A simple but delightful design idea

This week I'm going to share with you a lovely idea I picked up years ago from a garden design book. It seems I had unconsciously absorbed this idea, for just recently, while tending a customer's garden that I created some time ago, I noticed an element in the flower bed that owes a great deal, I'm sure, to the picture I'd seen.

The picture is in a book called "The Garden Planner" by Robin Williams,(ISBN 0-7112-0889-1). It's a book far more English in orientation than Mediterranean, but that doesn't matter, because the rules of good design are universal and apply in every context. In the featured garden bed, shrubs are topiaried into spheres, making for a very formal composition. Interspersed between the shrubs are groups of ornamental garlic (Allium), whose mauve flower heads are spherical in form.
That's what's so brilliant.The shape of the flowers echoes the shape of the shrubs! In other words, as far as flowers are concerned, there's more to take into account than just colour. Flowers also have shape, size and texture, and these are all factors which can either contribute to a composition, or detract from one. How and why?
We're talking here about two principles amongst six, of good design. One is variety and the other is unity. Good design of course encompasses both. In this example, the flowers' mauve colour provide variety to the green shrubs, yet their spherical shape strengthens the rounded motif provided by the shrubs. I remember thinking how this contrasts with the unrelated way most people use colour in the garden. The flowers are stuffed in, rather than belonging to the overall scheme.
My customer's garden is in a small town in central Israel. The climate is East Mediterranean. In order to save water, I strictly limit the flower beds. There's just one small bed in this garden – about 7m2 in area. The bed is composed of herbaceous perennials –Chrysanthemum frutescens, Bidens frulifolia, two species of Felicia, and for vertical accent, Solidago Canadensis. So what's going on here?
There is considerable unity in the leaf texture of the various plants. But more than this, the shape and size of the different flowers, while varying in colour, are almost identical. And then I realized that all the species belong to the same botanical family – Compositae (Asteraceae). Now I don't recall deliberately choosing plants from one family, but that's what turned out! So one way to plan a flower bed is to choose plants from the same or related families.
To learn how you can plan flower beds within a narrow water allowance, go to www.dryclimategardening.com

Replacing the lawn – But how do you get rid of the grass?

Many people today want to replace or seriously reduce the amount of lawn in the garden.
Organic gardeners dislike the mono-culture aspect to lawns, and the almost inevitable reliance on fertilizers and pesticides that this entails. Designers are appalled by the lack of proportion in the "standard" lawn-dominated suburban garden, and those of us who live breathe and garden in a dry climate, know that lawns are a major water guzzler.
Now if you intend to replace the lawn with alternative plants, there are a few things worth knowing.
· In warm dry climates, most lawns are perennials like Kikuya grass (Pennisetum clandestinum), Zoysia varieties, or Bermuda grass varieties.
· These species have massive root systems, whose ryzomes can remain dormant for years before springing back to life when provided with the right conditions for growth.
· It is virtually impossible to dig up the roots.
· If the grasses are not entirely eliminated, they will re-grow in your new bed, flower, vegetable ground cover, whatever. The rejuvenated grass, will benefit from all the horticultural treatments you give your preferred plants, and will plague you till you go crazy.
In other words, do not plant up an area which was previously used as a lawn, until totally getting rid of all remaining grasses first. This means I'm afraid, that the only resource available is to apply a systemic herbicide on the lawn, such as Glyphosate, whose systemic actions only work in temperature above 24 Centigrade This is the procedure for an area of worn out lawn:
· Water the area profusely and regularly, until the grass comes back and is green and healthy looking. It may be worth fertilizing as well, because Glyphosate works more effectively on well growing plants.
· Have the area sprayed by a gardener qualified to use herbicides.
· Wait a week, and start watering again, in order to repeat the process.
· Wait at least a month after the final application and planting.
Jonathan Ya'akobi
About Me:
· I've been a professional gardener in Israel for nearly 25 years
· I am the former head gardener of the Jerusalem Botanical Garden
· I now design and create gardens for private home owners
· And now:
I am the owner of a web site dedicated to the home gardener in a dry climate
See you at www.dryclimategardening.com

Why it's especially important to espalier plants in a dry climate garden

The technique of growing some shrubs and even trees horizontally on a wall, started I believe in the 17th century in Europe and came to be known as the espalier method.
By training juvenile branches on a wall when they are flexible, and by making sure the branches are parallel to the ground, the pushing forward of the leading bud is abolished (this is known as apical dominance) and the once dormant lateral buds burst into life.
Originally developed as a way of increasing fruit production in a limited space, espaliering can be used to significantly increase the quantity of flowers that flowering shrubs can produce.
Excellent examples of this are climbing roses – try the Bordeaux flowers of "Don Juan" on a whitish wall, Pyracantha, or Bougainvillea.
Where water is at a premium, we have to reduce the space allotted to flowers in the garden. But a composition of say pebbles on the ground plane, dotted with a few sculptural plants, and the wall of a building draped in flower colour, can be really spectacular, and far more creative than the standard annual flower bed. And as for water consumption? Your watering a few shrubs as opposed to a hundred or so annuals.
So I think that growing climbers up walls should become part of the dry climate gardener's thinking. The espalier technique requires the setting up of a frame which can take the weight of the plants, and involves a considerable amount of training and pruning over the gardening year. But I think it's well worth the effort and can really make your garden special.
Jonathan Ya'akobi
About Me:
· I've been a professional gardener in Israel for nearly 25 years
· I am the former head gardener of the Jerusalem Botanical Garden
· I now design and create gardens for private home owners
· And now:
I am the owner of a web site dedicated to the home gardener in a dry climate
See you at www.dryclimategardening.com

A must ground cover plant for a dry climate

Anyone who has seen a carpet of Ice Plant (Lampranthus roseus) in full colour cannot help but be impressed, if not moved. I don't think there's anything quite like it in the gardening world. When covering a reasonably significant area, say from 5 square meters, the flowers form a kind of wave, which not only provides staggering colour, but texture and "movement" as well The Ice Plant is a succulent from South Africa, and apart from the hottest desert areas, can be grown when established, virtually without irrigation. Compared to annuals, which in a Mediterranean climate require at least 1000mm (1000 liters per square meter) of water a year, that is some saving!
In order to get satisfactory results from your Ice Plants, I suggest the following fairly easy, but essential steps:
· Plant in the autumn/winter, not in the summer or spring. In this way the plants should be established before the summer.
· When in flower, do not wait for the last of the flowers to die off, rather, "give-up" on the last 25% or so, and lightly clip the plants, using sheers or even a hedge trimmer. By doing this vegetative growth is encouraged, and instead of an increasingly leggy and balding mess, you get a nice clean (if unspectacular) compact ground cover during the summer, lovely winter growth, followed by the amazing display in the spring. Lampranthus should not be pruned back to the wood.
· During the winter, which is its growing season, prune some cuttings, say 10 cm in length, and just stick them in the ground. As Lampranthus tends to degenerate after a few years, planting a certain percentage of the area each year, will allow for continual rejuvenation of the bed.
Jonathan Ya'akobi
About Me:
· I've been a professional gardener in Israel for nearly 25 years
· I am the former head gardener of the Jerusalem Botanical Garden
· I now design and create gardens for private home owners
· And now:
I am the owner of a web site dedicated to the home gardener in a dry climate
See you at www.dryclimategardening.com

An excellent reason for saving water in the garden other than the obvious ones!

If you live and have a garden in a dry climate you'll know doubt be wanting to conserve water for the following reasons.
· The amount of water available to you per annum is severely restricted by the local authority
· Water use is metered and very expensive
· You feel bad about wasting water
The third reason may be the most admirable, but it shares something in common with the other two. They are all negatives. It's important of course to be aware of undesirable things, but the trouble with focusing on the negative is that we're liable to do things begrudgingly. "If only we had enough water, we could have acres of lawn", or "I wish my garden was a tropical paradise, but they won't let us use enough water".
Obviously, the amount of water consumed is a function of the type of plants grown and the area they take up. For instance, in a typically Mediterranean climate of say
500 mm annual rainfall, with long hot rainless summers, a lawn is going to require at the very least, 700 mm of additional water. That is 700 liters per square meter. per year. Add to that fruit trees and annual flowers and we're talking about a crazy consumption rate.
Now think of the "standard" suburban garden. With the lawn taking up most of the space, a thin strip is left round the perimeter for a hedge, a flower bed, and a fruit tree or two. Considering the water needs of the grass, there's no way that water can be conserved. But who says that a garden should look like that anyway? Whether the garden is in Ireland, Thailand or Southern California, it's just dreadful design, if indeed the term "design" can be applied at all in these cases.
I myself choose to look on the lack of water not as a liability to be regretted, but as an opportunity to break the mold, indeed to break the paradigm of the standard garden. The cliché is not something to hanker after, but something to be liberated from, and we dry climate gardeners have been blessed with the incentive to stop copying, and to start designing!
Jonathan Ya'akobi
About Me:
· I've been a professional gardener in Israel for nearly 25 years
· I am the former head gardener of the Jerusalem Botanical Garden
· I now design and create gardens for private home owners
· And now:
I am the owner of a web site dedicated to the home gardener in a dry climate
See you at www.dryclimategardening.com