Garden Travel, Best Gardens!

Have you ever thumbed through a gardening magazine, and planned your travels aroundthe gardens you found within the pages? Ever Googled a favorite movie to find out where it was filmed, just so you could see the gardens in the film in person? Well, my friend, you have a problem… you’re a gardener! Don’t fret, we understand, and we’re here to help. This month on Garden Designers Roundtable, our designers are taking you on a trip to their favorite gardens.

Fern Richardson

We are very excited to have as a guest poster for this garden tour, Fern Richardsonfrom her excellent blog Life on the Balcony! Life on the Balcony is an award winning blog about container gardening tips and tricks, for growing plants on tiny balconies and patios and creating container gardens. You’ll also find great recipes, best enjoyed or made outdoors and other outdoor living ideas for balconies, patios and small decks.

Fern is also an author, with her first book Small Space Container Gardens, just released from Timber Press. You can find more info and join with her in discussing the book on her Facebook Page. 

Now let’s get to it, let’s explore the wonderful gardens through the eye of our guest Fern and our designers. Just click on the links below to start your tour!

Fern Richardson : Life on the Balcony : Orange County CA

Susan Morrison : Blue Planet Garden Blog : East Bay, CA

Susan Cohan : Miss Rumphius’ Rules : Chatham, NJ

Scott Hokunson : Blue Heron Landscapes : Granby, CT

Rochelle Greayer : Studio G : Boston, MA

Rebecca Sweet : Gossip In The Garden : Los Altos, CA

Lesley Hegarty & Robert Webber : Hegarty Webber Partnership : Bristol, UK

Genevieve Schmidt : North Coast Gardening : Arcata, CA

David Cristiani : The Desert Edge : Albuquerque NM

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Garden Designers Rountable: Reality Check / Don’t Do This…

This month on the Roundtable, we take a break from perusing seed catalogs and planning for spring planting for a garden design reality check. Our topic, Reality Check/Don’t Do This… is sure to illicit a wide range of thoughts from our group of Roundtablers..

Joining us this month is our guest, noted landscape architect David Cristiani, author of the blog The Desert Edge.

Here is a little more about David –

David has over 20 years of experience designing outdoor environments in the Southwest. His projects include a variety of resource-conservative commercial, institutional, and residential designs.
David has merged the practice of landscape design with his knowledge of climate and the study of arid-region plant geography and species composition. This unique insight has proved valuable for both site-specific design work and for assisting regional growers, by collecting seed and cuttings for large-scale production of promising high desert plant introductions.

And now, for a look at Reality Check / Don’t Do This…

Simply follow the links below to each of the blogs. Enjoy!

David Cristiani : The Desert Edge : Albuquerque, NM

Jocelyn Chilvers : The Art Garden : Denver, CO

Susan Morrison : Blue Planet Garden Blog : Easy Bay, CA

Andrew Keys : Garden Smackdown : Boston, MA

Susan Cohan : Miss Rumphius’ Rules : Chatham, NJ

Rebecca Sweet : Gossip In The Garden : Los Altos, CA

Christina Salwitz : Personal Garden Coach : Renton, WA

Shirley Bovshow : Eden Makers : Los Angeles, CA

Genevieve Schmidt : North Coast Gardening : Arcata, CA

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Yikes! Garden Design Don’ts

This month on the Garden Designers Roundtable, it’s time for a quick reality check. You don’t have to be a professional landscape designer to have literally been stopped in your tracks by some major garden design ‘Don’t’ you’ve seen somewhere in your travels. It could be across the world, across town, or even across the street.

We’ve all had moments when we’ve scratched our heads and wondered, ‘What were they thinking…’

Take the ‘What Were They Thinking’ Reality Check Challenge

♦ Do you live in New England but continue to try to grow cactus as a foundation plant (or do you live in the desert southwest and try to grow rhododendrons)?

♦ Do you sometimes forget that plants grow and get bigger and bigger and BIGGER?

♦ Do you believe that if one garden gnome adds a touch of whimsy, then ten garden gnomes must be ten times more whimsical?

♦ Has anyone ever told you to drop the pruning shears and leave that poor shrub alone?

If you can answer yes to even one of those questions, you may need a garden design reality check.

Our Guest This Month

What was David thinking.... sending us his high school ID?

This month on the Roundtable we are joined by none other than David Cristiani, principal of Quercus, a landscape architecture firm located in Albuquerque, NM.

Long before sustainable and eco-friendly design were buzzwords, David was designing residential and commercial outdoor spaces that capture the essence of the high desert region of the southwest that he loves.

David is also the author of the blog The Desert Edge. On his blog, David explores the landscape, plants, people and weather at the ‘edge of the vast Chihuahuan Desert + Great American SW’.

Join us on Tuesday, January 24th as we take a reality check and explore ‘Don’t Do This…’. Oh, and we’ll also have a current photo of David!

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Getting From Here to There…

This month, the lords and ladies of the Roundtable, along with our esteemed guests, Debra Prinzing and David Perry of A Fresh Bouquet, explore the topic Getting From Here to There. In the language of garden design, those 5 little words hold a multitude of possibilities. Before we delve into the topic of Getting From Here to There, let’s get to know our renowned companions for this month’s journey, Debra and David.

Debra Prinzing is a Seattle- and Los Angeles-based outdoor living expert who writes and lectures on gardens and home design. She has a background in textiles, journalism, landscape design and horticulture. A frequent speaker for botanical garden, horticultural society and flower show audiences, Debra is also a regular radio and television guest. Her five books include Garden Writers Association Gold Award-winning Stylish Sheds and Elegant Hideaways (Clarkson-Potter/Random House, 2008) and The Abundant Garden (2005).  She is now at work on her new book about seasonal, local and sustainably-grown cut flowers with photographer David Perry. Read more about it at www.afreshbouquet.com.

Debra is the new contributing garden editor for Better Homes & Gardens and her feature stories on architecture and design appear regularly in the Los Angeles Times’ Home section. She is also a contributing editor to Garden Design magazine and writes for top shelter and consumer publications, including Organic Gardening, Horticulture, Fine Gardening, Cottages & Bungalows, Metropolitan Home, Landscape Architecture, Sunset, Alaska Airlines Magazine, Old House Interiors, Seattle Homes & Lifestyles and Romantic Homes, among others. Her website and blog: www.debraprinzing.com.

David Perry has earned his living as a commercial photographer for more than thirty years and in that time has been invited back to work, again and again, for some of the most demanding clients, magazines, ad agencies and design firms in the world.  He has successfully completed assignments in each of the fifty states of the U.S. and in dozens of countries in every corner of the world.  Based in Seattle, he fills out those essential non-career corners of his life as a cook, a fly fisherman and an avid gardener.

His thoughtfully chronicled online journal, “A Photographer’s Garden Blog,” melds his two interests – photography and gardening. David’s clients have included AT&T, Amazon, Bantam and Ballentine Books, Boeing, Costco, Farm Credit, Harvard Business School, Microsoft, PACCAR, Weyerhaeuser and many others.  Over the past few years his work has been featured inLandscape Architecture Magazine (including two cover features) and Sunset. David is a regular contributor to Range magazine and has collaborated with Debra Prinzing on a garden feature for Seattle Homes & Lifestyles.

Join us on our adventure, as we explore Getting From Here to There. Simply click on the links below and enjoy the journey.

Debra Prinzing & David Perry:  A Fresh Bouquet

Pam Penick : Digging : Austin, TX

Scott Hokunson : Blue Heron Landscapes : Granby, CT

Rebecca Sweet : Gossip In The Garden : Los Altos, CA

Jenny Peterson : J Peterson Garden Design : Austin TX

Susan Cohan : Miss Rumphius’ Rules : Chatham, NJ

Susan Morrison : Blue Planet Garden Blog : East Bay, CA

Jocelyn Chilvers : The Art Garden : Denver, CO

Lesley Hegarty & Robert Webber : Hegarty Webber Partnership : Bristol, 

Christina Salwitz : Personal Garden Coach : Renton, WA

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Getting From Here to There

This month on Garden Designers Roundtable we explore the topic of Getting From Here to There.  As is true with many GDRT topics, this one is open to a multitude of different interpretations. In a very straightforward sense, Getting From Here to There can refer to the actual physical movement from one place in the garden to another.

Getting From Here to There can refer to the process of designing a garden – getting from ‘before’ to ‘after’, and everything in between. Or, in a more nuanced interpretation, it might refer to the never-ending pursuit of an ideal garden, one that is truly never finished.

Getting From Here to There...the possibilities are endless. And isn’t that what the Garden Designers Roundtable is all about?

Our Special Guests

Joining the Garden Designers Roundtable this month to give their interpretation of the topic are design writer, Debra Prinzing and photographer, David Perry, collaborators on the soon-to-be-published book, A Fresh Bouquet.

Debra Prinzing is a Seattle- and Los Angeles-based outdoor living expert who writes and lectures on gardens and home design. She has a background in textiles, journalism, landscape design and horticulture. A frequent speaker for botanical garden, horticultural society and flower show audiences, Debra is also a regular radio and television guest. Her five books include Garden Writers Association Gold Award-winning Stylish Sheds and Elegant Hideaways (Clarkson-Potter/Random House, 2008) and The Abundant Garden (2005).

Debra is the new contributing garden editor for Better Homes & Gardens and her feature stories on architecture and design appear regularly in the Los Angeles Times’ Home section. She is also a contributing editor to Garden Design magazine and writes for top shelter and consumer publications, including Organic Gardening, Horticulture, Fine Gardening, Cottages & Bungalows, Metropolitan Home, Landscape Architecture, Sunset, Alaska Airlines Magazine, Old House Interiors, Seattle Homes & Lifestyles and Romantic Homes, among others. Find out more about Debra on her website and blog.

David Perry is an inspirational photographer, a willing teacher and a captivating storyteller who brings the unique insights and skills garnered in his thirty plus years of worldwide, on-location photo assignments for major corporations, ad agencies, magazines and book publishers to each new project he encounters.

The inquisitive son of a zoologist, David grew up in the field with his dad, trapping and preserving specimens for museums, exploring caves and studying the complex interplay between life forms and their ecologies from the southern reaches of Mexico to northern Canada. He began documenting his impressions of the living world around him with cameras at a very early age.

His very popular, A Photographer’s Garden Blog, which he started publishing in January, 2007 brings thousands of readers together each week through garden tours, thoughtful essays, seasonal imagery and playful photographic assignments and contests that readers actively participate in.

Onstage he is a spirited, dynamic and slightly irreverent speaker who makes his presentation topics memorable and relevant to audiences through the ample use of clever graphics, breathtaking imagery, playful humor, and by never, ever talking down to them.

You can find out more about Debra and David’s new book about seasonal, local and sustainably-grown cut flowers by visiting their website A Fresh Bouquet.

Don’t forget to stop back again next week, on September 27^th for links to Getting From Here to There. In the meantime, visit us on our Facebook page and follow us on Twitter

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Lawn Alternatives!

This month on Garden Designers Roundtable, We’re talking ‘Lawn Alternatives’, and we’re very excited to have the Lawn Reform Coalition joining us for a blogging extravaganza! The Lawn Reform Coalition is Thirteen gardening and environmental advocates from across the U.S. promoting change in the American lawn, a loose coalition of writers and activists (including lawn-haters and lawn-improvers) pooling knowledge of up-to-date solutions to the many problems caused by a lawn culture that demands perfection, conformity, and the overuse of water, fertilizer and pesticides. To learn more about the Coalition, and to join in the revolution, visit www.LawnReform.org.

We’ll be joined this month by the following Lawn Reform Coalition members:

Susan Harris

Susan Harris – Coalition instigator and head wrangler, Susan is a garden writer and blogger who promotes lawn alternatives and organic lawn care.  Online she blogs for independent garden centers, publishes a website about Sustainable-Gardening, and co-founded the national team blog GardenRant.com. Susan also co-founded the DC Urban Gardeners and Green the Grounds.org, a campaign encouraging First Families to landscape their official residences sustainably. Her individual blog Gardener Susan’s Boomer Blog, goes radically off-topic to answer the question: What Turns Boomers On?  Susan gardens and teaches gardening in the Washington, D.C. area.

Billy Goodnick

Billy Goodnick – Billy is a landscape architect based in Santa Barbara, CA, specializing in designing public and residential landscapes. His freelance writing and his Cool Green Gardens blog at Fine Gardening Magazine instruct and encourage readers to adopt a more sustainable approach in their landscapes. Billy also co-hosts an educational and humorous regional television show, Garden Wise Guys, that emphasizes water conservation and lawn alternatives.

Evelyn Hadden

Evelyn Hadden – Evelyn has been writing about nature-friendly, chemical-free, do-it-yourself, low-maintenance landscaping since 2001, when she founded the informational website LessLawn.com.  She gardens in Minnesota and travels across the country speaking to other gardeners about ecological gardening, lawn alternatives, and ideas for shrinking your lawn.  Her most recent book, Shrink Your Lawn: Design ideas for any landscape, won a silver medal in the Independent Publisher’s 2009 Living Now Book Awards for promoting a healthy and balanced lifestyle. Evelyn works with the Permaculture Research Institute Cold Climate to find and share ways to build a restorative human culture.

Saxon Holt

Saxon Holt – Saxon is a professional garden photographer whose images are well recognized in hundreds of magazine and book credits. In his work he seeks to change the aesthetic of what we expect to see in a garden photograph so that the media portrays authentic and sustainable gardens. “The American Meadow Garden” and his two most previous books, Hardy Succulents, and Plants and Landscapes for Summer-Dry Climates, were all awarded prizes by the Garden Writers of America as “outstanding books”. He owns the stock photography library PhotoBotanic and blogs regularly at Gardening Gone Wild.

Ginny Stibolt

Ginny Stibolt – Ginny is the “Transplanted Gardener” from Maryland, where she received her MS degree in botany, to NE Florida.  Her column for Jacksonville’s Florida Times Union is posted on her website and on Floridata.com, Many of her columns have been republished in Master Gardener newsletters and elsewhere, and she also writes for Vero Beach Magazine.  She’s the author of Sustainable Gardening for Florida, published by the University Press of Florida.

Of note, two of our own members here at Garden Designers Roundtable are also Lawn Reform Coalition Members. Susan Morrison and Shirley Bovshow will also be posting today.

Garden Designers Roundtable is also very excited to announce in conjunction with this month’s topic, that one of our own, Pam Penick, has a new book coming out in February of 2013 entitled “The Alternative Lawn”, to be published by Ten Speed Press. Look for more information here and on Pam’s blog Digging as we get closer to the publishing date. Congratulations Pam!

Now without further ado, may we present to you our readers, ‘Lawn Alternatives’! Just click on the links below and Enjoy!

(and no, you’re not seeing double, Susan Harris has contributed two posts!)

Susan Harris : Garden Rant : Takoma Park, MD

Susan Harris : Gardener Susan’s Blog : Takoma Park, MD

Billy Goodnick : Cool Green Gardens : Santa Barbara, CA

Evelyn Hadden : Lawn Reform.Org : Saint Paul, MN

Saxon Holt : Gardening Gone Wild : Novato, CA

Ginny Stibolt : Florida Native Plant Society : Green Cove Springs, FL

Tara Dillard : Vanishing Threshold: Garden, Life, Home : Atlanta, GA

Susan Morrison : Blue Planet Garden Blog : East Bay, CA

Shirley Bovshow : Eden Makers : Los Angeles, CA

Scott Hokunson : Blue Heron Landscapes : Granby, CT

Rochelle Greayer : Studio G : Boston, MA

Rebecca Sweet : Gossip In The Garden : Los Altos, CA

Pam Penick : Digging : Austin, TX

Lesley Hegarty & Robert Webber : Hegarty Webber Partnership : Bristol, UK

Laura Livengood Schaub : Interleafings : San Jose, CA

Jocelyn Chilvers : The Art Garden : Denver, CO

Ivette Soler : The Germinatrix : Los Angeles, CA

Genevieve Schmidt : North Coast Gardening : Arcata, CA

Douglas Owens-Pike : Energyscapes : Minneapolis, MN

Debbie Roberts : A Garden of Possibilities : Stamford, CT

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Don’t let the Green Grass Fool Ya!

Humans, have an unnatural love affair with lawns. We spend countless hours and tons of chemicals trying to produce the perfect green carpet, because somewhere along the line it became popular wisdom that a perfect lawn was not only a thing of beauty, but a symbol of status and conformity.

Next week on August 23rd, right here, Garden Designers Roundtable is joining forces with The Lawn Reform Coalition to reveal that The Emperor has no Clothes! That’s right, you can have something other than a green carpet, and still be a valuable member of society. So, please join us for this very special event, as Susan Harris, Billy Goodnick, Saxon Holt, Ginny Stibolt, and Evelyn Hadden, along with fifteen of our own Roundtable members, as we consider ‘Lawn Alternatives’! Be sure to stop back next Tuesday, at 10 am!

In the meantime, if  a neighbor turn up his nose up at your less than perfect lawn, or laughs aloud because you have flowers and vegetables instead of a manicured carpet, just tell him to take a good look at his monument to conformity, and repeat after the great Jackie Wilson – “Don’t let the Green Grass Fool Ya!”

Click play and enjoy, while you look at the images of “conformity” below!

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Water!

Water; water everywhere…or not enough at all!  Water is the lifeblood of every living thing, and yet it can be destructive in its extremes.  It’s a resource that is ephemeral and unpredictable – be it by natures’ vagaries or politicians’ whims.  The partnering of thoughtful water management with appropriate plant selection is crucial to any garden design. Today the Garden Designers Roundtable presents the topic of water.

We are delighted to introduce Debra Lee Baldwin as our guest blogger this month.  Award-winning garden photojournalist Debra Lee Baldwin lives in the drought-parched Southwest, near San Diego. “Water?” she asks. “Ha! I wish.” Debra authored the Timber Press bestsellers Designing with Succulents and Succulent Container Gardens.   As a renowned authority on these elegant, easy-care and waterwise plants, Debra shares her expertise in print and online, via radio and TV, and at horticultural venues nationwide. She is one of several acclaimed authors and photographers who share the blog www.gardeninggonewild.com. More info: www.debraleebaldwin.com.

Now, please follow the links below, joining our special guest and members of the Roundtable, as we write about water.

Debra Lee Baldwin : Gardening Gone Wild : Escondido, CA

Tara Dillard : Vanishing Threshold : Atlanta, GA

Rochelle Greayer : Studio G : Boston, MA

Lesley Hegarty & Robert Webber : Hegarty Webber Partnership : Bristol, UK

Jenny Peterson : J Peterson Garden Design : Austin TX

Douglas Owens-Pike : Energyscapes : Minneapolis, MN

Christina Salwitz : Personal Garden Coach : Renton, WA

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Water – Next Tuesday!

The dog days of summer are upon us and with them the searing heat that wilts our bodies, our minds and…our gardens. Water, the magical elixir that can revive, calm, and cool, can also be an agent of destruction and a flashpoint for divisive policies and politics. As garden designers – and gardeners – we must keep the use of water and its powerful affects at the forefront of our planning.

This month the Roundtable topic is Water.   We are delighted that our guest blogger will be Debra Lee Baldwin, garden photojournalist and the author of Designing with Succulents and Succulent Container Gardens, and part of the talented blogging team at Gardening Gone Wild.  Tune in Tuesday, July 26^th for this powerful edition of The Garden Designers Roundtable!

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Made in the Shade

Whether you’re coping with an abundance of shade as your trees grow larger, or you’re constructing shade structures because of an abundance of sun, the Roundtable has you covered this month as we write about Shade. We are also delighted to welcome Margaret Roach of A Way to Garden http://awaytogarden.com/ as a guest blogger. Please join us next Tuesday, June 28^th, as we all get a little shady.

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