I have been sorting through box after box of old 35mm photographs of gardens and landscapes-old projects both for clients, and for myself.  I have always been a fairly decent record keeper.  This extends to keeping old letters, cards and notes-any and all materials that might be relevant to what I might have been doing in a garden at the time.  This includes garden journals, newspaper and magazine articles, tear sheets, plant tags, sketches, and the like.  I especially treasure the notes and letters from clients.  Even those letters that explain how I might have done a better job of helping them-of course I kept those.  No one takes the trouble to explain how things might be done better unless they 1) think you are capable of better, and 2) believe that their effort to explain will be heard.  These are good things, worth remembering.  Unbelievably, I have file folders dating back to 1986-my very first year in business.  I have every appointment book dating back to 1986 as well.  Why I am I looking through all of this? 

2011 is a year with multiple milestones for me, one of which is coming up quick.  Detroit Garden Works will celebrate its 15th year in business on March 29.  My design/build firm, Deborah Silver and Co, will celebrate its 25th year in business on July 1, 2011. Though I could write a novelette (OK- maybe a full length novel) about the failures, the things that didn’t work and the mistakes that were made, this is an accomplishment of which I am proud. 

Beyond this, I am interested in how those earlier years get lumped together.   Projects between 1986 and 1999 were all recorded with a 35 mm camera-pre my ability to use digitally based tools.  Thus my ungainly and tough to share storage boxes of pictures-most of which have inexplicably become all mixed up and out of order over the years  For all the world, the boxes look like the “Borrowers” have been in them, messing about.  You know, from the book “The Borrowers”-those mythical little people that live in the floorboards, and wreak havoc in the lives of those human sized people they borrow from.   Stacks of images that need resorting-this I have put off.  The photo boxes take up a lot of space, so they have been piled high on the shelves nearest the ceiling – out of the way, out of mind, and off the top 10 list.  What interests me about these pictures?  Though the form in which the work was recorded may be outdated, some of the work I rather like.  Some of the work-I rather like what it says about me.  Though the digital pictures I take now are more detailed, clearer, sharper and can be viewed in a much larger and simpler format, I can tell the work belongs to me. 

The most fun of all-pictures of my own first garden.  I see not so much evidence of design-but I do see a person who loved plants. In spite of the fact that I had little money to put to it, I had a big garden.  I was very big on the doing it myself part.  Those pictures of me in my garden-I look happy. Standing next to a tree peony in full bloom at the corner of my house-easily 5 feet tall, and 5 feet wide-I look delighted.  It’s clear what came first.  I was a gardener first.

I did truly believe I was done painting this floor late last week.  I was ready to let go.  Much to my chagrin, both Rob and Steve indicated they thought it was fine-but that they were surprised I was happy with it.  I waved them both off, but when Saturday came, I took a good look.  It was fine, but maybe it needed more contrast.  Buck brought a new quart of very dark chocolate paint with lunch.  When I opened the paint after lunch, I knew I had been Tom Sawyer-ed.  Fine is fine, but this fine could definitely be better.

Over the weekend, lots of those very dark drops, along with a second round of dark olive green drops, went to establish a zone 3.  That would be the transition space between the green zone, and the brown border. Transition spaces in any design are important.  It takes time to leave a space and reflect, then anticipate and get ready, and be presented with the next.  The  transtion spaces in my garden are built in; staircases mark not only a change of level, but a transition from one “room” to the next.  Gradeners without the luxury of built-in transition spaces manage a change of venue with arbors, groups of trees, or pots.  A perennial border which is the same on both sides of a path creates the impression that the path was laid after the garden.  Tall perennials on either side give the impression of walls, or a corridor.      

The dark drops went all over the brown border (and everything else within range) but were most frequent in that third zone.  Creating a third color zone meant I had to redo the the swoops and swirls of green.  It needed to look as though the gravelly drops came first, and the unmowed grass laying over came second.  The border also got a drip coat lighter than the lightest color I had used.  Thiese light drops helped to heighten the contrast as much as the dark ones.

The darkest green and the lightest green was swirled over the edge.  The light green reads especially well over that dark drip zone.The green is a lot more active visually as a result.  Light colors seem to come forward in a composition, and dark colors seem to recede.  This isea can be very helpful in making decisions about color in a garden-whether it be leaf or flower color.  My white anemones and lime green hostas read to my eye from a great distance, and in the evening when the light is low.  Very dark colors can be better seen, if they have light colors behind them.  I would always put yellow behind red, to better see the red.  Tall yellow marigolds behind a slightly shorter red salvia makes that red glow.  Short yellow marigolds in front of that same red salvia steal all of your attention; that red will visually recede.    

I appreciate your patience, plowing through this story a second time. But I am glad I took up the paint stick after I thought I was done. Sometimes a willingness to reconsider beyond the last drop can make a difference.

Today we are moving on to the main order of business-getting the shop in order for spring.