In no set order. Blooms supply the candy, along with many other items in a landscape. Always sort of breathlessly pretty, blooming things have a set limit of endurance – one reason I plant so many shrub roses any more. They are seasonal and fluid, if planted correctly, leaving something blooming at just about any time of the year not named Winter. Here’s some now:
I’ve always had a secret affinity for Smoke Trees, myself. Their subtle blooms really do look like smoke.
The early seed formation of Sumacs are another very under rated beauty, in my opinion. Naturally, landscapers also use them for dual purposes – their Fall foliage is out of this world.
But they can shimmer in the right light and look as good as any bloom anywhere, when happy:
Durable, reliable, easy-to-please and wonderfully fragrant, shrub roses and wild roses are an absolute must-have in my landscapes. These newly-developed cultivars require absolutely nothing special to bloom, look and smell happy and just plain be pleasing.
I think we can all agree that this is a big lump of Phlox. Man, these guys smell fabulous.
Poppies are always good for a solid month, if not more so. I plant tons of these guys as well.
Technically, not a bloom per se, grasses and especially this Purpurea rank highly as objects of beauty similar to blooms. The nicest part about the temporary nature of this “bloom” is the fact that it just gets bigger, rather than smaller as the year unfolds. This was an interesting project, high above Reno. Lots and lots of brick pavers.
We put this Clematis inside an entryway for a satisfied couple and got a satisfied plant as well!
This one is cool, from Vancouver. This time we got the bloomage and the architecture together. Those pots are some heavyweight suckers. Lots and lots of Rhodies and Azaleas here. This is North West landscaping, for real.
Speaking of the North West style, here’s from a project we installed, using about 7,000 Railroad Ties at a massive apartment complex in Vancouver, BC.
Rhododendrons are obviously (as evidenced all through this blog) my favorite bloom. Here’s a few from the Crystal Springs Rododendron Garden in Portland, Oregon. (These enlarge nicely)
Finally – an old favorite. Double File Viburnum. Somewhat “naturalized”:
I’m recirculating this post from over a year ago, as well as making substantial changes to it. The density of posts now – and their length – means many of these get lost in the packaging of the entire blog. This is a post about boulders and big rocks – and the joys and intensity of placing them. I hope no one minds……..
Much of what I blog about refers very specifically to what I know. It gives me a certain freedom of expression within these landscaping parameters that I don’t have when speculating on matters I may think about but which I have not, in fact, done. Politics, for example, while I spend ample time considering the greatness of some famous politicians and the lying weasel aspects of others, are a pastime and not something I am utterly competent to speak of. Like most of us, I can complain a lot! I do that pretty well, the fact is, just not in here.
But I do know rocks. By golly, I know rocks like a lover knows the curve of a spine or the taste of familiar lips. But rocks are family too! I have such a long term relationship with rocks, stones, gravel and rock mulch, when I get to Heaven I am positive they will put me in a celestial excavator and dump some titanic load of fractured Glacial Schist for me to make stuff out of.
Yesssssss!! ………………………….. “Hey, is that all you got?”
“I thought this was Heaven, Man!”
The not very secret fact is, I would be more than delighted. Placing rocks – the art of integrating boulders into a landscape and providing an almost immediate sense of permanency – to me is perhaps the finest form of artistic expression landscaping allows. The intensity of placing rocks lies in their permanence. As one adds boulders into the primitive beginnings to an eventual landscape, the heart always beats a little faster. I always get the feeling of “setting the stage” for everything that follows – plants, paving, the envisioned walkways. It therefore becomes something more than just a few rocks in the ground. These become the spine of the body of work. You tend to think in planes – geometrics. For example, many of my landscape rock placements have flat tops on them, hopefully virtually parallel with the ground itself. This gives yet another plane aspect to what will eventually rear up so vertical in the person of plants and constructions. In fact, it never seems enough. I want every rock to be that plane.
(Left Click all images to enlarge)
Interestingly, in denser concentrations such as the “rockery” retaining system below, they can be used as virtual steps to climb and deal with plants or just to make one’s way up the hillside.
Dropping a rock into place follows some very standard guidelines – typically, you want about a third of it underground. This to insure they don’t roll over and ruin the siding or worse, but also to embed itself so that eventual erosion and winds don’t expose the bottom. Nothing looks less permanent than some gigantic marble in your front yard or patio. Boulders like the ones below – your water-formed, circular and soft-lined river rocks – form a gentle presence stuck into a landscape. I use them here as seat rocks surrounding a fire pit and they serve that function well. The mellow curves and solid appearance of such well-formed boulders makes them an entirely welcome addition, blending as they do with the gentle curves of any landscape. They have a sensual style, nearly anthropomorphic, resembling things like clouds in the sky, rich for imaginations and for their gentle acceptance.
Used economically, they can anchor a landscape with permanence and form and provide lines which break up the monotony of paving or otherwise simple constructions.
These rounded rocks, showing the effects of centuries of wear and tear – of rolling around on river bottoms and being pummelled relentlessly by rushing water – seem so innocent and placid when in place. But then, all rocks do this, don’t they? We look at a rock and we see our innate vestigal human image of something totally permanent. (Unless, of course, we are geologists.) We see rivers and we see creeks when we see these rounded items -
Or more placid settings where the pools formed over centuries are bordered by such well-worn stones -
But not all rocks are equal! These cute little round boulders are great for the gentle among us. But there are other stones whose very form challenges us, in the most riveting and jarring artistic ways -
These may also be anthropomorphic in their own rights…………what do we make of that hulking beast above? Some daemonic Chinese stone that wakes up at night to prowl our ‘hoods, made to order to scare little kids into making sure they go back to bed?
Or we can go contemplative like those tricky Japanese who always mess with us like -
Or something like this big fellow, wise beyond it’s ancient years, standing alone and all-seeing among the plants he watches over, yet still able to evince a wonder at its teetering presence?
Rocks speak to us if we care to listen. They come in a pretty stunningly wide variety and they can be placed in remarkable ways by the enterprising landscaper. Some, we put together in combination’s to simply attract attention, almost always in 3′s – (click this one twice to see the water coming out of the medium guy here)
Some we bore holes into – all the way down their length – in order to have them perform a water dance while looking gorgeous as is their wont -
And some we just plaster together to see what happens -
We hang them off stuff, just because they are good-looking -
And still others beg us to do weird things with. They plea for an arrangement where they can show off best and give us humans some wonder in our boring lives -
Working with rocks and boulders has always been one of the true treats of my trade. I am sure it’s obvious I enjoy working with them and the very obvious truth, as well, is that I like operating machines that move them around! NO – let me rephrase that – I LOVE operating those machines! Honestly, there is something more than a little appealing about arranging these behemoths in a morning and have a client come home and see 30 huge boulders set in place. For example, we did this (at least the rocks) in about one day – he was pretty shocked.
But aside from my personal inclinations, rocks themselves are a marvelous adjunct to any landscaping enterprise. They can provide lines that interrupt or they can supply lines in a landscape that emphasize a certain quality of horizontal or even vertical planes. Oh – almost forgot – they can also provide seats! These are particularly interesting inasmuch as they store heat during sunlit days. It takes hours for them to cool down, too. It makes sitting on them during cool evenings yet another experience entirely. I have often said “Warm butts, warm hearts!” Well, OK, but I said it a few times.
I’m going to slip this weirdness into my Landscaping Blog, simply because I can, I guess. Like everyone else in the wide wide world, I like sharing. This has as much relation to landscaping as the Man in The Moon, but…………… I have always thought comedy and those who make it deserve a special place in our lives.
This blogger has decided to take yet more advantage of pure selfishness and display not only his wanton lust for the comic geniuses who have walked the stage and screen, but to date myself as well. Cursed with an excellent memory, I can remember watching such persons as Sid Ceasar, Steve Allen and this guy – Ernie Kovacs – as they first began appearing on television. Yes, we’re talking the mid 50′s, before color TV, even. I remember making an absolute ass out of myself amid my family, laughing pretty much out of control at Don Knotts and Louie Nye on the Steve Allen Show – or Imogene Coca and Howie Morris on Sid Ceasar. But this guy – Kovacs – honestly sent me like no other.
I watched the recent Kennedy Center Honors Show with my Mother where they featured Mel Brooks, among others. He wrote for Sid Ceasar back in the day and, especially with the interviews of the famous “2,000 Year Old Man”, it shows.
It made me investigate the older realms of TV comedy, back when everything was new. You can see the experimental attitude even in this clip. The guys on the set laugh, lol. Live TV was a trip. Sometimes, the regulars at places like Steve Allen or Ceasar wouldn’t be able to finish their lines becasue they couldn’t control their giggles – wonderfully unprofessional and just about a riot.
Anyway, next to Robin Williams, Richard Pryor and Jonathon Winters, Kovacs always represented the height of comedy to me. Subtle, incomplete, almost Lenny Bruce-like in his ability to change skin, here he gives us the famous fop – Percy Dovetails – live from his fabulous Poetry Palace. He’s a Laureate!!!!
Fossils!! Old Ones! These, in fact, are pretty close to the Oldest Ever. Dating from the Devonian Era, back about – ohhhhh – 386 million years ago, the Devonian Era evokes images of warm, tropical seas and a bustling marine realm. On land, plants and a few organisms including arthropods, arachnids and paleoinsects, were proliferating into new niche space. Amphibians first evolved in the late Devonian Period, actually just a few million years after the appearance of the first forests.
The pictures below are best viewed at double magnification (click twice) to find the details of the dam itself. The Louisville skyline rests behind the iron bridge’s framework.
My Mother and I decided to troop out one dreary afternoon, across the Ohio River into Indiana for a visit to the “Falls of The Ohio Interpretive Center” – a fascinating and informative educational and interpretive edifice which is ironically built on top of a literal profusion of some of the oldest known fossil beds on the entire planet. The “Falls” were a series of rapids which adversely affected river traffic back during the day when river traffic flowing towards the Mississippi River and thence to the Gulf Of Mexico and a wider world was highly desirable. Louisville became a city at this point and erected a dam and a set of locks for traffic to solve the ultimately impassable rapids.
I like the picture below as it shows the outline of this great modern building as well as revealing the mess a river can make that is 1,000 miles long and drains a quarter of a continent the size of North America. A mile wide in places and running at a surprisingly rapid rate, the Ohio fits every single criterion as one of the world’s great rivers. The driftwood and blanched branches and smaller debris is the accumulation of maybe one or two years. The buildup of debris which floats downriver from West Virginia and Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana and the rest of the eastern Midsection of the United States piles up like nobody’s business as cliffs erode and deposit whole trees as well as simply simply titanic amounts of dirt and water into the mighty Ohio River.
Here is a detritus-only view of the pretty much yearly deposits of debris from this mutably filled, oft-receding, oft-filling expanse of running water:
The view below is of some of the fossil beds themselves, with a glance outwards onto the plains and the crevasses which hold these little ancient wonders. The river over some millions of years on its own has carved and shaped the rock into the plains seen here.
And here is a look backwards from the rocky plains carved and eroded by the incessant onrush of such huge amounts of water. The statue is really cool – it is a depiction of the famous North American explorer George Rogers Clark and his fellow explorer, Merriweather Lewis.
Here is a closer look at these two, from the website:
As a youngster who prowled the forests and river banks of Kentucky, in Louisville and, downriver, in Owensboro, I developed a close relationship with the Ohio River. As a high schooler, we often got away from people and adults and ventured into secret lands, hard by the river, for swimming and playing, floating out on massive logs and tree hulks and experiencing the speed of the river’s currents. We fished it and we swam it. I once lost a pair of contact lens in the Ohio – and found them! LOL, adventure was thy name for rambunctious dumb teenagers like ourselves. But that’s the river of which I promise to speak another time – this is about fossils.
As an even younger child, we ventured out around Louisville and found fossils everywhere. It was a fecund natural area for kids who stayed outdoors in those days and who filled the hours with ventures into as many natural forests, creeks and rivers as a day would allow. Kids would also discover Indian arrowheads and develop lush fantasies about that warrior class of human beings as well as about our local heroes such as Daniel Boone or Davy Crockett. All those kid’s game were wonderful, sort of Mark Twain-like in so very many ways. But I also recall thoughtful, impressive and shared moments as we kids found fossils and wondered about their provenance.
We all had developed a very real sense of prehistory – at least my own family’s people and those of our friends at the time. The wonder at the absolute ancientness of anything which could reflect what it was when it was alive and then become a rock pretty much capped the impossible largeness and mystery of our world and Universe. We actually got good at identifying species – “Look! A fern!” “Wow! A mollusk and an early one!” rang through the forests and creek beds of limestone where we found these little objects. “That’s not a fossil!” “Is too!” also took place as real fossils chipped off the sides of the ancient cliffs and eroded limestone of our earth in Louisville. Arguments over a fossil or arrowhead’s worthiness as a collectible became intense as we analyzed to the limited best of our scientific little minds.
I am truly glad for those times. Living out West, my daughter got to see its own set of geological wonders. Growing up in Reno, Nevada, Alena could experience the real glories of “steam heat” – Geothermal Benefits – of an area who now relies upon just that. There is also a mountianside of pure Quartz just outside of Reno, abiove the little town of Mogul. Whole cliff faces appear suddenly which are nearly clear or a unbelievably resplendant with its startling white jewelled facade rising up sheer stories into the higher reaches, some of whose chips and rocks can be seen below on the ground as absolutely stunningly gorgeous huge quartz boulders and rocks.
I think I come by my love of rocks honestly, I guess is what I am saying. I have always somewhat specialized in boulder placements in all my landscaping projects. To me, rocks and boulders share an equal billing on Earth. Inanimate they may be but their stories are hidden inside, only waiting for the human imagination to cultivate their fullness and richness. What was the earth like 25,000,000 years ago? Ask a rock. Most of them were well past the age for legal drinking by then.
I do that pretty well, the fact is, just not in here.
