landscape

  • decor for the Arts & Crafts garden

    Old House Journal has a nice short article by Clare Martin on how to furnish or accessorize your traditional A&C garden – she covers arbors and fencing, gates, fountains, benches and more:

    If there’s one overarching goal that all gardens of the Arts &
    Crafts movement sought, it was to blend in. Proponents of Arts &
    Crafts garden design wanted their landscapes to connect not only with
    the homes they were attached to, but also with their natural
    surroundings. The use of native plants and wildflowers, along with
    uncomplicated layouts, helped achieve this ideal.

    Ornamentation also had its place in the Arts & Crafts garden,
    albeit in very subtle form. When looking for products to embellish your
    own garden, simplicity should be the name of the game. Forget ornate
    iron benches, elaborate trellises, and fancy ornamental planters. In
    the Arts & Crafts garden, as in the homes from the era, clean lines
    and unfussy patterns reign supreme.

  • Japanese Gardens in the US

    The United States includes a number of first-rate public and private Japanese gardens, some being the cause and others the result of the immense importance that Japanese formalism has had upon American landscape and architectural design, most visibly in the Arts & Crafts Movement and more recently in certain contemporary styles.

    One recent addition is the University of Illinois at Springfield’s new garden; other highlights throughout this country include the very small but well-designed Japanese garden in Ashland, Oregon’s Lithia Park and another, larger in scale, in Portland; San Francisco’s Japanese Tea Garden and Anderson Japanese Gardens in Rockford IL.

    Spokane, Wasington’s Nishinomiya Garden is particularly photogenic. Saratoga, California is home to Hakone Gardens, the oldest Japanese estate in the Western Hemisphere – the bamboo forests at this eighteen-acre preserve are as impressive as they are enormous. The University of Arkansas’ sprawling Garvan Woodland Gardens includes the Japanese-inspired Garden of the Pine Wind. San Diego’s Japanese Friendship Garden‘s tea house is in operation most weekends, and the koi in their pond are some of the oldest in North America. The Asticou Azalea Garden, on the property of the Asticou Inn in Northeast Harbor, Maine, is particularly attractive when its New England backdrop is in the throes of Autumn’s blazing reds and golds. The Morikami Museum and Japanese Gardens in Delray Beach, Florida, includes not only a very pleasant garden but a museum of Japanese, Japanese-American and other related artwork, both classical and contemporary. Van Nuys, California is home to Suiho En, a Japanese water and fragrance garden, noted as one of the most authentic in the US. Also in the greater Los Angeles area, San Marino’s Huntington Gardens includes a large pleasant Japanese garden as a small part of its acreage.

    Canada also includes three of the most impressive Japanese gardens in North America: the Nikka Yuko Japanese Garden, the Nitobe Memorial Garden on the University of British Columbia campus, and the Japanese garden at Butchart Gardens in Vancouver.

    creative commons-licensed photo courtesy of Flickr user Manyfires

  • Japanese Effects for Small Gardens (1910)

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    Florence Dixon was a regular contributor to The Craftsman between 1901 and 1916; the following article appeared in the September 1910 issue.

    The special value of the Japanese garden in this country lies in its availability for small areas. Nowadays, when a man wants a garden, he plans for some definite landscape effect. Often the size of his lot precludes the possibility of an Italian garden or a naturalistic treatment after the English-American plan. But a Japanese garden may be had in all completeness in a space where one would have said there was scarcely room for a flower bed. The Japanese garden adapts itself to lack of space. Other systems copy nature on only one set of terms, those of life-size, but the japanese method, while it can be and often is developed on a large scale, may also be reduced from natural size through all stages to a tiny miniature.

  • Craftsman landscaping – bits & pieces

    Arts & Crafts bungalows mix and match well with all sorts of
    landscaping – from the zen-like Asian-inspired landscapes of Greene
    & Greene to cactus gardens and even the manicured, symmetrical
    patterns of some of the English A&C-influenced landscape designers.

    • The San Francisco Chronicle takes a look at one particularly successful landscape makeover:

    When it came to planting the bungalow garden, the most influential
    designer for Californians, as for the rest of America and England, was
    Englishwoman Gertrude Jekyll, whose best-selling book "Colour in the Flower
    Garden" reflected nearly 30 years of plant design. Astonishingly, her plant
    combinations are still widely used today with all styles of homes. What she
    excelled at was the natural-looking border built up typically with a
    discerning use of grays, silvers, pinks and whites accented with blues and a
    touch here and there of yellow or red. In her prolific career she used
    hundreds of different plants, commenting, "There are no bad plants, only
    plants badly placed."


    • This 1915 Craftsman home       is ringed with appropriate trees and its entry is framed by a pretty pergola;
    • The Craftsman Perspective addresses landscaping, gives plant recommendations and some general gardening advice, tailored for the bungalow owner;
    • The newsletter of the Twin Cities Bungalow Club has a good article – including a few Q&A sessions – on what to plant and when to plant it in your bungalow garden.

  • Oaklawn Portal, South Pasadena


    Greene & Greene’s 1906 portal to the Oaklawn neighborhood in Pasadena; found in mins3rdkid’s Flickr photostream. Unfortunately, this pretty bit of stonework, wood and masonry is often overlooked in books and studies of the work of the brothers Greene; local artists, however, know it well – here’s Liz Reday’s painting.

  • a new picket fence from scratch

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    Reader and compulsive rehabber Matt Wyczalkowski writes in with another recent project. This time, as part of a general yard upgrade, Matt built a beautiful Craftsman-style picket fence from scratch. A Flickr photoset documents the project from start to finish. Matt, any time you want to come visit Sacramento, I have plenty of jobs I need done…

  • Don’t Fence Me In, part 2

    One of the burdens facing historic-home owners is how to choose fencing that matches – or at least doesn’t visibly clash with – the architectural style of their home. This can be more difficult than it seems, especially if you don’t want to break the bank; a good landscape designer or carpenter with an eye for historic architecture can match details in the house with custom work, but we don’t all have thousands of dollars to spend on a project like this (although a professional – someone like Peter Kirsch-Korff – would be happy to build you a fence, arbor, deck or gate that would certainly be more beautiful and sturdier than anything from a kit). The right fence, as Charles Smith notes in his 2005 San Francisco Chronicle article on the subject, can – paradoxically – draw neighbors in, and make a neighborhood’s overall aesthetic character even more consistent, rather than working to compartmentalize a block. Such fences can also be "functional works of art."

    There are some ready-made pieces, kits and packages out there, but a lot of times you’ll have to be a bit more creative, gussying up a standard design with small details to reflect aspects of the structure’s design – sheathing post-tops in copper or using a decorative finial, for example, or mirroring the house’s lattice or lintel work with a small add-on. In some cases, a simple minimalist fence will allow an arbor or gate, picked specifically to match a feature or features in the house, to really shine. Lights – post lanterns or even something on the ground – picked to match outside fixtures on the house are also a great and relatively inexpensive way to tie the house, yard and fence all together.

    And of course if you’re handy and you’ve got the tools – and the time – you can just do it yourself. But be careful – if you haven’t done this sort of job before, and if your property isn’t perfectly graded, you might be biting off way more than you can chew.

    Whatever you do, don’t forget to investigate permits and local guidelines governing landscape design first, or you could be in for a rude surprise. No matter how much you know about the historic character of your home and neighborhood, there’s sure to be someone in the city who thinks they know more and who claims to have more interest in the overall character of your neighborhood than you do.

    A few miscellaneous links:

  • A Minature Mountain Landscape in Berkeley, California

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    Konrad Gauder has an article in the August ’94 issue of Fine Gardening on building a scaled-down "alpine vista" in his yard in Berkeley – just perfect for the mountain cabin-esque Craftsman home that shares the site on Woolsey Street. Plenty of images of the project (and the absolutely beautiful fences and gates built by the Gauders) are also up on the site.

    Konrad and Denise Snaer-Gauder own Landsculpture, a Berkeley-based firm known for "naturalistic stone placements, mosiac-like stone
    flatwork, curvilinear brick work, as well as furniture-quality gates,
    fences, decks and arbors."

    In 1982, my wife, Denise, and I moved into her childhood home. It was a run-down, Berkeley Craftsman-style house, vintage 1910. The house had been unoccupied for seven years, but it held out lots of promise. What garden there was consisted of a strip of Bermuda grass sloping to the street in front of the house. Old bottlebrush, hibiscus and an invasive flowering quince decorated the foundation. Overgrown roses gave an unkempt appearance to the narrow strip of side yard, and in back of the house was a poorly constructed concrete-brick patio surrounded by shrubbery, a Japanese maple, and plum and mulberry trees. We kept the maple.

    Some of the Gauders’ other projects are equally impressive – a garden, fencing and stonework on Oakland’s Crofton Street; beautiful fairy-tale stonework in paths, walls and steps on Skywood Way in Woodside, and more.