Harvest Season, Napa Valley - Before the Storm!

Formerly: Go Fish restaurant, St. Helena

Yesterday, the ebullient harvest season in Napa Valley reigned!

After a delicious lunch at Go Fish,

an afternoon spent photographing winery gardens beneath overcast skies.

On the drive home, the clouds forecast the threatening rain.

Après le deluge ... a drenching storm blew in overnight, 

its blustery winds and rain

unabated this morning.

Let's focus on the scene on Monday: 

Napa Valley restaurant gardens, featuring an abundance of edibles & ornamentals. 

Mustard's Grill, one of many Napa Valley restaurants that cultivate lush kitchen gardens.

A welcoming water feature at Brix restaurant, Yountville.

Mustard's Grill - another section of the gardens, with a structure providing some shelter.

Opus One Winery colonnade....

Fuyu Persimmon

Edible blooms ... the peppery flavor of nasturtiums adds spice to a salad.

Click on link below for entree to a trove of.... California Wine Country destinations

Vertical Gardens! A Patrick Blanc Green Wall for San Francisco

Caixa Forum, Madrid

photos by sallylondon

Architects, Herzog & de Meuron (San Francisco's de Young Museum, 

among their accomplishments) designed the addition on the adjacent building adjacent to the green wall: 

The upper stories exhibiting a tactile, richly colored cor-ten steel facade, in brilliant juxtaposition alongside the verdant surface of Patrick Blanc's expansive plantings.

Blanc broke new ground when he developed a highly successful technique for living walls,  the vertical gardens that now adorn buildings worldwide in indoor and outdoor settings.

Years ago, while visiting Paris I planned an early-morning visit to the Pershing Hall hotel, to see an early Blanc project installed on an interior courtyard wall.

The green wall Blanc created for the Caixa Forum is composed of 15,000 plants;  250 different species. In Blanc's words, "The Vertical Garden allows man to re-create a living system very similar to natural environments. It's a way to add nature to places where man once removed it. Thanks to botanical knowledge, it's possible to display natural-looking plant landscapes even though they are man-made. ...a Vertical Garden" can be "a valuable shelter for biodiversity."

Locally, Blanc has been chosen to design a green wall for the new Assembly Wing of San Francisco's Drew School, Blanc's largest project in the U.S. to date.

I'll be attending Blanc's lecture in San Francisco.

A botanist by profession, with eye-popping green hair, 

Blanc is sure to draw an enthusiastic crowd to the SPUR center in downtown San Francisco!

Luminous and Inviting, The Lurie Garden, Chicago

Bottle Gentian .. Gentiana andrewsii 
Text  and  Photos © Alice Joyce

Late-summer in Chicago's Lurie Garden












UNDER CONSTRUCTION....

Spanning the rooftop of the Millennium Park parking garage, the lush greenery of the 

Lurie Garden appears as a surprising tour de force: An achievment that’s received worldwide attention for the transformation of a former rail yard into a classic Modernist space.

Designed by the firm of Gustafson Guthrie Nichol, Dutch plantsman Piet Oudolf, & lighting designer Robert Israel, the park is a rejuvenating oasis for downtown office workers, 

tourists and travelers.

Knotweed  Persicaria a. 'Firedance'

Enclosing the 2.5-acre garden from the north and west, a massive wall of greenery dubbed the Shoulder Hedge pays homage to Carl Sandburg. Hornbeam, European Beech, Arborvitae varieties make up the hedging. Growing within steel armatures, the hedge provides a protective function, to separate the garden’s fields of perennials from the thousands of concert -goers who stream out of the Gehry-designed bandshell. 

Coneflowers abound.

Water channel, wooden walkway and a limestone wall interrupt the garden layout, dividing it into two distinct compositions: 

The light plate features a sunny, exuberant planting scheme, calling to mind a prairie. 

While the dark plate conjures up a dramatic setting, where plant selections take on muted tones. Some 130 North American natives, plant species and cultivars emerge in Oudolf’s plantings; his designs well-known for their celebration of grasses. 

Looking toward new wing of the Art Institute of Chicago, in background.

Coneflowers: blooms and seedheads meld with swathes of grasses.

Oudolf’s palette incorporates myriad shapes, together with feathery, airy, and bristly textures. The quality of movement associated with grasses is unparalleled, as is the unrivaled way the  flowerheads and translucent blades catch the light, adding layers of interest to the garden even after snow begins to fall.

Agastache

Parthenium integrifolium

Giant Hyssop

Goldenrod - S. 'Fireworks'

Calamagrostis x acutiflora 'Karl Foerster' growing with catmint.

Looking out over the Lurie Garden through the glass wall of the Sculpture Terrace 

atop the new wing of the Art Institute of Chicago, 

where the garden's rill culminates in a sedate waterfall.

A work by Scott Burton, part of an installation on the museum's sculpture terrace,

overlooking Lurie Garden & Millennium Park's Pritzker Pavilion ... beyond the glass wall. 

During my September visit, the blooms were fading and the grasses had taken on burnished hues, yet I found it difficult to pull myself away from the garden's embrace.

Elegant Simplicity ... Pritzker Garden, Art Institute of Chicago

Margo and Thomas Pritzker Garden - Chicago

One approaches the Pritzker Garden from the museum's Griffin Court, 

in the new Modern Wing of the Art Institute of Chicago,

Facing Columbus Drive, the space is designed with an elegant simplicity, 

given a sense of shelter by the flying carpet overhead (upper left in photo),

so named by architect Renzo Piano.

Chartreuse chairs are placed about the crushed stone terrace,

the bright enameled seating producing an ambiance that conjures up images 

of European gardens.

Naturalistic plantings of grasses soften the sleek setting, 

punctuated by the spare placement of trees with peeling bark. 

White Curve

a work by Ellsworth Kelly glimmers with the changing light on the museum wall:

The sculpture's reflective surface animated by reflections of the garden's columns & trees.

Specially commissioned in collaboration with the building's architect, Renzo Piano, 

the work is the largest to-date in Kelly's oeuvre. 

Wilde ...as in Oscar! Chicago Streetscape

Chicago's Lakeview neighborhood ... on the North Side

My former stomping ground.

Wilde's

as in Oscar Wilde ... Irish Bar and Restaurant

Plantings - Anne Roberts Gardens

Streetscape ... 3130 N. Broadway

Late-September 2009

A belated postscript, mentioned in the comments here.

Visit VP's 18 Oct post on Veg Plotting: 

Out on the Streets

for street scenes from Liverpool to Brittany to downtown Toronto!