Winter Gardening Tips to Inspire Your Garden Designs; Green Cocktails and Gardens in Movies!

Making a pivot from my last post and its references to ballet and performance art, I thought I’d “pivot” or jeté back to the garden. Puns intended (smile).

Mac Griswold famously said, “Gardening is the slowest of the performing arts.” 

Mother Nature indeed knows how to choreograph a spectacular show: the colors, the texture, the orchestrated tempo of blooming flowers and blossoms, the dance of myriad pollinators ~ all coordinate to create a spectacular, heart-stopping show. And one of the best parts? The show changes every day! There’s no playbill noting intermissions or understudy.  The show must go on… 

Yet, let’s not forget that a garden is a planned space. I always tell my garden clients that every good garden design tells a story… When creating your garden oasis and telling your story, you need to start with a master plan to reimagine (if you’re just starting out) or to enhance your space (if you’ve already got a cultivated garden). What to do at this time of year if your garden views are white with snow or winter fog? 

Here are some tips to get your garden ready for the spring. Plus a list of movies that feature inspiring gardens, and a garden-to-glass cocktail that is sure to stimulate your green garden fantasies… 

Gardentopia: A Garden Design Book Shows How to Create an Outdoor Space Brimming with Joy & Serenity

  

For those who’ve been following me, you’ve “heard” me say often that “good garden design tells a story.” The book, Gardentopia, tells many a good garden story. The garden design guide is brimming with successful designs. Perhaps more poignantly, or perhaps more to the point, is that today, more than ever, we have come to recognize the importance of being in nature, nesting at home in our gardens…

If there is any silver lining to this coronavirus for those lucky and blessed enough to have a yard and property to shelter-in-place at, is that most everyone wants to create a garden retreat; to create their own arcadian hideaway.

But how to go about it is the speed bump.

Jan Johnsen’s book, Gardentopia was released last year and I think it is even more salient now. And I’m not just saying that to assuage my guilt about not writing the book review until now. It’s true I was sent a review copy of the book when it was first published and for no good reason (or for many working reasons!) I am just now sharing the good garden design news found in Gardentopia…

Seriously, the hard cover, large-format book is a tome (283 pages) chock-a-block with colorful photos - some with thumbnail captions that describe the story or detail about the image (not just the usual lusty garden display) - that showcase the plants -- there’s an entire chapter; more than 40 pages devoted to the “Plants and Planting” that Jan characterizes as “everyone’s favorite part of the garden. There are four other chapters showcasing the elements of Jan’s good garden design:

• Garden Design and Artful Accents ~ this is the garden’s framework, according to Jan

• Walls, Patios, Walks, and Steps ~ these are the bones of the outdoor space

• Theme Gardens ~ here’s where creativity and whimsy make a garden special
• Color in the Garden ~ Jan cites the impact of color and celebrates its potency and how to use it

Be assured that the sheer breadth of Gardentopia’s contents is well, breath-taking. If you never purchased another garden design book, you’d be just fine. This book is that comprehensive.

While It’s often said the devil's in the details; the original phrase was "God is in the details,” meaning that you needed to ensure that everything you did was done truthfully. Here, Jan’s masterful garden stories are abundant in their authenticity because they are based on her true to life experience and client examples and deliver on the finer elements without getting ahem, “into the weeds” or losing focus. Like her garden design guidelines or principles she advocates, it’s all about the balance...

As you know, I too, am a professional garden designer as well as a writer and author. I review many garden and plant-related books and in the days BC (before corona), I attended a plethora of garden design and horticulture lectures in New York City: most of them produced by the New York Botanical Garden and Metrohort. This is my wheelhouse to say the least. So trust me when I say what sets Jan’s book apart especially, is the way she talks to us in the book. This is no crunchy, esoteric guide for the garden elite. Although they too will delight in the sage advice found on every page of Gardentopia. While Jan quotes the venerable landscape designers including Isamu Noguchi, Frederick Law Olmstead, Geoffrey Jellico, among others, she leaves no doubt she is talking to us - the garden and flower lover. The homeowner. The novitiate.

Reading the book feels like you’re sharing a cup of tea or a glass of wine with Jan, while talking about your garden dreams and goals and she is gently, expertly, guiding you.

Jan surely knows her way around gardens and writing. If you are not familiar already with her and her garden design pedigree, she is “one of the most popular writers on GardenDesign.com” according to its publisher, Jim Peterson. Jan has successfully managed her own Westchester, New York based firm, Johnsen Landscape & Pool for nearly 35 years. Her work has been featured in numerous publications including This Old House and Horticulture Magazine. She was awarded the 2019 Award of Distinction by the Association of Professional Landscape Designers (APLD).

Gardentopia is published by Countryman Press and joins her other books, Heaven is a Garden (St Lynn's Press, 2014) and The Spirit of Stone (St Lynn's Press, 2017).

I know Jan from my days working at NYBG as well as the rather intimate clan of garden and horticulture enthusiasts based in Gotham. Jan is kind. She is generous. And those traits, along with her esteemed talent, makes this the perfect book to guide you garden designs. Even if your garden is more aspirational you will nonetheless enjoy curling up with Gardentopia

Along with all the tips - and there are nearly 140 of them - Jan’s Gardentopia, she reveals what the garden “power spot” is; the principle of the three depths; the utilization of the ancient Japanese design technique of miegakure or “hide and seek” which embraces the design of “partially screening a view or section of a garden to create the illusion of distance,” and why that’s important to good garden design - (in contrast to a rather banal exterior looks borrowed from interior design - that of the open space where all is revealed or seen in one expansive view. In good garden design, we much prefer the mystery and romance of leading you through the garden that enhances the connection to nature and it’s mysteries.

Moreover, Gardentopia provides practical, hands-on, experienced advice on how to achieve effects and results.

Honestly, this is a book to be experienced. It somewhat challenges a neat review. You, like me, will, return to it again and again. For inspiration. For instruction and guidance. For dreaming…

Thank you, Jan.

(All photos courtesy of Gardentopia/The Countryman Press)

BloemBox Premieres Hort Fashion Spring Line: Fresh, Flirty Poppies Gift Collection

Readers and fans of Garden Glamour know I adore BloemBox and its artful creations.

The romance and whimsy of horticulture couldn’t be more squeal inducing than in this line of gift-boxed seeds or bulbs that shape-shift as fashion.

In fact, there should be a Botanical Green Carpet! 

Every year brings a newly-designed BloemBox (Dutch for “flower”) collection: from Specialty Wildflower Gardens to Habitat Gardens with bumble bees or butterfly to Mini Hangings to Veggie & Herb Gardens. 

The original creations are confections to give or collect.

Or use as the perfect Spring Holiday tablescape fantasy and gift swag.  

Your dining table will transform to a shimmering garden with eye-popping color – think Pink, Blue, Yellow, Tangerine, and Green: The Color of the Year, don’t forget. 

All BloemBox designs are adorned or accessorized with floral and vegetable garnish or sweet-as-Disney pollinators including hummingbirds, bumble bees, and birds.

An instant conversation starter is to name all the flowers. 

You decide whether to require the flower’s common name or the botanical nomenclature. Ha. 

Choose from this season’s Poppies, or Dogtooth Daisy, Delphinium, French Marigold Cornflower, Maltese Cross, Zinnia’s, Wildflowers, scarlet sage, lemon mint, and edibles such as red and green French lettuce, royal purple Italian Heirloom eggplant or Nantes carrot and herb creations to create a dazzling, irresistible bouquet.

Leave it to a woman to Lean In in just the right – make that, green- way. 

Take that, Facebook COO, Sheryl Sandberg. 

Wrapped around the BloemBox collections is a woman’s entrepreneurial success story.

In the happy world of BloemBox - founder, product designer and botanist (love that!) Laura Quatrochi, is a visionary and hard working plant lover who cultivated her horticulture roots as a scientist and her creative charm, to produce a collection of glamorous, too-cute seeds or bulbs, discretely sheathed in the chic tissue paper slip, er, biodegradable ribbon sleeve, tucked inside the BloemBox signature lime-green, petite, glossy, hatbox that looks for all the world like it is channeling Lily Pulitzer and those hot Palm Beach colors.

This year, Quatrochi is channeling Mother Nature herself and has introduced the Poppy Collection in homage to the company’s signature flower, the Shirley Poppy, Papaver rhoeas.  

Garden Love

What better romantic suitor is there? BloemBox arrives with flowers, poems, seed “jewels” and love….  How glamorous!

BloemBox is the perfect Hostess Gift, too.

All BloemBox designs come gift wrapped with the corresponding silk flower or vegetable perched atop the preppy green box, 5’ of plantable tissue paper seed sleeve, tied up with a fetching ribbon, care instructions (a gardener can’t be too meticulous), a gift tag and a poetic reference to the flower.

Did I mention that Oprah and Paula Deen are among the celebrity BloemBox fans, having showcased the garden jewels to attract “happiness”?

I double-dare you and your guests not to smile when the look is a glamorous, layered arrangement of color, texture, and blooms - ready to go from BloemBox.

No floral arrangement or gardening resume required...

http://www.bloembox.com

Email: gifts@bloembox.com

Phone: 707-895-3500