Fantastic Native Cultivar: Amsonia 'Blue Ice'

Amsonia 'Blue Ice' in my garden late April next to Nepeta 'Walker's Low' & Phlomis

Who needs a compact, attractive, tough-as-nails perennial that--by the way--is gorgeous in two seasons?  Yes, everyone.  Then let me enthusiastically endorse Amsonia tabernaemontana 'Blue Ice.'

The horticultural world is still rightfully swooning over its feathery cousin, Arkansas Amsonia (Amsonia hubrichtii), recent winner of the Perennial Plant of the Year.   I will make the claim, however, that Amsonia 'Blue Ice' may be the more versatile and durable plant.

Amsonia 'Blue Ice' was discovered in a seedling block of Amsonia tabernaemontana at White Flower Farm in Connecticut.  It sports the same broad leaves of the species, giving it a handsome texture to contrast with finer-foliaged plants.  But it seems to be more compact (12-15 inches in height), longer blooming (three weeks + in my garden), and has this incredibly dark blue color of the bud of the flower.  Dark blue is incredibly rare in perennials.  The dark blue buds have this incredible shadowing effect underneath the lighter blue periwinkle-like flowers.  In the mid-Atlantic, it bloomed late April through early May.



Dark blue buds shadow the lighter blue open flowers of Amsonia 'Blue Ice'

Amsonia tabernaemontana is a member of the dogbane family (Apocynaceae).  Like other members of the dogbane family, it has a white, milky sap that is toxic to mammaliam herbivores--perhaps making this a deer-resistant plant?  (Have others of you grown this plant in deer country?  I'd be curious to know how it fares.) It grows natively in rich open woods, rocky woodlands, limestone glades, and moist sandy meadows.

'Blue Ice' is a hybrid, but the exact parentage of this cultivar is still unknown.  Tony Advent of Plant Delights Nursery guesses it is a cross with the taxonomically-debated dwarf Amsonia montana (which most nurseries seem to categorize as Amsonia tabernaemontana 'Montanta').  Others have wondered whether it is a cross with the Asian Rhaza orientale, which after looking at images of Rhaza, seems highly plausible.  Whoever the papa is, Amsonia 'Blue Ice' has proven to be incredibly tough.  I planted it where it spills over a public sidewalk.  The heat off this sidewalk regularly tops 95 degrees for weeks in the summer.  And yet the foliage remains steadfast and handsome.    Based on my two year trial, I'd recommend it as a replacement for groundcovers. 

The foliage of Amsonia 'Blue Ice' in the midsummer heat near the U.S. Senate office

In the fall, this Bluestar turns a golden yellow, though  not quite as brilliant as its Threadleaf-cousin (A. hubrichtii).  Fall color was ok the first year, and much better the second year.  The warm yellow autumnal foliage is nice in combination with low grasses and native deciduous shrubs.



The fall foliage of Amsonia 'Blue Ice' is good, though not as strong as A. hubrichtii



The success of two U.S. native Amsonias (A. tabernaemontana and A. hubrichtii) should convince plant breeders to explore more of this wonderful genus.  Piet Oudolf has used Amsonia tabernaemontana var. salicifolia to great effect on projects such as The Highline and the Lurie Garden.  This variety differs from the species in that is has narrower more lanceolate leaves that makes it more willowy in texture.  There are at least 22 known species of Amsonias--most native to North America--and many of them have horticultural potential.  Southeastern natives Amsonia illustris and Amsonia ludoviciana are two others worth noting.  I'm particulalry interested in the Louisiana native A. ludoviciana for its compact habit, heat tolerance, and whitish, whooly undersides.  Could be a great native groundcover that might have some deer tolerance.  Plant hunters and breeders, get to it!

Amsonia hubrichtii in fall is incredibly dramatic

Landscape Architecture's Finest Moment?

Is the profession of landscape architecture entering into a new golden age? If the 2012 ASLA awards are any indication, the answer may be yes.

Award of Excellence: “A Green Sponge for a Water Resilient City: Qunli Stormwater Park,” Haerbin City, China. Design by Turrenscape and Peking University, Beijing. Photos by Kogjian Yu.

Landscape architects have long lived with a dualistic view of the profession. Inside the profession, LA’s see themselves as heirs to Frederick Law Olmsted’s heroic and sweeping ambitions. Landscape architects shape cities, create National Parks, protect the environment, and even stimulate social reform. But this rather ambitious internal view of the profession is undercut by landscape architecture’s relative obscurity in the public eye. Introduce yourself as a landscape architect at a cocktail party and questions about lawn mowers, flowers, or plant diseases immediately follow. Since Olmsted, the chasm between what landscape architects think they do and what the majority of them actually do has been very deep. Until now.

Landscape architects may indeed be gaining influence. “Landscape urbanism,” the theory that landscape—rather than architecture—is more capable of organizing and enhancing cities has moved from obscure theory to the dominant pedagogy in design-related higher education. Large scale urban projects all over the world are being lead by elite landscape architecture firms rather than by architects. Landscape architecture is moving away from merely ornamenting buildings and instead shaping the very infrastructure of cities.

The 2012 ASLA Awards are another indication of landscape architecture’s emboldened scope. The awards feature a stunning array of projects, including a seven thousand acre stormwater park; a park highlighting urban agriculture; a former quarry turned garden; the defining memorial for 9/11; and two new botantical gardens that feature not just plants as horticultural objects, but the ecological relationship between them.

Honor Award: “Quarry Garden in Shanghai Botanical Garden,” Shanghai China. THUPDI & Tsinghua University.

What is remarkable about this year’s ASLA Awards is not just the variety of projects, but the ambition of each of them. The Qunli Stormwater Park in China shows that a gorgeously designed recreational park can also be a green sponge for the entire city. Lafayette Greens in Detroit shows how an engaging public space can also be a productive vegetable garden. The Arizona State University Polytechnic Campus shows how the ecological fabric of the Sonoran desert can be a setting for a campus. Canada’s Sugar Beach shows that playfulness and whimsicality can contribute to the beauty of an urban waterfront.

What’s different about these projects is not just their scope, but their voice. The names of the projects by themselves—“Quarry Garden,” “Green Sponge for a City,” “Sugar Beach,”—suggest the extraordinary dramatic authority that is at the heart of all these projects. These projects are not about making spaces that slip quietly into their context; they are instead a declaration of war. Their anthem is a simple: landscape matters.  Lanscape architects are no longer decorators of architecture; they are green knights who march foward with with the conviction that any outdoor space--from quarries to waterfronts, from gardens to cities--can be conquered with design.

Honor Award: “Canada’s Sugar Beach,” Toronto Waterfront. Claude Cormier Associes Inc. Images by Claude Cormier Associates and Nicola Betts.

Honor Award: “Lafayette Greens: Urban Agriculture, Urban Fabric, Urban Sustainability,” Detroit, Michigan. Kenneth Weikal Landscape Architecture.  Images by Beth Hagenbuch.

Honor Award: “Sunnylands Center and Gardens.” Rancho Mirage, California. The Office of James Burnett. Images by Mark Davidson and Dillon Diers.

For the full list of the 2012 ASLA Awards, including more images and fuller project descriptions, click here.

Thirty Seconds Until You are Totally Inspired

Several weeks ago, I wrote a post comparing texture in music to planting design.  The other day, I read this quote by one of my favorite landscape architects in the world, London-based Tom Stuart-Smith, which also compares music to the garden.  Like everything he does, the quote is simple, yet briming in shimmering detail.  Enjoy!

"I rarely listen to music while I’m working since I cannot concentrate.  But instead, some musical phrase takes up permanent residence in a chamber of my ind and accompanies me through the day.  In one very facile respect music is like a garden, with its contrast between form and content.  The formal structure of music is often quite rigid, as with sonota form, which is then contrasted with the embellishment of detail. 

"With Beethoven’s late quartets and piano sonatas, contrast is taken to an extreme: an almost savage starkness and sparse construction is set against passages of eloquent lyricism or gaping silences.  If this music depicts anything, it is a succession of emotional experiences.  Perhaps this is like a garden, with its crescendos and diminuendos, its sudden bursts of energy and silences—all set within an overriding architecture.  Doesn’t the garden at its best become an abstract expression of man’s connection to the world beyond himself?  Like music . . . but just a little less turbulent than Beethoven.” 

Landscape architect Tom Stuart-Smith.  Quote originally appeared in Garden Design Journal, September 2004

Garden for a Modern Pavilion

I was pleased to see a garden I had recently worked on featured in the fall issue of Home and Design Magazine. My involvement in the garden began when director Elliot Rhodeside of my firm, Rhodeside & Harwell, introduced me to a long-time friend and client of his. The client had hired local architect Robert Gurney to design a modern pool house for his Bethesda home. Elliot had designed several phases of the garden several years before and oversaw all aspects of this garden design.

Robert Gurney is a celebrated modernist architect. For this project, he created a jeweled glass and stone pavilion to sit atop a new swimming pool. The old pool was ripped out and a new pool was created to connect the house and pavilion. Gurney sensitively sited the pavilion as far back against the existing woods as possible to ground the structure in vegetation.

The existing planting beds did not relate at all to the new structure, so our challenge was to blend the pavilion into the landscape and the woodland behind it. To that end, Elliot and I enlarged the planting bed and focused on a palette of perennials and grasses to create a foreground for the pavilion. The planting also had to blend the orthogonal geometry of the pool and pavilion with the more curvilinear geometry of the existing lawn. To add structure to the garden, clusters of boxwoods were added at key corners. These clusters will eventually grow together and be clipped into gumdrop shapes. Behind the pavilion, we planted a grove of Stewartias with Palm Sedge grass (Carex muskingumensis ‘Oehme’). We wanted to intensify the feeling of woods immediately behind the pavilion.  Elliot suggested the row of columnar Magnolia 'Alta' that flanks the fenceline along the pool.  These stately trees draw screen the neighboring property and draw the eye toward the pavilion.

Here is a link to the full article.

Garden Designer's Roundtable: Designing with Native Plants

Native plants have a particular allure for me. Perhaps they evoke memories of my childhood. I remember drawing Tolkien-esque maps of the forest that bordered our suburban home in the Alabama Piedmont. The thicket of Sparkleberry trees (Vaccineum arboreum) I drew to look like Mirkwood Forest; I sketched the huge Southern Red Oak—the meeting spot for my neighborhood friends—to look like one of the mythic trees of Fanghorn. And while I romped through these woods with a pack of irreverent boys, we all had a certain reverence for a cluster of Beech trees that resided at the intersection of two streams. When the winter sun backlit those copper leaves, that golden grove became our Lothlorien.

But the allure of natives is stronger than just memory; in them, I feel a more primal pull. For me, there is something very powerful about that attraction—something even ancient. I want to articulate why native plants have this appeal and how this can be used to create bolder, more emotionally-rich gardens and landscapes.

illustration by Alfred Parsons for The Wild Garden

Readers of this blog know that I am an advocate for native plants, but sometimes I get frustrated with the reasons I hear for using natives. Yes, the environmental benefits are real: their value to our bees, bugs, and birds cannot be understated. But as a gardener and plant lover, choosing plants based on environmental ethics is kind of a bummer. Life is serious enough already; I want to garden as an escape from weighty moralism.

To understand designing with native plants, you have to understand the garden itself. Designed landscapes and gardens are manipulated fantasies. They are our mental projections, our ideas, and our desires projected onto a piece of land. And gardens and landscapes don’t really live apart from us. Ultimately, without our input and continued maintenance, they would cease to be. That gardens are fantasies does not undermine their value; on the contrary, this very fact is what makes them art. If all gardens are fantasies, then native and naturalistic gardens are a particular kind of fantasy.

Can a Small Garden be Grown from Seed?

Another horticultural experiment in our garden

See list below for species

I have several horticultural experiments brewing at my own home garden. Last year, my wife and I bought a small, mid-century Ranch house on a corner lot. The architecture is functional, but not terribly charming. We spent most of last year gutting and renovating the interior and still have big plans for the exterior. While most of our efforts have focused on making the house livable, we have started a few different garden experiments.

We’re keeping a small patch of lawn in front of the house, but the two side yard areas have been the focus of our efforts. We located gardens in the side yards mostly out of need for screening. Both spaces are close to streets, so gardens serve the dual function of screening and embellishing those spaces. Each of the gardens will be somewhat opposite in character, a sort of yin-yang of moods. On one side, we planted a sunny, exuberant border—what will be my mid-Atlantic version of the splendor of Great Dixter. That border will eventually be a raucous, over-the-top assembly of all kinds of plants—a hot mess of North American prairie natives, tropical bulbs, Mediterranean herbs, and lots of landscape annuals. So far, that experiment has not been terribly successful—mostly because it has been half-heartedly implemented—but more on that later.

"Cottage Garden, American Style," featured in The American Gardener Magazine

Can the British cottage garden style be adapted with American native plants?  Absolutely!  To find out how, check out this month's (July/August 2012) issue of the The American Gardener Magazine, featuring a full-length article that I wrote addressing this very topic.  "Cottage Garden, American Style," explains the design principles behind creating cottage gardens and includes lists of native plants best adapted to give it that unique look.  As a web special, The American Horticultural Society included my list of native cottage garden plants organized by regions of the country. 

The article expands upon a post I wrote on this blog called "Native Plants for the Cottage Garden" back in 2010.  The American Gardener Magazine is the official publication of The American Horticultural Society.  A subscription to the magazine is available for a very reasonable membership fee. 

Why I Don't Believe in Low Maintenance Landscapes

The American obsession with low maintenance landscapes is a problem. Here’s why.

There are several phrases I’ve learned to dread from clients. “I want to swim by Memorial Day,” is always a heart-stopper, particularly when you were hired in March to design a swimming pool and garden. “I want this garden to look perfect for my daughter’s wedding,” is perhaps the most dreaded phrase of all. If you ever hear that one, run far away. But the phrase that makes me cringe the most is a phrase I hear all the time: “I want this to be low maintenance.”

A low maintenance landscape is a rather innocuous request. It is also, of course, an absolutely sensible one. After all, who has the time or resources to pour endless hours into a landscape? Plus, traditional maintenance often focuses on chemical inputs and gas-powered machinery, all of which are bad for the environment. Perhaps low maintenance landscapes are both good for people and the environment, right?

Yes and no. “Low maintenance” is not just an idea, it is an ideology. It is the promise of more for less. As Americans, we still believe cheap, fertile land is our manifest destiny. We deserve bounty without labor, satisfaction without commitment.

The Garden Like You've Never Seen It Before

The magical photography of Magdalena Wasiczek

The first time I saw a photograph of Magdalena Wasiczek, my heart hurt.  It was an image of Heleniums, but it took me a moment to recognize the flowers.  The image focused on three sculptural flowers with planet-like orbs in the center.  The color of the flowers were muted, yet intense, like the last moments of a sunset.  The flowers floated on this turquoise-black background that conveyed an endless depth and all around the flowers. Dust (or pollen? or water? or fairies?) twirled around flowers, animating the image like a constellation in motion.  I tore the image out of the magazine and took it with me to work. I tacked it next to my computer screen.  When I look at it, I feel energized yet calmed.  I imagine that this is what God sees when he looks at Heleniums. 

Summer in Rain, on right, the image I referenced above.

The Most Ambitious Public Planting Ever?

London's Olympic Park brings together three of the most innovative plantsmen in the world.  Will the results live up to the hype?

Not since the Victorian era--at the height of the British empire--has a park been created with as much ambition or swagger.  The London Olympic Park, a 247-acre "park with venues," is the largest urban park developed in Europe in 150 years. 

Professor Nigel Dunnett standing in one of his annual meadows.

The master plan for the park was developed by American landscape architecture firm Hargreaves and Associates together with British LDA Associates.  Hargreaves Associates is known for their sculptural treatment of large, post-industrial sites--an appropriate choice for this former industrial site at Stratford in east London.  But for once, it is not the architecture of the park that will take center stage, but the planting instead.

The planting was lead by  two of the most innovative, cutting-edge plantsmen in the world: Professors James Hitchmough and Nigel Dunnett of the Department of Landscape, University of Sheffield.  Their research-based approach to planting has produced landscapes that are both ecologically funtional and jaw-droppingly beautiful.  Hitchmough and Dunnett pioneered a unique approach to urban planting, which combines native and non-native plant species in low-input systems based on semi-natural vegetation types, such as meadows, woodlands and wetlands.  This approach has come to be known as `The Sheffield School´ of planting design.  The two men bridge the gap between ecological restoration and horticulture, creating landscapes that address urban ecology and beauty.

A 'pictorial meadow' in South Park developed by Dunnett/Hitchmough.  Photo: Dunnett

Graphic Design as Garden Design

I'm a big fan of graphic design.  Good graphic designers are alchemists.  Smart use of font, illustration, and design can transform one's identity.  I occasionally peruse the websites of my favorite graphic designers looking for inspiration for my landscape design.  I came across this recent design by the firm Filthy Media.  They created a branding package for a fascinating new arts and entertainment district in London. 

Here is their description of the project: London Pleasure Gardens (LPG), the major new 20 acre site is opening its doors for the very first time on Saturday 30th June 2012 in the heart of Olympic East London. The colossal project has transformed this forgotten stretch of wasteland into a bonafide wonderland, ready to host a plethora of innovative, world-class art and culture events.