Mike Crawshaw’s blog

This garden on Williamson Ave in Grey Lynn, Auckland, features a reasonably dense mix of flaxes, astelias and carex. Cordylines, akaake and a pittosporum have been used as accents and, in the case of the akeake, to create a living screen. The plantout is interspersed with volcanic rocks.  

The colour combination is of clusters of green (Carex commons 'Frosted Curls', Cordyline 'Kaspar', and a flax, Phormium 'Green Dwarf' and Akeake (Dodonea viscosa) against black (Phormium 'Black Rage') and silver (Astelia 'Silver Spear').  As accents the red-bronze of Astelia 'Westlands' is planted amidst A. 'Silver spear' and P. 'Green Dwarf' while clusters of Carex 'Commons' merge with the flaxes and eventually relent to orange Carex testacea.   Additional accent, Carex buchananii, a light-umber, provides support, in a loose line, for a row of Dodonea viscosa planted immediately in front of the deck and to the left of Pittosporum cornifolium.

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Some thoughts on running a landscape design/install/maintain business:

Harsh Truth # 1: There is probably insufficient demand to justify many competing sole "design" practices in Auckland.  If you're considering this as a career option you might have to think about doing something more to make ends meet.

Harsh Truth # 2:  Few people have any idea how labour intensive design work can be, and few in the middle-income bracket are prepared to pay for it. Conversely, in my experience, some of these people are happy to pay a reasonable dollar to have their properties maintained - or to have a design installed.   I have been discounting design work just in order to win this other work.
 
Harsh Truth # 3: Not every job requires that you follow a standard design process.  It's hard to have this ingrained training beaten out of you.  I know that there are landscapers/garden installers out there (I'm not really referring those who have passed through a technical training institute) who have never drawn up a planting plan, and who probably wouldn't even know what one looked like.  Sobering thought.

Harsh truth # 4:   It is impossible to make any serious money in this industry working by yourself. 

Phil Smith from O2 Landscapes has said it before, so I'm not saying anything new. These plants are both deserving of more recognition and use in landscaping.  It's a strange thing that they haven't found their way into every back yard by now.  Beautiful leaf clusters springing from every node - shrubby and fine of leaf - not sprase at the base like karo (P. crassifolium).  Bright emerald shoots darkening with age.

Thanks Lindsay from Joy Plants for showing me his amazing plants. Lindsay's another under-utalised landscaping resource.

Here's a systematic approach that may work for some designers when deciding on plants and other structures.   It's sort of borrowed from the Japanese:  

Japanese designers have traditionally made selections of suitable plants by shape using a framework of bamboo poles in order to impose their designs upon an empty field of space.  I understand that these techniques were developed in a period well before the advent of the camera.  In truth our contemporary Western design approach is still locked into a design method that predates photography - that of using the plan view to design or describe gardens.   The Japanese method is better.  It provides a clear modelling of the introduction of new shapes. Conversely, plan and elevation method allow understanding only on a single dimensional plane.  CAD modelling allows us to recreate the space artificially, but is (a) a slow and thereby an expensive means of modelling organic and structural choices and (b) pretty darn wooden.  What can be useful is to regenerate the basic structure using a computer and allow the framework to be used for the free-handing. This is useful because we can generate views of a proposed structure and illustrate the detail with some humanity.  Starting with fluid dimensional lines we can also use our pencil to describe loose zones in harmony with the underlying structure (and with an eye to its utility).            

The Kindly Ones

Jonathan Littell

I've been reading Jonathan Littell's The Kindly Ones.   Bloody good book.  And what daring - to choose as your protagonist a incestous, gay, matricidal, National Socialist serial-killer.  The whole thing is a nightmare painted by Bosch.  A brilliant and terrifying report from Hell from one of it's free-roaming demons.

Groans on like a slow old machine then opens the door on a lounge of Velvet Cushions. Alien girls, suction cup breasts, serve drinks.  The lizard man at the bar slithers closer and its over before it begins. Next Act: an endless parade of spiral palaces, boulders, and blue alarms changing tunes.   

I believe something has to be said for the idea that deadness lies in the existence of objects within a strictly symmetrical or linear order.    It is as if the designer inhabits an uni-dimensional universe and seeks to impose this order upon a multi-dimensional reality; and this imposition limits our understanding of the wider field - as dead arrangements are clearly closed systems. They are a mute testament to the spirit of our culture. They refer only to themselves and the transitionary architectural forms they accompany.  True multi-dimensional forms are both open and closed - they can be described as sets in themselves, but they are also sets composed of subsets, sets as members of greater subsets - and on and on.  

 The apparent abstractions of muti-dimensional arrangements present their order only in our motion. 

The archetypal expression of the uni-dimensional style is the arrangement of objects in a pattern of rank and file.  We might reasonably attribute its popularity to the militarism of the first half of the twentieth century, though its antecedents are clearly ancient.  It’s premise is reassurance – the ordering of a pocket of space – the taming of chaos.  But the corollary to this reassurance is that nothing in the system is to be unknown, and that the unknowable is outside and Verboten.  The counterposition is a design ethos that seeks distortion of order - hyper-referencing of the external - harmony in organic arrangements, and playful use of scale.