The Wall Street Journal recently ran

According to the article:

Multicolored flower gardens look muddy in moonlight, but moon gardens glow because of their predominately white flowers and silvery foliage. Some blossoms unfurl only at day’s end—especially moonflowers (Ipomoea alba), a type of morning glory; angel’s trumpets (Brugmansia arborea), so named because the flowers open downward, as if from heaven; and devil’s trumpets (Datura meteloides), so named because they open from the opposite direction. Both are poisonous and emit a perfume that grows more pronounced in heavy evening air. The white flowers, which seem to illuminate the dark, are visible to night pollinators such as the sphinx moth, which is drawn to the scent and the tubular, nectar-filled blooms.

The article’s author, Anne Marie Chaker, also blogged about her own experience creating a moon garden at her own home, and you can read that post online as well, at the WSJ’s Speakeasy Blog.

Flowers that open at twilight: moonflower (left) is a vine in the morning glory family and angel's trumpet (right) is a woody, tender perennial with a strong fragance

I’m more accustomed to the term “white garden” for a garden designed around white flowers and silvery gray foliage. These have been popular through the ages, with the most famous being the white garden designed by Vita Sackville-West in the 1930s at Sissinghurst Castle, in England.

Spirea, a deciduous shrub, blooms in late spring

The idea of relying on white flowers for gardens and terraces that will be used primarily at night seems a bit old-fashioned to me. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not without its charm. I do love white flowers, but I also tend to be one of those gardeners who wants one of everything that grows, so it would be hard for me to limit my palette this way.

Left: Dramatic, snowball shaped blooms on Viburnum macrocephalum. Right: The white panicles of oakleaf hydrangea (H. quercifolia) glow in a shady spot.

Let’s say you have a terrace or courtyard that’s the perfect place to relax with an evening glass of wine… or even a picture window that provides a glorious view of your back garden. And, you want to extend your enjoyment of a flower bed or a water feature past sunset. I think the best way to do this is through well planned landscape lighting — and I’m not talking about the security floodlights that come on every time a raccoon walks past the motion sensor!

Plants with silvery foliage, like this artemisia, are often used to complement white flowers in moon gardens -- but they're also an effective foil to brighter colors and hot hues

I did a quick Google search on adding landscape lighting to gardens and quickly found two good newspaper articles. Here’s an excerpt from the Toledo Blade:

There’s an art to lighting the landscape, so deciding what to accent, how to aim the lights, and where to place them is one of the keys to a successful project.

The idea is to cast light on structural and natural features, not make the display all about the light itself. Techniques include uplighting, downlighting, spotlighting, silhouetting, shadowing, and washing. The light should make you see the rough texture of stone on a house, or the spray of water in a fountain, not a line of bulbs marching like little soldiers along a sidewalk or the front of the house.

The Cape Cod Times also makes several good points, including this one:

Most of us don’t spend nearly enough time outdoors for one reason or another. Landscape lighting expands our opportunity. Not just in the summer, but all year long. Lighting enhances our view during the dark months of the year. Imagine being able to see the snow falling outside while you relax with a cup of cocoa. Or the beauty of beds of tulips and daffodils on a cool spring evening. You might even spot wildlife you’re not aware of. Outdoor lighting creates a window on the world, adding to our enjoyment 12 months of the year.

If there are any landscape designers out there, I’d love to have you weigh in — what are the best options for enjoying a garden after sunset? Are white flowers the most important element, or is effective outdoor lighting?

]]> http://www.bluestonegarden.com/blog/garden-design/gardens-that-glow-after-sunset/feed 2 http://www.bluestonegarden.com/blog/vegetables/raised-beds-are-beautiful-and-functional?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=raised-beds-are-beautiful-and-functional http://www.bluestonegarden.com/blog/vegetables/raised-beds-are-beautiful-and-functional#comments Mon, 12 Jul 2010 20:02:03 +0000 Hilda http://www.bluestonegarden.com/blog/?p=782

This tiny, unassuming vegetable garden caught my eye recently on a garden tour. It was tucked away in the side yard of a rather large, elaborate estate garden, in a sunny spot near the kitchen door. And it reminded me that growing vegetables doesn’t have to be done on a large . . . → Read More: Raised Beds Are Beautiful and Functional]]>

This tiny, unassuming vegetable garden caught my eye recently on a garden tour. It was tucked away in the side yard of a rather large, elaborate estate garden, in a sunny spot near the kitchen door. And it reminded me that growing vegetables doesn’t have to be done on a large scale — after all, not everyone wants to put up jars of stewed tomatoes or fill the freezer with bags of pole beans.

Wouldn’t be nice to have just enough produce and fresh herbs to use for summertime meals, without having to deal with a surplus, or constant garden chores? For this kind of small scale gardening, these tiny raised beds seem perfect, eliminating the need for tilling, digging, and amending poor soil. Even though this kitchen garden is very utilitarian, I still found it charming.

Raised beds seem to be a trend right now. I recently saw another very functional raised bed garden on the food blog Hungry Memphis. And the L.A. Times home & garden blog featured a gardener who is using raised beds to grow vegetables in her tiny front yard.

However, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a kitchen garden more beautiful and well planned than Brooke Giannetti’s, below. Brooke blogs about interior design over at Velvet & Linen, where you can enjoy a photo tour of her gorgeous potager. I love the way she’s planted low growing herbs like lemon thyme outside the raised beds to soften the edges a bit!

The vegetable garden at Monticello, Charlottesville, Va. (Image source: Wikimedia Commons)

According to the article, our third president was not only a prolific but an innovative gardener who took full advantage of various micro-climates on his estate:

After he left the White House in 1809 and moved to Monticello, his Palladian estate here, Jefferson grew 170 varieties of fruits and 330 varieties of vegetables and herbs, until his death in 1826.

The intense heat and humidity of a Virginia summer explain why colonial gardens were planted only in spring and toward the end of summer, when temperatures cooled. But Jefferson gardened year-round, planting early in heat-collecting beds along the mountain slope and growing heat-loving crops like okra, melons and tomatoes during the scorching summers. He also grew cool-season lettuces long past their time in the low-lying, damper areas farther down the mountain.

Monticello also houses the Thomas Jefferson Center for Historic Plants, a program that collects, maintains and sells a wide selection of heirloom plants, especially those grown by Jefferson or discovered and developed in his lifetime. Some of the veggies being grown today in Michelle Obama’s kitchen garden at the White House come from seeds that originated at Monticello.

Planting Tip:

Growing Heirloom Tomatoes in Dry Climates

For all you California and Western gardeners out there, the L.A. Times home & garden blog has a great piece about heirloom tomatoes. It touches on the fact that heirloom varieties come true from seed, unlike modern hybrids, and offers tips for separating the seeds from the fruit to save them.

I’ve experimented with all different kinds of color schemes in my container plantings, but when it comes to choosing plants, there’s one formula I always stick with, and it involves these three elements:

• A tall, spiky, bold leaved, or otherwise dramatic plant for the center of the container (although sometimes it can be off-center for an asymmetrical effect)
• Lots of mounding plants to fill in most of the space – can either be flowers or interesting foliage
• Trailing plants that will cascade over the edge of the pot and soften the edges

These photos from the garden tour show me that other people have the same idea about combining plants in containers using the three-element formula.

I also saw these gorgeous containers designed for shade: no flowers, just plenty of contrast between the foliage plants in terms of their shape, texture, and color. I love both of these compositions and would like to recreate them at home. Each of them only uses two kinds of plant material, but they look stunning.

For more ideas on creating container plantings, take a look at this article on Fine Gardening’s website. The author also recommends the three-ingredient approach, though he’s rather creatively described the three distinct types of plants as “thrillers, fillers, and spillers.”

♣

I fell in love with this adorable climber the first time I saw it in someone’s garden, and immediately asked if I could collect some of the seeds. The feathery fern-like foliage would be stunning on its own, even without the tiny, tubular red flowers that flare out into a five-pointed star. I just love the texture of this plant!

Like most morning glories, this vine is easy to grow. I sowed seeds only once and it’s reseeded itself every year since then. Because I grow it in a container on a metal obelisk, the growth is very restrained, but I’ve seen this vine grow to 20 feet tall against a utility pole on a public street corner – just spectacular!

Did I mention the red flowers attract hummingbirds? They don’t spend long on individual flowers, which probably only provide a sip of nectar, but once the vine really gets going it’s covered with enough flowers to provide a feast.

The vine has one minor drawback – like most morning glories, the flowers last only a day, opening just after dawn and closing up by early afternoon.

For those of you who like a more dramatic display, I recommend a morning glory named ‘Heavenly Blue’, which was hybridized from the wild morning glory (Ipomoea tricolor) to bear bigger, more dramatic flowers. A friend of mine grew this on a pierced brick wall last summer and sent me this picture. Another friend used to grow ‘Heavenly Blue’ on a lamppost in her front yard. She’d create a lush pyramid of vines by driving several stakes into the ground around the base of the post, then stringing twine from the stakes to the top of the lamppost. After starting seeds indoors, she’d transplant the seedlings into the ground next to the stakes, coaxing them up the twine as they grew.

Want to extend the flowery display into the evening hours? Many gardeners in the South, where I live, plant ‘Heavenly Blue’ along with moon vine (Ipomoea alba), mixing the two vines on the same trellis or support. Moon vine is kind of a reverse morning glory – its huge, fragrant, white flowers open at twilight and stay open all night. So when you plant these two related vines together, you get 24 hours of bloom, with a color change in the middle!

Planting tip:

Morning glory seeds have a thick seed coat that can cause them to be slow to germinate. You can speed up the process either by soaking them in water overnight or nicking them slightly with a utility knife (some people use a metal nail file to lightly scratch the seed coat).

But today I learned from one of my favorite blogs, Garden Rant, that there’s a group of guys in Virginia who grow gourds for the purpose of fashioning them into musical instruments. They call themselves the Richmond Indigenous Gourd Orchestra. Their website makes the following statements:

The Richmond Indigenous Gourd Orchestra resides in Richmond, Virginia, where members grow gourds, make instruments and create music. A band of musicians with dirt under their fingernails–they put the “cult” back into culture, and “culture” back into agriculture.

Original music played on handmade instruments made from locally grown gourds, the Gourd Orchestra plays its own brand of paleolithic lounge music – mixing past with present, rhythm with melody, and chaos with order.

The website also allows you to sample the Gourd Orchestra’s music, which is actually rather pleasant and catchy in an odd, earthy kind of way.

And let’s not forget the gourd-growing tips. I looked them over, and it seems as if the seeds should have been in the ground weeks ago, but if you have a long growing season where you live, it might not be too late to get started. And if you’re already a veteran gourd-grower, please leave a comment!

Loofah image, above, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.