PLANTWISE

Oh Terrariums, How I Love You!

fantastical terrarium creations at the Vallarta Botanical Gardens

Posted by: Kate Bryant on Jan 14, 2011 at 06:00AM 3 Comments

One of Robert’s counter displays: this one includes a moist terrarium (far right) with humidity-loving plants; a still-life shell and stone terrarium (center) and a terrarium habitat with a live, active tarantula creeping about in it (far left).

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One of Robert’s counter displays: this one includes a moist terrarium (far right) with humidity-loving plants; a still-life shell and stone terrarium (center) and a terrarium habitat with a live, active tarantula creeping about in it (far left).

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Only a thin layer of glass between this tarantula and visitors!

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One of many handsome display tables in the open-air main building

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Close-up view of venus fly trap plants in a tall, closed, cake-stand terrarium. Venus fly traps require bright light to thrive, although a closed glass terrarium + direct sunlight can = overheating. Perhaps Robert lifts the tops off the terrariums from time to time, allowing jungle breezes to refresh the air.

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Another glass cake stand terrarium

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A better view inside, with the top lifted off

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Robert Price, founder and curator of the Puerto Vallarta Botanical Gardens – also natural history and plant buff and terrarium maker

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The “natural history museum” wall and case outside the restrooms at the PV Botanical Garden – a great way to keep the gents occupied while the ladies avail themselves of the facilities!

Another happy discovery I made at the Puerto Vallarta Botanical Gardens – fun terrariums made by the garden’s founder and curator, Robert Price. My photographs do not do them justice! Hopefully you can see beyond the abysmal light and reflective glass to gain a glimpse into the interior of these magical creations populated not only by Vallarta area plants, stone, and shells but also giant, colorful living beetles and spiders. One terrarium contained an enormous, hairy, and beautiful creeping tarantula. Like Mexico’s sometimes rickety city buses and 8-foot high sidewalks without handrails, terrariums containing tarantulas are certainly not something you are likely to find in an American shop!

There are so many kinds of terrariums out there – a rudimentary on-line search will bring up an astonishing array of styles and components, including kitchy figurines and toys, miniature beer cans, plastic plants and garishly colored sands and rocks. But for me, the loveliest terrariums somehow manage to distill nature, allowing people an opportunity to see and relate to the natural world in an intimate way. Thanks to months of close work with Amy Bryant-Aiello for our upcoming book Terrarium Craft, I admit I’ve become a little prejudiced: I’m less fond of fussy, kitschy styles and more partial to earthy, subtly-colored terrariums made from natural – and even local, when possible – materials including plants, mosses, lichens, bark, and insects. Not only are natural terrariums aesthetically delightful and a joy to make; they can also help us all develop a closer relationship to the natural world. And that is a good thing.

Enjoy!

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Tags: Slideshow, Plant People, terrariums,

Garden by Cycle

Posted by: Kate Bryant on Aug 25, 2010 at 04:57PM 4 Comments

Elizabeth’s own beautifully-tended community garden plot (background) is brimming with delicious produce. Zucchini, anyone?

Biking and gardening – they’re a natural together. So says Portlander Elizabeth Bryant, professional gardener and creator of Garden by Cycle, a sustainably-driven garden consulting and maintenance business. “It doesn’t logically make sense to burn fuel to beautify the planet,” she told me the other day when we met for coffee. I had button-holed her to talk business and check out her new cargo bike.

Her one-woman operation, Garden by Cycle was launched in July 2009 after she’d completed her OSU Master Gardener training, her Organic Gardening Certificate Program and, soon after, her Permaculture Design Certification program. Elizabeth’s work includes garden mentoring and education; restoration; planting; and maintenance including weeding, pruning, dead-heading and general plant care – all using organic methods.

When she started her business, she used a regular bike with a trailer to pull her tools and materials. But this spring, her busy schedule began to take its toll, between pedaling with heavy loads up steep hills, finishing up her Permaculture program, and rushing to her daughter’s school for drop-off and pick-up. She wondered whether she could get it all done. Her first thought: “maybe I need to buy a truck.” But half-way through the process of looking into a loan for a truck, she switched gears and decided to look for a fancy, tricked-out bike instead. “I wanted to keep that feeling I had of abundance, not get into the deprivation mode that feeds those kinds of decisions. And I can relax on a bike! Driving creates its own stress and you can be just as psychically exhausted when you arrive in a car as you’d be physically on a bike.”

To get the best of both worlds – the sense of calm that comes from pedaling while simultaneously not wearing herself out before even arriving at a gardening job – she converted to an awesome KONA electric cargo bike with an electric assist motor for steep climbs and heavy loads.

Another view of the bike, all set for work. While admiring her bike on the sidewalk, we chatted with a passer-by, Garth, who described the many options that exist for sharing extra produce with food kitchens for homeless and hungry people in Portland. Stay tuned for more information on that soon.

Apparently, it doesn’t really go faster than a regular bike because it’s “pedal-assist,” not a throttle. So you don’t really feel the power unless you’re turning it on going up a hill. But since Elizabeth often works all day, then rides to her daughter’s school to pick her up before finally heading home, that little extra oomph makes her job much easier – while saving gas, minimizing pollution, keeping her fit and helping her practice her principles.

She bought her lovely Kona Ute with an electric assist motor at Splendid Cycles.

Behind it, she pulls her gardening gear – sturdy but light-weight rakes, shovels, and hand-tools – in a roomy, handsome WIKE Park Pioneer Landscaping Trailer that can carry 150 pounds.

It’s a great combo, especially with the child seat and handlebars for her daughter to grip on to for the commutes to and from school.

“The past year or more has been a learning experience,” she says. “It’s not always easy to do it all by bike. But I’m just amazed with what can be done.” And her business has grown, too: “It started out with friends and neighbors and it’s just grown from there.”

Other links provided by Elizabeth, for those interested in learning more about gardening businesses run on bikes, both locally and internationally:

Portland:

Hand Made Gardens
Bike Portland Article
Sunroot Gardens

Other folks:
Bicycle Gardening
Brighton Cycling Gardener
The Cycling Gardener
Jardiniers a Bicyclette
Graceful Gardens

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Tags: Garden Stuff, Plant People, Good Ideas

Plant Lust

…hopefully consummated, and often!

Posted by: Kate Bryant on Aug 17, 2010 at 10:05AM 0 Comments

I’ve been on the lookout for this rare, shade tolerant evergreen ground cover with gold-tinted leaves and pinkish new growth (among its many assets) since I first laid eyes on it last fall at the wholesale Hawksridge Nursery in Hickory, NC. No such luck – yet. Perhaps some day, Plant Lust will help people find a local source for this plant (Ardisia japonica ‘Houkan’).

It seems there’s always some new website launch in the plant world: one or another new on-line gardening “community” or resource where you can read about plants, comment, add content, review plants or garden products, get free design advice or what-have-you. So far, I’ve been unimpressed. There’s too much crud to slog through before you get to the juicy stuff – too much information that is inappropriate to our local climate or just plain incorrect, ugly formatting, no good searchability, and sometimes irrelevant comments.

Now there’s something brand-new and pretty cool-looking out there. The project is still in its infancy but I for one will be watching it with great interest.

It’s called Plant Lust. Conceived by Portland garden blogger Megan Hansen of Nestmaker, Plant Lust is basically an on-line resource for really interesting plants. It will provide searchable information about the plants, a diversity of photos, and links to the nurseries where they can be found. There are plans down the road to make it more interactive. But what it hopes to do in the near-future is perfectly fabulous as is.

The Plant Lust team – Megan, her savvy mother Tricia Cunningham and avid plant lover/garden blogger Loree Bohl of Danger Garden – has already rounded up one of the Willamette Valley’s best nurseries, Gossler Farms, for the launch. The Gossler Nursery catalog is currently in the Plant Lust system and can be searched using a wide set of criteria including plant names; plant features like peeling bark or fragrance; preferred conditions such as full sun or dry shade; type of plant like vine or ground cover; and even by hardiness zone.

For starters, the goal is to gather the best and most interesting of the Pacific Northwest’s smaller nurseries catalogs into one searchable site. Because sometimes you’re looking for a plant… but you just don’t know what it is yet! Other times, you need to know where to get the plant you’ve been lusting after for years. And sometimes, you just want to get several, authoritative perspectives on the plant. (“Will it even survive here? Well, four of seven highly respected plantspeople say yes so why not?”) Plant Lust could turn out to be an incredibly useful and fun-to-browse resource for those looking to learn about or shop for plants. There are a few glitches that are sure to be worked out but overall, I sure like the looks and function of it.

Poke around a little and let me know what you think. Potentially useful? Thumbs up or down?

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Tags: Plant People, Good Ideas

Design Tips from Dan Hinkley

notes from the 2010 PPA conference in Portland

Posted by: Kate Bryant on Jul 25, 2010 at 04:20AM 1 Comments

Plant explorer, gardener and witty fellow Dan Hinkley giving a talk at Cistus Design Nursery in 2009. I was so rapt listening to him talk the other day at the PPA conference that I forgot to pull out my camera.

I try to avoid joining groups and engaging in activities where I have to wait in lines, sit in chairs for hours at a time and dutifully clap between endless rounds of announcements.

But late last week, I got a call from the plant-savvy Dan Heims, owner of Terra Nova Nursery, breeder and wholesale producer of new perennial plants (especially famous for Heuchera and Echinacea). He was at the Doubletree Hotel at Lloyd Center where the Perennial Plant Association was holding its annual conference. “You need to get down here,” he said. “there are some really cool containers in the lobby that you should see…”

This is not the first time Mr. Heims has egged me into getting my sorry self to attend an official horticulture-related conference – and I must say, I’ve always been glad I went when all was said and done. So I huffed over to the Doubletree Hotel at Lloyd Center lobby on Thursday, only to learn that Dan Hinkley – superstar plant explorer and lecturer – would be speaking that afternoon. I had no option: I joined the PPA and forked over an additional $75 to hear the afternoon’s remaining lectures. All previous plans fell by the wayside.

As well as the containers designed by local nurseries on display in the lobby, there were several other lectures to attend before Dan Hinkley’s time at the lectern: I learned about the best performing garden bamboos from wholesaler Boo-Shoots owner Jackie Heinricher (good resources on that website, especially about good clumping bamboos) and about the complexities of fern nomenclature from the irresistible and outspoken Judith Jones of Fancy Fronds. (She’s the ultimate fern advocate and her website fern descriptions are enough to make even the most mediterranean-oriented gardener fall in love with ferns.) But I’m a sucker for Dan Hinkley’s talks because he always sneaks some crazily beautiful rare plants into his presentations and, well… he’s so funny!

His talk was titled “Plant Marriages: Exceptional Combinations Using Foliage Aspects”.

He opened his talk by asking: How do you place plants to make them sing?

He showed slides from his old garden at Heronswood: the first, what he called “a vomitous combination” of perennials in a border, with no structure or grace. It was, he said, “like a large whale had washed up on shore and rotted”. He showed an image of the same border a year later, when he’d made some improvements. It was okay but, as he pointed out, no great shakes. His third image, taken a few years later, demonstrated what he’d learned in the intervening years: to build balance, height differentials, foliar texture, and repetition (of color or plant form) into his gardens. So how did he do it?

His talk outlined three simple garden design principles he had used to make his borders “sing”:

- Punctuation (a bold-leafed plant)
Sometimes adding just one bold-leafed plant like a cardoon (Cynara sp., Gunnera sp., Darmera peltata, Nicotiana sylvestris, or Fatsia can completely shift the look from drab to dazzling. For his audience, he digitally altered the photo of the garden, adding and subtracting various large-leaved plants to show what a difference its presence made. Wow!

- Exclamation (a “statement” plant)
Whether used as a single statement (look at me!, says a dramatic clump of bright red, 5-foot tall Lobelia tupa) or a sustained conversation used throughout the garden to break up the sky (scattered Green Arrow Chamaecyparis nootkatensis or narrow holly (Ilex crenata‘Sky Pencil’), exclamation plants need breathing room and will lose their punch if crowded. But are brilliant at creating the sense of height and dimension in a space by drawing the eye upward. Again, he popped plants in and out digitally and the difference was extraordinary.

- Accentuation (repetition of particular plants or plant colors or textures)
This is the hardest principle to enact for those of us who are plant collectors. But it’s one of the best – and easiest – ways to tie a garden together by creating a common link and knitting the whole together. I liked his observation that you can actually borrow a color in a neighbor’s yard and build on it in your own yard. He also added that repetition doesn’t have to come from plants but can be created by placing similarly colored pots throughout a garden, hanging buoys or lanterns, stoneware balls, or other objects that are meaningful to you and the site. The digital appearance and disappearance of objects helped illustrate his point.

If you haven’t done it before, remember that the old-fashioned method of simply shifting potted plants in and out of your own garden to see how they look in various spots works perfectly well when designing. It’s nice to give yourself a few days to live with something in a particular spot to see if you like it there. Just remember to water it while you’re deciding!

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Tags: Gardening Events, Garden Design, Plant People