scooter riding.

Sections of hedge were removed from each side of the walkway to unify both sides of the front lawn.  A scraggly pine was removed to allow what will be a beautiful Cornus kousa more light and room.  Boxwood were replace with those from other areas and were pruned into clean lined shapes. Nepeta and daylillies were transplanted from the driveway to add seasonal interest.  Plants were added to a side walk as well as to the driveway areas and new micro patio.

The best thing is that every time I visit there are bikes, hula hoops, pool toys and chalk art everywhere. What was once a problem space has become one that is loved and used.  I can’t ask for a better result!

Nobody ever taught me the rules of containers so I approach them in the same way I would any design. I lean towards structure planted with abandon in my garden design and my container plantings reflect that for the most part. Since the space and number of plants I can use is so limited, I am a ruthless editor.  I don’t personally love planters filled with lots of different kinds of plants. I think it makes a stronger visual statement to limit them in the same way I would any other design. The container above has four varieties in it, the one below three. In a really big planter I may use as many as five, repeated throughout the design.

My approach is the same as for any design–first decide on the primary structure and then build down from there. In a garden that may be a tree, a pergola, or a sculpture, in a pot, it’s the same–there has to be something anchoring it all.

When I shop for container plants,  I shop for all of  them at once, collecting special plants from a wide variety of sources. The process takes several days. If a specific request was made, such as the variegated willow standards in the pots above I will seek them out. Each season I limit the color palette which aids in later editing. This year my palette included chartreuse, deep green, salmon/apricot, white/grey and a very saturated purple.

Most of the time I use the client’s own containers, but over the past few years I’ve been specifying them in larger designs so I know they will work within the context of the larger landscape that I have designed. Planters to scale and the right style for the larger context are details that make or break a project.