I’m finally at a point with our landscaping that I feel I can share a few pics.It’s taken a while to get here, we are not done, but it’s moving forward.
As shared in my previous landscaping post the idea was to subdivide the garden, which was largely lawn by creating space for a patio, a playhouse for Nathan and pockets of form plants and textures. My deadline was June 17th, I missed it, but as of today I’m where I wanted to be.
I went a little overboard on the playhouse, which became a black Nordic inspired cabin with a deck and almost floor to ceiling wrap around window, but I LOVE it!
Sadly I had a fight with my contractor and threw him off site during the building, which meant I had to do a lot of the work myself, action-ed in dribs and drabs with all this rain we’ve been having.
I designed and coordinated the hard and landscaping, but enlisted the help of my friend Anton Fourie from Stonescapes and his staff to action my ideas, something he does with efficiency and precision, a rare trait today!
As regular readers know, I’m a modernist, I prefer clean lines and have a penchant for mid-century design, including landscaping.
In designing it I bought several Sunset and Better Home & Gardens patio design books from the 50′s/60′s at local thrift shops and bookstores and spent countless hours on Pintrest and Houzz.
I wanted to work largely with evergreen form plants, sculptural plants in shades of green, grey, crimson and salmon pink.
I found an invaluable landscape resource over at the Eichler For Sale website with a list of commonly used mid-mod plants.
The selection is minimal, two varieties of New Zealand Flax (Phormium Tenax), some Lily Grass (Ophiopogon Variegata) and Blue Mountain Grass (Festuca Glauca) in one bed. Cape Reed Grass (Chrondopetalum Tectorum) in another and lastly Hedge Bamboo (Bambusa Multiplex) in another.
The Flax will grow rather tall and create a nice hedge in time, as seen below.
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June 23rd, 2012 - 7:24 pm
Wow!!! ABSOLUTELY gorgeous. SERIOUSLY good job
June 23rd, 2012 - 8:19 pm
Hi Nix, thanks for the kind words. It seems simple enough, but the hours of deliberation, gosh! Glad that it turned out the way I envisioned it.
June 23rd, 2012 - 9:53 pm
LOVE it Matt – i want a playhouse too!! Thanks for the bamboo tip – looking to plant something to offset our grey painted home and that looks like a great option. V x
June 23rd, 2012 - 10:32 pm
Ha Ha, yeah, I totally built the playhouse for me! I started with Nathan in mind and it blew up from there
PLEASE use Multiplex, there are one or two others like Nana that also work, but 90% of the bamboo (Bambusa) family are runners, once they are in the ground you’ll regret it as they can trail for meters and are very invasive.
Alternatively keep them in pots. One of my favorites is Bambusa Nigra, commonly called ‘Black Bamboo’, but it to will get out of control if not confined.
June 25th, 2012 - 12:31 am
Thanks Matt, that was my nxt question, if they do well in pots. V x
July 26th, 2012 - 12:58 pm
[...] mentioned in my previous landscaping post that I plan on culturing moss in my Zen like rock garden on a few granite boulders that I found in [...]
August 7th, 2012 - 8:00 pm
Wow! Great job! You are right it does look like something from My country. Love how you stowe the fire Wood underneath.
August 7th, 2012 - 8:34 pm
Thanks Jenny. It started as small Wendy House, but I tried to make it look a little hipper and that’s the end result! The wood was actually from a tree I felled 2 yrs ago. I let it cure and a few months ago painstakingly split the logs with an axe… it’s almost hard to believe I live in the middle of the suburbs, I guess I secretly wish I had a cabin in the woods…