Living room Garden

My friend Virginia sent me photos the other day of a planting we did two years ago at the Ohio State Learning Gardens. When we were both students, we worked in the gardens together, and started a tradition of whimsical, furniture-based plantings.

This is what we did for 2008:

Coleus on the couch watching TV next to the Canna Grandfather clock

Begonia end table and more of the couch

Virginia herself, relaxing on the sedum-ajuga rug next to the thyme chair.

Last year we were both too busy to do a planting, but we're getting ready to do one for this year come May!

Photos of ideas

A lot of the pictures I take are of ideas: Bits of design, combinations of plants -- cool stuff I want to remember to play with in my own garden. And half the time I never go back to those pictures and actually DO anything with them. Blogging projects are always a good way to make me actually do something I've long been thinking about, so I'm going to do a series of posts with photos that represent some cool gardening idea to me.

 To start off: This image I took in the summer of 2005 when I was working as an intern at a nursery in Saitama, Japan.

 (Do click on the image to view it full size -- it is better that way)
This garden is in front of a small, neighborhood shrine, and perfectly creates the quiet, restful, sacred atmosphere appropriate for this space. If I was gardening this space, I think I would be tempted to throw in variegated foliage, or a few slashes or flowers -- but the restrained colors really work, and play up the gorgeous contrasts in texture. And the stone trough it just about perfect -- again, simple, but not boring. Just enough decoration, the color nicely matching the stones set around it. As you can only sort of see in this picture, it is filled with still water, which I love. No trickling waterfall or fountain -- just placid water.

Best of all, like so many Japanese gardens, this one is tiny, and so could easily translate to the smallest yard. I want to create a small, peaceful, sacred nook like this in my garden. I just need to figure out where.

Resolutions for the garden

For my 2010 garden, I have a few resolutions:

1. Experiment with scent in the garden. A resolution inspired by Louise Beebe Wilder's The Fragrant Path (my review). I'm used to thinking about designing my garden in terms of color, form, texture, etc, but designing for fragrance is new for me. So I'm going to do some exploring this year -- grow more fragrant plants, sniff about, and think about how they might go together to add another layer to my garden. Should be a fun project. It will also be fun trying to describe scents in a blog...

2. Plan for winter color. I talked about this one recently so I won't belabor the point, but it is now an official goal: next winter is going to be a lot livelier 'round these parts.

3. Add non-plant items to my garden. Currently, my garden is all plant, all the time, but this year, I want to add sculpture and such. I'm going to try making hypertufa balls following the instructions from Faire Garden, and maybe play with other home-made sculpture. And candles... I want candles in my garden. Since seeing Avatar, my mind is full of ideas on how to play with light in the garden at night, and the natural, flickering light of candles seems perfect.

4. Plant a HUGE cutting garden. I'm nuts about cut flowers, and have always had a cutting garden, but last year amid the chaos of moving to a new house I didn't get enough ground prepped to have room for both vegetables and cut flowers -- and I sided with vegetables. This year will be different: I'm doubling the size of my vegetable garden area, and devoting half of it to cut flowers.

What are your resolutions for Garden 2010?