Marpa Landscape Design Studio Blog

It’s not often we find a book that deals with the heart of what the garden is about: sacred space.  We’ve found one recently, by Tom Stoner and Carolyn Rapp, called “Open Spaces, Sacred Places.”

Tom and his wife Kitty were visiting London, and arrived at their hotel before their room was ready.  They decided to battle their jet lag by taking a walk outdoors while they waited, and in their wanderings, came across a small, enclosed garden space between several buildings.  It wasn’t some spectacular display that delighted them, not a fancy water feature or expensive art.  Rather, it was this publicly available but protected area, the sudden quiet from the noise of the city, and a little bench that captured their fancy.  Together they experienced that kind of “ahhhh” of relaxation and ease that anyone who walks into a well-made garden can recognize.

The Stoners wrote their book as a effort to explore what exactly about a garden offers this to visitors.  They’ve made it a priority in their lives to figure out not only what sacred space means to them, but how to give that same experience to others.  Their book explores a number of gardens to try to answer those questions.  Find it on Amazon or at your local book store, and enjoy:

http://www.amazon.com/Open-Spaces-Sacred-Places-Stories/dp/0981565603/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1331832846&sr=1-1.

We’ve talked about various ways to use ornamental grasses in your garden design, but we’ve left out one reason to do so: the sheer whimsical beauty of the grass.

Ornamental grasses have both visual appeal and lend softness to hardscape, as we mentioned last time.  Another way to utilize these qualities in your design is to set grasses at the edge of water.  Often we see too much concrete or rock at the edges of ponds and pools; grasses are a means to ease the transition from the water to the ground.

Grasses are tall enough to use as part of your “conceal and reveal” design strategy.  Part of the delight of the garden is discovery,where the visitor constantly sees something new as they travel the pathways.  With movement, some view is lost (concealed) and another is opened up (revealed).  To accomplish this, you do not need walls or big rocks, you can also use a wall of ornamental grasses, as in this photo:

Ornamental grasses can be workhorses in the garden.  We’ve talked the last two times about using grass as an accent, either alone, or in flower beds.

Grass, like all plants, will soften hardscape.  When you have something simple and elegant in the foreground, you don’t really want something fussy or too colorful in the background.  Yet you might still want a backdrop that is not just wall or fence for your composition.

Here, ornamental grasses ease the harshness of the wall behind, without detracting from the water basin rock in front:

Even as this grass grows and spreads, it will not visually take over the space, due to its monochrome color.

We talked last week about putting ornamental grasses to work in the garden as interesting, low-maintenance accents.

Another use of these wonderful plants is to mix them with other blooming plants in beds.  This allows you to use the interesting texture and color of the leaves to highlight flowers when they arrive.

The height of the grass used in this bed helps to extend the visual effect of the flowers and the complementary color of the inflorescence (the grass’ flower) emphasizes the amazing blooms in front of it.

Mixing grasses into flower beds adds texture and variations of color both during the flowering season of the plants surrounding it and afterward.  Here is grass inter-planted with day lilies; imagine this bed after the flowers are finished:

“I am the grass.

Let me work.”       –Carl Sandburg, from “Grass”

There are many ways to put grass to work in our gardens.  We’ve talked before about lawns; now we turn to ornamental grasses.

Ornamental grasses come in a huge variety of sizes, textures, and colors, and are sadly overlooked by many gardeners. They tend to grow well where other plants struggle, and offer their color and their inflorescence in the late summer and autumn, when other flowers are well finished.

One way to use grasses is as an accent.  Here, someone has cleverly used only tall, reddish grasses in planters around a concrete landing.  The color complements the wood of the house, and gives a sleek, modern look that a variety of color can’t match:

A different kind of “accent” grass is this low-height grass, used in front of a water wall.  Here the simple color lends its modern feel to this courtyard garden, while providing a lively contrast with all the hard surface that surrounds it:

The high plains and mountains of our Rocky Mountain region can be tough on plants.  Things that grow elsewhere in the same “zone” don’t necessarily do well here, where the conditions can be harsher and drier.

Happily we can rely on our academic friends at Colorado State University, where they conduct growth trials on various plants in their “Trial Garden” in Fort Collins, CO.  Each year they test out new varieties of plants and rate them on how well they grow in our climate and soil.  They choose the best among them and describe their performance.

So if you’re getting ready to plant your summer garden, check them out at www.flowertrials.colostate.edu.  Your garden might be better for it!

A new study from the UK suggests that plants can communicate with each other!

Researchers revealed how plants talk by modifying a cabbage gene which triggers the production of a gas emitted when a plant’s surface is cut or pierced. By adding the protein luciferase to the DNA, the plants’ emissions could be monitored on camera.

One cabbage plant had a leaf cut off with scissors and started emitting a gas – methyl jasmonate – thereby ‘telling’ its neighbors there may be trouble ahead.

Two nearby cabbage plants, which had not been touched, received the message they should protect themselves. They did this by producing toxic chemicals on the leaves to fend off predators such as caterpillars.

It is the first time such a process has been caught on camera. Scientists say it raises the possibility that plants are all communicating with each other in a complex invisible language which we know nothing about.

The work was led by Professor Nick Smirnoff, who said: “We have managed to show in a visual way that the gas emitted by plants when they have been wounded affects their neighbors. But at this stage we don’t know why. They could have been trying to alert the plant’s other leaves to the damage and their neighbors have just picked it up, or they for some reason evolved to alert other plants.”

Just another of the mysteries of the garden!
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2096302/Prince-Charles-right-plants-really-communicate-another.html#ixzz1oumJBg6v

The contemplative garden seeks to bring the visitor into the present moment.  The idea is to delight and engage the senses sufficiently to make people forget themselves and enter into something larger and wider.

One means of doing this is with the element of surprise.  “Conceal and reveal” is one useful technique, where as one moves through the garden, something is always appearing and some other view is lost.

Another technique is to use unusual, unexpected material that makes us look twice.  In this small garden, Marpa designers incorporated blue glass in alternating patterns with ground covers. The look is striking and unusual, and certainly makes you look twice:

In another Marpa garden, the designers played on the confusion of inside and outside.  The owners built this extension onto their home, with doors that slide all the way open to connect the indoor room with the outdoor room.  To add to the illusion, Marpa used the same flooring material from the room indoors for the patio outdoors, only leaving space for small ground covers to define each stone.

Where does the indoors end and the outdoors begin?  Visitors are enchanted.