Well, I did it again. I nearly blew up my camera taking pictures. I think I ended up with 132 clicks of the ole shutter. Now I find there are not 2 but 3 most definite Spring rotations to the blooms here. This visit would be during the “middle one” for catching the best and biggest blooms from Rhododendrons. Now, having said that, this is probably the very best time to catch all the other plants blooming as well – the Double File Viburnums, Azaleas, even the young but amazingly robust Ferns in the deep forest sitting by the waterfall and creek.
Any way you cut it, I am almost totally convinced there is no bad season here at the Crystal Springs Rhododendron Garden, set hard in the middle of Portland, Oregon.
Come along with me now and we’ll see what this gorgeous garden has going for it now.
(click all images to enlarge hugely)
First off – What made the day even more special were the large number of reasonably well-behaved kids, some brought by parents and some – like this unruly little crowd below – apparently on their own. It can be disturbing seeing this sort of wild behavior in Nature. It’s as if all these little ducklings cared about was swimming around and trying to have fun. If you look closely, I mean all you see is smiles.
The entry to the Garden is always spectacular. I absolutely cannot get enough of this particular vista. This view comes as you enter the very gate to the premises, where you find yourself pretty much above this large ravine they inherited, perfectly-shaded and so very lush and perfect for our blooming subjects. That one can concentrate so much condensed beauty into this space still astounds me.
We were delighted to see that some families were stunningly well-behaved.
The scene below gave us hope for our future on this planet. My friend did, however, have to go and mention what he noticed – it appears there is a remaining rebel – will this ever stop??? – following behind the lot.
Moving long now……. ……As we enter, we start getting peeks at what is to come. This is some serious acreage, so it all unfolds in various ways, depending on the route one takes. Among my favorite Japanese Maples in the world, this one has been a subject of more pictures from me than any other. Set hard in the midst of the park, it can be seen from almost anywhere, prominent and bronze. The color contrast it always offers just seems breathtaking to me.
We had visited here in another post a month or so ago and these Gunnera to the right had only peeked up just a tad. Well, they aren’t “tads” any more. Soon their growth will get simply outrageous as the leaves themselves will reach 6 feet in girth. Spikey, with these stickers that actually pack an irritating venom, these are great to look at and pleasantly lush and freaky, but you don’t want to go playing around in them. Better to find a bowl of Pirahna and wash one’s hands in some good old pork gravy.
In that prior post, we had seen the waterfall, featured below. At this time of year we now notice a virtual explosion of Hosta at the break separating the branching stream flows as well as the placement of those aforementioned Gunnera above.
As well, the young, unfurling Ferns we noticed back then have taken on a brand spanking and mighty powerful new look as well:
And now onto the stars of the show, the luscious and mind-bogglingly rich Rhododendrons.
I am convinced every color on the color chart is represented, along with some New Age – more electrical – colorations that even an advertiser could not match. From here to my last picture – a shot of a desperate family who apparently dropped their camera in the lake – I will just let you scroll and stroll a bit.
Bon voyage!
“Madge, dangit, where is the camera! I know I dropped it around here somewhere. Blast#@&%!!?**$$#!!!!!”
“Good Lord, Henry, you dropped it again? Here, Eloise and I will give you a hand.”
Huge sigh. “Bottoms up! It has to be around here somewhere.”
I like flowers, just like the rest of us. It often seems I post so much about installation issues and designs in landscaping I often miss those delights everyone else is so eager to feature. But make no mistake – I adore blooming things and I crave using them in landscapes. The fact is, I do a ton of it.
Living in Vancouver, British Columbia offered an incredibly rich supply of blooming things from Cherry trees and ornamentals to fascinating mixes of Exbury Hybrid Azaleas and Rhododendrons.
This was all well and good but when I moved to Reno, Nevada I found the alkaline soils and the concerns over water usage restricted me far more in terms of adding color to landscapes. It was then that I began studying more options to make a landscape an interesting and appealing place to enjoy. Naturally, I studied rocks and structural things. And much of this was owing to not only a less urban area than Vancouver but also because of the space one had to fill in the typically larger lots of Reno.
Since the constant wind caused so many problems with blowing the mulches I had gotten so familiar with in Vancouver and Portland, I began to look closer at rock mulches and then naturally to filling those areas as well with ground covers and other growing things. I mention this as a segue into the world of Perennials. Annuals in Reno face the water issues which they require so desperately and I began omitting them from design considerations. Sure, Summers can find Geraniums and Petunias all over but hardly to the extent one finds in the North West with its abundant water. The perennial search served as an attractive and fascinating angle of approach and I began using them increasingly. Incidentally, I also include roses in this category, although I did concentrate on those easiest to maintain and rely upon.The red Meidiland Roses are my own particular fave. Here, in the picture below, taken on a dark day, the highlights of the crimson shades stand out, I think impressively. That deep red gives depth and it gives an optimistic sort of background among the wide variety of foliage there and serves to provide a consistent backdrop.
In other applications, perennials of all types, including Sedges and Grasses have served my needs perfectly.
Anyway, I did develop some real favorite plants, in all this. Here are some pictures I took of some of these:
(I’m real big on Evening Primrose [Oenothera Biennis]……..)
(This below was a little “starter kit” of Evening Primrose with those typical Meidiland Reds on the rocks around this ‘pondless waterfall we installed off someone’s patio…..for the record, these are taken here soon after planting……they have gotten huge since)
Penstemons are my ultimate favroite, I think. Here is a dry climate version of an almost “native” one:
When a Penstemon gets to a full size, they are spectacular. Notice the variety of them in this picture:
This one is a bit sparse-looking now but it grew into an impressive area next to our paver driveway and patio:
And here is a completely gratuitous – but related! – picture of some Clematis at one of the homes above:
Naturally, no bloom pictures will be complete without some rhodies, these from Vancouver and a project there:
Embarrassing and as unprofessional as it may be, the hose in the foreground below has to prove I was the photographer! This one was true fun to do. Watching this property develop as time went on has provided some serious joy for me and re-emphasized the utter rightness of using perennials in landscapes:
Who knew a Sumac could be so pretty?
Or be so lush?
Or the old Smoke Tree?
The Cotinus is an old Favorite……………and not a perennial but I couldn’t resist.
Flowers rock.
I could go on……….. In fact, I just may. Everyone likes unique looks at the same old stuff. Flowers, after all, never get old, do they?
The storm rolled in announced by the highest winds in Reno history – gusts of up to 120 MPH hit the Reno airport. Naturally, the front that followed was a whopper. Full of snow, it dropped 4 feet in one night in the middle of Reno, then another couple feet a few days later, virtually paralyzing the entire town. Ironically, as bad as it was, it did not yield the flooding that made such a spectacular disaster in 1997. But it was still dreadful. Out at our project in Washoe Valley, the earth was saturated. The neighbor’s house, above our project, did not provide for all the drainage issues which we had provided for down below. Of course, the neighbor had an entire mountain to drain, so it was easy to see why he may have underestimated the potential hazards. In any event, the melting snow, then subsequent heavy rains collapsed the small provisions the neighbor had made to protect us below and we received all of the impact of that mistake.
Liquid mud coursed down through the fence line and into our drain creek beds, constructed painstakingly as we planted the trees and boulders with the machines which allowed us to “cut and paste” our way down the hills. Immediately filled with the overflowing slurry, the channel was soon erased, causing the wild and monstrous amount of overflow to find new avenues. Down below, we found a crevasse opened up on one hillside of the new terrain over 30 feet wide and 20 feet deep! The relentless waters and the slurry of freshly strewn soil caused enormous damage to our project, exposing pipes, ruining huge areas of lawn and taking plants and trees down with it. The driveway soon became impassable not only up by the house but down at the entrance as well. Easily 3,000 yards of earth made its way down the hill and into the very worst places imaginable. It was a disaster.
It was so bad, in fact, that in our haste to repair it all and save our friend’s investment, we failed to take many pictures. Yet, here are a few, shown after much of the repairs had taken place. This shot (above) is of the field which once had far less soil in it. The pools are the remains of what was a virtual lake.
This shot shows what was once a nice little stream bed, completely rocked in, looking every inch the small creek. I put a “before” shot, then the “after” shot below. And this was after a week of cleaning up. Look on the left hand side. Incidentally, the dirty street in the “after” shot is where the slurry of silty soil ended up, halfway out into the street itself. Where it appears merely dusty here was a pile of slurried soil 3 feet thick. It completely blocked access to the driveway and the neighbor’s as well. It took an entire day just to remove what was on the street – with two machines!
The excavating company who provided the initial grading and soil placements were called out to try and rectify the more major aspects of the project’s disaster. We first allowed them to do their part in providing yet more drainage aspects for the entirety of the project………huge pipes were installed, drain basins for collections, leading to fully functional modes of dispatching water and more water. We built it for the next 100 year event. We followed them with our fine tuning – basically reinventing what we had already done. It was almost depressing, the truth is. I had so little heart for taking pictures and I now regret it, strictly for purposes of this blog.
Every area which had eroded was treated anew. Our former small creek beds became not only larger, but we installed a fabric underneath them so as the keep the soil in place while the water went on its way. Should we have done this earlier? Probably, although the upper property was the primary culprit in this saga. Here is a look at some of the treatments, after the fact:
(This creek bed courses along the front hill, just beneath the patio area. This is the major exit artery for the collected water from the lawns and areas above.)
This picture (below) gives an idea of the simpler areas where we dealt with the flow without the neighboring property’s input. You can see the exposed pipes – once neatly buried – and the general ravages of flooding. Needless to say, the walkway was a mess. At the top right in this picture, at the end of the lawn area where (if enlarged) one can see the black filter cloth and the indentation where grass had not yet been replaced. It was here that we had our biggest channel – the virtual “gorge” mentioned earlier, where hundreds of yards of soil had simply washed out onto the fields below. This “gorge”, 30 feet wide and 20 feet deep, was simply amazing. We just filled it back in and packed as we went which is what you do with dirt. Then we planted thicker and placed rocks with fabric under, where the grass was not replaced.
Whereas we had finished the planting in late Fall, we had not gone to the extent yet of applying rock covers alongside the driveway, also to collect and then conduct water. The driveway you’re seeing here was almost as impassable as the street in the above shots.
This view accomplishes a couple of perspectives. The two creek beds shown here did not exist before. They were re-filled by ourselves and then constructed with fabric under and those rocks above to provide yet more drainage from the house itself. The work required our full attention for quite some time. The weeds and grasses grew nearly overnight, giving us yet another mess which also took a while to deal with.
The coolest part of that picture, however, are the blooming Crabapples. Some of the Spring shots are pretty nice to look at, actually.
These pictures were all taken long after the hard work of getting to all the affected areas. Areas such as the one below were low on the priority list but they also required some work, obviously.
In a couple of months, it all seemed almost as if nothing untoward had happened. Stuff bloomed on command and the world had realigned itself with gorgeous gardens and appreciative people.
Parties were had this year, grateful clients were happy and the world was fine.
Turned out, in far less than a year, it was already looking full and vibrant.
Only we knew how many of the hardest lessons we had ever learned had occurred. Nature is one very stern taskmaster who does not tolerate the weak.
I have completely redone my local computer set up. Hopefully, this arrangement I now have will give me what I was looking for and so far it has. It took a while adjusting and ironing things out and I am hardly a computer maven. Anyway, I have not posted in a while – which is probably unforgivable since I had left some people in suspense regarding the Winter Storm which ravaged a project we were in the midst of and which I aim to provide yet more data on. Just not today, lol. I am tired and thrilled, at the same time, to be operating at the current level. Instead, I decided to give some music. After all, I fully intended to be a full-service blogger from the get go.
Anoushka Shankar is Ravi Shankar’s daughter. She plays the sitar just like Dad does, but…………she does it with a most definite “twist”. Anoushka is extremely modern, wonderfully-talented and has an innovator’s instincts. This is a concert performance where she joins up with a master violinist, Joshua Bell, and pretty much just “cooks”. I have a distinct fondness for “different things”. Finding this gal was a real nice revelation for me. I hope you enjoy it as much as I have. I give you Anoushka Shankar!:
I managed to find some previously-lost pictures which describe the scene a bit better. I am definitely not a good picture editor, so I will leave this scan as I found it. However, it does present a good picture not only of how dusty the entire place was to begin with, but it also gives a real look at what we dealt with in terms of plants and trees. Since we had just truckloads – semi’s – of plants delivered, one gets a far better idea of the scope of the project, I think. Sometimes, it could take 2 hours just to off load the plants from the truck. It was a damn fine plant orgy! Totally Roman! It is almost impossible to detail the sensation of going to Moana Nursery in Reno and just either pointing a finger or decorating a tree with a red ribbon indicating “Sold”, then knowing that plant would be out on my site in a day or two along with other virtual “Specimen Trees” and plants.
Each of those trees required careful handling, using chains and our largest machines to lift them from the truck and to set them gently down. Obviously, it was no slam dunk planting them either, but the picture below these shows we had some definite “beef” handling the merchandise.
Here’s the “Beef”! Yes, I am the joker in the middle, surrounded by 200+ pound Mexicans. The guy with his arm around me was a baseball legend in Mexico, all from the same ranchero. I’ve been to their parties and their Baptisms and, to this day, I miss them all. Good folks and hard working as heck.
Keeping it non-weather-related as yet, let’s go ahead and take a look at what we had finished when the weather did hit. Here are the results of 3 months of work, pretty much 6 days a week.
Starting with the trees, we moved to paving, then lawns, complete with irrigation – and lots of that. We also picked up another family of guys along the way, 3 more brothers, who sped us along. Let’s see what we did:
The brick paving wound around the entire house, from the driveway to the patio at the “back” of the house (from this view) and back again, to the driveway. After finishing the paving, we paid attention to those “Bubble Rocks” mentioned at the onset. We had two clusters of them to make – one much larger than the others. The smaller set of 3 were geared for sheer sound alone – a gentle trickle to help my friend’s mother-in-law sleep better at night and to balance out a sense of scale. Thus, we used some pretty small rocks and had them bored out. We did have a semblance of a design in mind but – as is always the case – seeing the rocks themselves finished it off. Here’s what we came up with:
This (above) picture is during their construction – with the water running – and here’s a somewhat dark look at a reasonably finished product:
And here are their “Big Brothers” at the other end of the patio:
Or from a floor-level perspective, down the patio, they are at the end:
After pretty much finishing the patio area, we began focusing on filling in between the trees we planted with plantings next to the house. At the same time, we began putting down the lawn:
I looked for ways and reasons to integrate wide-sweeping curves into the parameters of the lawn and so we invented some roadways and pathways just to say we did. It resulted in inventing an access point for the owner’s wife and her small 4 wheelers and turned out to please them immensely.
Now, some of these are taken during the Spring following our “Disaster cleanup” so forgive the sequence dissonance if you have some. It would be understandable. Had I realized I would be supplying a blog like this back then, the pictures would have been something else. But as it is, I think we can see what was going on in general.
These two pictures (above and below) are taken from the highest lawn level, up by the garage housing equipment and a big old RV. These pictures are taken from the farthest North and South corners of that upper lawn.
And here’s some plantings, mixed in with this lawn shot on the outside of the partio area.
Here’s a look in the other direction, pardon the amateur second picture.
A final look at some plants, this down the driveway:
This is a view of the project from the nice and bucolic highway out front of this place. The road actually travels the length and width of Washoe Lake, a lake about 15 miles South of Reno that has been a recreational and great fishing spot for Renoites for decades. This particular highway was once used as the primary link between Reno and the state capital of Carson City until a sort of super highway was constructed on the other side of the lake in a more direct path to Carson City. Yes, it is smack in the middle, more or less, of Northern Nevada’s High Desert. And, yes, this property is pretty doggone large – 10 acres of landscaping, in fact. That’s big for anyone, much less my crew of about 4 other persons. But it was one of those challenges I could not resist. The owner – a friend and client for commercial purposes – is a local builder who loved the relative isolation and the superb vista’s this place tossed out like “mana from heaven”. As the post continues, you will see what I mean. It is every bit of that – just gorgeous. Well, our job was to make it gorgeous at home too, not just for the view. The fact is, we were working on someone else’s “Dream Home”. When this happens, you raise your game just a little.
Here is that view from the house:
And here from the road down below:
Back to the house now………………………………
A bit closer look here, inside the fence. If you notice the fine dust in the foreground, bear in mind the entire property was nothing other than that when we began. It was entirely shaped using local topsoil which was incredibly sandy/silty and which caused no end of problems for no end of reasons. It was the old lake bed, in fact, since about 10,000 years ago there was a 6,000 square mile lake connected to this one – Lake Lahontan. Up there in those hills – at about 200 feet – you can still find caves where fishing implements were found by local archaeologists.
Prominent among the problems we faced, of course, was the dust factor which the rather constant winds just exacerbated no end. (Our debt to the Almighty for creating the phenomenon known as “grass” knows no bounds.) The other humongous problem, later, was erosion. Everything we did – even from the first – bore this in mind and we enacted every single bulwark we could against having the place just erode away. Our efforts paid off but there were still some dreadful surprises, including a legitimate “100 year storm” which tested our construction to the max.
You might know!
My charge was to complete his own small laundry list of items – 1.) 2 “Bubble Rock” clusters in his patio; one much larger than the other; 2.) for us to irrigate and supply some lawns areas, the design of which were up to me; 3.) obvious pathways throughout the property; 4.) a system of retaining the inclines throughout using rock placements; 5.) plantings for all these things and more. His wife and he were very much involved at every stage and were always helpful – never bothersome. She had a number of specific plants and he had his own specialties he wanted and could not care less about plants. “That’s all her’s!” LOL. Funny enough, what got done was they both maintained how much they enjoyed the specialties of the other, when completed. It was win-win! They and I could all feel smart as whips.
Inasmuch as we showed up on that dustpile with it absolutely fresh and barren, our first order of business – as usual – was to arrange rocks/boulders. We had some 25 loads of rocks delivered altogether in either doubles or in the back of 25 yard trucks. That makes just about 500 tons or so. Since we began the project in September, we had some pressure to try and shore things up and get the rock work done by the Winter, when Reno gets its snow and rains. It was fortuitous in so many ways for us. We pretty much finished the rock work in late October and began walkway paving and planting the trees next.
Many of the sloped areas – and there were a lot – required “keying in” lines of rocks at the base for purposes of holding the banks up. In some cases, more extremely-sloped areas, we added a row at the base. As well, we inserted boulders to help fortify the overall integrity of the slopes. I regret that quite a few pictures of this project have been lost – from the earlier stages. Nevertheless, I think it won’t take a brain surgeon to figure it out. After all, consider the author of this post.
The visible pipes and even the wires seen here are strewn completely throughout supplying the drip irrigation and the “uplighting” around trees which we installed soon after completing the tree planting. As can be seen, the pathway itself – and also the driveway – was also lit by small 7 Watt bulbs in frosted covers, illuminating a walkway and the drive in an area that can be virtually pitch black on cloudy nights. As astounding as the night sky was when it was cloudless, with a starry heaven just remarkable to behold, it could be just an severe when the night sky was not lit by a moon or stars. We are definitely talking about “out of town” here.
One of the “great good fortune” aspects was the time of year when we decided to go purchase plants and trees. A local nursery – the largest in town – was clearing out a humongous stash of trees – any of which had been sitting in their nursery for more than 2 years. The implications for us were that we were able to acquire an absolutely obscene number of huge trees for about 1/3 their normal prices or even less. It was a fantastic development and it allowed us to plant better trees and plants arranged much thicker than I had ever dreamed. Needless to say, it made me look like a genius to the homeowner and he gave me some room to buy what I deemed worthy and plant them all appropriately. I was in 7th Heaven.
We were enabled to plant literal groves of trees such as these Jackmontii Birches above on the left. We also found 20 foot high Sequoia’s, a wild number of large Blue Atlas Cedars and Pines of all types. Blooming trees were available in abundance as well and I scooped up nearly everything they had for a serious Springtime Show for my friend’s place. We’ll see in the next post how that all worked out.
Only one thing kept the project from working out like an absolute dream…………………………… Weather.
That 100 year event I mentioned really did happen. Fresh off a huge snowfall, unbelievable rains began hitting an already-saturated ground, resulting in a basic catastrophe. All those hidden concerns about drainage and moisture disasters descended on the place and created a disaster. Next door, the entire hillside collapsed, running down onto our project, just liquid dirt, in tonnage, not just a little. Not only that, but the amount of water collected from the entire mountain came down as well. It seemed all those smart and wary moves we made considered everything but a disaster resulting from someone else’s property.
I’ll delve more into this insanity in the next post.
I nearly blew up my camera taking pictures. I think I ended up with 132 clicks of the ole shutter. Now I find there are not 2 but 3 most definite Spring rotations to the blooms here. This visit would be during the “middle one” for catching the best and biggest blooms from Rhododendrons. Now, having said that, this is probably the very best time to catch all the other plants blooming as well – the Double File Viburnums, Azaleas, even the young but amazingly robust Ferns in the deep forest sitting by the waterfall and creek.
……As we enter, we start getting peeks at what is to come. This is some serious acreage, so it all unfolds in various ways, depending on the route one takes. Among my favorite Japanese Maples in the world, this one has been a subject of more pictures from me than any other. Set hard in the midst of the park, it can be seen from almost anywhere, prominent and bronze. The color contrast it always offers just seems breathtaking to me.
