Tough plants

Hi there! We've been working long hours in the field, but we're hoping the next few weeks should bring more pictures and ideas to the journal. With the hot weather (again!) this week, it seems like a great time to share a few observations about reducing our summer irrigation. We've irrigated less frequently this summer than in previous years. This summer, our irrigation system runs every 6 days most of the time, with an extra cycle on the weeks when temps are above 95. While some of our plants show signs of stress, quite a few seem to tolerate dryer conditions quite well. Below are a few notes from our experience that may help you in planning or expanding your lower-water-use garden. We've linked to images for a few of the plants worth noting.

Among the toughest sun perennials are some plants with tuberous or bulbing roots, like our Eucomis 'Sparkling Burgundy' (pictured at left), lillies, and dahlias. I'm sure they would all suffer with no water, but it seems like they could handle even less frequent irrigation.... The Kniphofias (torch lillies) are beautiful, too, and our Molinia 'variegata' looks so terrific that it is our new favorite ornamental grass.

Among larger plants, most of our conifers have held up well, although a few, like our Picea glauca 'Pendula' burned during the hottest weather. On the whole, "shrubby" plants like Cotinus, Sambucus, and Rhododendron have held up well, although the gold foliaged shrubs look a little scalded. The Physocarpus 'Diablo' may be one of the bigger surprises, as it wilts readily when first planted, but seems to handle much drier conditions once established.

In the shade garden, many of our ferns seem hardly to have missed a beat. As a very loose rule of thumb, the ferns with glossier, sturdier looking fronds seem to tolerate the dryer conditions better than the more delicate ferns. The Helleborus hybrids are holding up quite well. They seem to droop a little towards the end of the dry period, but perk up with each watering. Two standout drought-tolerant shade plants are our Bletilla striata 'Alba' - a lovely terrestrial orchid with a long, pin-striped leaf - and the white variegated Eleutherococcus (used to be Acanthopanax) that we got from Roger Gossler. It seems like they could not care less!

We haven't lost many plants, but quite a few aren't as attractive as they would be with more water. Heucheras, astrantias, and rodgersias all show signs of drought stress, but we expect them to bounce back over the winter. If we decide to further reduce our irrigation frequency next year, a few of them may have to find new homes....

For what it's worth, there are many gardens that use much less water than ours. We didn't set out to create a drought tolerant garden (what we *did* set out to create is another post entirely), but we hope that our experience with lowering water use in our little space may help a few people plan or edit their own gardens to achieve a graceful balance of resource-consciousness and beauty.

Hope your gardens are faring well!

Sun dogs

Who says dogs and gardens don't mix?

Thank you for a great day!

Thanks so much to everyone who organized and attended the Music in the Garden tour. We were delighted to share our space with so many lovely people, and we hope you had as much fun as we did.

Our summer promises to bring lots of posts and new photos, so be sure to check in at the journal now and then! Many of our updates are spontaneous, but there are a few semi-definite posts to look forward to. We are taking a photographic series of the gorgeous stone wall we're building right now, we should have some great new photos coming in early summer, and, of course, our next newsletter is due in about a week and a half.

We look forward to sharing more of our work with you!

Rebecca & Buell

Perfect tour weather

Garden photographers live for forecasts like tomorrow's - mostly cloudy with a high of 73. The plants will love the comfortable, but not-too-warm temperatures (us too!), and gardens look their best under a little cloud cover. It's shaping up to be a great tour.

See you tomorrow,

Rebecca & Buell

A brief photo history of our garden

With the Eugene Symphony Music in the Garden tour coming this Sunday, it seems like a good time to share a short photo history of our space! We began hardscape construction in fall of 2002, put the first plants in the ground in 2003. The ipe deck we installed in 2004 completed the garden's structure, but a garden is never finished. We make large and small changes to the plantings every year.

Our garden has been featured in Garden Design, Sunset, Pacific Horticulture and Fine Gardening magazines. A few of those articles are available on the press page of our main website and offer a much more complete account of the design of our space than we can offer here. For now, we just hope to entice you to visit the garden and support a great cause this Sunday!

i

i

Click on the images below to enlarge.

[gallery columns="5"]

Mosaic's tomato cages

[Edit: Hi!  This page gets a lot of traffic, so we thought we'd make sure you knew about the rest of our journal and our other veggie-related posts.  We update regularly during the growing season and hope you'll check back in.  Thanks for stopping by!  Mosaic]

Our ornamental garden gets most of the questions on garden tours, but our take on tomato cages always catches the attention of dedicated veggie gardeners. These cages allow us to support a whole row of vigorous tomatoes at once and collapse into flat panels when not in use. Best of all, they are as sturdy, straight and good looking as the first time we used them six years ago!

One of our tomato cages, ready for the summer

To make Mosaic's tomato cages, you'll need:

• two strong galvanized welded wire panels (bull wire or some tough hog wire from the farm supply store is a great choice)
• strong wire cutters or a grinder
• 4 pieces of rebar (concrete reinforcing bar), with at least two pieces approx 5-6' long (depends on how deep you can drive them into your soil)
• twine

First, cut your bull wire panels to size with the wire cutters or grinder. Our panels are the length of our veggie rows and about 4' high. We cut at least the bottom wire off the panels, so that the bottom vertical pieces form lots of little "stakes" to help secure the panels. We make sure that the ends of the panels are trimmed off, so no one can get caught or scraped.

Next, stick the panels in on either side of your tomatoes at an angle and then drive rebar into the soil, outside of the panels. Make sure the rebar is firmly in place, because it is the primary support for your structure and will hold everything together under high winds and heavy tomato loads. Tie the rebar securely to the panels with the twine.

Finally, string twine in a zig-zag pattern through the middle and top of the wire panels. These layers will help support the plants and fruit as they grow up through the cages.

At the end of the year, the cages are quick and easy to disassemble and store. We use a smaller version of these cages for peppers and eggplants and single panels of the same wire for climbing plants like peas and cucumbers.

Happy gardening!

Tomatoes overflowing our strong cages on right. Photo courtesy of Robin Bachtler Cushman.

Spring Veggies

I love planting our veggie garden. It's hard to believe that tiny seeds and transplants will produce so much beautiful food! Two photos from this morning and one from last fall.

Music in the Garden

Please join us for the Eugene Symphony Guild's Music in the Garden tour on Sunday, June 14, 10am - 4pm. The tour will feature seven terrific Eugene Gardens, including ours, as well as music, food and a plant sale.

Advance tickets are $12 and available at many local nurseries, including Down to Earth, Gray's, Jerry's, Johnson Brothers and Little Red Farm. Tickets are also available on the day of the tour for $15.

We will be available all day for questions and conversation. We hope to see you then!

Newsletter #2!

Welcome to our second newsletter! In this edition, we'll share how we select and place garden features and introduce one of our favorite nurseries - Dancing Oaks. If you haven't visited the journal since our last newsletter, we've added a few posts, including some inspiration for those of you who share your garden with deer. If you'd like for us to post more often, please tell your friends about our journal and leave a comment. The more visitors and feedback we have, the more we'll know we're on the right track!

[Edit, 5/28: Don't forget to visit the main page of our journal! We just posted some new photos, and there will be more photos and news to come.]

And... Save the Date!

We hope you will visit our garden on the Eugene Symphony Guild's Music in the Garden tour on Sunday, June 14. Advance tickets are available at most local nurseries. Stay tuned to the journal for more information on how you can support the Symphony Guild, see seven Eugene gardens and meet Mosaic.

iFocus on Features

Location, location, location.

The first step in placing a feature is to consider the points from which it will be seen. If the feature can be seen from the house, primary windows and doors are a great place to start. Sometimes the view from the house trumps all other considerations. The pond in our garden, for instance, is centered on our large living room window. On our sloping lot, most of the garden falls below the windows, and we wanted a large, powerful feature to draw attention from the house into the garden. Once we'd selected the location of the 7' diameter stock tank, we designed the pathways and other hardscape around it.

Features can improve the house-garden connection in less structured spaces as well. A Vietnamese urn draws attention from the front window into the deer-friendly cottage garden. From another perspective, the basalt pathway splits, framing the view of the feature from below. Centering the feature on a primary garden path focuses attention and grounds the otherwise chaotic floral display.

k

i

i

Think big!

Our number one rule of feature selection is more about substance than style. Even in small spaces, it's important to use features that draw attention from in and outside the garden. In the space below, a 48" tall Vietnamese urn stops the eye, where a smaller feature would not hold attention in the narrow space. Many of our features are 36" - 48" high and roughly as wide, and command attention in their carefully chosen locations.

Some features do double duty as furniture, screens or fire pits. A galvanized and powder-coated metal bench in the photo above anchors the other end of the rectangular gravel terrace. The sandstone bench we mentioned in the last newsletter is not tall, but its substantial form in combination with the backdrop of a rusting wall is a perfect, functional focal point.

While size is important, the design and feeling of a space may call for flexible thinking. If you don't want to stop the eye, a low, broad feature, like a pond, will encourage the viewer to look across and into the garden, rather than stopping their eye.

Simplicity works.

We believe that simple forms make the best features. In a classical or contemporary space, clean, unadorned forms dovetail with the geometry of their surroundings. In spaces that overflow with plants or lack a formal framework, visual complexity would be lost in the noise. Clean, quiet lines balance the surrounding chaos. We have designed several features, including a rusted metal fountain at the new Watershed building and several stacked stone sculptures. When left to our own devices, we always return to the simplest forms. Click on the images below for a closer look.

[gallery columns="4"]

iDancing Oaks!

Leonard Foltz and Fred Weisensee are plant geeks with a sense of style. They comb catalogs and continents to find the most stunning (and the most bizarre) foliage, blooms and form. The selection and diversity of plants at Dancing Oaks is unbelievable, if a bit dangerous. Some friends who took their compact car for the first visit had to return the next day with a truck! The nursery is northwest of Corvallis, and well worth the drive. Once you've seen the display garden, chatted with the kind and knowledgeable staff and filled a few nursery carts, you'll see what we mean. Dancing Oaks is open 9-5, Tuesday - Saturday or by appointment on other days. Please tell them Rebecca & Buell say hi! For more information, visit dancingoaks.com.

That's all for now,

but check back soon! It's photography season, and we will post some of Buell's 2009 shots soon. In the meantime, please share this journal with your friends and leave a comment if you have questions, requests or thoughts. And don't forget about the Music in the Garden tour on June 14....

If you'd like to make sure your garden project is on the calendar for this year, call 541.434.6467 to schedule a consultation. We look forward to talking with you!

Veg out!

Just a quick note to announce the photography exhibition of our friend, Robin Bachtler Cushman! Robin is one of four local photographers whose work will be featured in "Markets," a show celebrating farmer's markets in Eugene and around the world.

Stop by the David Joyce Gallery on the LCC main campus - Building 19, 2nd floor. Map at www.lanecc.edu/cml. The opening is tonight from 5-6:30, but the show will be up until September 21.

Robin was the first photographer to shoot our garden, and we love her work. We hope you'll find time to see the show (and check out Robin's cool website).ig

g

the garden this morning

Four photos from my walk through the garden this morning.... Click the images to enlarge. [gallery columns="4"]