We developed workflows to work remotely because of COVID, but it turns out that they’re great for designing landscapes that are impractically distant. This design would have stuck us in the car for about five hours.
This composite image uses multiple data sources, plus input from our client, to create something “close enough” for a conceptual design.
Once we had a couple of concepts, we put everything together into a “sketchbook” pdf file, letter size, so they could print it out, check dimensions on site and look at building the new design.
In the past, we could have taken advantage of getting far away from the office, but for now overnight trips to Mendocino are uncertain.
Wineries are for learning, socializing, being entertained. They should be beautiful, artistic and most of all worth repeat visits. A winery can host tastings, lectures, cooking demonstrations, organic gardening, tours, bocce tournaments, weddings, parties, anniversaries…
Our goal is to create a unique look and feel, a sense of place, a unique brand that dovetails with what they make and what they do. We start with ideas, goals, thoughts of what would be really fun to experience. Then add nuts and bolds: define circulation from place to place, sketch in utility areas for smooth functioning, map out the size and relation of event spaces, tasting areas, parking and whatever else needs to happen for the venue to be wonderful and memorable. Then go back and reevaluate, talk to everyone involved to make things not only beautiful, but functional too.
Perspective views
One client wanted the full treatment, perspective views showing proposed materials, features and views from one space to another.
The other winery is still in the master planning stage, and in any case will likely not move into perspective drawings because most buildings are either built or have already been modeled by their architect.
Master plans
Everything starts with a master plan. This is where the relations of use areas to each other can be shown, circulation patterns delineated and multiple use areas bubbled in, then designed.
One plan starts from existing structures, growing in new features somewhat organically so they fit in with what’s already there. It’s a bit eclectic, but that brings character, too.
The other started from bare earth, so there’s a much tighter integration between the buildings and the new landscape, everything done with harmonious style.
If it’s 108º F, you move out of the sun. But if you’re a plant, you’re stuck. Unfortunately, every summer in Sacramento seems to have more and more days of blasting triple digit heat. This time, it’s different: it rains, too. Last night, lightning ripped across the sky, rain pelted the landscape and yet the heat did not abate. All the world was just one giant sauna.
With all this heat, what’s happening in the garden? What plants still bloom? What’s thriving?
ROSES
Many roses shut down in the heat. Flower life is shorter, and the edges of the petals may brown. The plants themselves seem to muddle through.
White flowered roses fare better, with the “popcorn” type doing best of all: small flowers, white, in clusters.
The rose is one of Annette’s rescue projects. It’s a Chrysler Imperial, found discounted at a Home Depot. If it were a cat, you’d hesitate to adopt in fear of massive vet bills, but a rose is not a cat. It’s doing better, although it had to be dug up and potted so we could move it as needed and ensure that it was in good soil (the garden tends toward heavy clay).
FLOWERS
Mexican Lobelia. This is just coming into flower and the plants are looking fantastic. This is something some hummingbirds love, others ignore.
Black-Eyed Susan(Rudbeckia fulgida ‘Goldsturm’). These are in a meadow where the local humidity is high. They’re planted in a depression where water collects; good for summer but we’ll see if they drown in a wet winter.
Red Yucca(Hesperaloe parviflora). Desert plants thrive in the heat, and the plant even seems to be pushing out more buds to celebrate the hot weather. A hummingbird favorite, too.
FOOD
Sweet Basil. Basil loves heat. And water. Give it both and you’re in caprese salads, pesto and fresh marinara all summer long. If there’s anything left at the end of the season, you can freeze the leaves for a bit of summer during the colder months.
Since basil is an annual, it’s gone with the first frost, so you’ll have to replant again next year.
Watercress. As an experiment, we threw some watercress into the fountain. This plant needs running water, but maybe it’s more a question of oxygenated water. Whatever, it exploded, covering the water to the point where we had to harvest regularly. A bonus is clouds of white flowers in spring, followed by a period where good leaves are scarce. (no photo shown)
When you can’t get away as much as you like, create your destination where you live. You can play pétanque, dip in the pool, relax on the deck, entertain, enjoy a glass of Côtes-du-Ventoux with your friends. No arduous plane trip required! Maybe you can even speak a bit of French…
Materials:
Zellige tiles in varying shades of blue, Gladding-Mc Bean floor tiles and stair treads in two color patterns, glass tile on the warming shelf, and lots of colorful plants bordered by tall evergreen hedges.
Concept Image
Concept modeled in 3D and rendered, with a bit of retouching for the water jets, since for some reason they never seem to look right coming out of the CAD system.
That’s romantic as in movie stars and moguls hanging out in an outdoor resort and lounge in Palm Springs. Except this garden is in Sacramento, so no Hollywood types unless they’re friends of the owners. As for the glamour, well, that’s all there!
Modern desert style
breeze block
This lets breezes through, of course. But it also lets light through. During the day, it’s just ordinary light, but after the sun sets things get exotic, where the walls get painted with color, some of it shining through the holes, some bouncing off the floor and overhead structure.
desert plants
Look at the Sonoran desert. The plants aren’t just cacti. There are a lot of other things growing with them, not all bold. This lets the bold forms of the agaves, cacti and yuccas stand out. There are sparse desert-like grasses, gray sages, low succulents and yellow-flowered ground covers accenting the architectural plant forms like colors on a canvas.
style!
All the elements: plants, walls, structures, lighting add up to one heck of a gestalt style that really is more than the sum of its parts.
This will be a place to entertain, relax, sip coffee in the morning or something else in the evening… a Martini perhaps, with some appropriate Palm Springs 60’s era music playing in the background…
About the renderings
First you need to create all the materials, if they’re not in your CAD system’s library. Most of these weren’t. No breeze blocks, concrete block with this finish, desert plants, gravels, lights… If it’s not in the box, you need to construct it. Luckily you only have to construct something once and save it so the program knows what it is.
Then the two dimensional concept plan sketched out on an iPad gets transformed into a three dimensional model of the site, using data from the survey as a start and going from there. Once it’s modeled, you can walk around, fly, take pictures…
For views like this, you need lots of lights by night and two suns by day, just not at the same time – one for morning images, the other for afternoon. And no sun at night. A computer doesn’t know these things and would happily turn everything on for a bleached overexposed look.
Low-growing plants create a tapestry of color, punctuated by bold agaves, backed by taller shrubs and trees. It’s a great place for hummingbirds and pollinators, too. This garden has been growing for several years now, and has moved into the phase where maintenance centers on keeping the plants in bound as opposed to letting weeds take over.
Low plants
This is the where tapestry effect plays a major role. Plants overlap a bit, as they would in nature. There’s two varieties of California fuchsia, germander, sundrops (Calylophus) and a bit of gentian sage. These plants have overlapping bloom seasons for more dynamic, mixed color.
Foliage colors are gray dominant, with some neutral green thrown in for variety and to harmonize with the green deer grass near the middle of the planting.
Accent plant
The Agave salmiana is a living sculpture. This is a large species of century plant, and here we gave it room to grow. It will become even more impressive as time goes by, a real “wow” plant especially for lovers of agaves.
Some agave parryi backs up the form of the salmiana for design consistency, but this species only grows to about 30″ or so.
A red yucca sends up salmon-orange flowers at the other side of the driveway.
Screen plants
The neighbor’s driveway is pretty much always crowded with cars. To mitigate this view, a mix of mounding and screen plants filters and blocks views of this motley collection of recent vehicles.
First, there’s some deer grass, then taller ceanothus along the border between the two properties. The result is a more gentle screen than a solid hedge, and with all that’s happening in the foreground, nobody looks as much at the cars as before.
For the birds…
Mostly hummingbirds, in fact. The California fuchsia and red yucca are favorites, but they appreciate the sages, too. The agaves will likely attract them years from now, but the goal is to provide a food supply every year. There are a lot of insects visiting the other flowers – hummingbirds like to snap them up, as they’re an excellent source of protein.
Our butterfly bush gets numerous visitors as butterflies emerge. The garden also gets the occasional dragonfly who snatches small flying insects in the air and devours them. So far, we’ve had about six species of butterflies and three species of dragonflies.
butterflies
Butterflies have scaly wings, hence their name in Latin, lepidoptera. So if one flies into your house and you need to free it, be gentle. If you rub off the scales, you’ll be left with a very drab insect.
Moths are the (generally) nocturnal branch of the lepidoptera. They’re (generally) not as colorful as butterflies, although spinx moths can be quite impressive, and some are so large they can be confused with hummingbirds – although hummingbirds don’t fly at night.
Caterpillars are very finicky, to the pont where they’d rather go extinct than eat something other than their normal food plant. So, if you want to increase your local butterfly population, you’ll need to plant their food plants in sufficient quantity to feed hungry caterpillars. Planting the right thing may not be enough: we have some no doubt very tasty stands of native milkweed yet have yet to see a monarch butterfly or caterpillar.
Common butterflies
Gulf fritillaries (Agraulis vanillae). They’re not closely related to temperate zone true fritillaries. They belong to a tropical family of butterflies (Heliconiinae, in case you were wondering) that have interesting shapes and often transparent wings in the tropics. We get a mimic that looks kind of like a bad-tasting monarch. They’re smaller than monarchs and their wing beats are much more rapid. Their food plant is passion vine, something we don’t have in the garden.
Painted ladies (Vanessa cardui) These are not so common in the garden as in the deserts, where they drift across the landscape in great numbers.
They tend to fly rapidly about, then suddenly land and fold up their wings, effectively disappearing.
Swallowtails
Three species of swallowtails live around here. Theoretically, we have food plants for all of them. That doesn’t mean we’ll have caterpillars, however.
Pipevine Swallowtail (Battus philenor) Our pipevine is all chewed up, so it looks like the pipevine swallowtails found it this year. We saw a caterpillar looking for a place to pupate, quite a distance from the vine. Hopefully we’ll have several broods of butterflies!
Western Tiger Swallowtail (Papilio rutulus). This is our big, bold, beautiful black and yellow butterfly that floats majestically through the garden. We’ve never seen a caterpillar, but since they feed on trees, that’s not unusual.
Anise Swallowtail (Papilio zelicaon). Like a smaller version of the tiger swallowtail, perhaps not as common for some reason. The caterpillars feed on fennel, something that grows all along the American river parkway, and in our garden. They might feed on other things in the carrot family, too – but so far no caterpillars on either our fennel nor our carrots.
Dragonflies (odonata)
These insects pass their larval stage in water, where they devour pretty much anything they can catch. We may have some in the pond, but since the larvae look like bits of waterlogged wood, they’re hard to see unless you drain the pond. Not worth disturbing everything just for curiosity!
Although we call them all dragonflies, odonata specialists give them more unique names. Most around here are types of skimmers, although we get a lot more variety in the wetlands: meadowhawks, dashers, darners, pondhawks…
Then there are damselflies, that like dragonflies are called something else: bluets. That’s also the name of a flower in French. Confusing!
We’ve been busy doing consults. They’re not affected much by social distancing since they’re outdoors and we email back the drawings. Staying home in a wonderful new garden space is not a bad thing!
New Style
A bold, modern desert look is up next, transforming an ordinary suburban landscape into a bold, water conserving statement. There will be rocks, the spaces re-graded for some flat spots and paths. Existing decks off the house will have laser-cut metal panels to enhance the desert style (and remove the dated wood slats).
New spaces
The front yard will get a realigned driveway, plants that let light into the house, a wandering path and a new place to sit near the entry.
The back will have a new swimming pool, fire pit area, artificial lawn in deep shade for the kids, and more lawn for putting. New paths and planting will link all these spaces.
Transformed planting
There’s a specimen pine tree in the front, but the rest of the planting could use a refresh. So out goes the ivy and overgrown shrubs that block light to the house. In go bold, structural plants and color.
The trailing, spreading paths that choke the front path are gone, replaced by clumping succulents and accent plants that will require only minimal maintenance.
Between working remotely on projects, our garden is the place to go. There’s always something happening if you look closely enough. Every day is different: new flowers in, old flowers out. Different birds. Strange insects and spiders that appear as you sit and watch the plants.
The plans went out in 2004. In 2005 or so, they were enjoying their new landscape, although it already had some issues due to a less than stellar installation by the contractor. The gate and structure sagged or wobbled (the gate brace was installed backwards). The fountain leaked, and was later abandoned. It was time for a renovation.
The first thing to go was the backward gate and flimsy structure, replaced by something that looks like it would survive a major flood. The gate and structure mark a side entry direct to the patio, so they’re features that are used a lot during nice weather.
For some reason, the steps below the gate were never installed, so the path is steeper than we intended. Maybe they roll things into the back yard this way instead of around the side?
Original gate detail (from 2004)
This was a simpler version, held together with heavy duty strap ties and deep footings.
There was a moon gate opening with laser-cut corten steel that worked as a peep hole.
The plans
These plans were drawn for the recently completed renovation, replacing the turf areas with more water conserving plants and adding a gas grill and counter
We’re now working under fairly mature trees, so sunny areas now get significant amounts of shade, making a planting refresh even more necessary.
