The Gardeners Anonymous Blog

Green Fountain

My friend Jennifer planted her fountain and made this beautiful succulent sculpture.

It is magnificent. Think about it. Here’s a way to save on electricity and water. It’s a green fountain in more ways than one.

I saw something like this a couple of years ago at the San Francisco Flower and Garden Show. It was my favorite thing there.

Since then I was lucky enough to find my own fountain (for a small sum) to turn into living art.

My fountain scavanged off Craigslist next to my urn

I have tried to use it as a fountain but it leaks and splashes and the pumped get plugged up. Really the only ones that benefit from that fountain are the mosquitoes.

And we all know that they suck. Sorry, I couldn’t stop myself. 

So, this spring, guess what? 

Yep, I’ll be following in Jennifer’s footsteps and filling in the mosquito village with dirt and plants and maybe even an alligator head or two.

 

At Last, My Six-Year Driveway

There’s this weird thing called money, and this other weird thing called a recession.

Added together, they equal The Six-Year Driveway.


What do I mean by The Six-Year Driveway? Six years is how long it has taken my husband and me to actually complete our 4,200 square-foot driveway.


My dreams of boys shooting hoops or riding skateboards or learning to ride bikes have yet to be realized.

Would my children rather play Nintendo? Would they rather play Dungeons and Dragons? Would they rather sing and dance in musical theater?

O.K. Maybe so.

But I’ll just blame it on the driveway. It is the driveway’s fault that my kids never learned to ride bikes. It’s our driveway’s fault they never learned to “shoot hoops” I believe that is the correct terminology. They never learned driveway hockey. They never learned to be proficient at skateboarding, scootering, rip-sticking, roller-blading, roller-skating, or doing anything with wheels.

Six years ago, we were completing the drainage and septic system for our house and our yard. It was just to disturbing to watch water bubbling up in the garden surrounding the old septic tank each time we flushed the toilet.

During the septic project, we removed part of the old asphalt driveway. My bright idea was to remove the rest of the asphalt and replace it with base rock to get it ready for the brand-new Paver Driveway I was going to install.

Then I priced a new Paver Driveway.

OMG, a 4,200 square-foot driveway is not cheap. It turned out to be way too expensive, around $19,000 just for the paver bricks.

If you figured the installation plus other materials, it totaled $9-$13 per square ft. Where was I going to get $50,000?

I had no sick or dying relatives, at least none that liked me.

My mind turned back to the chunks of discarded asphalt. I was wondering if I could put it back together, like a mosaic—only in shades of black—or a giant black jigsaw puzzle.

I’m good with puzzles. I could figure out how it all had fit together and then I could sort of fill in the cracks with gravel. Better yet, I could fill the cracks with dirt and grass seeds. It could become a sort of green garden art quilt. A black quilt with “green” stitching, if you will. I finally gave up on the demented quilt idea and accepted the fact that I no longer had a driveway.

But I still had the dream of: A Driveway.

In the days after The Old Driveway was removed, I came to realize how much I missed walking around outside barefoot. Yup, tip toeing across base rock isn’t quite the same.

A couple of years ago I was skimming through Craigslist (one of my many, let's say, frugal personal habits).

Lo and behold, in the “Farm and Garden” section was an ad for approximately 3800 square feet of tumbled quarry stone pavers—exactly the ones I was looking for. The gentleman selling the pavers wanted about $1 per square foot. Yahoo. My husband hired a truck to haul them (they were already wrapped and on pallets). We found out later that the actual quantity was close to 4200 square feet—the exact size of our driveway.

We had them shipped to our house.

And that is where they sat for two years, until we saved enough money to finally put them in.

I can finally run barefoot over my Six-Year Driveway.



 

Sierra Azul Sculpture Garden

I saw an article in Sunset Magazine about the Sierra Azul Sculpture Garden. It looked intriguing and it was close. So I packed up my youngest son and a couple of dogs and drove down the coast to Watsonville.

Going to a sculpture garden with an eleven-year-old boy and 140 pounds of dogs was not the best way to view the art and greenery but who said easy is fun? 

I was up for an adventure, not your average everyday stroll through a nursery uninterrupted, enjoying the sunlight, inhaling the perfume from the flowers appreciating the nuances of each piece of art, taking notes on each artist, talking with the docents, noticing the pairing of art and plant.

What was I thinking?

Luckily I took pictures so I can actually remember what I saw while being drug through by three individuals whose focus was to get in and out as fast as possible.

Crikey, That's One Freaky Fountain!

I showed my favorite demo garden at the San Francisco Flower and Garden Show now I’m going to show you my favorite single thing—item—piece of Kitsch.

The one thing I loved most was this weird fountain thing in the garden called “Salvaged Creole Jazz Courtyard”

I loved this freaky thing. It’s renew, reuse, recycle at it’s best.

The base is just broken concrete. The base of the fountain itself is probably broken and that is why it is sitting in concrete. It is partially mosaic. It holds succulents, which are very big this year—including “string of pearls”( Senecio rowleyanus )—reminiscent of the beads tossed around during Mardi Gras.

I must admit that the mix of alligator heads as a garden focal point is slightly odd. But there are people who consider me slightly odd.

Where does one get stuffed alligator heads, Bindi Irwin’s closet perhaps?

The Salvaged Creole Jazz Courtyard by:
Dawn Engel
Mike Diefenbach
Torres Gonzalez

Stumble It!

Bathroom Mosaic Update

How long should it take to mosaic two small bathroom walls?

Hmmm. The two walls together are only 88 square feet. If you were just throwing some time at them it might take one non-tile-laying layman a few days—or maybe a weekend—and of course 88 square feet of tiles.

Because I was doing a mosaic, the amount of tile needed ran between one quarter and one third that amount.

So let’s see, there’s coming up with the design, breaking the tile, changing your mind several times about the design, breaking more tile, gluing the broken pieces down, stepping back and looking at the design that you change your mind about every few minutes, and repeating this process several hundred times. How long should this project take?

Let’s throw in two boys, motherhood, wifedom, gardening, housekeeping, dogs, birds, driving endlessly to pick up and drop off and picking up and grocery shopping and blogging and gardening and helping other people garden, watercolor journaling, house-painting, volunteer work, gardening, watching the Bachelorette, reading people magazine, reading gardening magazines, taking silly classes, entertaining, gardening, surfing, running, hiking, yoga, biking and gardening…

In Case of Emergency, Break Glass: The Art of Mosaic.

There are so many multitalented people in this tight knit garden blogging community.

Kate has her fiddle and her painting, Annie has her music, and almost everyone is a good writer and great photographer.

I wanted you to know that I don’t just bumble around in the garden. I actually do other things. I’m also a mosaic artist.

I love doing jigsaw puzzles—as a matter of fact I can’t have them in the house. Jigsaw puzzles are to me what computer games are to my two boys.

If I let them play computer games all the time, they would. Likewise jigsaws for me.

So creating mosaics is sort of like a jigsaw puzzle and it’s sort of like gardening. It is very meditative and even though it seems like mindless work, there is actually a lot of mindfulness and design that goes into it.

I would like to show you some pieces I have done.