Garden Scents, Cents & Sensibilities, Beyond Visual Appeal

Much of what I admire in garden design, I learned to love from the time I was just a caterpillar. I learned that the garden looked and smelled good. We delighted in found objects and shared the bounty. I learned to tread lightly as an intruder, in a place where bees and snakes belonged as much as butterflies and ladybugs. Still, there was an ease about the garden. Additions contributed to that ease, or out they went, like a weed. Expectations raised, I felt prepared for contemporary gardening where planning produced a multi-sensory, beautiful, fragrant, vigorous and adaptable, ornamental and edible garden. Every gardener moves the practice, and we now apply interior design principles to complete the garden from ground up, with art, rooms and rugs. Gardening fulfilled makes scents, cents & sensibilities.



Scents
My garden wishes are filled with memories of my Grandma's nose buried in the center of childish fistful of violets, their scent forever associated with her soft, sun warmed arms. Do I remember her garden? To this day, I can still close my eyes and see the secret location of Grandma's bluebells. My love of fragrance in the garden comes with a love of native plants, the plants of my childhood memories. Later I learned that native plants are almost always more fragrant than their hybridized counterparts.


I admire Piet Oudolf, the Dutch Master of Gardens, who, consistent with my childhood foundations, creates visually stunning gardens, planted in naturalized drifts, with graphic patterns of color and texture for all seasons. Unlike the majority of designers, Piet pays close attention to scent, drawing in pollinators and giving visitors the deeply intimate human experience of being wrapped in sweet perfume. Since we aren't likely to have Piet walk by and volunteer to paint our gardens with fragrant plants, we'll have to make "scents" of the garden on our own.


Cents
Our practices in the garden make or take "cents". Lawns are expensive for what little pleasure they provide & frankly, I’m limited in the amount of work I can do, so low maintenance gardening is my goal, like most. No garden is no maintenance, but lawn requires more than weekly care with fertilizer and pesticides, spread in regular intervals, all in an attempt to make the wrong plant happy in the right place. To reduce the impact and cost of chemical support, my beds have been eating the lawn for years now, with only a 10’ x 16’ amebic shape remaining.


Making “cents” in the presence of long term drought conditions, requires a low water, environmentally sustainable garden. Native plants, with deep root systems, bread from genetic evolution concurrent with climate change, are hardier in good years and lean. Piet Oudolf relies on plants that thrive in stark or low nutrient conditions and packs them tightly to discourage weeds,  increasing survivability, reducing chemical controls and water usage, saving money, making "cents".  


Climate may be beyond our direct control, but there are a number of factors immediately within our wheelhouse - best practices for properly planting the right plant in the right place, watering infrequently and deeply, mulching to retain moisture, sanitation of grounds and tools, reduced use of chemicals, pruning, knocking down invasives, and dividing as needed to multiply and invigorate plants. 


Sensibilities
Sensibilities come from closely held values and personal preferences, family experiences, a lifetime of forging personal style, special places, environment factors and a thousand other influences that make one like or dislike someone or something.


On my father's side I had my Grandma's warm arms and bright bluebells, and on the other side I had my Aunt, the original upcycler. She was an artist with a fantastical garden. Her garden was her masterpiece, an Impressionist's dream, with wide swaths of contrasting colors and textures. Dotted with art and hidden rooms, she was a leader before there were pins on Pinterest to show us the way. Paradise even had a snake. As little girls, my cousin (her tow headed daughter) and I (my hair almost black in contrast), in harmonic, high pitched squeals of terror, begged her to slaughter a terrifying snake. Sssssaid snake carelessly flicked its forked tongue our way. We showed her where it went and she taught us that we were the pests in her garden, and the garter snake the one who belonged.


Sensibilities are visual and tactile. They come from admired artists, stylists and interior designers. Mix or match color (contrast or ombre), scale (small, medium or large), texture (soft, fine, glossy, coarse, matte) style (traditional, transitional, eclectic, contemporary, modern) and purpose (active youth, dog friendly, entertaining, respite, hospice or retreat). If you think about it, the land is your canvas, the plants are your separates, the sections are your rooms and the garden is your stay-cation. 


It is in our best interest to value the residents of the garden, from bees and other pollinators for fruiting to snakes that control rodents. When action follow values, a garden is made more vital. Show concern for fragile migrants. Monarch butterflies are under particular stress from reduced habitat (development, herbicides and rights-of-way mowing of their only "whole life cycle" host plant, milkweed) and disease. Garden for Monarchs, so carelessly perched on the brink of extinction that our grandchildren, or our children's' grandchildren may only see them in museums or images. Please find a place for milkweed (a misnomer that hardly does justice to a beautiful plant). Find regionally native milkweed; plant it in a corner of your garden; plant it and they will come!


Perhaps the most sensible reason to garden of all, there are the health and well being factors to consider. Studies now show that gardeners experience emotional and physiological benefits from gardening - "Immunity, blood pressure and peace, Oh My!" ...


Are we still having fun? Not surprisingly, I am. My garden is a reflection of my scents, cents and sensibilities, my recipe: a dash of Grandma, a pinch of Italy and pound of Aunt Gean, mixed with resilience, availability and vigor, beautiful and strong. If you design a garden around your sensibilities, you'll have a place worth loving. Apply what you know about design and you're sure to create a garden worth visiting.


In Practice
I highly recommend Pinterest as a starting place for your garden plan - there you may find a style you love. Keep a visual firmly in mind as you add and subtract your way through your space. I began by looking at landscapes planned by Piet Oudolf - I found his naturalized, low water, deeply rooted, tightly packed, odoriferous gardens to be worth emulating on a smaller scale.


I also had a collection of pottery fish on stakes to incorporate. With the images of Lurie Garden in mind and fish in hand, I turned to a few favorite online resources with the goal of selecting 2-3 plants to populate each of several garden layers. I wanted a broad carpet of ground covering or low growing grass to simulate waves of water (for the fish), low-mid perennials, mid-high shrubs and sky high trees. Sometimes, we, I, as an unapologetic plant collector, tend to add hundreds of plants, no two alike. Sadly, I have learned that undisciplined plant collecting leads to chaos and not to an aesthetic result. (I’m trying to curb my plant addiction in my bed additions, but it’s so very difficult).







To help me curb my plant addiction, I learned how to approximate a landscape plan, a horizontal map of plant symbols drawn to scale. A landscape plan keeps you focused on your goals, like shopping with a list and not when you're hungry keeps you on task and on budget. I use photo manipulation apps (Photoshop) to visualize the vertical appearance of plants at maturity. I make simple mash ups, scaling plants using an object of known height, like an existing shrub or my fish in the picture for scale. Remember that it is nearly impossible to illustrate the way the garden will look seasonally, because everyone photographs plants when they’re in bloom, making it very difficult to visualize seasonal changes. Think of seed heads and plan for seasonal interest.

Planning seems to have worked well. On our last expansion into the lawn, our bed went from denuded to lush in the first season. However, the majority of what we planted was seed grown, regionally native stock. Given challenging site conditions, a cool & wet spring, followed by a hot and dry summer, I think that careful planning and proper planting of quality native plants produced excellent results, and not by coincidence.
 

Repeatable
For there to be method in my madness, the results need to be repeatable. I believe they are, given other examples I have found in research and locally in friends' gardens. A wealth of online resources and wonderful books are filled with fabulous detail on native plants (wildflowers and more). A good place to begin your research is at the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center (www.wildflower.org). The Wildflower Center has a data base of wildflowers, and boxes you can select to filter the search set for a variety of characteristic.

For example, a search for the area of Folsom, California produced more than 2,500 results (individual native plants). By height range, plant type  (shrub, tree, herb, etc.) and condition (sun, shade, wet, dry, sand, clay, and etc.) you may "drill" down, truncating the list to those native plants most likely to survive the site conditions. The Wildflower Center allows for refinement by many other botanical characteristics.

The California site requires special consideration for the prolonged western drought. The subset of dry soils narrows the list to 474 plants. A comparison of plants in four garden layers, can be cross checked for local availability. From there, it's a matter of a personal preference, keeping in mind scents, cents and sensibilities.

A sample selection is shown below:















• Carpet Layer: Sand Verbena  & Angel Trumpets purple & white.


Notes:










• Mid Layer: Angelica , Wooly Pod Milkweed  & Showy Milkweed  

Notes:












• Eye High Layer: Serviceberry,  Bush Anemone , Western Spicebush, Buttonbush  & Red Currant.












Notes:









• Sky Layer: Acacia Tree, Honey Locust - Sunburst thornless Gleditsia triacanthos var. inermis variety  & Douglas Fir.  (May have existing Douglas Fir, iffy, but Cali has lost so many, you may want to try for the sake of preservation.)

Notes:

















Additional Regional Resources
Best booklet: A California-Friendly Guide to Native and Drought Tolerant Gardens (http://lvmwd.com/home/showdocument?id=711)


Santa Monica Parks Design - incorporates the styling of my all time favorite designer, Piet Oudolf. You may find and apply elements in this plan in your garden, wherever it is, using his well laid out examples and regionally native plants. The documents include the following particularly helpful design elements:


1. - Slope Planting Detail
2. - Park Project Plan
3. - Garden Walk Plan in Action


(http://www.santamonicaparks.org/design-1; http://www.smciviccenterparks.com/design/)


Learn where to purchase plants. No matter where you are, there are resources to help you find plants that are native to your region. Seed collecting and wild harvesting is considered to be poaching - often illegal, so make sure what you are buying is locally produced from seed (preferred) or by cloning (from cuttings or tissue cultures. Cloning produce identical copies - good, but more susceptible to problems, if a pest or disease attacks one - it attacks them all). Connect with your local chapter of Wild Ones Natural Landscapers, Inc., Native Plant Society, Environmental Protection, Fish & Game, USDA Government Plant Files, local parks, public works & planning offices and many more data sources for information you can use in your garden. Be prepared, creative, personal and amazed at what you can accomplish in your garden.