Saxon Holt Photography Workshop

In October I took a Saxon Holt Landscape Photography class through the Sacramento APLD. We had some classroom time, during which I did take notes (which I now can’t find!?!), and we visited two gardens for some field experience.

IMG_1647.JPEG

It is important to have some photography basics if you are a landscape designer. When I visit a new site for a potential project I have to take photographs to help me understand the site, to look at sun patterns, views, and practical locations of things in the landscape. These photos don’t have to be attractive necessarily but they do have to be informative. Sometimes a project won’t happen for months after I have initially visited the site and taken those photos, so they have to be good enough to help me remember all the details.

Having photography skills is also crucial for getting photos of in-progress gardens and completed and mature garden projects. You want o showcase your gardens in the best way and we can’t always afford a professional photographer.

I also love to go on garden tours. It’s a great way to see and learn from mature gardens designed by the best in the industry. It’s also great to visit the same gardens multiple times to see how they change over time. Having great photos to look back on for inspiration is so useful.

There’s this thing about garden photography during tours though… it is hard to not just end up with a camera roll full of pictures of

  • other people’s butts

  • other people taking pictures of other people’s butts.

The struggle is real and no amount of workshopping is going to help you.

Fortunately, in this workshop, we formed small groups to visit the garden and all felt pretty comfortable saying, “um, could you move your butt for a sec?”

Photograph of a garden with Salvia leucantha in the foreground and light shinning through Pennisetum seed heads in the background. There is also a staked tree with a bell hanging from it.

Photograph of a garden with Salvia leucantha in the foreground and light shinning through Pennisetum seed heads in the background. There is also a staked tree with a bell hanging from it.

The above photo has nice light but really would have been better without the tree stake and rubber. I suppose I could photoshop that out?

Some things to think about while photographing a garden:

  • Time of day - Harsh midday sun is no good for garden photography, early morning or early evening are best

  • Composition - The rule of thirds applies to photography as much as sketching

  • Focal Points - A big -’ole mess of green in a photograph is no good, find a focal point!

  • Long Shots and Vignettes - Photograph your subject from a variety of angles, distances, and lighting varieties.

  • Other Things - You can photograph the non-plant elements of a garden to help with the journy you are taking your viewers on.

Garden Tour - Keelya Meadows

I absolutely love the book Fearless Color Gardens by Keelya Meadows. I knew she was a local designer because she has a little exhibit at American Soil and Stone and I knew her home garden was open sometimes but I was not sure of the details. I joined the Garden Conservancy this year and lo! her garden was on the Open Days list! I made T. come with me.

I love all the quirky paving, concrete forms, and amazingly fun use of color. I wish my own garden was just like this. It was a bit over the top for T. though and I suspect he will object.

I’m desperately in love with that leopard-spotted Ligularia and must acquire one for myself immediately.

Right Tree, Right Place

This is a handy tree guide made up for PGE by California Polytechnic State University for the Bay Area, Northern and Central California. If you're working on a site with power line issues this tool can be quite useful.This page has some handy guides for selecting the right tree for the right place based on some other guidelines like allergy and toxicity or fire safety.

You can order a Right Tree, Right Place poster from PGE here and download a cute poster for Palm trees appropriate for use near power lines.

The people who planted redwoods right next to the power lines at a recent client's property could have used this guide 15 years ago...

Visualizing with SketchUp

Still thinking about visualizing. I do like 3D scenes in SketchUp. It’s nice to have a but of that realistic texturing and the rendered shadows are super nice as well. In my own hand drawings I tend to not put those dramatic shadows in because I worry about ruining the drawing. :D

I think one of my annoyances with SketchUp is just have to do with finding the right plant objects to use. If a picture looks fairly realistic the plants need to be pretty darn close the actual plant being spec’ed in the plan otherwise homeowners get confused. With a hand-drawing you can just be like, “oh yeah, this is an artistic rendition”.

Again, these are not my design they are from the wonderful Susan at Garden Alchemy.

Oh, yeah, I also created that metal hoop sculpture you see in the photos in SketchUp and you can find it in the 3D Warehouse and use it if you want to!


Honeysuckle Sipping, The Plant Lore of Children

My previous post about Making Daisy chains reminded me of this book I’ve been meaning to review: Honeysuckle Sipping The Plant Lore of Children by Jeanne R. Chesanow

What is my plant lore? It’s not much, really. How to braid pine needles and attempt to weave them, how to use a blade of grass as a whistle, making play environments for my glass animals with moss and flowers and sticks and stones, where to find the blueberries and chipmunks at my grandparents house… dandelion seed heads, maple seed ‘rhinoceros horns’, what else?

I had a suburban upbringing. But it was the 70’s and 80’s and supervision was lacking in comparison to current times. As I read through this book I kept saying to myself, ‘Oh yeah! I did that too!”. I think that, anyone who reads this book will have those moments of remembering too and it will bring joy.

I just love this book. The author sent out a call for people to remember and write to her about the plant lore of their own childhoods and she amassed a lovely set of stories and reminiscence.

book-honeysuckle.jpg

In the intro and through out the book she mentions more ancient childhood plant lore. And, I would like to point out here, MOST of this book is white, European and European-American childhood plant lore. There are some mentions of Indigenous North American children, however. I would love to read about other cultures nature play. Note to self: see what you can find about this!

One of my favorites mentioned is a game from ancient Greece in which the kids throw a nut into a circle. Sounds a lot like the (horribly named) game cornhole, doesn’t it?!

Here is a link to a whole scholarly article about play and childhood in ancient Greece!

I’ve mentioned before that I worried about this a lot when my kid was an infant and small child. What would my kid’s childhood plant lore/memories of time spent in nature end up being?! We lived in a loft in West Oakland and there was concrete for days!

I feel lucky that my mother’s group ended up creating a Forest Pre-School which we called ‘Oakland Urban Forest Community’. We hired a Waldorf teacher and spent a ton of time trying to make it work. It DID work for quite a while and then it didn’t and I can’t even remember why! I do know that my kid spent three days a week in nature with other kids, guided by like minded parents and a teacher. They made boats out of bark and sailed them, created puppets out of natural materials for plays, went on nature walks, and many other things.

This is also one of the reasons I sent him to Park Day School in Oakland.

At home we had squirrel tea parties with flowers and seeds as the meal, we picked and ate ‘sour grass’ (Oxalis) on our walks in the neighborhood, and we made roly poly houses with natural materials, so I hope he remembers those things!

New skatepark landscape

I noticed the other day when I stopped at CVS on San Pablo that they added a really interesting skatepark along the parking lot to this strip mall. What a great use of space! I really love the large boulders they used.

Designed by Wormhoudt Inc.

Here is a cute SketchUp walk through of the concept. They did include one female presenting entourage with a skateboard!

There is a you tube video of the grand opening here.

I stopped to walk through it and took a few pictures.

Visualizing Designs

I’m imagining that everyone has their own work flow for creating client visuals. I love 3D and, in fact, have a degree in 3D Animation and Computer Modeling (or something along those lines… it’s been a long time). Making 3D renderings look good is fairly time consuming and I often don’t love the final product. The time consuming part is what is important here though, I’m not sure your small to mid sized residential projects will want to pay for that time. The GOAL of these visuals is to help the client imagine their space and maybe it doesn’t have to super elaborate and 100% perfect and I need to remember that.

Right now I am using SketchUp. It’s good enough but I do still love that hand-drawn look. Lately I have been rendering a line drawing in SketchUp and then coloring over it. Here is an uncolored example.

Firepit with shrubs

Firepit with shrubs

Same view but with different plants and chairs.

Same view but with different plants and chairs.

And a color example. The color on this scan came out a tad weird but you can see how I go about making a test drawing and trying out markers.

admarker-landscape2016.jpeg

I print out several and then us AD Markers to color. I do love to color!

My current process:

Create basic SketchUp model and use one of the sketch filters. Create several views and print them out.

Draw in the plants - sometimes I draw directly on to the print out and sometimes I do a more elaborate dance with tracing paper, rescanning, color adjusting in Photoshop but honestly that takes way longer.

Choose a coloring medium - I have been using AD Markers lately but sometimes I use colored pencils. I would love to do watercolor. One of the joys of watercolor is how fast and blendable they are. I have not really worked out HOW to do this yet though. I don’t think my printer will work even wth the flimsiest watercolor paper. I could trace the drawing on but haven’t tried that yet. Something to work on, I guess!

Then scan, color correct, and done!

I don’t have my own clients yet but I get to color other peoples designs and I freaking love it.

The above landscape designs are by Susan of Garden Alchemy.

Color Blobs

If I’m not feeling inspired to draw/paint anything in particular I like to just play around with color. Sometimes I even just paint circles of single colors. It helps that my paint of choice, Daniel Smith watercolors, has such amazing vibrant pigments. A mistake I see people make is buying student grade watercolors. ALWAYS buy artist grade. I don’t care if they are more expensive! Even if you can only buy your warm and cool primaries artist grade is the way to go.

Vendors? What are vendors?

I went to my first NorCal event this year. NorCal is a trade show for the landscape business that is held at the San Mateo event center every year. Every possible thing related to the landscaping industry can be found and explored there.

Who are these vendors? Why do I want to know them?

Vendors are the sales representatives for all the landscaping products used in the industry! Who knew?! Not sure why I find this so weird and novel but I do.

Why do you and I want to know them? Because they will help you spec their products, they will spend a decent chunk of time explaining things to you and your clients. They will even sometimes go to your project site and bring samples for your clients. Amazing!

I, while not exactly shy, do not love to chit chat. I marvel at people who can chit chat. I just can’t do it, my mind goes immediately blank and I become the most uninteresting person in the universe. Although, (CW: alcohol) if I have a glass or two of wine I will totally hang out and chit chat. There is no wine at NorCal so just forget that. Anyway, you can chat up these folks and they will be absolute fonts of knowledge about their products.

Some examples:

Local stone yards will often have sales reps that rep various paver companies. For instance, PBM - Peninsula Building Materials has showrooms all over the Bay Area. If you contact them with a question about a product you will be directed to the sales rep for that product.

Specific paver companies - For instance, StepStone has a sales rep for the Bay Area. Need color samples? Call them!

There are sales reps for sod, plants (think Proven Winners or Sunset Plants), landscape lighting, and irrigation companies are just a few I can think of.

Not sure if I emphasized this enough but these people will help you for FREE. It’s great.

The SF Wave Organ

My sister and I jaunted over to SF to visit the Wave Organ in January, sketchbooks and coffees in hand. How had I never been here? All the years I was living in SF and specifically exploring everything I could and I somehow never ended up here. Anyway, I went now and it was a beautiful winter day with the sun shining. It was so nice to just sit and draw in my sketchbook listening to the waves and people and sea gulls.

Sun shining on an open sketchbook with a pen and green pencil. There is a pen drawing of the wave organ in the sketchbook

Sun shining on an open sketchbook with a pen and green pencil. There is a pen drawing of the wave organ in the sketchbook

The sculpture was delightfully like an ancient ruin. I do love a good ruin. A real ruin not to miss is the Sutro Baths. I go there all the time and I should post some pics of that landscape.

This wave organ is a sound sculpture made from reused items including stones from an old cemetery. I love that and it makes for some very interesting sculptural stone work. The actual organ pipes are PVC and concrete. I think it sounds kind of like rubber bands!

Panorama picture with a woman with purple hair pointing a camera , the Golden Gate Bridge in teh background, the smooth waters of the San Francisco Bay and then some palm trees and a sea wall on the right.

Panorama picture with a woman with purple hair pointing a camera , the Golden Gate Bridge in teh background, the smooth waters of the San Francisco Bay and then some palm trees and a sea wall on the right.

Sunset Headquarters in Menlo Park

I heard the Sunset headquarters is going to move so I wanted to dash down there to visit it before it relocated. When I first moved to CA I worked just down the street but did not know about Sunset magazine at that time. Nor did I particularly care about gardens at age 19. Anyway, my friend and I jaunted down there to take some pics.

I’m so glad we did! I just love the color and texture they are playing with. The bright orange, round trellis is also speaking to me. I would like to own this moon gate trellis for myself!

Pavement 2 Parks in SF

This Pavements to Parks initiative in SF is really interesting. I must see if Oakland has something similar.

I drove by this little parklet on my way somewhere and I came back later to investigate more thoroughly.

Guerrero Park by Shift Studio in SF

Guerrero Park by Shift Studio in SF

This Places for People idea is marvelous. I love how they have created these planting spaces and seating areas on the harsh concrete of this street using recycled materials. I hope people come hang out here!