Dream Journey ... Edible Landscape on Vancouver Island

View of Sooke Harbour House & Whiffen Spit 

Exceptional outings .... an edible landscape on Vancouver Island, British Columbia.

Botanically-inclined travelers with a penchant for slow food aim for

Sooke Harbour House, an unparalleled retreat that's not to be missed 

when touring Vancouver Island.

 Trace the West Shore’s Old Island Highway from the city of Victoria to Sooke village,

and follow along to the inn.

The Kitchen Garden

Perched on a bluff overlooking the Strait of Juan de Fuca, 

Sooke Harbour House is an idyllic destination, with luxe rooms, and a restaurant that garners accolades too numerous to mention. Guests and the public are invited to tour the 

organic gardens - a vertiable edible landscape.

The gardens & the sea (gooseneck barnacles...sea urchin...geoduck) 

yield ingredients for the restaurant’s imaginative fare. 

Wild native plants - nodding onion, wild thimble, salal berries, the young light green needles of grand firs, licorice fern root - are cultivated alongside leeks and kales, 

herbs and tasty edible flowers.

All contribute to the highly original, regional Northwest coast cuisine served 

at the inn's remarkable restaurant.

Autumn View

The mist-shrouded hillside setting encompasses yet another wonder.  

Meander to the water’s edge for a glimpse of the sinuous Whiffen Spit, a natural formation akin to a work of the Earth Art movement, like Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty, or Alain Idoux’s Lavender Wedge in Provence.

I fell under the spell of the sandy spit of land. Waking early, I walked out, my footsteps following the landform’s 1/4-mile curvilinear pattern sketched into sheltered Sooke Harbour. 

Photos:  Sooke Harbour House

The inn features casually elegant rooms: Inviting jacuzzis, fireplaces, and views,

while the serene setting is known for top-notch bird watching,

 and to-die-for vistas of the Olympic Mountains.

Even the parking lot is noteworthy: 

An environmentally-wise, green design of grass turf and a recycled plastic grid set in sand.

Link to Sooke Harbour House on Bay Area Tendrils .... Hotels & Inns 

- column on the right -

Blotanical Awards ... Good News!

.... Awards ....

Photo: San Francisco Tiled Steps 

Super News!

While I've been scouting interesting settings in my home town, Chicago,

it has just come to my attention that

Bay Area Tendrils Garden Travel has been nominated

for a number of awards on Blotanical - the go-to web site

and gathering place for countless garden geeks, landscape designers, plant lovers,

and garden travelers, too,

be they partaking of a virtual feast of gardens in their own backyards,

or slipping on their walking shoes to trek through great gardens further afield.

Thank you, Stuart Robinson, the Australian gardening mate who thought up the idea for Blotanical. Stuart keeps its wheels turning... even as the number of blogging green, brown, and variegated thumbs grows greater with each passing day.

 

Here are the categories where you'll find Bay Area Tendrils nominated:

Best Blog Design

Best Garden Art

Best California Blog

and a unique niche: Blog You'd Most Like An Invite From to Guest Post

Thanks, all! I must sign off now.....

Historic Gardens of Alcatraz - A Garden Conservancy Project

Westside gardens

Photos by Elizabeth Byers

Spring 2008

The Historic Gardens of Alcatraz

- a project of the Garden Conservancy - recently received two awards from the California Preservation Foundation.

Alcatraz staff family in an Officers' Row garden, circa 1869

Photo by Eadweard Muybridge, Bancroft Library

Roadside Gardens, 2009

The Garden Conservancy became involved in 2003 with spearheading the rehabilitation of the heritage gardens on The Rock: now a National Historic Landmark,

and listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

The 22-acre island, part of the National Park Services Golden Gate National Recreation Area, is the GGNRA's most visited site, with some 1.3 million annual visitors

hopping a ferry ride from San Francisco to see Alcatraz first-hand.

Officers' Row, 2009

A brilliant team of volunteers have gardened and toiled

to restore the uniquely stunning landscape.

A tour is a once-in-a-lifetime adventure! The gardens shown to you within the context of history, horticulture, and cultural significance.

The Late Show Gardens - Future Feast ...Hope and Inspiration

Future Feast in The Garden of Flow/Accumulation

Suzanne Biaggi and Patrick Picard

The Late Show Gardens - September 2009






Under Construction.....

The Biaggi/Picard design focused upon the cycles of nature, or Flow,

& Accumulation - interpreted as man's interruption of nature's rhythms.

The garden utilized watering systems that were meant to offer solutions to the results of accumulation.

Photos copyright © Alice Joyce

The alluring feast spread out upon the commodious table represents hope.

Charred saplings are featured among the garden's objects/symbols.

An intriguing garden to wander through.

Among Suzanne's inspirations? The mannerist gardens of Italy!

Photos © Alice Joyce

'Future Feast' may remain as a permanent installation at Cornerstone Sonoma, 

when The Late Show Gardens concludes.

Must wait and see......

Picard's expertise encompasses the garden's permaculture plantings .

Biaggi talked with me about how permaculture 

needn't always be rustic, as people might conjure it.

Shadows often bring another element to a design, as with a sculpture in an outdoor setting

 (or indoors with special lighting). 

In this instance, the repetition of the black saplings adds drama.

Can you feel the intensity of the sun on a late-summer day in Sonoma?

The Late Show Gardens - Visual Impact

Resting Dragon by Stephen Glassman

The site-specific installation arises from a grassy expanse in John Greenlee's 

Mediterranean Meadow Garden.

Materials: Planed and stained, and natural bamboo; stone; gambions.

After the Fall

....a sculptural installation by sculptor and award-winning landscape architect, Jack Chandler.

Chandler breaks new ground at The Late Show Gardens, moving away from the picturesque, contemporary settings designed by the firm of Chandler & Chandler.

Chandler pulls no punches here, offering up a design "not drenched in fantasy, but ...the reality of a world warmed and polluted by our own hands."

The artist, Simple's lighthearted creation made from harvested grasses.

Simple's Horticultural Art Gallery is located in Douglasville, PA.

Succulents & Stone 

Complementary and contrasting - shapes, textures and alluring color:

Displays from Artefact Design & Salvage, 

on the grounds of Cornerstone Sonoma.

The Late Show Gardens ... The Hermit's Garden

The Hermit's Garden .....at The Late Show Gardens

Designers: Kate Frey and Ben Frey

Kate Frey is known for her long stint as the garden director/designer of the lovely Bonterra Gardens - edible, ornamental and habitat - at Fetzer Vineyards, alas, now closed.

To my knowledge, Kate is a rare U.S. designer, having won medals, including 

a Gold Medal for her designs at London's Chelsea Flower Show.

Kate has worked recently with Ben Frey, her husband and owner of Rustic Towers. 

Ben "rescues" wood, bringing it back to life as eye-catching garden towers, furniture, buildings, gates, and other constructions both useful and playful. 

In The Hermit's Garden, the designers create a cautionary narrative.

Their artist's statement presents the image of "man striding from a pastoral, rustic past into an unreflective future where destruction of the environment occurs around him."

Detail from the figure pictured above.

"...the unquenchable desire of the masses for more of everything the earth has to offer has drained the land of water and life. The hermit cannot avoid the momentum of his shared destiny...."

While the garden's delightful aspects draw the viewer in,

I see the design as positing a future that will be bleak 

unless we collectively reassess and change direction.

The Late Show Gardens ... An Elegant Entryway

This page is UNDER CONSTRUCTION ...

Renewal

Designed by Gary Ratway and Mike Lucas

Entryway to... The Late Show Gardens

Massive, crushed gasoline tanks - the ultimate discarded salvage material - emerge as components in the show's elegant entryway design. The designers transform propane tank end cuts into shapely planters filled with billowy grasses.

The grid-like arrangement creates a calculated repetition that effectively

guides visitors at the entrance to the show.

Aligned in a soothing linear pattern, spheres of clipped box give rise to exuberant grasses, flowering perennials, and languid vines.

I loved this thoughtful, sophisticated design that so inventively combines the harsh material of rusted steel with the gem-like emerald green shrubs, and  thesoft hues and blousy textures of the grasses. 

Moving beyond beauty, the designers' statement speaks to the planting of "masses of grasses (in the crushed tanks) which bio-remediate contaminated soils." 

Their "fusion of high design and principals of sustainability,"

a complete success from my point of view!

The Late Show Gardens ... Innovative Design

This page is UNDER CONSTRUCTION ...

A Gala Evening Event ushered in The Late Show Gardens,

Taking Place in Wine Country at Cornerstone Sonoma, September 18, 19 & 20

Here's a Preview! 

The Grow Melt Project

Designers: Peter Good, Liz Einwiller, Adam Greenspan, Sarah Kuehl and David Fong

Calling attention to climate change, the garden features an austere yet sublime

 wall of glittering ice; its melting form generating a pool of water 

during the duration of the show.

As the sun set during the preview event, an opening appeared,  signaling the onset of the ice wall's conversion to water.

I'm returning to the Show today, where temperatures are expected to reach 90 degrees.

Moments after completion of the wall's construction, 

Peter Good attends to the garden's faceted stepping stones.

A Sustainable Landscape and Green Roof Garden

Like her design firm’s name, Wonderland Garden and Landscape, Lauren Schneider conjured a magical rooftop plantscape in the sky.

An Evening at the Margarido House, Oakland, California

Benefit for

The Garden Conservancy

Thursday, October 1 - 5 p.m. to 7:30 p.m.

Join the designers and creators for a private tour of a LEED-H Platinum Rated home, landscape and rooftop garden, designed and built by MCD/McDonald Construction & Development; landscape design by Lauren Schneider, Wonderland Garden and Landscape.

Softened by a sustainable landscape of drought-tolerant California natives & Mediterranean plants, the Margarido House is the first LEED-H Platinum certified custom home

in Northern California.

Photos by Mariko Reed, courtesy of Garden Design magazine

Los Angeles-based outdoor living expert Debra Prinzing will be on hand to help tell the story of this award-winning sustainable design project, which she profiled in the September-October 2009 issue of Garden Design magazine.

A Bias for Blue! Drought-tolerant Perennial with Panache

Take a gander at 'Blue Throatwort' - Trachelium caeruleum! 

Native to the Mediterranean region, this clump-former is perennial in USDA Zones 7-11, growing with vigor as an annual in colder climates.

Some 3 to 4 feet tall, blue throatwort boasts large, dome-shaped umbels composed of countless miniature individual blue-violet flowers. 

They're said to be lightly scented, but I haven't noticed any fragrance. 

The botanical name, Trachelium is a reference to the neck: it was once thought to cure throat maladies.

Blue throatwort is not a fusspot! 

Rather, it's adaptable and drought tolerant, growing in my garden in both rich soil and lean, performing most vigorously in sun, although it has emerged and bloomed in a shadier spot, too. 

Staking is often necessary. I stake loosely, and the tallest stems take on an interesting curvature. 

Expect plants to die back after a couple years, but look for new, self-sown specimens that may appear close by. Deadheading results in second flush of blooms, although flower heads are smaller and not as impressive.  Old-fashioned throatwort makes a lovely dried flower if you cut the long, strong stems as they reach full bloom.  Strip away the leaves and arrange them in a tall vase, where they will dry naturally over time.  In a year-round garden border, the blooms of throatwort complement the deeply toothed, silvery foliage of honey bush (Melianthus major), and the felted gray leaves of Plectranthus argentatus.