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Archives for February 2018

Coming Home

Rob shops on and off all year long, but in the month of September, he shops in Europe and the US, traveling just about full time. Months ahead of the fact, he is shopping for the spring season to come. Last year’s extended shopping trip was to France. Suffice it to say that he landed in Paris, picked up his rental car, and hit the ground running. For weeks he drove all over France attending antique shows, visiting dealers with whom he has long standing relationships, potteries, small specialty businesses, and the Maison Et Objet design fair. This biannual fair, one of the largest in the world, features high style objects for both inside and out.

In January of last year, his trip to the Mart in Atlanta resulted in the purchase of a container load of pots from Vietnam. A dealer in Louisiana who owns potteries and contracts out the manufacture of pots to her specification in Vietnam is a friend and valued supplier. Rob places an order, based on pot shapes and glazes that he sees in person. These stoneware pots are frost proof. Her glazes are beautiful, intriguing, and equally as frost proof as the clay body. The frost proof part is a big issue for gardeners in Michigan. A pot that can stay out all winter is of great value in our climate. Pots that can stay in place over the winter are pots we like.

This year, we placed an order for a 52 foot long container, stacked to the ceiling. The Vietnamese potteries are unusual in the following regard. They not only manufacture to order, they ready their goods for shipment. They are expert packers. They are happy to load a container bound for other countries. Their packing expertise has a lot to do with the thriving tennis shoe industry in Vietnam. Each pot you see in the above picture has 3 smaller sizes nested inside. The smaller pots, in graduated sizes, are nested inside the Mama pot protected by a layer of recycled tennis shoe sole cut offs. The pots that Rob orders and brings in from Vietnam are gorgeous. They are compatible with both tradition and contemporary landscapes. When he orders an entire container load, this means that the price to our customers is all that much more reasonable. I can say that Detroit Garden Works will have lots of frost proof glazed stoneware pots available for great prices this spring.

Not all of Rob’s shopping is as efficient and reasonable as the load of pots from Vietnam. He shopped at a number of small potteries in France this past September. Few of them have the ability to pack, and deliver. They make the pots, and offer them for sale. Locally. He placed a special order for pots, knowing that we would need help to get them ready to ship. Our shipping company played a vital role in getting this container to us. They send trucks to all of those places where Rob shopped, to pick up the goods and consolidate them in their warehouse in Paris. Once all of his purchases have been collected, they are boxed or crated for shipment. Once everything is ready, the goods are handed off to a freight company that will see that our container is shipped door to door, from Paris France to Sylvan Lake Michigan. Countless rules and regulations govern the import of goods from other countries. In a good year, all goes smoothly. This year, a glitch. The bill of lading did not specify the city, so the transport company decided their work was done once the container arrived in Detroit. It sat on the railway for better than a week after it cleared customs, while all the parties involved decided how to get our container transported the last 28 miles. Heather’s last week with us was in part spent training our new internet sales and service person Jackie in the fine art of getting a container derailed by incomplete paperwork back on track.    Once the container was unloaded, all of the boxes went into our garage and stockroom. There were a lot of boxes and crates to unpack. 204, to be exact. Every pot Rob purchased came to us in its own box.  Every box was stuffed with heavyweight kraft packing paper. Very large pots came in wood crates built especially for this purpose.

The trip from Paris can be a rough ride, so expert packing is necessary. Though the entire container load was insured, our primary interest is in pots delivered in perfect condition. In all of the 204 packages, only one pot has a small chip in the glaze.

A collection of both new and antique wood barrels would not be subject to breakage, so they were blanket wrapped.

In the upper left of the above photo you can see Jackie moving a pot she had just unpacked. That will give you an idea of how much paper was used to pack the pots. I was standing near the top of our rolling ladder to take this picture.

We are fortunate to have a paper recycling facility available to us. After all of the boxes were knocked down and placed flat in our box truck, we started loading the paper.  It would take 3 truck loads before all of the paper was gone. Now we are taking inventory, pricing, and displaying asfast as we can.  The shop reopens for the season in 2 days.

A first look at the pots from Les Enfant de Boisset made clear why Rob fell for them.  The color is a rich and lively mix of olive greens.

Even the interior of the pots is beautiful.

Detroit Garden Works is opening for the 2018 season March 1.

 

Posted on: February 27, 2018 17 Comments
Filed Under: Color, Garden Ornament, Detroit Garden Works, Spring Tagged With:

Bringing The Outside In

Given that the inside and outside are very different places to be, it is no surprise that designers who are equally at ease whether inside or out are the exception rather than the rule. I know a few, and I admire them for their ability to move from inside out and back in again without skipping a beat. A client asking me for interior design gets referred to someone else. I know enough about interior design to know I would be seriously out of my depth. Several years ago I made major changes to the interior of my own home, with the help of a very well regarded interior designer. She happens to be a friend, so we fought like cats and dogs more often than I want to admit. None of that difference of opinion is visible. She had an overall vision of the project from the beginning, and the results, happily for me, reflect that. She stuck by her ideas. One space flows into another. There are visual and spatial surprises. My interiors do not look like what she would would have for herself. They look like me, only better and more finely tuned than what I could have ever done on my own. The fact that she is at her best inside, and I am at my worst inside, made for an interesting relationship.

Though I would rather be outdoors than anywhere else, it seems natural that a thoughtful balance between in and out is a relationship worth cultivating. Cultivation churns up a lot of dirt. More on that to come! A dwelling is a place to be out of, and protected from, the elements. I like that the water comes out of the faucets in my house, rather than from the ceiling. My house is a getaway from extreme heat and cold, wind, pelting rain, snow, mosquitoes and so forth. I am appreciative and interested in all manner of wildlife, but a mouse in the house is a no go. Windows are just that-a view to, rather than an immersion in the natural world. Being inside has its value and charm.

That idea in favor of separation and distinctly different experiences between inside and out has been challenged in recent years. Exterior grade furniture upholstered in exterior grade fabric makes an outdoor living room possible. That furniture can be placed on an exterior grade rug. Exterior kitchens that mimic and rival a well equipped interior kitchen further blur the line between the inside and out. Exterior grade is a fancy way of saying weather resistant. My outdoor furniture is resin wicker. It is lightweight, and impervious to sun, rain, snow and ice. The cushions are specifically designed to drain quickly after a downpour. After 8 years outdoors, the fabric  is a wee bit faded, and moss and lichens have begun to grow in the seams. I do not mind plants growing on my cushions outdoors; that seems appropriate to the place.

An ancient roof at Detroit Garden Works was showing strong signs of age.  It was not doing such a great job of keeping what was outside on the outside. Every rain would produce drips from one end of the building to the other. It only took a week or so to install a new roof. And another 2 or 3 weeks to track down some trouble spots. But one significant trouble spot needed attention. In 1995, we installed a 3′ by 3′ skylight near the entrance doors to the shop. It was a way to bring the light from outdoors into the interior. But the wood framing had deteriorated over the years such that we had more than light coming through that hole in the roof.

A decision was made to replace the skylight with a bigger skylight. This 8′ by 8′ domed skylight is technologically vastly superior to our previous version, and its great size floods the area with light. We even have views of the trees on either side of the building.  I would think a banana plant would be very happy under the dome. The size was a bit of a shock, but this is a dose of the outdoors inside I am sure we will enjoy.

Given how much work we had already done to introduce more light into the shop, it was decided to repaint the ceiling. The last time we had painted it was in 1996. That job was rather easy, as the space was empty. Our general contractor sprayed the ceilings while Rob pushed him around on our rolling ladder. I still remember the name of the color-Winter Pear. Once the skylight was in, we realized how really dark that color that ceiling color was. Repainting this was not a job any of us wanted to take on, so I called Wayne.

We moved every object in both rooms to the garage. We gave Wayne a hand covering the walls and floors with plastic and painters tarps, picking up paint, and renting the scaffolding he needed. We primed the raw steel beams with iron oxide primer. Every square inch in the airspace got repainted the same color as the walls-Dove White, from Benjamin Moore. We had entered into the churning up dirt part of cultivating better light inside the shop. Though we had covered every surface, paint dust managed to get on just about everything.

Wayne ran the heat at 65 degrees to get the paint to dry more quickly, so the blower from the furnace did a good job of pushing the paint particulates everywhere. The painting went very fast, the cleanup took some time.

We are happy with with the outcome.  We have just enough of the outdoors inside now to make our garden shop feel more like the garden. You’ll see.

Everything will move fast now.  We are beginning to put the store back together.  A 40 foot container from France will be at our door this Friday morning. And March 1st, Detroit Garden Works will be back open for the 2018 gardening season. We have had time to make all of these changes, courtesy of the great outdoors.    The February garden

Posted on: February 14, 2018 10 Comments
Filed Under: Winter, Detroit Garden Works

The Amaryllis Crop

February in a northern garden designer’s life ought to be snoozy. 25 years ago, my landscape design work finished up in mid November, and did not resume until the snow and cold looked to be waning the following March. I can’t remember what I did with those winters now, so it couldn’t have been much. How fun, to not have much to do. Oh to have those quiet winter baby days back. Now there are requests for design year round. Some late 2017 projects are inching slowly towards the drawing board now, as I reserve the right to indulge in a little bit of horsing around. Even though the engine is running, the parking brake is on.

It takes an entire winter to re imagine Detroit Garden Works for the season to come. That process is still in process. If you follow Rob’s instagram page DetroitGarden you know the walls, fixtures and floors in the largest part of the store are swathed in painter’s plastic. Wayne is here spray painting the ceilings, a job that was last done in 1995. Yes, they were due. Moving everything our of those rooms, dusting and scraping the loose paint, and repainting all of the shelves and trim took most of January. Two containers from overseas have arrived. A container from France should be docking in NY shortly, and two more will arrive from Belgium and Vietnam towards the end of the month. The shop is due to reopen March 1. February is a busy time, ready  or not. Most annoyingly, part of my winter has involved some involuntary babysitting. If you read this journal regularly, you know I am not a fan of plants in the house. I love having a plant free season. Like most houses, I have a house which is notable for a lack of natural light in the winter. My house is dark (by plant standards), hot and the air is dry- an environment that plants don’t want. Well I don’t want them either. The bugs and dirt don’t bother me. Nor the fact that tropical plants hardly look like they belong inside a house in Michigan. I could live with those things. The fact that they need regular care and attention leaves me cold. Enough of my time gets absorbed by the needs of the plants for a good portion of the year. I like the time off from that group of living things that have no problem dying on you despite a huge effort to keep them happy and healthy. The phalaenopsis orchids pictured above are a gift scheduled to be delivered the end of the week. That I can live with, as the end of my responsibility for them is near. After having them for one day, a new bud is withering.  I can’t get rid of them fast enough.

The amaryllis are another story. Rob sells scads of them in the shop at the holidays. Invariably, there are a few left over. Some bare root bulbs I gave away to good customers when no one was watching. I knew anything left over would come to me, as my office is warm. Karen potted up and watered them liberally, and moved them to the utility room near my office. Then she went on break. There they sat. I have a little frig for my milk and a spot for cereal, so every morning making breakfast I had to look at them. Not one was making any move to come on. Not one was looking like it was shriveling or dying. They were in a state of suspended animation.

After three weeks of scowling at them every time I walked in that room, I looked up their culture on line.  I did not read anything that I did not already know. Popular lore suggests that after potting and watering, the bulb so be left alone until it puts forth growth, either in the form of flowers or leaves. By mid January these bulbs had been watered only once in the 6 months since they arrived. Another article (which of course I cannot find now) suggested that watering the bulbs normally, but sparingly in advance of any growth was fine.

Tired of looking at their expectant bulb faces, I had a decision to make. I had to either throw them away, or see if I could get them to grow. I knew I would feel guilty, and face ridicule from Rob if I didn’t try to grow them on. So I soaked the pots thoroughly, and moved them to an all plastic Rubbermaid tabouret in my drawing studio. The tabouret has tall sides, so I could slosh the water and dirt around with impunity. The industrial windows are 6 feet tall, and face south. At least if we had no sun, there was still plenty of light. The tabouret also has wheels, so I could move them away from the windows when the temperatures dropped into the single digits.

You see what was happening here? My carefree February became an obsession to get those bulbs to break dormancy, grow and bloom. I  scrutinized them every day. I had to come in on Sunday to be sure they didn’t need anything. I was certain that the bulbs that had been potted in non-draining jardinieres would rot if I wasn’t especially careful with the water. And the one’s planted to larger fiber pots would come blind from having been over potted. None of this happened. One by one, they began to grow. One bulb threw a pair of stalks at once, and is in full bloom on my conference table right now.  I have to admit The big showy white flowers are a welcome contrast to that other kind of white blanketing the entire landscape.

One hapless bulb had been left behind by shoppers as it one bloom stalk withered and rotted from the cold in the greenhouse. So I cut it back, and watched to see if another bloom stalk would emerge. After sulking for a few weeks, I could tell something was afoot. It is February, so I had time to turn the flowering stalks leaning towards the light away from the window.

My amaryllis crop, which I never sought or wanted, had me in its grip. The attention it took had expanded to an alarming amount of time. I was going in there 4 times a day just to look things over.

The second bulb to bloom had red flowers – not my favorite. So I took it in to Dave and Heather so they could enjoy it. Now I have 3 stops to make every day, checking on the amaryllis. And to make matters that much worse, I have made a list of suppliers of unusual amaryllis bulbs and the varieties I like available to Rob, as well as a source of heat mats so we can provide them with the heat they want and need to come on. And finally, the time it took to take pictures and write this post-hours more.

Now you know why I do not like having plants in the house.

 

Posted on: February 7, 2018 48 Comments
Filed Under: Winter, flowers, Plants Tagged With:

Buds

You know it is the dead of winter in Michigan when the garden is a place to long for from afar. Most of my garden views now are through the windows. Not that I didn’t plan for good views from inside, but the sheer thrill of a landscape is being in it, or experiencing it up close. I would be lying if I said I enjoyed the winter as much as the other three seasons. Ha!~ I hate being cooped up, and I am not a skier or an ice fisherman. Being outside now is a necessity to get from one place to another. I do not walk my garden in the winter. I cannot really explain this, but I do not want to disturb my dormant landscape. In my opinion, the winter is the time to let everything as it is, be. As it is, to see this part of the garden in winter requires gearing up – as in coat, hat, boots and gloves. Today I jump tromped through the snow rather that shoveling the upper deck, to take this picture. Was it worth the effort? But for a gorgeous circa 1920 Jarre de Biot, from the now closed Poterie Provencale that makes my heart beat faster every time I look at it, this scene is not that scenic. A garden growing and representing is a tough act to follow.

The best part of it may be the Parrotia Persica. There are four of them in the driveway garden. I planted them close to 20 years ago. This means they are old enough to exhibit that beautiful exfoliating bark prized by gardeners. They also hang on to their leaves throughout all but the windiest of winters. Those copper color leaves are a sight for winter sore eyes.

Even these dead leaves look good to me. But the fact of the matter is I am not looking at anything that is dead. Hibernating would be a better and much less emotionally charged word. Every woody plant in my yard grew and set buds for the spring of 2018 last summer. Some buds, on spring flowering trees are flower buds.  Smaller buds will surely become leaves once the weather breaks. The dead leaves from 2017 on the parrotias will be pushed off in the spring, when the 2018 leaf buds set in 2017, swell and grow. The parrotias were ready for this winter long before I was.

The flower buds on magnolia trees are large and fuzzy. No big fuzzy oval buds on a magnolia going in to winter means there will be no flowers. Terribly cold weather can damage or destroy those flower buds, while the leaf buds survive. A flower bud is a big and vulnerable structure, whereas every tree keeps their leaf buds close to their vest until the winter passes. It is an easy matter to spot magnolia flower buds in winter, especially when a light and dry snow falls. You can see your future in the garden if you see the signs. Happily, I see magnolia flowers in my future.

Nature does not wait until the last minute to make a move. As no growth goes on during the winter months, the formation of buds for the spring to come have to be made many months in advance. This is why watering trees and shrubs in August and on through the fall is so important. Once the leaves drop, and the ground freezes, there will be no more activity until the season turns to spring. It only makes sense that the growth of any woody plant instigated by the spring of one year culminates in the readiness for the spring of the following year. This is not in any way magical.  It is survival.

The dogwoods are the easiest to read. The big fat round buds set in September are flower buds. The small pointed buds will eventually unfurl and become leaves. In a way, I regret knowing in advance whether there will be a heavy dogwood bloom 6 months in advance of the fact. But I do like knowing in advance that if I water my trees properly at the time they are setting flower and leaf buds, I am giving them a helping hand.

Though it might appear that all there is to see here are sticks and snow, nothing could be further from the truth. Thousands upon thousands of fully formed but dormant buds are ready and waiting for the light to turn green. Imagine that.The spring season every gardener longs for will finally arrive, and will be impossible to keep up with.

The spring is a rush of events almost impossible to keep track of. I am sure there are moments I miss, no matter how much effort I put towards experiencing it all. Today I took note of the columnar fruiting pear tree in the foreground of this picture, and imagined what it will be to see it it in full bloom with the leaf shoots not far behind. I had time for that today. Those flowers in spring will last but a moment.

I also had time to think about how nature is a consummate engineer. Very little of the story of survival is left to chance. That is a big topic best left to the dog days of winter to think about. All the bare branches outlined in snow today were beautiful. But what is simmering beneath the surface is better than beautiful.

These evergreen Frazier fir boughs were cut in November. They were stuffed in to dry floral foam set in the containers I have at the end of my driveway. Though they were cut from the tree 3 months ago, the dormant buds are still plump, juicy, and viable. This is what I would call the miracle of the will to live. That will to live and prosper is so strong in every living thing. Nature makes the plant world, in all of its forms, possible. Viable.

Though the view out my window is this shade of blah and that shade of blah, and all that blah dusted with a fresh layer of snow from grey skies, what lies in wait beneath the surface is very exciting, indeed. Waiting out the winter is an exercise in restraint and appreciation. Truly.

 

Posted on: February 4, 2018 17 Comments
Filed Under: Woody Plants, Winter Tagged With: , , , , ,