You are here: Home / Archives for Garden Ornament

Buck Week

I was remiss in one very important regard concerning the development of the Jackie boxes a few days ago.  They would not have been possible without Buck.  A Saarinen scholar in architecture at Cranbrook Academy of Art in the 70’s, a licensed contractor, and an architect and Director of technical design with Rossetti Architects for years-he agreed to come on at Branch.  He makes it possible for me to make the idea of beautiful objects for gardens a reality.  Though he has lived in Michigan for over 30 years, he is Texas to the bone.  He still has the accent; his southern style language can be better than colorful.  He loves anything that goes fast or makes lots of noise; this makes him a Harley guy.  Outside of this,  he is a very talented CAD designer, and an exactingly precise and formidably talented fabricator. He informs all of my design with a construction process that is solid, durable, true and square. And he is famous with me for having infinite patience,  as I struggle trying to put a good design together. I thought I should take some time to talk about some of the things he has made, and how he makes them. 

  
The Jackie box is by no means the only box we manufacture.  This lattice box with a diamond medallion and button is a complex box to make, though the general construction is very much the same as the Jackie box. He contructs the size of the lattice based on the overall size of the box.  The idea is to represent as many complete diamonds as possible, with no awkward shapes on the frame edges.  You can see in this three quarter view that all the partial diamonds match all the way around. The liner in this case is extira board varnished with marine varnish.  I like the contrast between the solid steel diamond, and the open latticework diamonds.  It is a detailed yet elegant box. Best of all, it is so perfectly contructed no one would notice the construction.  Buck has no interest in a slip that shows. 

This lattice box, custom made for a client, has a copper liner. The look is much more formal than the extira version, but much the same warm color.  Special request from clients, he handles them like the professional that he is. He personally sees to every detail.  Every box is tig welded-by Buck.  He shepards them through the hot dip galvanizing process.  He acid washes them himself.  Every box we make-made by hand.  

We did make the tall lattice box with the panel at the top; the intricate detail of the lattice welcomes and supports the plain rectangle at the top.  This rectangular shape does a great job of making a considerable statement at the front door. 

One season a client requested a cream yellow extira board panels.  I followed suit with a planting that celebrated that yellow.  In late fall, the extira boards got a coat of dark chocolate paint.  What made by hand gets you is the ability to update by hand.  This I like.

Our tall lattice boxes now sport extira panels in a dark blue grey.  This color so celebrates the color of the acid washed steel. A dark base color lends importance to the variation in the steel finish color.  Acid washing is more than unpredictable.  No matter how many tests we make, each run has its own character.  Should you like the variability of the color of lead, you will like this finish. 


My Jackie box-I hope it is as reserved and beautifully formal as Jackie K.  Buck saw to all of the details.  The lattice box makes much of every gardener’s love of lattice,  and then some.  Every single box we have at the shop comes from Buck’s hands.  This week-I plan to celebrate that.  Buck week.

Posted on: June 28, 2010 3 Comments
Filed Under: The Branch Studio, Garden Ornament, Detroit Garden Works Tagged With: , ,

The Jackie Box

Who knows why I have never posted about my subsidiary company, the Branch Studio, but I will now. Five years ago or better I created a division of Deborah Silver and Company devoted to the creation and manufacture of fine objects for gardens.  A thirteen thousand square foot building houses a wood shop, a kiln, sophisticated welding equipment and all that goes with. a fabrication  studio. It has long been been a dream of mine-to design and manufacture great objects for gardens in a variety of materials.  Designing beautiful and functional objects is not easy.  Each object has a beginning, CAD drawings, a series of prototypes, a tuneup, and a number of revisions; there is an entire evolutionary process that goes on longer than I thought.  And longer still. Most everything can be improved upon, can it not?       

Not surprisingly, the first item on my design agenda-a box.  I have a long standing love affair with the garden box.  Some call them orangery boxes; the first image that comes to my mind are the boxes at Versailles, used to house an enormous collection of citrus trees.  I doubt most people feel their glass of lemonade is a luxury; sophisticated growing and shipping make it possible to buy a lemon for not so much money every day of the year.  But there was a time in northern climates when having oranges available to eat meant growing orange trees and wintering them under glass.  Giant boxes housing citrus trees were a feature at Versailles.  The Versailles box still made by Les Jardins du Roi Soleil-they made my heart pound 20 years ago and still do.  Manufactured of hinged wood panels, and cast iron frames, a fruit tree destined for a winter in the orangery could easily be slid out and moved indoors, while the boxes stayed put outdoors.  I imported and sold plenty of them over the past 15 years.  All my gardening life I have wanted to make beautiful boxes.  For boxwood topiaries, for trees, for citrus, for flowers, for tomatoes.  A well donebox can provide an elegant and generously sized home for a garden.

My first box design-the Jackie box.  This classic box with an X detail celebrated by a button of note-inspired by Jackie Kennedy. Her fabulous Oleg Cassini suits featured big buttons I will never forget. I am not the only one who admired her great style. Her suit buttons are so much a part of my history, and so much a part of what I admire about design. These buttons were jewelry integral to the overall design of the suit.  Though I have not one bit of interest in clothes myself, I admired Mr. Cassini’s design work, and the iconic Jackie Kennedy.   My first Jackie boxes had extira board panels-a favorite of sign companies; these panels do not absorb water.  They could be left to weather, be varnished like the panels of a Brownie camera, or painted. 

Though weatherproof, each Jackie box has its own galvanized metal liner, and a removeable steel frame sitting on top that provides the illusion of thickness, and finishes the top edge with a wide band of steel.  Welded to the bottom, bun feet know in the metal industry as squashed ball feet. A citrus tree could be lifted out of the box in its galvanized liner, and wintered in a conservatory.


The first variation on the Jackie box-a tall box with a rectangluar panel at the bottom. We also made a series with the panel at the top-but I like this version best. The tall box has a much different feeling than the square. It is no surprise that geometry has visual cache, but shapes have an emotional component as well.  Some squares are pleasingly solid and formal-others can be stodgy-funny that.  Part of the design process was selecting sizes and proportions that are heartstopping, not sleepy.   

I grew up designing objects at the same pace that the Jackie boxes evolved. The brown extira board was certainly durable, but this brown is better on a UPS truck than a planter box.  These painted extira board panels were a reference to the shutter color on the house.  This was the decision of the client, and her interior designer Lucy Earl-it would not have been my call. But I was surprised how much I liked the end result-the colors of the flowers I have chosen have everything to do with the blue of this box; it was much too strong to ignore.  

I did however take a cue from those blue extira board panels.  We now paint our boxes for the shop with Porter exterior acrylic paint.  It is amazingly durable.  This color, a darker blue grey than the steel.  The painted extira panel has finally come into its own.    

This small Jackie box was made with steel in smaller widths, and a smaller buttom. Scaling a design up or down requires looking at the dimension and thickness of every component.  Lots of things seem obvious now that were not so obvious at the beginning.    

A beautiful box-I have been after that design a good many years.  We are now making the Jackie box with solid steel panels.  I think it is a good looking box.  Given the currently astronomical price of lead, I think this steel and its finish provides a viable and handsome alternative to that classic material.  Judging from the orders we have filled this season for Jackie boxes in a number of sizes and panel options, other people are starting to think so too.  I have a pair of Jackie boxes very close to finish-38″ by 38″ by 30″ tall made with 1/4 inch thick steel-to be planted with flowers.  I cannot wait.

Posted on: June 27, 2010 4 Comments
Filed Under: The Branch Studio, Garden Ornament Tagged With: , , , , ,

A Designer’s Garden

The time I spend planting pots and containers for clients sometimes enables me to see landscapes I would not otherwise see.  This old and stately Tudor style home has a landscape of considerable age- still viable, and still beautiful.  I am sure I have quoted Henry Mitchell at least three times on this topic.  “There are no beautiful old landscapes…beautiful landscapes are a result of the intensive care of the present.”  That being said, there are times when intensive care really means sensitive care.  Though this client is an interior designer of considerable skill, she felt no need to take apart, streamline, cleanup, remake, or other wise impose on a landscape beautifully situated and thriving in its own right.  

There is an understated but fully mature beauty to this property.  It takes a very mature and sure eye to leave untouched what is an integral part of the history of the property.  Her ability to leave be is pretty impressive.  These vintage wood boxes at her front door got tree-form hydrangea “Pink Diamond” .  It is a classically beautiful white hydrangea of paniculata grandiflora heritage, whose blooms pink as they age.  They seem so appropriate to the architecture of both the house and landscape. There are times when seeing what you expect to see is completely satisfying.  Certain plant materials feel right with certain architecture.  Nantucket style houses have a love affair of long standing with Rugosa roses.  1950 style ranch homes, on the other hand, can easily handle boxed hedges of gold vicary privet.  These plant materials are authentic to their respective time and place.      

This gorgeous stone staircase which I am guessing dates back to the 1920’s, is a home to old boston ivy vines.  My client made no effort to break up this old relationship-she only and gently prunes the vines away from the stair treads.  The urn set in a bed look like it has been there many years.  I have been guilty as charged plenty of times-thinking that gardening is another word for housekeeping. Like most people, I can be a contradiction in terms.  The Italian garden on the verge of ruin that I love so much I would never permit on my own property.  So I do recognize and respect a designer who deliberately keeps her hands from cleaning up the evidence of age from her landscape.

This pool is original to the house; the horizontal arms are a lap pool; the vertical arms designed for lounging in the water.  I have never seen another pool of this shape and design in person or in books. How it works to accomodate swimmers and loungers alike is simple and effective.  The overall shape striking-and well worth preservation.  

This very large oval wirework plant stand of an age and design quite sympathetic to the house and grounds, does not hold individual clay pots, as it once would have.  My client wanted to plant it of a piece.  Her point of view contrasts with the original intent of the piece, in a very effective way.  A garden of size is growing here.  The blues and whites are friendly to the overall white and lavender color scheme in evidence in all of the garden areas.  The piece sits on a bluestone terrace adjacent to the kitchen, at the rear of the house.  This garden is a very private space.   

A contemporary French terra cotta pot from the south of France is whitewashed, and planted in concert with the wirework stand.   Like other places in the landscape, my enchantment with the space does not rely on surprise. Every element seems to belong.

New to the kitchen terrace this year, a table and chairs in an entirely contemporary vein. The terrace has a new reason for being.


As sculptural as they are utilitarian, the suite is a substantial and confident dose of individual expression.  Unexpectedly, I really like it.

Posted on: June 20, 2010 Leave a Comment
Filed Under: Garden Ornament, Garden Design, Landscape Design Tagged With:

Ready For Water

These early June days, my days are filled with projects, and those scraps and pieces more commonly known as following up.  The fulfillment of all of those little ending details that transforms a job to be done into a finished and beautiful presentation.  These big things and little things, at the same time, is the normal course of events.  At home, a big and little thing of my own.  Carter has rebuilt my leaking fountain, and Buck repainted the inside.  The chlorinated rubber pool paint has to cure five days before the pool can be filled. It seems like it has been a lifetime since I have had  my water.      

Post the appropriate waiting period, Buck is filling the fountain.  Gillette Pools installed new out take jets-installed properly in the wall of the basin.  The original pool had these jets installed in the stone riser-not such a good look. Lest you not understand the effort expended for my fountain by Gillette Pools, they took on a massive mess, and made it right. They took on a deconstruction and reconstruction; this is tedious and uncertain work.  I had to commit to the project before what they knew what it would take to fix it. Yikes! Though we cleaned the inside, the sandy grit from the concrete work is still visible on the bottom of the pool.     

Howard and Milo are happy about getting their overscaled water dish back; the moment water started pouring into the fountain, they were there checking it out. Sometimes I leave the water at the level shown here-sometimes I fill it all the way to the top.  Today, I am feeling like to the top is an excellent idea. If you think this was the equivalent of Christmas Day to me, you are right. 

Milo is in motion running for his life the very second water starts blasting out of those jets. How did I know when the exact moment was at hand?  Buck and I were on the phone with each other-as he needed to be in the basement to adjust the valves governing the height of the water.  I was so worried the pumps would not work at all-having been silent almost 10 months.  No science here-just a nagging worry that something else would go wrong.  Buck had hauled the filters outside and cleaned them, and was very confident all would work fine. 

The water coming out of the jets-old stinky and dirty water. It will take a few minutes for each jet to be flushed out, and spouting clean water.  The corgis are no where to be seen.  Then the tedious job of getting the jets adjusted so the height is just so-meaning high enough to make enough sound to blotto the sound of my neighbor’s lawn mower.  The sound that a jet of water produces is the best part of having a fountain. 

Each valve gets turned up or down and up again until the pressure produces spouts of equal height. 

The water is murky with mortar and dirt.  It will take a few days stirring up and filtering out before the water is clean.  The reconstruction was such a beautiful job; the water appears to my eye to be exactly level-as if the fountain had a sheet of glass over the top.   

In another few days, the water is clean, and the Corgis are back to drinking from it like nothing had ever happened. But I know plenty has happened-and more is yet to come.  Dealing with the damage to the landscape is the next order of business.  There is more work to go than what I would like.  The good part-I have the luxury of rethinking certain parts of the composition.  Luxury from disaster-this is what I call trying to keep a good attitude going.    


I will keep you posted.

Posted on: June 9, 2010 1 Comment
Filed Under: Garden Stories, Garden Ornament, The Natural World Tagged With: