Pleasing Plantings - One Leaf at A Time.
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- Arnvid
- Carol Wallace
- Carol Wallace
- Kirk_Johnson
- Kirk_Johnson
- Carol Wallace
- JaneHollis
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» Arnvid - One Leaf at A Time
“One Leaf at A Time”Carol you reminded me of a old friend - one of the most prominent artists in Scandinavia during the last 30 / 35 years...
He once got his work - a "Vietnam picture" exhibited outside the Government building in Oslo - smashed to pieces by a “axe man” (well he got some front page head lines on that one) - another time he settled down in the Modern Museum in Stockholm for a week, with cooking equipment and more in the main exhibition hall - as the director of the museum was so *stupid* to say that everyone should feel the museum as “a home”... Well Kjartan only listened to the director.
When he came back to Norway with a huge exhibition only made up of rubbish and waste, then he got grand reviews all over - suddenly he was “house-warm” in Norway. So with his next exhibition - which I arranged for him, he wanted to say “thank you to the Norwegian people” as he expressed it. The whole exhibition was made out of leaves (stolen from the botanical garden in Stockholm, mind you). Result the most unbelievable collages / montages made “One Leaf at A Time”.
When we put up the exhibition, Kjartan told me following short story ((-;
“First I started very enthusiastic, but I soon found that by changing just one leaf - the whole picture changed, and with all leaves - how could I cover all options?
Then I was thinking - God is clever, he just drop them down from the trees...
Then it came to me; - but Kjartan are not so stupid either!!!
So I put different sheets on the floor, went up on a high chair - and started dropping - One Leaf at A Time.”
Let me add that the exhibition was a grand success ((-:
So thanks Carol for making me remember a nice story - not exactly “garden” - but maybe some garden designers can get a idea (he, he...)
He said....
-- posted by Arnvid
» Carol Wallace - Sigh
If only it were so easy! (Great story!) Your artist friend's theory has great merit - if you imitate nature and try to think like nature might think, you very often come up wih something incredibly pleasing. (I wish you had a picture of "One Leaf at a Time.")I look at the way Nature plants in my wooded area, now that I have cleared out a lot of the scrub trees and allowed some sunlight in so things can grow. And the design flows together beautifully with no help from me. (Well, other than a bushel of daffodils and a bunch of blue grape hyacinths. . . but they will be gone all too soon.) We could all take lessons from it.
-- posted by Carol Wallace
» Carol Wallace - But for those of us who have other ideas
Does anyone have any especially favorite foliage combinations? Another one I didn't mention in the article that I love is Hosta Kabitan with Hakonochloa macra 'Albo-aurea' - the gold in the hosta exactly matches the edge of the grass. Bowles golden sedge also works well with it.-- posted by Carol Wallace
» Kirk_Johnson - Combinations
I envy people who garden like jewelers, composing intricate compositions. I tend to mass plants with similar leaves. I am not very subtle.-- posted by Kirk_Johnson
» Kirk_Johnson - Combinations
I envy people who garden like jewelers, composing intricate compositions. I tend to mass plants with similar leaves. I am not very subtle, but then, I don't really want to be subtle. The style of my garden is rustic formal. I don't want my plantings to be too sophisticated, it would spoil the mood.-- posted by Kirk_Johnson
» Carol Wallace - It depends on where you are gardening
I have some areas where I plant for broad effect. But my secret garden, which is always seen from close up, in an enclosed space, needs more of a fine tuned approach. And I enjoy doing both.-- posted by Carol Wallace
» JaneHollis - Small spaces
Carol,That's what I was about to say! With a small garden like my own, there is more opportunity to tinker with the combination of individual plants. I have listed some of my favorites in
Perfect Plant Partnerships, but some others include:
The feathery foliage of Californian poppies around the base of a spiky purple leaved Phormium tenax (even better when the orange blooms appear).
Neat domes of silvery Santolina with the upright habit and blue-grey foliage of Rosemary 'Miss Jessop's Upright'.
Golden foliage of Lamium maculatum 'Golden Nuggets' with dark and crinkly Polystichum tsussimense and the fresh green of the grass Melica nutans. Great in a shady spot.
Some plants just seem to have the kind of foliage that go well with most other plants - Stachys byzantina (which you mention) and Pulmonaria, for example.
-- posted by JaneHollis
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