The OG

Guernsey Garden

noreply@blogger.com (TheO Gardener) — Fri, 14 Aug 2015 15:47:00 +0000

I've been remiss in not writing about the first garden that I helped design for someone other than myself and that's my aunt's garden in Guernsey. She had an offer from a neighbour to take a little off the side of her garden in return for more space at the back. In the photo the side is the wall straight ahead, and to the left the arch of roses leads to the additional rear space.

I had been to her quaint stone cottage, a step back in time on an ancient village lane, a couple of times before but the job of redesigning the space was done remotely while I was home in London. It was actually a tricky thing as the back area was sloped and the entire space was asymmetrical. Measurements were exchanged over the phone and my pencil sketch faxed over.

The solution I came up with was to put the main part into a circular quadrant which you entered from the side of the house and the back part was stepped into a higher level with a somewhat secret seating area. Tucked round the hedge on the right side is the kitchen door, where you get the full effect of the view - circular raised bed and a glimpse of what is beyond the rose arch.

Apart from a few suggestions that were more architectural like planting Ceanothus on the side wall the planting scheme was decided on by my aunt and another gardener friend with a general guideline that it should be 'cottagey'. Sadly I've never seen the finished result in person having moved to the US shortly after, but a couple of years ago she sent me some photos of the now fully mature garden and I have to say it looks pretty good. I did envision something a little taller in the raised bed at the entrance so it would be more of a surprise when you stepped into the space, but I can also see how a clearer view might also be more inviting.

Coincidentally the other garden I've been commissioned to design, the one in Mamaroneck is similarly a raised bed cottage type stone wall design. Although these cottage gardens feel like a hazy memory here in the sunny tropics, thanks to facebook, every time my cousin visits Guernsey and posts photos I'm right back there - like this one on the left of tulips in spring.

Shady Meadow

noreply@blogger.com (TheO Gardener) — Sat, 08 Aug 2015 15:38:00 +0000

The only kind of gardening that goes on in the orchard is a mowing about once a month, sometimes stretching to six weeks if the weather is dry and slows the growth down. I've experimented with leaving parts of it wild but I get concerned that my dogs who do like to go down there on occasion, might end up with ticks which they are miraculously free from now without any chemical help. Touchwood. So it is allowed to get a little bit wild but not too much and thats what it was like today when I went down there to take some photos.

I was surprised to see last week when I went down there, quite a lot Chinese Violet, Asystasia gangetica. Not a huge surprise as its a pretty invasive weed here - just that it looked more meadow like with its pretty flowers mixed in with the lanky Alternatha Sessilis pictured here. Both are actually edible so I picked a nice bunch of the Asystasia which ended up in a frittata. There's an interesting video recipe for a dish combining alternatha sessilis leaves with lentils that I must try out.

There are a few different grasses down here, Kyllinga nemoralis, which is a big problem wherever I have lawn because it grows so quickly. Here it's polka dot white flowers look quite pretty and its an interesting plant in its own right with some interesting medicinal qualities, its leaves having antimicrobial properties.

There's also Nut Grass or Java Grass or Cyperus rotundus, whose roots are supposed to have protected cavemen's teeth from decay. Otherwise not a particularly interesting looking plant. There are a couple of patches of fountain grass which I will not see unless my gardener has machine issues and delays his visit for a couple more weeks, taking it up to a couple of months between mowing. Bamboo grass Pogonatherum crinitum keeps a low profile here whereas I see it becoming quite tall in places that have been left to grow wild.

This shady meadow has changed somewhat since I first got here. There were quite few garden escapees down here- Caladiums, Cococasias and quite a bit of Syngonium Podophyllum. I've moved them all into other parts of the garden. There was a medium sized weed tree, Clausena excavata, that got blown over in a storm that has since been removed as have quite a few rocks and pieces of concrete. This has changed sun exposure and competition and for the better - there's definitely a softer, meadow like feel and what seems like slightly different patches of diversity.

Riverine Wilderness

noreply@blogger.com (TheO Gardener) — Mon, 05 May 2014 16:50:00 +0000

A while ago, I visited Tanjung Piai, a listed Ramsar site, ie a wetland of international importance. To be honest, it was depressing. Poorly maintained, you could see from the boardwalks, garbage tangled in the mangrove roots. There was a stench that distracted from the beauty of the surrounding flora and as soon as you reached the coast edge, the horizon had a line of tankers en route to nearby Singapore and beyond. The fluctuations in tidal waves they create erode the shrinking coast, their illegal dumping of toxic sludge poison it further. It was hard to connect with this wilderness without being horrified at the obvious threat that it was facing.

Recently I visited another wetland closer to the city at Kampung Sungai Temon where there is a community of indigenous people called Orang Seletar. Instead of a boardwalk, we went in small boats that they skilfully navigated in and out of the forest. The experience here was quite different. The environment seemed healthy. There was no stench, the water clean, crabs scuttled all over the trunks of trees and the rich diversity of this particular wilderness came alive.

Besides the tangled roots that are iconic of these forest there were also stands of trees that just looked like a forest in a flood or submerged at high tide. Occasionally there would be sightings of rattan palms, a mangrove in bloom or a fruit that the Orang Seletar would tell us was edible or used for medicine. They showed us where they caught shrimp and fish, their trained eyes picked out birds and monkeys that they thought would interest us. This was really different. The longer we were there the more the environment became familiar and we understood the deep bond this community of indigenous people have with it.

When we headed back for lunch at the village, I talked with our guide, the son of the village penghulu or leader. He described how their catch was shrinking, how some species of flora were disappearing or harder to find. Their traditional livelihood of subsistence now requires supplementatiom with work in nearby urban factories or as guides for visitors like us. They own one of the two restaurants in the village that draws the city folk to enjoy fresh caught seafood in a rustic setting. All this was fine they said but they were visibly upset that they were under threat of being relocated.

The area is not gazetted and targeted for development. The community is fighting their eviction orders which you can see stresses them. They just want to be left alone to carry on the way of life they have always enjoyed just as the environment that sustains them wants the same. It is sad to think that this beautiful riverine wilderness, is something that I have only recently become acquainted with and will shortly mourn its loss.

Blooming Stress

noreply@blogger.com (TheO Gardener) — Mon, 08 Jun 2015 15:38:00 +0000

"Your cactus is flowering, it must be under stress" a friend said. I looked up at the tall blue green column and holy moly there were about 20 buds on it. There were a couple of buds on the other column last week but I was dissapointed not to have seen it become a flower. Maybe it blooms at night, it suddenly registered, and there it was a huge white bloom when I rushed outside to check.

Do cacti flower under stress? Its certainly a stressful situation, hot dry sunny slope and the plant has become huge and quite crowded, I recently cut out a few of the less attractive parts. The other plant pictured, not a cactus, but Euphorbia Antiquorum quite certainly blooms under stress. It is so prolific that I've sliced huge 4 foot chunks and potted them in tiny pots - just because that's all I had at the time and a few weeks later its covered in bloom.

As a creative, the idea of stress having a positive outcome is of course statistically proven, countless projects and endeavours have 'bloomed' after a harsh gestation. The phrase 'the harshest soils often yield the best wines' not sure where I read that has always struck home. So I went searching the internet and Plants, compared to animals, insects, and humans, have to be a lot more sophisticated with their response to stress since they are stuck wherever they grow and cannot run from whatever stress they encounter," from here was a sobering perspective. Indeed stress is a trigger for all kinds of complex responses and certainly a cue for flowering.

Although there may be some nutrient depletion going on here, its hard to equate the word stress with these two plants as they have largely been doing the opposite which is thriving. The cactus started out as a gift from one of the part time hands that first helped with the digging and preparation of the garden. Once he saw the few plants I had selected to put into that location - aloes, agaves, euphorbias, he arrived the next time with a 2 foot length of this blue cactus. Four years later it has multiplied ten fold with a couple of the columns reaching about 5 foot tall, which on higher ground towers above as you walk by. Which was why I didn't even notice the buds until friend pointed them out.

The euphorbia was about 3 foot tall in a pot and here on the property when I took it over. It is now four ungainly monsters over 6 foot tall that require regular propping and trimming or they would fall over. There's smaller ones in pots and I've just planted an army of them along a wall in the orchard to help keep out trespassers during durian season. Once identified, it was interesting to discover its a regional species also know as Malayan Spurge hence its ubiquity in most gardens in this city.

The cactus, I've yet to properly identify although the white, night flowering clue has helped narrow it down to perhaps Cereus Validus or Cereus peruvianus. In either case I can expect a fruit to follow, hence their other name apple cactus. Curiously the subject of fruit is when I first heard of stress and plants. On a visit to an organic fruit farm, I was told that plants are scarred or pruned, to trigger a fruiting response.

Room to Grow

noreply@blogger.com (TheO Gardener) — Mon, 27 Apr 2015 15:02:00 +0000

The arbor in the tropical potager is now fully covered with the Passiflora Coccinea. What a great job its doing of that. Very nice even cover over the bamboo trellis trailing over the edge with a string of red flowers. I was recently offered a rattan coffee table that made me rethink things and bring the table over from the verandah, which I don't know why I didn't do earlier, its slatted and matches the slatted bench I already have here. Then I found a bamboo gate that concertinas, allowing me to gate off entry into this area, see left pic, from my dogs who love to dig in the beds here. Add a couple of solar laterns from Ikea and I have a garden room with a roof, a gate, lighting and a table to entertain or have a cup of coffee at in the mornings.

So I've entered a new phase in this part of the garden, spending more time here, enjoying the sunbirds swinging on the Passiflora and surprised by the amount of butterflies, lizards and squirrels it attracts. With this time spent, I've also started to notice all the problems and empty spots which means when I'm at the farmers market, I'm more likely to think about buying plants to fill those spots.

I've wanted this garden to be more flowery and a more colorful but have had a terrible time making that happen. One issue is just getting to terms with what happens here in the tropics- things happen very quickly. Things get huge then sickly fast. Within days what were perfectly good and flowering have burnt to a crisp. Things in pots send roots out of that little hole in the bottom and before you know it there a monster of a plant in a tiny pot. There's a different pace here and I find myself discovering, too late, that something doesn't fit.

Another standout issue- perhaps because I want more flowers is how quickly nutrients leach out of the soil. I 'm only just beginning to grasp how much more compost and manure ( I use sheep manure from a guy at the market and chicken manure from the supermarket) to add. When the miniature roses and the thai basil start to look a little lacklustre - I know its time to feed them again.

I'm also beginning to move away from just flowers and cheat with more colored foliage like lime green Osmoxylon lineare or red leaved Coleus and Cordyline that are much easier to please. Both the Coleus and the Portulacea also need regular pinching and replanting or they get lanky and start to fade.

There are banana trees here that cut out the very strong sun but I've been wrong in thinking that the shady spots at certain times of day, stay that way throughout the day. My worst mistakes have been to underestimate how dry it can get here. Its easy to forget that the long spells of rainy weather sometimes turn into long dry ones and I've paid the heavy price of checking in a week later to find carnage.

April is a rainy month here and things are going well. New plantings are adjusting, there is fruit on four of the banana trees and I'm loving the warm acid tones of lime, yellow and orange reds in one of the beds- you can see a bit of it in the right hand side pic.

Green Flowers

noreply@blogger.com (TheO Gardener) — Sat, 28 Feb 2015 17:37:00 +0000

I don't often see green flowered orchids at the farmers market but I did today and two spectacular ones at that. Dendrobium Callophyllum on the right is a native of Java, Lesser Sunda Islands and the Moluccas. Hallelujah it likes sun and I have just the spot for it. I will be moving it out of its pot (growing on charcoal) to attach to a branch to hang on the Dark Verandah. Most of the epiphytes I have, similarly set up are clustered around the shady bits so its great to have this filling one of the sunnier gaps. And fill nicely it will as it has 5 or 6 fairly lanky arched leaf stems.

Dendrobium Ionopus on the left requires medium light so will join the crowd huddled under the shadier spot, perhaps further up front. It will stand out though with its unusual pendulum blooms and spidery foliage. The flowers hang off rigid stem like lanterns on a stick. Where the Callophylum is a fairly bright green, this one is pale , tending to yellow. This orchid is endemic to Phillippines.

I have other green orchids, one is a Coelogyne (a gift) and the other is an unidentified one that I bought. Both were blooming when I acquired them but haven't done so since which is an admission of a huge problem that I have with orchids - I haven't really got the hang of them yet. In a sense they are somewhat high maintenance with their watering needs and their fairly specific sunlight requirements. These sunlight requirements include a nuanced understanding about the difference between bright light and light sun and early morning or late evening sun. Lets just say I'm still learning. It helps when the vendor can give me some directions or at least a name for me to look up its needs. and this is just to keep them alive, I've yet to master whatever feeding or other requirements they need to reflower.

For this reason, these two were priced just right. I see many gorgeous orchids at the market and they are not inexpensive. I've murdered enough of them to resist the temptation to splurge. These were affordable to buy both but also costly enough for me to pay attention to them as I have lost many an orchid, in that early stage when its situation hasn't really been fully understood yet. Additionally, there are a few other factors like storms and squirrels that lead to discovery of a dead, dried out, or rotted that has fallen in between the pots underneath it.

Ultimately, it will be about finding a balance between getting the conditions and situation right and enough care without it being a burden. Its certainly worth pursuing though as even this narrower range that interests me - wild orchids of this region, has beautiful specimens of extraordinary shapes colors and scents that send out their siren call everytime I go to the market.

White Corner

noreply@blogger.com (TheO Gardener) — Tue, 22 Oct 2013 06:05:00 +0000

I have yet another 'section' in my garden that has endured a shuffling and reshuffling of items, starting life as a repository for 'undecideds' whilst I tinkered with the other sections. Gradually though an idea of sorts emerged and it is now my White Corner. It is literally a two sided corner with its main idea initiated by plants that I've inherited from my Dad's garden which include a white Jessamine, white Bougainvillea, white Gardenia Jasminoides, and an assortment of white vareigated foliage plants - more about that in a future post.

I inherited from the previous tenant a Wrightia Religiosa, pictured right and then went on to purchase Jasmine Multiflorum, pictured left, Clerodendrum Calamitosum, and also Vallaris Glabra. Apart from the Bougainvillea - all the other white blooms are fragrant which is the other defining feature of this corner. Other non scented white flowers are Wrightia Antidysenterica and white Madagascar periwinkle both not doing terribly well which needs some looking into. Doing ok are white Ixora and Eucharis grandiflora.

This idea of scent has also informed some further development in this corner as I want that scent to 'envelop' the visitor to that corner, so I'm now trying, with the help of some recently purchased bamboo poles, to create an arbor of sorts for the Jasmine to clamber over. One side of this 'corner' is a bamboo fence that encloses a covered dining patio which also provides a vertical growing space.

The other side of this corner is a walled bed which contains more foliage elements - notably Acalypha Siamensis, a Strobilanthes Crispa and Syngonium Podophyllum all of whom started out rather modestly but have turned out to be quite thuggish. Not a bad thing as I need the space filled for now but it requires a fair amount of cutting back. Along with the white flowered weed Mikania micrantha at the back that helps to cover a wire fence, I'm looking to slowly displace them with other things as the bed matures. Except the Acalypha which I clipped into a ball shape and looks quite interesting.

False Rue

noreply@blogger.com (TheO Gardener) — Tue, 24 Feb 2015 12:39:00 +0000

As I often complain, I'm in ownership of a quite a few plants that remain unidentified as that's how plants are sold here- without any kind of label. Occasionally the seller might be knowledgeable enough to identify the plant- sometimes it even helps just to know the local name. Otherwise its a google search that might take a while to track down. Let me just say though, it is astonishing what google can do with a few keywords.

I now also have about three textbooks written by local authors and make it a morning habit to flip through them, cup of coffee in hand. This is the other method that occasionally yields a good result when I make the connection between a photo in the book and something I just bought. Its amazing what slips through though as I discover something only on the 20th reading.

And then there's the more random situation where you are looking for something else on the internet and you identify something quite different altogether. That's how I discovered False Rue, Baeckea frutescens. I was looking for information about 'tropical pines' and there it was - an image of its slender branches of pine like needles that droop in downward elegant curves. All the vendor could tell me when I bought it is that it is very slow growing.

Its not a Pine but in the Myrtle family, and while 70 of the 75 species are endemic to Australia, this one is native to South East Asia. Turns out, it also has a host of medicinal qualities and I write this while enjoying a very pleasant scented herbal tea made from it. I can't help thinking of it as the kind of 'comforting beverage doubling as medicine' that those Septagenarians on the Greek Island of Ikaria are nourishing themselves with. In fact its whole vibe is mediterranean both woody and herbal not unlike something growing wild in Greece or Spain you might run into on a hike. It enjoys similar conditions here, the poor soils of rocky hill slopes and sandy coasts.

The branches' arched lines and interesting shades of color - quite limey when the growth is new, make it a regular choice of foliage for a friend who practises Ikebana and has a larger more mature specimen growing in her garden in full sun. So thats where I put mine, in the White Corner where its hot and sunny, and its doing just fine.

Lightning Orchids

noreply@blogger.com (TheO Gardener) — Fri, 30 Jan 2015 09:03:00 +0000

My dad called these Lightning Orchids, which I've discovered is not correct, the plant is Dendrobium Crumanatum and the common name for them is Pigeon Orchids. He said that they flowered after a lightning storm and he's not completely wrong about that. This orchid forms buds after there is a temperature drop, usually due to a thunderstorm. Nine days later long necklaces of white flowers with a yellow throat bloom gregariously with members of this species in its vicinity. The blooms are fragrant, particularly in the morning and last only a day.

This ephemeral quality perfectly suits where these orchids reside, on the branches of the durian trees in the orchard. Its an area that is not 'gardened' I cut the grass once a month but otherwise leave it mostly alone and enjoy the occasional surprise of these orchids which literally lights up the trees with these strings of white flowers. Apart from the durian flowers, these are the only other flowers here.

They are a relatively common wild orchid, you see them in a lot of trees but due to this ephemeral, weather specific behavior, unless you are actually in regular contact with them- you might miss these little shows that they put on. They also really want to stay wild - I've tried having them on wooden branches hung in the porch and they never flower and generally look ill at ease. So their ideal situation is what exists in the orchard a colony growing on the branches of a small grove of untended trees, protected but with a lot of light.

Its been an extraordinarily cool and wet monsoon this year which is unusual to even say as we really live far south of the monsoon belt and shouldn't really be experiencing such a clear seasonal pattern. But we are and there's been serious flooding throughout the country, particularly on the east coast, a consequence of climate change and deforestation. I have to admit, I've loved the cool mornings and the garden has also loved the daily soak that it gets. We're now back into hot dry weather and it must have been that one heavy shower we had over a week ago that cooled things down and triggered these orchids to put on a show.

The Color Orange

noreply@blogger.com (TheO Gardener) — Mon, 05 Jan 2015 05:12:00 +0000

The decision to go for a color palette with warm sunset accents in the Gravel Garden developed along a few lines. One was how well those colors look with the many succulents I have here. Another is how it pairs with all the concrete and gravel mulch and terracota that dominates the hardscape. It also makes sense that it is in the same spectrum as the berries of the Ficus Deltoides and also the ripe Citrus when it fruits. Finally, this garden's best moment is at the end of the day when the sun is just about to set providing a lovely glow to the space which reminded me of how the cottage garden at Sissinghurst full of coppery sunset colors comes alive at that time. The challenge has been to find the tropical version of this.

I've had little success though getting this color scheme in flower form in the dry slope bed as the intense sun exposure has literally fried everything I tried there. Moss Roses, Portulacea when I had them there looked gorgeous and seemed to be the perfect way to get chunks of these warm colors but they were too short lived and required too much attention in a space that's hard to access and full of spiky thorny plants. So the color is to be found only in the berries and citrus fruit and the occasional flower spike from the Aloes.

My success in getting these colors into this space has been in the potted plants on the other side which gets a little respite from the hot sun. It's still somewhat dry and hot there and potted plants need to fulfil the condition of being pretty drought tolerant as I don't want to have to water them unless its particularly dry. As things have matured though some of the taller potted plants are providing oasis conditions for others and this is where Chrysothemis Pulchella pictured left fits in. This is one of those plants I purchased and put in to the dry slope bed that came to a sorry end. Recently though I pinched a cutting from a friend's garden and stuck it in a pot enjoying a shady nook in the shadow of a large planter. It sprang to life and is now two pots. The flowers are not only orange but include shades between yellow and red which look spectacular set against its dark bronze leaves.

Against the back wall of the space that has a short concrete wall and then bamboo fencing behind it is another semi protected enclave where my potted Golden Gardenia is thriving. This is a plant that I'm not at all certain about identifying having first made its acquaintence as Gardenia Carinata but then subsequently discovered there are other similar ones called Gardenia Tubifera and perhaps Gardenia Lamingtonia or Gardenia Ghellerupii. I'll update this once I get a proper handle on it. In any case it produces a spectacular show of blooms on a regular basis with a knockout fragrance. The blooms start out pale yellow, which is when they are most fragrant and then darken to an orange that has a gorgeous burnt quality.

Painterly Whites

noreply@blogger.com (TheO Gardener) — Tue, 25 Nov 2014 13:59:00 +0000

The ribs on the Caladium Lindenii pictured left, look like they're painted on. In the background of the picture on the right, what looks like green paint spattered on white paper is Diffenbachia Star Bright I think, hard to tell with so many variations that look quite similar. The papery leaves in the foreground with the broad watercolor stripes belong to variegated Arrowroot, Maranta Arundinacea, possibly my favorite of this trio.

I inherited these guys from my parents garden, which along with a collection of fragrant white flowered plants, I started organizing into a 'white corner'. To be honest the situation was not ideal- too hot and sunny for these shade lovers, the plan was to get some larger plants and some climbers to protect them. It took a while for that to happen so in the meantime it was virtually plant abuse as I would forget and find them bone dry, scorched which would lead to yellowing and brown edges. Not Pretty.

Things are better now, there's a fair amount of dappled shade. A few repottings have also happened which with regular mulching with compost keeps them in good shape. In return the corner is looking good, these variegated whites provide an illusion of being icy cool- its a joy to catch a glimpse of them on a hot sunny day. At night there's an added etherealness to their appearance which in combination with the evening perfume of the many scented white flowers gives this spot a unique personality of its own.

Now that I have this section and my eye catches white flowered or white variegated plants when I'm plant shopping or just browsing online, its quite extraordinary how many plant there are that fit into this category. Just as I was surprised to discover a while ago the prevalence of white in the fall garden at NYBG and Cape Cod, I'm now finding the same in tropical plants. What a huge range of perfumed white flowered and white variegated leaves there are - many of them native to this part of the world.

The problem still remains that this spot is pretty exposed and can get very hot and dry except in its deepest corner which is where these painterly whites are currently thriving. Next week I'm going to do some moving around, repotting and fence repair so who knows I might end up with a little expansion of this space.

Craftsman's Garden

noreply@blogger.com (TheO Gardener) — Sat, 22 Nov 2014 15:32:00 +0000

This was my second visit to the garden at the National Craft Center in Kuala Lumpur. I had returned primarily to take another look at the garden having been really impressed with its design on my first visit. The visit reiterated my original impressions of the garden being not only well designed but uniquely suited to the purpose of the center to celebrate Malaysian handicrafts.

The garden is not large, inhabiting space between buildings at the complex with a few small artisan cottage studios at its center where artisans work and sell their wares. That in itself is instructional in garden design - what it manages to pack in this small space is extraordinary - a small stream, a pool, lush plantings and an interesting variety of hardscapes that lead the visitor through the artisanal commune, see the album of photos.

Not only are the hardscapes interesting and visually compelling, the collection of assorted earthen containers, large driftwoods and boulders are completely in keeping with the spirit of the center as a craftman's haven. Its hard to tell sometimes if they belong to the garden or are waiting to be worked on by an artisanal hand or just completed by one. The terracota pots have grooves and grids that collect moss and the logs and driftwoods add extraordinary visual texture. There's always a knowing mix of geometric forms and patterns juxtaposed with organic ones like gnarly roots and paving stones, or a pile of boulders and a twisted trunk set against the decorative grid of air bricks.

The color palette is masterful. There are painted surfaces in a warm ochre that resonate with the terracotta and ceramic pots as well as picking up shades in the boulders and pebbles. The grayer shades of the stones are in tune with the gray of bark and driftwoods pickled and bleached by the equatorial sun.

Its surprising how well these colors look combined with a lush green tropical planting. The colors are are also cleverly knitted together in the design, bright green moss in the grooves of the terracota and the hollows of driftwood or wrapped around pebbles. The ochres are picked up in the color of coconuts or foliage as they yellow and clumps of yellow stemmed bamboo. The green color is also purposefully limited to foliage - largely ferns, palms and bamboos, with little to no flowers to be seen.

It happened to thunderstorm quite heavily during my visit which revealed yet more layers to the design. Water thundered down gutters and splashed in the pools and small stream and bounced of large leaved plants providing an audio sensory experience unique to this part of the world - when it rains here - it really rains. There was movement - large bamboos and skinny palm swayed and the rain rendered erratic staccato movements to the leaves. There was also the added glossy textures and darker colors that the rain also brings.

A measure of a beautifully designed garden is to want to visit it again, and I certainly do and the other is whether it inspires to find ways of incorporating its ideas into your own garden and I certainly will.

Autumn Leaves, Sort of

noreply@blogger.com (TheO Gardener) — Wed, 15 Oct 2014 07:06:00 +0000

Now that I am living in an endless tropical summer I realize how much an ever changing temperate environment drives you forward into new cycles of activity or states of mind. The longing for warm summer days, the thrill of fall in New York City when everyone is back from their summer sojourns, the inertia of winter and for gardeners the rush of a new growing season.

I have come to the realisation however that the botanical changes that define each season from bud to flower and fruit and then bare branches is something that happens here too - just not in synchronicity. Take the visual spectacle of autumn leaves happening now in northern temperate countries that will soon crescendo into a glorious show of color . The science of why that is happening, is happening here too except for slightly different reasons and in an unorchestrated way.

We have here, leaves going through the same end of life process, yellowing and turning brown as well as an anthocyanin fueled range of oranges and red that happen as a biological strategy to protect new emerging leaves from the hot tropical sun. So we are seeing this palette of colors thoughout the year, not in a huge burst but in a continual cycle that layers into all the other typically green leaf colors.

Pictured right is one I see all the time, young red leaves of the Wild Cinammon, Cinnamomum Iners that is almost weed like if given a chance. On the left, a tree that I see everyday walking the dogs and have yet to identify is almost constantly in this state of autumnal color. Another, that has become endemic in our landscape, since it is a favorite of local municipal landscapers and private homes as a easy to grow hedge, Syzygium Myrtifolium. Almost everywhere we see the burnished oranges and reds of its new growth.

Yesterday, when I took these photos in my neighborhood, it was late afternoon just after a heavy shower. I enjoy a slight microclimate here being slightly elevated and in close proximity to a small forest, a heavy shower at a cooler time of day will elicit a slight mist. The mist, occasional piles of leaf fall, short bursts of autumn leaf color as described above and and I couldn't help but be transported back to the memory of autumn walks in New York City and Westchester. Minus of course the chill and the slight dread about where this colorful autumn road will eventually lead.

The Patient Path

noreply@blogger.com (TheO Gardener) — Fri, 15 Aug 2014 15:17:00 +0000

In the last few weeks, the stone path I laid in the dark verandah has finally 'clicked'. It's taken the best part of a couple of years. It's a short path that takes you from the concrete verandah, through the border and an opening in the bamboo fence. I found most of the 'stones' in the orchard where I think many years ago some renovation had occured and these broken pieces ended up being disposed there. They are really chunks of cement and gravel but having been laying around for years in the cooler shade of the orchard, had become mossy.

Having transferred and laid them, which took a few tries to get right, their new site was a little sunnier than what they were used to and the mossiness started to fade. I planted Hemigraphis Alternata and Peacock Ginger, Kaemferia Elegans on one side and Piper Betel on the other. Every few weeks I bought a bag full of Centella Asiatica from the farmers market (sold as a salad green but still with roots on) and stuffed them into all the spaces in between. They were all slow to take and sulky. Both the Hemigraphis and Kaemferia elegans would disappear and return again in a slighty different spot.

Now, some of the stones are lush with moss, the Hemigraphis like a multi hued purple wave lapping this mossy shore. The Kaemferia's complex patterned leaves is regularly accented with a shot of purple flower. The Betel leaves are a vibrant lime color punctuated by the darker green of a Pennywort, Hydrocotyle Ranunculoides self seeded from a nearby pot. The path instead of leading your eye out, now with all these textures and colors, holds your interest and even encourages you to stop to crouch and take a closer look.

The change happened as I started to fill the verandah with more and larger plants. I also put in a bamboo grid arbour- more about that later, both of these have created a significant change in the amount of shade this path now receives. It's almost been a lesson in Zen, there I was thinking that I was patiently waiting for all these plants to get their act together and all this time it was them waiting for me to create the conditions that now makes them thrive.

Malay Apples

noreply@blogger.com (TheO Gardener) — Fri, 20 Jun 2014 15:11:00 +0000

In the last few years of living in New York City I tried consciously to eat more seasonally which was all well and good in the summer months but as the seasons progressed into the colder months the selection would inevitably thin to root vegetables and apples. I ate a lot of apples. But then I did love going down to the farmers market at Union square and filling up my backpack with them.

Here now in the tropics there are no heirloom apples to be found - just the bright red or green homogenous supermarket varieties - Granny Smiths and Red Delicious from Australia and New Zealand. Their perfectly shiny uniformity lack the attraction I found in the odd shaped Braeburns and Cox Pippins with their more complex tangy flavors and hard crunch.

I miss them but I also I don't primarily because there is so much other fruit here and I might add, incredible fruit at that. Can't complain when there are four or five different kinds of Mangoes, Bananas and Pineapples available in its place, pretty much year round.

There is however a kind of substitute in Malay apples or Water Apples or Java apples. Not actually an apple or related to apples but in the Syzygium, Myrtle family (which includes Cloves): Syzygium malaccense and Syzygium samarangense or Syzygium javanicum. Never quite sure which is which, they come either green pink or red in either a longish shape like the one pictured above or shorter and plumper and sometimes more fluted.

There is a crunch when you first bite into them but the sensation quickly shifts into a spongier texture so it doesn't really do what the much denser apple does. There is much variation in flavor in every batch from bland watery to sweet and tart but always with a faint rose scent. Better to get them from a regular reliable source, and there's a local fruit farm grows them organically and often has them for sale at the night market in Pelangi.

Growing up, our neighbour had a tree growing in their yard and we often were climbing it to score a few fruit to take home and eat as the locals do here with a sauce of dark soy and sugar. It remains a good way to flesh out its flavor profile. In New York I did something similar mixing soy sauce, lime juice and Peanut butter as a dressing for apples in a salad.

I'm not tempted to grow the tree myself as I've seen many a sad looking tree full of fruit - too much perhaps with much of it ending up rotting on the ground. At Desaru fruit farm- how they grow it organically is to barrier protect by wrapping each individual fruit with a physical barrier, that's too much work. I'll stick with buying them at the market, which also means I get to cycle through the slightly different varieties.

They don't do well in the fridge, better eaten up quickly before they bruise and soften but on a hot day a couple of refrigerated ones are just the thing to snack on for a little cool respite. Here's where their lack of density actually works in their favor as you can do this a few times a day.

.......

Sparkle

noreply@blogger.com (TheO Gardener) — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 17:21:00 +0000

Sparkle. South Street Seaport. Music Double Rondo by Steve Howe.

Tropical Chocolate

noreply@blogger.com (TheO Gardener) — Fri, 30 May 2014 03:50:00 +0000

Its amazing how a few small changes can substantially change the look of a garden. A few new acquisitions for the Dark Verandah have done exactly that. Last saturday on my usual hunt at the farmers market, I found not one but two chocolate colored coleus. Week after week this one vendor would have coleus but always in brighter colors of reds and pinks, then this week he had these two - a ruffled chocolate edge one and one with chocolate splashes.

Having had some experience now with the shifting personalites of Coleus I'm going to keep these two in pots and in heavier shade. I've found that shade keeps the lime colors greener (they seem to get more yellow in sun) and the chocolate, darker (they get redder in sun). Keeping them in pots will allow me to move them around to where they keep the color values I like best. I must also propagate frequently as they wax and wane quite dramatically left to their own devices.

Yesterday on a visit to an orchid farm, I found a couple of pots of the black cordyline pictured above left. I think its Cordyline Fruticosa Black Magic, and what I really like about it is that it does not have red or pink tones that I frequently see in Cordylines for sale here. This one is largely black with some green. The nursery owner was reluctant to sell it, but thankfully I convince him to part with one of those two plants.

I've had the Christia Obcordata for while, with its pretty chocolate striped leaves that look like butterfly wings. I'd been keeping it in the shade thinking that's what it liked. Although it continued to grow, it remained spindly until a few weeks ago I moved the pot into the bed where its a little shaded by a neighbouring plant but does get some sunshine. It quite literally transformed, doubling its size and becoming an important feature with its unusual coloring shape and pattern.

So a nice boost to my chocolate palette and a little further along the learning curve on how to manage this palette better by playing musical chairs, moving these potted beauties around.

Painted Nettle

noreply@blogger.com (TheO Gardener) — Tue, 07 Jan 2014 04:12:00 +0000

The painted nettle or Coleus has become a favorite in my garden. Although still much in use, the name Coleus is apparently defunct and should properly be called Solenostemon scutellarioides. Can't say I'm adjusting to that terribly well. In the Dark Verandah garden the few that I've planted there have become important color accents adding shots of lime or splashes of yellow or adding dark chocolates and charred purples to the dark theme.

They also grow fairly vigorously so quickly fill the many blank spaces in in the border that desperately need filling. This growth habit is also part of its challenge, as soon as a gorgeous stand takes to take shape, it starts to fall apart. They start to fall over, the leaves that have started to get huge start to be replaced by much smaller ones as the plant starts to take issue with an environment that it seemed to be perfectly happy with before.

They don't all do this, the purply one is guilty of the above and I've learnt to just get into the rhythm of simply snapping a healthy branch and sticking it into the ground and voila a new generation arrives to replace the one that's petering out. This one also complains if it gets a little too sunny and being my first purchase I assumed that this was the case for all Coleus but that's not true.

The maroon one with the pink splashes is quite the opposite. It was doing just ok in a pot in shade and I moved it to a really sunny spot, and forgot all about it. I found it a changed character a week later, thriving twice its size in its new favored spot. Of all the coleus, the large spikes of violet blue flowers of this plant are the most handsome, partly perhaps because of its strong contrast to its red hued leaves.

The splotchy one top right, has been a crowd stopper pulling as many admirers as any flower I've ever known. Regular requests for cuttings perhaps is the key to its success as it remains growing steadily without any crazy spurts, happily enjoying its sunny position. It's also done something odd. One of the cuttings has mutated into a plant that doesn't have the burgundy splotches but is attractive in its own right being just lime and yellow. Fine with me as it looks almost like a completely different variety.

Its actually been difficult to find them in colors I like, many for sale are too gaudy a mix of pinks and greens that don't fit with what I have in mind. You can practically hear my squeal of delight when I see one for sale that does with my palette of greens, yellows and darks. I covet the delicious colors I see on foreign seed catalogues and will soon resort to ordering from them. For now, a friend who has gone on vacation in the US has promised to look for seeds for the black coleus that I used to have and I must admit the thrill of the hunt on Saturdays to the farmers market to find a new one, like the one a I got a couple of weeks ago with the bright lime spot in the middle, is a fun addiction.

Coleus are also native to this region and therefore perfect for the dark verandah where I want to showcase as many natives as possible. Thankfully their wonderful colors helps to provide the balance that is sometimes missing in tropical gardens as native plants tend to be more about foliage than flowers. This explains the the immense popularity of brightly flowered tropical South American species like heliconias that now dominate gardens here. Here in my garden they help draw the eye to the interesting textural and sculptural values of the the other tenants.

Aloe Aloe

noreply@blogger.com (TheO Gardener) — Wed, 25 Dec 2013 06:03:00 +0000

I bought a couple and then a friend brought some over from his garden, then they multiplied and now I have a rather larger collection of Aloes. I'm not complaining, they look great with their sculptural shapes and the myriad of pups that they send out filling out the Gravel Garden nicely but I didn't anticipate their vigour. They have pretty much outgrown any pot or container that I put them in and look painfully crowded wherever they are in the border as they push up against their neighbours.

A serious lift and separate session is long overdue which I'm not looking forward to as one thing I have noticed about them is that they really don't like to be moved. They recover alright but spend a fair amount of time looking miserably discolored and not at all their perky selves. I'm not sure yet if I want to replant all of them if they are that vigorous. Perhaps I should thin them out and give them more room and pass some on to neighbours.

Another disappointment is the flowers. I see the flower spikes emerge with a blush of orange and then they wither and die off. Not all all like the spectacular racemes that I have seen images of. The internet is not giving me much information as to why this is happening. Is it too humid here and too damp with all the rain? Its certainly not affecting the plants who seem happy in the dry gravel mulched slope and pots that they inhabit. Must get to the bottom of this as I need a little more color here in the Gravel Garden.

What on the other hand is a tremendous resource is the gel that the leaves yield. There is near always one in my refrigerator on standby for minor cuts and itchies, I've used it to gel my hair and occasionally as an antiperspirant. The locals here make a drink with it and tell me its good for digestive issues. After a bout of gardening nothing beats a fridge cooled slice of aloe to soothe the battle wounds of tussling with weeds and scratchy plants.

The slight spotting and the flower shape indicates that these Aloes might be Aloe Massawana, see also this. It is certainly the only kind that I see here growing in gardens or available at the nurseries, and come to think of it I don't think I've seen it flower anywhere else.

Tropical Harvest

noreply@blogger.com (TheO Gardener) — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 06:48:00 +0000

Doing some clearing up in the garden also means scoring a small bounty of produce. Enough even to share, so I walked over with some to my neighbour and on the way home foraged a couple more things that grow by the side of the road.

Looking at what I had in hand, I realized that this is all really quite different from my previous life as a gardener in the New York area. My tropical harvest is not only of different botanic material, but three years now living back home in the tropics, they are also the ingredients of a different cuisine and lifestyle.

Lets start bottom right where I have some Pandan leaves, Pandanus amaryllifolius, and some Cymbopogon nardus, Citronella grass. The Citronella, I have by accident. I bought what I thought was lemon grass from the farmers market and since some still had roots, I planted them in the garden. I always thought they looked a little different, the stalks have a brown skin that curls away. One day a friend came over, sniffed a leaf and said- that's Citronella.

I trim it when it gets untidy and braid it with the pandan leaves to use as an indoor freshener that also has insect repellant properties. The Pandan leaves are traditionally used for cooking, added for fragrance to coconut rice and also color to some local cakes, but I noticed some locals with a bunch tied into a knot under their car seat for these air freshening and repellant properties.

The Kaffir limes which I thought were not edible, except as marmalade, are in fact quite edible. I read this somewhere which said that left to mature on the tree, they are not as bitter. Indeed, its nomore than grapefruit bitter and there's an interesting perfumed flavor that echoes the leaves which are more commonly used in Tom Yam. Nice squeezed into a glass of cold water.

The other fruit is Averrhoa bilimbi, Blimbing, a cousin of the starfruit that is sharply sour. I've had it pickled with slices of lemon as a side or mixed with a sambal but I also like it sliced thinly as a sour note in a salad. This is one of the foraged items that grows on the trunk of a tree across the street.

The other foraged item is those pods on the top, Leucaena leucocephala, Petai Cina. The tiny seed inside is another great salad item, nutty with a slight pungency reminiscent of a popular vegetable here the much larger Petai, Parkia Speciosa which I don't quite like mainly because of its lingering after effects which you can read about in the link.

The bunch of greens are a mix of an edible weed, Asystasia gangetica or tropical violet, which cooks like spinach, some Thai Basil and Persicaria Capitata, more of a medicinal herb that's boiled to make a tonic drink but I use it as a salad green which has a slightly sour taste.

Where there's Smoke

noreply@blogger.com (TheO Gardener) — Mon, 01 Jul 2013 16:47:00 +0000

It rained today. An event that has acquired new meaning since we were shrouded with haze billowing in from the neighbouring Indonesian islands. The dry weather that brought the haze finally gave way, thunder rumbled for hours as we waited with bated breath literally until the rain came and washed a week's suffering away. What was joyful relief has now instilled a new found sense of gratitude every time it rains.

That week, the days began with an anxious checking of the air pollutant index to see with growing wariness the numbers escalate to unhealthy and then hazardous levels. The authorities warned everyone to stay at home with the air conditioning on and not go outside. I don't have air conditioning. I live in an older house in a less urbanised neighbourhood that's better ventilated and suited to living with just fans. The pictures above show a landscape with almost a dreamlike quality wrapped in mist except it wasn't mist it was acrid particulate smoke that you could smell and irritated your eyes, nose, throat and lungs.

New to this phenomenon, I navigated a sizeable learning curve trying to understand the problem I was dealing with and what I should do. The first discovery is that there are quite a few measurements for pollutants out there and both Malaysia's API and Singapore's PSI don't include PM2.5 which is the finer particulate that gets into your lungs and stays there. On learning this I became more vigilant about closing windows and doors. A few days later, the numbers started to go down aided by the intervention of cloud seeding and waterbombing and finally, it rained.

A casual mention on my facebook timeline alerted me to the effects of haze in the garden. A friend noted that leaves were turning yellow. Another friend echoed the same and I ran outside to see its effect on mine. Indeed, here and there I could see it too. The haze wasn't just choking us, it was doing the same to other living beings too. And not just flora, there was all the wildlife that can't stay inside in the air conditioning or put a mask on.

As the fires raged in indonesia, so did public opinion about who was to blame and whether adequate measures were being taken. Indonesian leaders deflected blame to the unscrupulous land clearing practises of Malaysian and Singaporean Palm oil companies situated in Indonesia. Singaporeans complained about the government's continued use of the PSI, accusing them of hiding the truth. In Malaysia there was such poorly disseminated information, that even a well intentioned Cabinet minister comically gave out 40,000 face masks that had no ability to protect the wearer from harmful effects.

Amidst the din of all this, little analysis has been given to the real arsonist here, the spiralling demand for Palm oil based products. Demand for palm oil has doubled in the last thirteen years and is predicted to more than double again by 2030 and to triple by 2050 to keep up with the spiralling demand for more chocolates, cookies, cosmetics, air fresheners to name a few. This is the fire, that really needs to be put out.

Brutal Harvest

noreply@blogger.com (TheO Gardener) — Tue, 26 Nov 2013 16:26:00 +0000

Its Durian season. Its the second one I've had to deal with and its brutal. As it gets into full swing, up to ten fruits fall a day with a crashing thud. The heavy spiked fruits can be lethal if they fall on you, as one nearly did the other day missing me by a few feet. There is a myth that they fall only at night. Not true, it can be at any time of the day or night.

First thing in the morning, I don a construction hat and head down into the orchard to pick whatever's fallen and keep an eye out through the day for more mainly because fruit lying around attracts thieves. I noticed this the first harvest when fruit I was pretty sure I had seen lying on the ground in the morning was no longer there in the evening. Then I saw the occasional chap climb over the wall to help himself. Durians are expensive nowadays so the temptation to indulge is sufficient to lead one to crime it seems.

After they fall, they don't last very long, no more than two days. I have to either shell them and keep the fruit in the fridge or freezer or they end up in the compost heap. I like durians but I don't love them so after a few days I've had my fill after which I just want to get rid of them. So everyday after that, I play Santa Claus calling in friends and neighbours to come help themselves. Most locals here love durians so the invitation elicits squeals of joy and by the end of each day all the durians go home with very appreciative folk.

I now pick them up and put them straight into a closed garbage can which helps but doesn't completely remove the heavy smell, some would say stench of the ripe fruit that fills the air. This year I've got a better handle on it than I did last year with a lot of ripe and overipe fruit around it was intense. This year, the Rambutans have decided to fruit at the same time and there's a lot of fallen fruit that decomposes adding another wine like odor to the mix.

Not all the trees fruit each time, this year the D24 is really good and there's a classic local or kampung variety that I really like -small fruit with just a few seeds but a nice flavor. Another couple of weeks of this and it'll be over, which I'm quite looking forward to.

...........

The Stranglers

noreply@blogger.com (TheO Gardener) — Tue, 17 Sep 2013 07:57:00 +0000

Strangler figs are a common sight here, often found sprouting on the walls of abandoned buildings. Patrick Le Blanc has some photos of Ficus Religiosa doing exactly that on his inspiration page, as one source of his ideas for developing his renowned vertical gardens.

Here, we seem to see more Ficus Benjamina, which if left unsupervised will quickly wrap masonry with its vicious tentacles. We also see many trees in their murderous grip, the photo on the left being one taken after, when the deed is done. The strangler, seeds itself somewhere in the branches of the host tree, wrapping itself around its host until its own canopy along with its crushing tendrils kill it, replacing the tree that was once there. The photo is poignant as its a photo taken at my childhood home. Once there was a Cajeput tree there, a native to this region related to the Tea tree. Now, this giant unrecognizable Banyan, is the only thing left standing as the old house was also recently torn down.

In the empty plot that is adjacent to mine, what was once the property of a ballet school, there are some large Ficus Benjamina that I can see from my house and it represents something different altogether. It is the perch of hundreds of birds that frolic daily in its branches enjoying its regularly bounty of small berries. As urbanization continues to clear oases of natural vegetation like this one and the fauna that survive in it, it is is a joy to watch this vibrant hum of natural wild activity.

Something about the rampancy of how these trees grow speaks of the tropics and what I find is a huge challenge gardening here - how quickly things get out of hand. Suddenly before you know it there's a tree growing in the wall that you can no longer dislodge. There were a couple such trees growing on the outside of my southern wall which by the time I got round to checking, were huge.

I ripped them off, gouged out what I could of their insidous roots and dragged them back home. No mean feat as the larger of the two is about 12 feet tall. I shoved them into a couple of large pots and though they are complaining bitterly with a massive leaf drop, I'm hoping they'll get over it and I will have some badly needed instant shade for the dark verandah.

Looking at all the dropped leaves, I am reminded of the large Ficus benjamina I had in my rented London room a few decades ago, for which I paid a small fortune which would similarly drop all its leaves after a particularly bad spate of neglect but could be cajoled back to life after a little TLC. Back then I didn't even know that this popular houseplant was native to my home country where I am now and see these strange creatures everywhere.

Fern and Vine

noreply@blogger.com (TheO Gardener) — Tue, 13 Aug 2013 09:29:00 +0000

I've started planting a corner of the large bed I started around the Dark Verandah and some random happenstances have turned out to be really quite delightful. Two of them are pictured above, a dark sweet potato vine and a black stemmed fern.

On visiting a friend's garden I managed to score a couple of lengths of the sweet potato vine - I've not seen it for sale in the nurseries. I put it at the base of the black bamboo I had recently transplanted. Sadly the black bamboo died- it only had a few leaves left to begin with when I transferred it there from the pot it was in. Then I notice one day that those few leaves had shrivelled, the vine below however was very much alive. Then one day connected the dots, why not let the vine travel up. Bam. I now have a dark sooty column thats already six or seven feet high creating a strong architectural shape in the border.

This particular fern often seeded itself in the plant pots at my dad's house. I allowed its own pot and discovered quite a large attractive fern, finely cut foliage, dark black stems and elegant fiddleheads dusted with white. I still find volunteers in the pots so I transferred them into the bed nestling them in with the black vine unsure if it might be too sunny. Not at all. Its thriving and getting quite big so I'm adding more as I find them to form a colony.

I've no idea what this fern is but I'm amassing a small collection of them by finding them self seeded in walls around the property, in the monsoon drains, on my walks growing on the trunks of trees. The variety is quite amazing. I'm presuming they are all native as I really do want to try and keep this part of the garden native. The Sweet Potato vine isn't indigenous, with South American origins, but a little research tells me that they have been around in this part of the world for a long time like that other settler that seems almost local, the Chilli. In fact the locals commonly eat the sweet potato leaves as a vegetable which you don't see in the west.

The visual chemistry of this fern with the vine is quite spectacular as the dark vine trails underneath and behind it as it crawls upwards creating the perfect foil for the lacy foliage. The black stalks also echo the admittedly dead black bamboo ones. All in all, with some of the other interesting things going on around which I'll detail later like a purple leaved Persian Shield and some dark coleus, my Dark Verandah is coming along.

Compost Happens

noreply@blogger.com (TheO Gardener) — Mon, 15 Jul 2013 14:06:00 +0000

At the back of the house, there is a brick structure which I believe were destined to be dog kennels. Unfinished, the walls are about four foot high forming two bays with an open front that looked very much like compost heaps I had seen in a grander garden somewhere on my travels. Of course that is exactly how I have utilised them.

The windfall of having a structure that might as well have been purpose built for composting is additionally sweetened by a ridiculous amount of available organic material. The grass gets cut twice a month which is a couple of feet's worth in one of those bays. Then trimmings of sugar cane, banana and papaya trees and miscellaneous garden cuttings supplement the kitchen waste of coffee grounds, vegetables, fruit trimmings etc. The supply is prolific. I even have the choice of occasionally dragging a neighbours bag of grass or trimming from outside.

I don't even turn it. Days of hot dry sun and then soaking tropical thunderstorm make the decomposition process intense and it is year round. Once one bay is full, I start filling the next and halfway through, the first bay is composted and ready to be used.

I use the layer just above the compost that is not quite ready but has started to break down as a 'nourishing mulch' for the plant beds in the Potager which are closest to this heap. I might mix this with some dried leaves too. The compost I then use in the specific areas I'm planting or mixed with some top soil for potting. The compost is a rich dark chocolate cake which I just marvel at and harvest so to speak in roughly three month cycles. I can't quite believe how ridiculously easy this is now that I 've got into a groove with it.

I avoid putting weeds in there although the grass cuttings may unintentionally include some and a friend advised against any kind of citrus that has bactericide properties that can slow down the process. Once while helping myself to some of that luscious dirt with my hands I scooped up a gigantic grub, possibly a rhinocerous beetle. I don't ever do that anymore with my hands.

I also have an unofficial compost heap outside these bays, against one of the walls. Here I do put weeds and turf and twiggy branches that I can't be bothered to strip of their leaves but no kitchen stuff and I leave it for a longer time. I started doing this because I didn't really know what to do with all of that and discovered that after a year, it composted just the same, but with a little more woody bits that need to be sifted out.

I use this other compost when I'm planting a new bed, turning it in deeper so that there is less chance of weed material having any effect. My guess is that with a longer breakdown, it's less likely to happen. Although, I'm beginning to not worry so much about this as weeds from blown seed is so prolific that the real game is in making sure there's a good amount of mulch and some kind of weeding goes on before they get out of hand.

Its a good job that I do have this resource because the soil here is incredibly clayey. At first I followed the lead of the locals in leaving it that way, as plants seemd to do fairly well in their gardens but then they also do a lot of watering (that clay gets hard when its dry) and a lot of fertilizing. I have since learnt to manage better by reverting to a soil mix that I've learnt with experience is pretty much an ideal growing medium - sandy loam.

Natural Color

noreply@blogger.com (TheO Gardener) — Wed, 13 Apr 2011 15:47:00 +0000

Bloom - Tinctorial 150 years ago everything that was dyed, was from natural material

In Search of Lost Color

Fence Me In

noreply@blogger.com (TheO Gardener) — Fri, 31 May 2013 07:19:00 +0000

Finally. I've done what I've been wanting to for ages - fenced in the area that borders the Dark Verandah. Should I, shouldn't I? I agonized over it for ages mainly because it was no mean feat to claim that rectangular border which is a fairly large area. A lot needed to be done to peel off the lawn, dig up the soil, fill it up with plants and then of course, fence it in.

The bamboo fencing is something I already knew about. I bought a few panels to screen in the side porch at a great price from a place that I bought all the dark ceramic pots for this verandah. They were a great price because no one really appreciated their rustic beauty and lay in a few forlorn piles gathering dust for years. As I got closer to the decision of starting this project, I called them and asked for a price to take the whole lot. What they quoted was bananas, and so I acquired sixty panels of varying sizes and and the peeling and the digging commenced.

They sell single lengths of bamboo here, nine feet long, at the hardware store, wrapped in plastic to be used as washing lines or poles. Cut in half and stripped of the plastic, they became the the fence poles to wire these panels to. They are inexpensive enough to just hammer into the ground and not worry about their longevity. I did discover late into the process that I really should have just left a few inches of plastic wrap before knocking them in and that would have delayed that process. Live and learn.

Serendipitously, I had exactly the number of panels I needed of the same type, sort of a double diamond pattern, for this area leaving, again serendipitously, exactly the right number of panels to enclose the potager area (a slightly wider bamboo was used here) and exactly enough to do something new - more about that later. What bloomin luck.

As far as the dark verandah goes, its doing exactly what I wanted it to do, screen off and make private a courtyard area, while still maintaing a sense of the garden beyond it. The porousness of the fence does that. The picture shows a gate opening of sorts which frames the trees in the orchard and enhances the distance of the fence at the end of the garden.

Now comes the trickier part of planting. I'm moving the black bamboos there, they really aren't doing in well in the pots they're in. The black stemmed Lady palm Rhapis Excelsa on the other hand is doing great in a pot and I decided I like the look of them so much I bought three more to put in the border. Two other kinds of palms that have a delicate look, bambooish even, have gone in, one in fact called a bamboo palm Chamaedorea Seifrizii, the other Chrysalidocarpus Lutescens or Areca palm. Those are the main structural elements that now need time to gain height , I put a deep, mulch of twigs and leaves to 'finish' it so to speak while I continue to add things as I find them. So far a couple of ferns and potentially a lot more, I'm just going to move them in as I find them seeding themselves in other areas of the garden.

.......

Spices

noreply@blogger.com (TheO Gardener) — Fri, 10 Dec 2010 07:31:00 +0000

Spices by H. N Ridley. Review from 1912.

Lexicon of Sustainability

noreply@blogger.com (TheO Gardener) — Fri, 04 May 2012 09:18:00 +0000

Lexicon of Sustainability Audio Slide Show: Orion Magazine

Photographer Douglas Gayeton explains the genesis of his giant-sized, mural-like photos designed to protect from corporate marketing the meaning behind the words we use to describe sustainability.

Monet's Garden under Glass

noreply@blogger.com (TheO Gardener) — Fri, 04 May 2012 09:07:00 +0000

Monet's Garden in the Nolen Glasshouses by The New York Botanical Garden

Leaf Wrapped Fish

noreply@blogger.com (TheO Gardener) — Sun, 11 Dec 2011 04:23:00 +0000

How to cook fish in an open fire over coals using a wrapping of leaves to steam the meat while keeping it from burning...The leaves used are sour wood and tulip poplar. Inside we stuffed mint, lemon balm and a naturalized mint called Shiso (Japanese) or parilla. The leaves were tied in place using inner bark string from the tulip poplar tree. To help hold the leaves in place and to enhance the flavor we made toothpicks from sassafras wood which we pushed through the wrapped bundle. Finally the whole bundle was placed either directly on hot coals or on a soap stone griddle over the fire to cook. The results were fantastic - a meal steamed to perfection with hints of the leaves spices throughout. Open Fire Cooking of fish wrapped in leaves by Steven Bell

Orchid Breeders

noreply@blogger.com (TheO Gardener) — Sun, 11 Dec 2011 04:06:00 +0000

Orchid Breeders at the World Orchid Convention in Singapore BEST IN SHOW by Li-Anne Huang

Frankincense

noreply@blogger.com (TheO Gardener) — Sun, 11 Dec 2011 03:49:00 +0000

Boswellia. The holiest plant of the Christmas season............. a cross between aspirin, penicillin, Xanax and Viagra, with a touch of duct tape and magic. Frankincense Fit for a King | NYTimes

Rooms with a View

noreply@blogger.com (TheO Gardener) — Sun, 15 May 2011 07:26:00 +0000

"Everything at a distance turns into poetry: distant mountains, distant people, distant events: all become Romantic." Novalis, 1798

Rooms with a View: The Open Window in the 19th Century at the Met.

This exhibition focuses on a subject treasured by the Romantics: the view through an open window. German, French, Danish, and Russian artists first took up the theme in the second decade of the nineteenth century. Juxtaposing near and far, the window is a metaphor for unfulfilled longing. Painters distilled this feeling in pictures of hushed, spare rooms with contemplative figures; studios with artists at work; and open windows as the sole motif.

Painting Prospect

noreply@blogger.com (TheO Gardener) — Mon, 07 Nov 2011 13:42:00 +0000

seven paintings
New Work by Frank Meuschke
November 6 through December 3, 2011

No Globe Exhibition Space
488 Morgan Avenue
3rd Floor
Greenpoint, Brooklyn
Entrance and elevator on Division Place

Paintings are mostly representations of Prospect Park as Frank, also a New York based garden blogger, explains on his blog. More previews here.

Will Beckers

noreply@blogger.com (TheO Gardener) — Sun, 06 Nov 2011 04:22:00 +0000

Land Art in the Forest - TV LIMBURG - Belgium - By Will Beckers

Re-Cover, by Land Art artist, Will Beckers at the Verbeke Foundation, Antwerp

Green School Bali

noreply@blogger.com (TheO Gardener) — Sun, 11 Sep 2011 02:06:00 +0000

A short tour around the grounds of the amazing project that is The Green School located in the lush foothills of Bali, Indonesia.

Coffer

noreply@blogger.com (TheO Gardener) — Sat, 10 Sep 2011 19:22:00 +0000

John Coffer on THIS MUST BE THE PLACE - a series of short films that explore the idea of home; what makes them, how they represent us, why we need them.

Piet Oudolf @ Serpentine

noreply@blogger.com (TheO Gardener) — Sat, 10 Sep 2011 18:36:00 +0000

The concept for this year’s Pavilion at the Serpentine Gallery is the hortus conclusus, a contemplative room, a garden within a garden. One enters the building from the lawn and begins the transition into the central garden, a place abstracted from the world of noise and traffic and the smells of London – an interior space within which to sit, to walk, to observe the flowers. Pavillion by architect Peter Zumthor and garden by Piet Oudolf

“Enclosed gardens fascinate me,” he says. “A forerunner of this fascination is my love of the fenced vegetable gardens on farms in the Alps. I love the image of these small rectangles cut out of vast alpine meadows, the fence keeping the animals out. There is something else that strikes me in this image of a garden fenced off within the larger landscape around it: something small has found sanctuary within something big.” | Piet Oudolf's garden at the Serpentine Gallery pavilion Telegraph

Plant list here.

Mind's Eye

noreply@blogger.com (TheO Gardener) — Tue, 06 Sep 2011 04:02:00 +0000

The Mind's Eye
Long preoccupied with technology, David Hockney is exploring a new artistic medium that uses high-definition cameras, screens, software, and moving images to capture the experience of seeing.....using a special rig, holding 9 high-definition cameras, to view and photograph nature scenes, simulating and expanding the experience of (the) human eye(s) and cameras | MIT Technology Review

Between City Streets

noreply@blogger.com (TheO Gardener) — Wed, 31 Aug 2011 15:12:00 +0000

Steve Brill leads over 100 curious eaters in search of wild foods growing between the streets of DC | Andre Szabo

The wild man has a new Wild Edibles app.

Recently in the New York Times: Enjoy Park Greenery, City Says, but Not as Salad

Climbing in Yosemite

noreply@blogger.com (TheO Gardener) — Mon, 22 Aug 2011 18:01:00 +0000

On Assignment for a National Geographic feature story Renan Ozturk, tells North Face athlete Jimmy Chin's story of modern day climbing in Yosemite

Sea of Roses

noreply@blogger.com (TheO Gardener) — Fri, 12 Aug 2011 07:35:00 +0000

In this movie that Dezeen filmed for trade show Garden Unique, British garden designer Andrew Wilson of Wilson McWilliam Studio talks about a few of his studio’s favourite projects, including a pathway cantilevered over an intense sea of roses.

Growing Wild

noreply@blogger.com (TheO Gardener) — Fri, 22 Jul 2011 11:04:00 +0000

In Philadelphia, Going Green or Growing Wild? | NYTimes.......her yard (almost 7,500 square feet) is forest and shrubs. She rarely waters, except her tiny vegetable patch, and a few shrubs during drought. Rainwater is funneled off the roof into the landscape....... To tame her forest, she found a gardener who understood that. Together they have coppiced, or pruned to four feet, the black cherry trees, creating a hedgelike thicket facing the street. Young oaks have been pruned to resemble open-branched shrubs.........She has ignored the don’t-plant-one-of-everything rule. (Designers are supposed to plant in sweeps and repetitions.)...........“This is like a Garden of Eden,”

Kinfolk

noreply@blogger.com (TheO Gardener) — Wed, 20 Jul 2011 07:52:00 +0000

Kinfolk A guide for Small Gatherings. Kinfolk is a growing community of artists with a shared interest in small gatherings. We recognize that there is something about a table shared by friends, not just a wedding or once-a-year holiday extravaganza, that anchors our relationships and energizes us. We have come together to create Kinfolk as our collaborative way of advocating the natural approach to entertaining that we love.

Every element of Kinfolk – the features, photography, and general aesthetics – are consistent with the way we feel entertaining should be: simple, uncomplicated, and less contrived. Kinfolk is the marriage of our appreciation for art and design and our love for spending time with family and friends.

Ribboned Asparagus Salad

noreply@blogger.com (TheO Gardener) — Wed, 20 Jul 2011 07:37:00 +0000

Ribboned Asparagus Salad | Tiger in a Jar

Flower Trickery

noreply@blogger.com (TheO Gardener) — Sun, 17 Jul 2011 08:12:00 +0000

Jonathan Drori shows the extraordinary ways flowering plants -- over a quarter million species -- have evolved to attract insects to spread their pollen: growing 'landing-strips' to guide the insects in, shining in ultraviolet, building elaborate traps, and even mimicking other insects in heat. | Ted

New Potpourri

noreply@blogger.com (TheO Gardener) — Wed, 06 Jul 2011 07:00:00 +0000

Potpourri is traditionally a mix of dried flowers, leaves, roots and seeds, with floral, citrus, herbal, wood or spice notes. A contemporary-minded potpourri might have basic counterpoints, rendered in fresh new ways—like a lightened, reinvented recipe.

The less likely your ingredients—and your garden is a seasonal trove of commercially unavailable items—the more likely your blends will be one of a kind | WSJ Online

Rainbow Gathering

noreply@blogger.com (TheO Gardener) — Sun, 22 May 2011 14:54:00 +0000

Rainbow Gatherings are temporary intentional communities, typically held in outdoor settings, and espousing and practicing ideals of peace, love, harmony, freedom and community, as a consciously expressed alternative to mainstream popular culture, consumerism, capitalism and mass media. | Benoit Paille

Somewhere to Disappear

noreply@blogger.com (TheO Gardener) — Sun, 15 May 2011 14:20:00 +0000

"It's not really about running away, it's about the desire to run away"

Somewhere to Disappear Laure Flammarion and Arnaud Uyttenhove, two young European filmmakers followed, the American photographer Alec Soth all over America during winter 2008, summer 2008 and spring 2009. Riding in the back of the artist's van, they drove more than 20 000 miles together going from one state to another, and from one season to another. The result is a 57 minutes movie about the photographer and his project, which was called 'How to disappear in America', about people who decided to withdraw themselves from society. The road trip offers a series of incredible meetings but it also tells the story of an introspective journey.

Cyanotype Artist

noreply@blogger.com (TheO Gardener) — Sun, 15 May 2011 06:37:00 +0000

Christina McFall is obsessed with color, texture, form, and chemical reactions. She approaches the art of cyanotype printing with the mind of a scientist, carefully recording tests and cataloging results. She hand draws and tessellates patterns with her tablet to produce her negatives. Her innovative printing methods harness UV light to create Prussian Blue prints on fabric. She then hacks the dye with various treatments to induce a rainbow of unexpected results.

Bluebell Paradise

noreply@blogger.com (TheO Gardener) — Sun, 15 May 2011 06:57:00 +0000

Bluebells at Harcourt Arboretum by Clare Holt, Nice Tree Films The bluebell wood at Harcourt Arboretum is a real hidden gem of Oxfordshire, which unfurls its secrets every spring with an exquisite display of millions of flowers. The oak woodland provides the perfect habitat for the English Bluebell, and in this short film, Timothy Walker, the Director of the University of Oxford Botanic Garden, tells us what it takes to make a bluebell happy, and why the Elizabethan fashion designers had a lot to thank this iconic wild flower for.

Scent of Revolution

noreply@blogger.com (TheO Gardener) — Sat, 14 May 2011 15:52:00 +0000

Since Tunisian revolutionaries anointed their successful revolt the “Jasmine Revolution,” the flowering cousin of the olive tree has been branded a nefarious change-agent | NYTimes

Leafsnap

noreply@blogger.com (TheO Gardener) — Sun, 08 May 2011 14:33:00 +0000

Columbia University, the University of Maryland, and theSmithsonian Institution are working on visual recognition software to help identify species from photographs. Leafsnap is the first in a series of electronic field guides being developed to demonstrate this new technology. This free mobile app helps identify tree species from photographs of their leaves and contains beautiful high-resolution images of their flowers, fruit, petiole, seeds, and bark. Leafsnap currently includes the trees of New York City and Washington, D.C., and will soon grow to cover the trees of the entire continental United States.

Leafsnap turns users into citizen scientists, automatically sharing images, species identifications, and geo-coded stamps of species locations with a community of scientists who will use the stream of data to map and monitor the ebb and flow of flora nationwide.

Without a Car

noreply@blogger.com (TheO Gardener) — Thu, 05 May 2011 11:07:00 +0000

Photographer Diane Meyer discusses her photo essay from the May/June 2011 issue of Orion about Angelenos, who not only survive, but often thrive in the City of Angels without automobiles. Includes additional portraits from her “Without a Car” project. Orion

Les Nymphéas

noreply@blogger.com (TheO Gardener) — Mon, 25 Apr 2011 16:19:00 +0000

Imagine, a circular room...covered with water, dotted with these plants to the very horizon, walls of a transparency alternately green and mauve, the calm and silence of the still waters reflecting the open blossoms. The tones are vague, deliciously nuanced, with a dreamlike delicacy.
—Claude Monet, 1898

Monet's Les Nymphéas by Smarthistory Videos

Garden Green Objects

noreply@blogger.com (TheO Gardener) — Mon, 25 Apr 2011 16:06:00 +0000

Garden Green Objects by Sushipot

Lightchimes

noreply@blogger.com (TheO Gardener) — Sat, 23 Apr 2011 15:46:00 +0000

Jimmy Chion, Jason Chua, and Kiran Malladi are the creators of Lightchimes, 169 hanging LED pendants. The circuit is simple, but the results are complex. This project is about interaction- without interference from a participant, the lights would never shine. Similarly, without collaborative interaction, this project would never have become a reality.

Bed of Moss

noreply@blogger.com (TheO Gardener) — Sat, 23 Apr 2011 16:14:00 +0000

Bed of Moss by Kurtis Hough

Dye From Plants

noreply@blogger.com (TheO Gardener) — Wed, 13 Apr 2011 15:49:00 +0000

How To Make Dye From Plants

Eye of the Day

noreply@blogger.com (TheO Gardener) — Sat, 19 Mar 2011 04:02:00 +0000

A video poem by Mike Ladd. Filmed inside an old kampong house at Rimbun Dahan, Malaysia, in 2009. The video features five poems in traditional pantum form which are linked to the five Muslim prayer times of the day: dawn, noon, afternoon, sunset and night. The Eye of the Day won equal first prize at the 2010 Poetronica awards for a multimedia poem.

Landscape views from a train

noreply@blogger.com (TheO Gardener) — Sun, 06 Mar 2011 02:37:00 +0000

Overnight sleeper from Kuala Lumpur close to arriving in Johor Bahru.

How Species Save Our Lives

noreply@blogger.com (TheO Gardener) — Sun, 06 Mar 2011 02:30:00 +0000

The Madagascar periwinkle is a source of cancer drugs. P. Goltra www.ntbg.org

Given the untapped potential of the natural world, you might think governments and drug companies would be racing to save species and screen them for other such extraordinary powers. In fact, says James S. Miller, vice president for science at the New York Botanical Garden, “only a tiny percentage of the world’s plants have been screened,” and even those “have only been screened against a small fraction of the diseases for which they could be effective.” Instead, pharmacologically-active compounds developed over millions of years and found effective in the world’s harshest laboratory—nature—routinely vanish, as the species in which they evolved go extinct.................How Species Save Our Lives | NYTimes

Wild Man

noreply@blogger.com (TheO Gardener) — Wed, 02 Feb 2011 15:53:00 +0000

David Abram is an American philosopher, cultural ecologist, and performance artist, best known for his work bridging the philosophical tradition of phenomenology with environmental and ecological issues.

We are human only in contact and conviviality with what is not human. Only in reciprocity with what is Other do we begin to heal ourselves The Ecology of Magic David Abram

David Abram is the the author of Becoming Animal Read an Excerpt and The Spell of the Sensuous

The Charpoy

noreply@blogger.com (TheO Gardener) — Fri, 28 Jan 2011 03:54:00 +0000

The Charpoy: A light, portable, indoor, outdoor bed of Indian origin traditionally made from wood and jute twine.

“The beds in India are very light. A single man can carry one and every traveller should have his own bed, which his slave carries about on his head. The bed consists of four conical legs on which four staves are laid ; between they plait a sort of ribbon of silk or cotton. When you lie on it you need nothing else to render the bed sufficiently elastic.”-iii. 380. *Ibn Batuta. Voyages d’Ibn Batoutah, Texte Arabe, (Societe Asiatique). 4 vols. Paris, 1853-58.

Charpoys made in Malaysia

Paula Hayes Containers

noreply@blogger.com (TheO Gardener) — Sun, 02 Jan 2011 13:57:00 +0000

Nocturne of the Limax maximus Botanical Sculptures by Paula Hayes Installed in Museum of Modern Art's Lobby from November 17, 2010 through February 28, 2011. Her blog posts.

Man in a Blizzard

noreply@blogger.com (TheO Gardener) — Fri, 31 Dec 2010 08:35:00 +0000

Man in a Blizzard | Jamie Stuart

This film deserves to win the Academy Award for best live-action short subject says Roger Ebert

Wearable Vegetables

noreply@blogger.com (TheO Gardener) — Thu, 30 Dec 2010 08:41:00 +0000

Chives

Eggplant

Wearable Food Series by Yeonju Sung

Fresh Flowers

noreply@blogger.com (TheO Gardener) — Sat, 25 Dec 2010 14:46:00 +0000

“I draw flowers every day on my iPhone,” he told me then, “and send them to my friends, so they get fresh flowers every morning. And my flowers last. Not only can I draw them as if in a little sketchbook, I can also then send them to 15 or 20 people who then get them that morning when they wake up.” David Hockney | The Telegraph

David Hockney: Fleurs Fraîches is at the Fondation Pierre Bergé - Yves Saint Laurent, Paris from Thurs until Jan 30 2011

David Hockney's new show is alive. Every few days he creates a painting with his iPad's Brushes application, then emails it to identical devices on display at Paris's Pierre Berge-Yves St. Laurent Foundation, where his "Fresh Flowers" exhibition runs through January 30. As of this writing, there are over 300 pictures and counting. | The Atlantic

Garden Dating

noreply@blogger.com (TheO Gardener) — Wed, 15 Dec 2010 13:41:00 +0000

A 'Big Shift' from the 20th century, a time defined by hyper-consumption, to a 21st century age of Collaborative Consumption, is underway.

Collaborative Consumption describes the rapid explosion in traditional sharing, bartering, lending, trading, renting, gifting, and swapping redefined through technology and peer communities. collaborativeconsumption.com

It is the subject of a new book, What's Mine is Yours: The Rise of Collaborative Consumption, by Rachel Botsman and Roo Rogers.

Ginger Garden

noreply@blogger.com (TheO Gardener) — Mon, 06 Dec 2010 12:36:00 +0000

The Ginger Garden at Singapore Botanic Gardens. The Ginger family- Zingiberale- includes :
Zingiberaceae
Orchidanta
Heliconia
Cannas
Costus/Spiral Gingers
Banana Family
Bird of Paradise family
Prayer Plant

Home

noreply@blogger.com (TheO Gardener) — Mon, 29 Nov 2010 06:55:00 +0000

Home - the most important place in the world by Martin de Thurah for Ikea

Patterns of Fire

noreply@blogger.com (TheO Gardener) — Thu, 25 Nov 2010 17:44:00 +0000

Patterns of Fire via Studio life quartet

Acoustic Botany

noreply@blogger.com (TheO Gardener) — Sat, 20 Nov 2010 15:00:00 +0000

Genetically Engineered Sound Garden. The debate around Genetic Engineering is currently centered around vital issues such as food, healthcare and the environment. However, we have been shaping nature for thousands of years, not only to suit our needs, but our most irrational desires. Beautiful flowers, mind altering weeds and crabs shaped like human faces all thrive on these desires, giving them an evolutionary advantage. By presenting a fantastical acoustic garden, a controlled ecosystem of entertainment, I aim to explore our cultural and aesthetic relationship to nature, and to question its future in the age of Synthetic Biology. David Benque

Winter Squash

noreply@blogger.com (TheO Gardener) — Sat, 20 Nov 2010 14:47:00 +0000

Winter Squash, Warts and All | NYTimes

Blue Poppy

noreply@blogger.com (TheO Gardener) — Mon, 08 Nov 2010 13:13:00 +0000

Three young Tibetan women, trained as traditional doctors, leave their nomadic homeland for Scotland. What they learn at Edinburgh’s world-famous Royal Botanic Garden may help ensure the survival of Tibet’s medicinal plants. 25 mins 2008.| Sitar Rose

Are Mushrooms the New Plastic?

noreply@blogger.com (TheO Gardener) — Sun, 17 Oct 2010 03:07:00 +0000

Product designer Eben Bayer reveals his recipe for a new, fungus-based packaging material that protects fragile stuff like furniture, plasma screens -- and the environment.

Art of the Eco Mindshift

noreply@blogger.com (TheO Gardener) — Sun, 17 Oct 2010 02:36:00 +0000

Natalie Jeremijenko's unusual lab puts art to work, and addresses environmental woes by combining engineering know-how with public art and a team of volunteers. These real-life experiments include: Walking tadpoles, texting "fish," planting fire-hydrant gardens and more. TED

Jason Tennant

noreply@blogger.com (TheO Gardener) — Tue, 07 Sep 2010 13:47:00 +0000

Jason Tennant. His sculptures are quiet, flowing in the grace of their motion, but also hard and complex, like the wilderness that is their subject. Etsy

The Art of Sticks

noreply@blogger.com (TheO Gardener) — Sat, 07 Aug 2010 06:02:00 +0000

A look at the work of artist Patrick Dougherty, who uses found sticks, branches, and trees to construct huge sculptures.

For three weeks in August, artist Patrick Dougherty and a team of volunteers are constructing a monumental woven-wood sculpture in honor of Brooklyn Botanic Garden's centennial.

Whispering in the Leaves

noreply@blogger.com (TheO Gardener) — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 14:01:00 +0000

Chris Watson’s Whispering in the Leaves is an extraordinary sound installation, using recordings and natural history broadcast to transport us to the far-flung, dense rainforests of South and Central America. Throughout Kew Gardens’ Summer festival, the Palm House will be diffused with the dawn and dusk choruses of the myriad of creatures native to these lush tropical landscapes. Whispering in the leaves.

eel•water•rock•man

noreply@blogger.com (TheO Gardener) — Sun, 04 Jul 2010 14:55:00 +0000

eel•water•rock•man by Orion Magazine

Brown Rice Family

noreply@blogger.com (TheO Gardener) — Wed, 23 Jun 2010 03:24:00 +0000

Brown Rice Family | Etsy

Hydroponic Herb Garden

noreply@blogger.com (TheO Gardener) — Fri, 16 Apr 2010 18:26:00 +0000

How to set up a hydroponic herb garden | make magazine

Passage for Two

noreply@blogger.com (TheO Gardener) — Fri, 16 Apr 2010 16:45:00 +0000

Passage for Two” is the fourth movement in NY Export: Opus Jazz, featuring the choreography of Jerome Robbins and music by Robert Prince. This excerpt was shot in June 2007 before the opening of the new High Line park in New York City, when the former elevated railway was overgrown with wild weeds and grass. | PBS

New Zealand

noreply@blogger.com (TheO Gardener) — Wed, 31 Mar 2010 16:48:00 +0000

How the Landscape of New Zealand has influenced the work of David Trubridge.

Farm Tables

noreply@blogger.com (TheO Gardener) — Sun, 28 Mar 2010 00:57:00 +0000

Process: Farm Tables With David Ellison of Lorimer Workshop | Etsy

Fallen Leaf Plates

noreply@blogger.com (TheO Gardener) — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 16:28:00 +0000

Verterra Dinnerware:Dinnerware made from fallen leaves.

Recycled Houses

noreply@blogger.com (TheO Gardener) — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 20:04:00 +0000

One Man's Trash | NYTimes

Build Your own Wormery

noreply@blogger.com (TheO Gardener) — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 00:48:00 +0000

Build your own wormery | National Trust Sign Off

Willow Sculpture

noreply@blogger.com (TheO Gardener) — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 02:56:00 +0000

Willow Sculpture Garden by Brian Birch

Vertical Vegetables

noreply@blogger.com (TheO Gardener) — Sun, 12 Jul 2009 04:18:00 +0000

Try this vertical vegetable garden | craftzine

Xmas Tree Furniture

noreply@blogger.com (TheO Gardener) — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 17:29:00 +0000

Royal College of Art graduate Fabien Cappello has created a collection of furniture from unwanted Christmas trees. | Dezeen

Grass Sleeve

noreply@blogger.com (TheO Gardener) — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 20:39:00 +0000

A $30 grass laptop "folder" from ABC Carpet & Home | Hollister H Hovey

Stone Leaves

noreply@blogger.com (TheO Gardener) — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 18:50:00 +0000

Last year I hammer printed plants and flowers onto fabric. Yesterday I tried it on some stones and I really love the result. It works best with smooth light colored stones. I used a rubber mallet instead of a hammer ........resurrectionfern

Handmade Soap

noreply@blogger.com (TheO Gardener) — Sun, 14 Jun 2009 00:52:00 +0000

Process: Handmade Soap with BeyondThePicketFence | Etsy

Plastic Fantastic

noreply@blogger.com (TheO Gardener) — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 23:11:00 +0000

Found object sheathed in knitted plastic bags by Anne Cecile Rappa via Dezeen

Sandals by MLeak

How to make Plarn

More Plastic Bag Crafts | Craftzine

Make a Messenger Bag out of Trash Bags | Make

Renegade Picks

noreply@blogger.com (TheO Gardener) — Sun, 07 Jun 2009 04:28:00 +0000

These were my favorites at the Renegade Craft Fair in Brooklyn:
Bettula
Photosynthesis
The Black Spot Books
Forest Bound

Rustic Wedding

noreply@blogger.com (TheO Gardener) — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 16:50:00 +0000

Lauren and Andrew's diy rustic wedding | iDiY via craftzine

left: place cards made from eucalyptus discs

right: chipboard invitation wheels made from two circles of untreated, recycled chipboard diecut and letterpressed to look like an old planting wheel with redwood rings on it.

Design for a living World

noreply@blogger.com (TheO Gardener) — Thu, 21 May 2009 20:14:00 +0000

Design for a living World at the Cooper-Hewitt
Ten leading designers have been commissioned to develop new uses for sustainably grown and harvested materials in order to tell a unique story about the life-cycle of materials and the power of conservation and design.