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A New Brick Walk

In 2004 I bought 7 acres of land that was home to a pair of 15,000 square foot industrial buildings.  One of the buildings is home to all of the landscape vehicles, machines, tools and materials.  The other is a place where we fabricate ornament for gardens in a variety of media.  It was a big move, but the landscape company needed the space, and I needed to design and make things for gardens.  A brick road dating back to the 1920’s came with the land and buildings.  Buried under 8 inches of composted weeds, I did not discover the brick until I had owned the property for over a year.  Steve dug up a bucket full of bricks, and called me over to see them.  I was thrilled.  We have used them on several projects.  I have been waiting a long time for a 2 day break in the landscape schedule, so I could take some of that brick home for my front walk.  We had a breather; Steve and his crew would dry laid the brick on a bed of slag. 

These are handmade bricks, made in Ohio in the late 19th and early 20th century.  They are sometimes called shale brick, as they are made from that silica rich material.  They are sometimes called fireclay bricks, as they were fired at such high temperatures for so long that the clay particles actually melt, and vitrify, like glass.  They are incredibly durable, and absolutely impervious to weather or weight.  Not incidentally, they happen to be beautiful. 

The invention of paved roads had much to do with the invention of the automobile.  Dusty rocky roads were hard on paint, chrome, and touring outfits. Asphalt was invented in 1930, but it was a while before the material and technique was perfected.  These rock hard overscaled bricks were perfect for roads.  No cars come to my front door, but I knew they would be a welcome replacement for my broken and nondescript 1930’s concrete walk.  The tools are pretty simple, but the skill required is considerable.  Each brick is a different size, and a different thickness.  The walk needed to slope slightly towards the sidewalk, to insure positive drainage.  The steps needed to be level; a step out of level can trip someone.   

My front walk gets very little traffic, besides the mailman.  Mine is a corner house; the driveway is around that corner from here.  Buck and I use the basement door, and so do our friends.  In good weather, the gate to the garden is at the end of the drive.  I was mostly interested in a look that would compliment my 1930’s house. 

I had some worry about the color of the brick.  The house brick is a creamy, yellow-golden tan-how is that for a description? But the front steps and porch are quarry tile; it is as brick orange as can be.  I went for it.  I do not have enough knowledge to thoroughly explain how this walk was installed, but I do know a few things.  Almost everything in Michigan which is wet set, or mortared into place, will break or crack eventually, given the severity of our winters.  I dry lay stone or brick whenever I can.  A brick which has heaved up is easy to set back down.  A broken mortar joint-not so easy to fix.  A dry laid walk needs a base of coarse stone, so water will quickly drain away.  Freezing temperatures and water expanding as it becomes ice can play havoc with any hard surface in the landscape.     

The edges of the brick were captured by steel edging, and an existing stone wall.  This keeps them from sliding side to side.  The steps have to be wet set.  The mortar holds those bricks level, and in place.  No one needs a brick sliding forward, given their foot on a step.  This particular pattern of brick is called stack bond, or Jack on Jack.  For a truly tight and non moving walk that gets heavy traffic, choose a pattern where the joints never line up.  The bricks will interlock.  I like the look of Jack on Jack, and this is a perfect place to use it-a low traffic walk.

The mortared brick steps need time to set up, and become strong before anyone uses them.  The top flight of steps got set first; the dry laid walk was installed up to the grade of the steps.  On day 2, the lower flight of steps was installed.  Note the very thick steel holding the bottom layer of bricks in place.  No one needs a walk to slide out from under them.  Some improvements were made.  The lower flight of steps were quite steep, compared to the top flight.  Steve split the difference, so each flight is more uniform, and easier to navigate.  Most people navigate stairs without looking at them.  There is the instinctive expectation that the each riser will be the same.   


Last night, the walk was ready for company.  Of course Howard and Milo had to come out to see what all the hoopla was about. I’ll say there was hoopla-I think the walk looks great.  I will have to brush sand into the cracks quite a few more times to fill them.  There are other joint materials, but this is a traditional material.  The joints are wide enough that I could seed them with alyssum, or plant them with hens and chick babies.    

I am so pleased with the outcome.  The color, pattern and texture seem appropriate to the place.  I am sure you cannot make heads or tails of the landscape design on that upper level;  the plants need to grow in.  Given some time, you’ll see.  It is enough for now-a beautiful front walk.

Posted on: September 5, 2011 6 Comments
Filed Under: Landscape Design Tagged With: , , ,

Especially For You, Mathias

I have clients in Ann Arbor, Michigan.  Michael, and Mathias.  I am due to make a landscape design presentation regarding their property September 10.  It has taken 18 months to get to know one another, and set a firm date.  Michael has a Renaissance sensibility.  He can hold his own about farming, romance, music, culture, gardens, a passionately lived life is his life; I am also quite sure he could fix a broken zipper with dispatch.  Matthias is French.  He is reserved, except where his dog Banjo, his garden, and his love for France is concerned.  He is talented, kindly, compassionate, and passionately French.  When Rob sent me this first picture from France, I thought first of Mathias. Though his experience is more urban than this picture would suggest, I am thinking a lot about a culture other than my own.  Rob drove down this two-track dirt road after shopping all day, to have dinner with friends- French friends. 

They have a house in town.  They have a garden property some distance away.  The garden has a small structure that houses a kitchen, a sink, and a bathroom.  She calls that building the hut.  They grow vegetables and herbs here.  The water canal brings water to their garden.  It is quiet, dusty, unpretentious-the perfect place to decompress, have a glass of wine, and fashion a dinner.  They come here quite often.  Rob told me about their place and this evening in great detail-no wonder.  It is a landscape, and a way of life that could not be further from his own.      

The landscape of this house is mostly about the existing native landscape.  The plant choices are dictated by the climate; a few treasured plants are grown in pots-herbs, vegetables, citrus trees.  There is a lot of bare dirt, and even more gravel-it is a dry climate, and gardens acknowledge this.  They are cultivated in a different way.  I cannot really explain what I mean by this, except to say that the gardens are more about coexistence, and less about intervention.

 No where in my garden do I have a wheelbarrow full of lavender; this picture makes me long for for it.  This garden is not for show, it is for living.  As much as it is a living space, it is unabashedly a working space.  There is something so comfortable and inviting about this space; there is an authenticity of place.  Do I have anything like this-no.  But what becomes so valuable about this landscape is what there is to be learned about another place, another climate, another environment.   

  This poterie garden is ornamented with terra cotta trays, broken in the kiln. It seems appropriate, this.  Though broken terra cotta plates may not translate directly to my experience, there is that idea that the most ordinary of things become ornamental given how they are placed.  The beauty of a garden is very much about its identity.    

This collection of citrus trees in pots, and the orangerie boxes with their citrus trees at Versailles differ only in degree.  French gardeners value their lemons, oranges and limes enough to cultivate them in pots.  I have seen so many textiles, pottery and dinnerware from the south of France in the colors of fruits.  That French blue?  The color of the sky, or the Mediterranean.       This terra cotta pot with its  succulents and trailing weed-nothing fussy here about the planting, or the care required.  The finish on the terra cotta so beautifully reflects the natural stone and mortar in the stairs and wall.  This container planting is subtle, and satisfying.

This olive tree is unexpectedly studded with snails, not olives.  This is indeed a landscape completely unlike my own.  

The landscape that runs right up to the sides of this two track-equally unlike my paved roads with their curbs, medians and street signs.  This kind of peace and quiet is compelling.  Mathias-his property has elements exactly like this.  Part of my job as a designer is to recognize the natural beauty of that place.  The landscape will have to recognize, not dilute or compromise what needs little help from me in the first place.  No doubt a kitchen garden, and fruit trees will figure prominently in the design.    
For 9 nights, this street in France, with the buildings run right up to the road will be Rob’s home away from home.  Every time he shops overseas, he adds to his knowledge of gardening and ornamenting the gardens practiced in other places.  How he sees that fitting with how we garden here fuels and enriches his choices.  No doubt this gets passed along to me.  In turn, I hope it will influence how I design.

Posted on: September 3, 2011 3 Comments
Filed Under: Landscape Design

Airy

 

I greatly admire any expression that is airy, artless, graceful, breezy, unstudied, beautifully accidental or subtle- underwrought.  What do I admire this?  I greatly admire that which is the most difficult for me to achieve with a planting.  Luckily, I have help from the plant kingdom.  I have never loved the look of hosta flowers.  Sometimes I go so far as to cut them off before they bloom-reckless, I know.  But in a sunny spot, the grey/lavender of these flowers is beautiful.  The stalks going this way and that-artless.  Both nicotiana mutabilis and dward cleome have wispy flowers that flutter in the slightest breeze.  Anchored with  a solidly blooming base of petunias, this planting is a meadow in a pot.  This planting had a lot of help from nature. 

The pale pink nicotiana in the outside pots on this porch-who knew how pretty they would be with a pair of white dieffenbachia.  A few spiky leaves of green New Zealand flax unexpectedly echo that dieffenbachia color.  The variegated ivy is a casual and airy compliment to those stiff paddle shaped leaves.  This planting was better than I thought it could be.  I credit the plants for that.

Mandevillea is one of my favorite summer plants.  Vining plants have a way of growing that sets a planting free.  They will grab any airborn support.  Lacking support, they will vine down and out.  Variegated licorice has stiff stems-but they grow every which way.  I call it the cowlick plant.  It provides some stiff horizontal support to the mandevillea vines that wander.  Some of the red mandevillea flowers appear to be floating, do they not?


Plants with subtly colored flowers and foliage have that airy look, no matter their habit.  Succulents and herbs tolerate close planting, as long as I am careful not to overwater.  Closely planted plants make a community of one, as long as I do not interfere too much.  Plants left to weave in and out of each other make their own statement.  This staement is infinitely more interesting and beautiful than anything I could engineer.  

Pots placed on porches, pillars, pedestals and promenades make a studied design statement before they are planted.  A pot set in a garden bed comes out of the gate with an entirely different attitude.  This entirely formal French pot from the Poterie Madeleine has a planting that reflects the garden.        

Some clients like that wispy, artless look.  They like subtle colors.  They like the air as much as they like the flowers.  Small flowers nurture that airy look.  How hard is it to make a dahlia look graceful?  You know the problem. 

Verbena bonariensis wrote the book on airy, breezy and cloudlike.  I plant it every chance I get.  In containers, it can loosen up the most formal of landscapes.  It can define the airspace above an urn.  It needs very little in the way of staking.    

Verbena bonariensis in the ground-stellar.  Imagine this space planted with impatiens-ho hum.  This clean and crisp terrace furniture is all the more striking given the contrasting cloud of verbena in the background. 

Gardeners may think what they have to work with is the soil.  But in fact, they also have an airspace just asking for some attention.   

What overflows, what moves in the slightest breeze, what grows in out and around-this is a look I treasure.  Loose and lovely.

Posted on: August 30, 2011 4 Comments
Filed Under: Landscape Design, Garden Design, Good Design

Fencing For Privacy

I would say relatively few of my clients fence for privacy.  Most gardeners would choose plant material to screen untoward views. if they had the chance.  But very small urban properties-mine included-do not have the luxury of space.  This client designed and had built a fence which would afford him some privacy from neighbors very close by.  Painted that shade of disappearing green, it would screen the garden at the ground level from a neighboring house.  The lindens would provide screening in the airspace, an important consideration in neighborhoods with two story homes in close proximity.


Though the landscape has the appearance of a sunken garden, the lindens were actually planted in raised beds.  This did a great job of making the ground plane of the yard even more private. The trees create the illusion of a much bigger space than what actually exists.  Only the trunks occupy any space in the yard.  The tree tops are shared with the neighbors, creating more privacy for all.  A wood pergola with a gridded roof and gravel floor would provide space for seating and dining.   

10 years later, the lindens had grown considerably, and grown unchecked.  I will specify lindens for screening in a small yard, as they respond really well to pruning.  Left unpruned, they grow to enormous size.  The privacy fence appeared black in the increasing shade.  The hydrangeas were getting that leggy light starved look. A wisteria vine planted on the pergola had run rampant, and had almost completely covered the roof. 

Arborvitae that had been planted in the raised beds around the pergola; there was insufficient room for any more lindens.  The privacy they afforded from yet another neighboring house had further limited the available light under the pergola.  An update was in order, the first of which involved the fence.The arborvitae were removed altogether, in favor of a new fence.  Though these Belgian woven hazelwood panels provide a lot of privacy, light still comes through.  The wood for these panels is farmed using a method known as coppicing.  The shrubby trees are periodically cut back to the ground.  This hard pruning result in long straight branches, suitable for weaving into the panels  The coppice wood from which the fencing is constructed still has its bark.  This gives the fencing a much longer life.  Importing wood from another country that still has its bark is a laborious and expensive procedure.  Both US customs and the USDA have to be absolutely sure there are no pests hiding under that bark. The peeled cedar fence poles come from the upper peninsula of Michigan; 4 feet is set below ground to insure the fence will stay straight.

Venus dogwoods were planted in lieu of a large growing evergreen; their airy habit of growth will provide privacy without blocking so much light.  The wisteria got a much needed haircut and thinning.  The boxwood will will provide some green during the winter months, and will never grow so large as to obstruct a view of the fence.    

The lindens were given their first haircut.  Pruning trees that have never been pruned involves small steps over a period of time.  In a few years, they will read as a deciduous hedge above ground.  All of the other plant material in the yard will grow better, given the extra light. 

The original back yard fence found a new home in the front yard.  A neighboring white wood fence with a lattice border was not particularly appealing to my client, nor did it do any justice to the trunks of a hedgerow of Ivory Chalice magnolias. Along the driveway in front of the garage is a pass through-not a spot to linger.  The solid wood fence provides complete enclosure close to the ground.  The magnolias do the work up high.  


The dark solid wood fence handsomely compliments those tree trunks.  Most importantly, this fence clearly represents the aesthetic of sense of my client.  It is important to drive up to a landscape that pleases your eye.

Posted on: August 26, 2011 6 Comments
Filed Under: Landscape Design, Garden Ornament Tagged With: , ,