Get off the floor, get onto the key board and take a big gigantic peek at our long smooth range of eco chic (ed) garden accessories and eco gifts.
We are sick of interiors having all the fun.
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Airplants (genus Tillandsia) offer much garden art inspiration. Tillandsia create amazing shapes with their tentical like leaves. They do not need any soil and are therefore able to be fixed to various materials and locations. Landscape Architect, Flora Grubb in San Francisco has become well known for her arrangements of these plants. The idea of arranging Tillandsia is not new but Flora has certainly moved these plants from their original 70’s wood and rock arrangements (as shown below) .
Given the current trend of architecture morphing with the garden in a Patric Blanc style it is likely that we will continue to see different garden typologies develop.
Flora has also been responsible for some beautiful succulent green walls. These wall planters have been inspiring many internet gardeners and she now has the product available for purchase .
Biospheres by Artist Tomas Saraceno uses the airplants in his art to explore ecology. For a full explanation on these Globes please refer to RETHINK Contemporary art and climate change .
From his work place Dan is just a short walk to the beach. This is the lifestyle he was after. Dan is a product designer who has built a business designing and manufacturing garden accessories within proximity to the water – hence the name of his business ‘ashortwalk’.
Garden clocks and garden sundials have been reinvigorated by his simple approach to a garden accessory that has been paid little design attention by contemporary product designers.
Dan has developed a serious of affordable garden clocks, sundials and thermometers that are designed and manufactured in the UK from recycled plastic coffee cups. As explained in his marketing material
Recycled products not only save on landfill; …………….recycled coffee cup material has around half the carbon footprint of virgin material…over 5 million cups saved from landfill so far!
Thankfully Dan has managed to create a quality finish to these recycled materials. The garden accessories in his ECO range are described as having a lovely solid, heavy, earthy feel, very much like natural slate.
The idea of a leaf as a swing is often used in children books. Veronica Martinez has been sculpting with this idea and has created a beautiful hanging sculpture for any treed or treeless garden. Or perhaps it can be a variation on the indoor hanging chair? Its context of course can be varied.
The skeletal leaf form of the swing provides great shadow potential. The Autumn Leaf Swing is available soon at Garden Beet.
I don’t know many people in the UK and therefore do not often get invited into people’s home for a little look however I must say from my observation to date the front yard and the back yard treatments are completely different. Do you have any pics to support or refute this claim? I am going to start documenting this little observation…submissions would be grand
Miguel Nelson is the inventor of the Woolly Pocket and he and his brother, Rodney Nelson, operate Woolly Pocket Gardening Company in the US.
Miguel Nelson has a background in sculpture and as the author of Shed Style has observed ‘he obviously thinks about sculpture in a completely different way than artists whose work stands on a pedestal in the garden or in the foyer of a home’.
His event space titled Smog Shoppe is where the Woolly Pocket concept began. The Pockets were devised as a way to grow plants vertically to soften the walls of this disused vehicle emissions testing site. The pockets enable people to grow plants on indoor and outdoor walls – very useful for those with limited spaces For further details on this product please refer to the Green Wall pages of Garden Beet.
I read ThinkinGardens and it tells me that UK gardens are conservative. Agreed. It is also reflected in the UK’s architecture. The built environment is held by a very conservative design shackle. Working example below.
I thought it was a fairly accepted notion amongst professional designers that it is not a good idea to make alterations to a historical anything without making a visual distinction between old and new. That is what we learned at Melbourne University, Australia..and that is pretty conservative anyway so I never ever thought it would be a controversial subject amongst design practioners. Wrong.
My first lesson in historical landscape treatments in the UK was upon consideration of tending for the public square outside Parliament House in London. The firm I was working for at the time looked at me like I had spoken of true evil when I suggested that perhaps we should consider a treatment that did NOT try to blend the alteration with the existing streetscape. Wow…….but how can this be?……Europe is just over there and they do insertion of ‘new’ in ‘old’ all the time ?…..some of the most exciting landscapes are created by this tension …..new ways of using space are developed.
What is going on – London is a hub for design and art?
Perhaps all the exciting stuff is happening behind walls – where there are less design laws.
I have been to a few open architecture days and am always surprised how the historical façades in London are kept pristine to maintain streetscape character – all the contemporary stuff is well concealed from the public gaze. Why can’t we see ‘Old’ and ‘New’ together. What is wrong with ‘New’?
- the town planners are very busy controlling whether a roof can be a pitch of 30 degrees or 50 degrees – god there are so many issues here – but I suspect the lack of a contemporary design response to gardens may be partly influenced by the unwieldy nature of the planning laws ….this leads me to my next point.
A new type of garden is evolving worldwide – and I wonder whether UK planning laws are flexible enough to allow it to occur naturally in the UK – its driven by the need to create sustainable urban living - we are seeing a convergence of architecture and plants – and I have already stumbled into a few planning problems whilst trying to install a green wall product (Woolly Pockets – a vertical planter that is attached to walls).
So if I am having this problem with these fairly harmless planters (that look fantastic) what other products that have the potential to update our urban spaces are hindered as well- what is happening with solar panels, water butts etc.
Are planning laws partly responsible for the demise of contemporary responses to domestic garden design? Thinking Gardens I reakon this topic is important to your discussion. People need to experiment, and people need to see those experiments to develop ideas. How can this be done when streetscapes that respond to a different social condition have to be kept intact?
I started reading ThinkinGardens the other day. ThinkinGardens is a website that is all about trying to get gardening to ‘grow up’ and be taken seriously by the ‘Arts’. Garden reviews apparently suffer from sickly comments from the RHS et al and not enough intellectual debate from the Arts community. Some members of the garden design world feel under recognised. Its manifesto also states that
The ThinkinGardens group is exploring a new way of thinking about, and discussing, gardens. This manifesto sets out the agenda for change, and asks the reader to contribute to this debate.
OK great I will. And in true bloggin style I felt the need to share my opinion every now and then. I have grown so use to this being an acceptable form of commentary I felt the lack of a comment box was like a major barrier to contributing to the debate.
What I had to write a letter to make a comment? Shall I title the page Sir? It seemed a very old fashioned way to discuss ideas. Is this really a new way of discussing gardens? May be the quick bloggin response is not appropriate for their proposed task.
I appreciate the need for considered articles. But given the pace of ideas hurtling through cyber space these days I fear these guys are missing a huge opportunity by not allowing some of this debate to be in current time.
I am sure the discussion would be much livelier if some on-line conversation was allowed. What about Google Wave?
Anyway my letter has been submitted (via email) so lets see what happens.
I just wanted to pay homage to the designers of the magnetic wall planter – Metallicus. Sorry for the incorrect credit on previous post. Here it is again.
Metallicus create a variety of metal garden accessories, many bespoke. The planters above are attached to the metal wall via magnets. Its a very nifty idea whereby the magnetic planters can be moved around to create a variety of patterns. Plants and their containers are placed into the red cubes. The cubes act as a water catcher and are yet another variation on the green wall concept.
Following on from discussion b/w the ediblegardener in the comment section below
Here is a cheaper and more make shift way of creating the above with an Ikea magnetic notice board and its little black boxes. Of course the Ikea version could never carry the weight of a mature plant (and its soil) however may be an idea for cut flowers? Also the Ikea board is not designed for outside use. Really there are major design issues with the Ikea solution.
If I was about to build a garden I would be investigating installing a magnetic wall outside to hold Metallicus’ planters. Also it becomes another interesting playspace for children – down low the letters of the alphabet and for me above (hang tools etc). Metallicus have also designed cushions with magnetics for outdoor furniture – i really like the idea of using magnets outside. It opens up many possibilities.
Australians Many Victorians in Australia love a good mulch. Mulch in all its various guises are essential in harsh climates. Mulch can not be viewed as mere garden accessories to be added at a later date. Water is so scarce that any successful planting bed without mulch is almost socially unacceptable. Water evaporation is just too high without some type of soil cover. No mulch and healthy lush green plants equals a Wally Water Abuser. That is totally unacceptable.
When I started working in the UK I could not believe that large public landscape projects (budgets in excess of £500,000) did not have to specify mulch. No budget was allowed either. Mulch can eat up budgets and so its not something that you can just slip into a design at the very last moment. It needs to be incorporated into the concept plan otherwise there will be no hero landscape moments. A client is not going to be very happy if informed that the 50 metre long sculptural seating arrangement is being removed because we now need mulch.
To me exposed earth looks naked. A part from its ability to save water mulch also acts as a weed suppressant and provides uniformity to the ground plane. Plus it reduces maintenance and can add nutrients to the soil as it breaks down.
Despite the colder climate surely UK gardens and larger public landscapes would benefit from mulch? I would be interested to hear your opinions.
Mulch comes in various forms including straw mulch, bark chips and cocoa shell mulch (which makes the garden smell like coconut for its first 2 weeks after laying).
When selecting mulch there is a need to investigate the impacts of your proposed mulch material after it breaks down. Some mulches release certain chemicals into the soil or alter the soil’s PH. This natural composting process may adversely affect particular plant species. For example you would never use a eucalyptus mulch (known as ‘eucy mulch’ in Australia) on a garden bed of vegetables. It is not my intent to provide exhaustive information on this topic but rather to highlight that it pays to do a little research.
Mulch can be worked into a landscape or smaller garden design to create a design feature. In fact mulch can be the major design feature. Fern Alder a UK landscape designer uses recycled glass in many of her projects including this project, Le Jardin pour la Paix in France. Here it is used as a major design feature. Photo by Fern Alder.
Granitic sand is another type of mulch as illustrated below. This mulch can also be used as a surface for pedestrians. It is therefore a very handy material if you do not want your planting beds to look separated from pedestrian areas. Plants appear to float. While done to death in Melbourne, Australia I still love a good strappy Lomandra longifolia appearing out of a granitic path.
Translucent concrete is a relatively new product (launch 2006) that offers plenty of scope for creating garden art in the contemporary garden. Kerry Jackson, a landscape designer who operates in Devon and Cornwall area of the UK, has been experimenting with the product. With his background in sculpture he see plenty of design potential for this material ‘As more and more people in Devon and Cornwall see the potential of translucent concrete within the garden and home, translucent concrete will become more and more visible’.
Translucent concrete allows light to be transmitted via optical fibres mixed into a fine concrete mix. The inventor of this technology is Hungarian architect Aron Losonczi who has recently released prefabricated blocks of the material capable of bearing loads. The technology allows light to be transmitted through walls – it appears to defy logic but it really does work.
Here is a little except from Losonczi’s website
Thousands of optical glass fibres form a matrix and run parallel to each other between the two main surfaces of each block. The proportion of the fibres is very small (4%) compared to the total volume of the blocks. Moreover, these fibres mingle in the concrete because of their insignificant size, and they become a structural component as a kind of modest aggregate. Therefore, the surface of the blocks remains homogeneous concrete. In theory, a wall structure built from light-transmitting concrete can be several meters thick, because the fibres work without almost any loss in light up until 20 meters. Load-bearing structures can be also built of these blocks, since glass fibres do not have a negative effect on the well-known high compressive strength value of concrete. The blocks can be produced in various sizes and with embedded heat-isolation.
Concrete is evolving. It is a beautiful material when used well. Its overuse and poor finishings have given it a bad name. As with all aspects of design the success of a great idea is reliant on excellent workmanship. Working with concrete is like making a cake, but harder. The ingredients need to be right and they need to be added at the right time. Plus the weather needs to behave – no raining. Oh and all that needs to coincide with the programming of building works. Get yourself a good concreter.
